Review: Bluets

Bluets

Los Angeles based author Maggie Nelson

By Alex Gallo-Brown

240 propositions on the color blue

You might not expect a book that borrows its form from Wittgenstein’s famously dry “propositions” and appropriates the findings of philosophers, painters, and scientists in a wide-ranging investigation of the color blue to jar open your heart. Yet, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets does just that.

Comprised of 240 sequentially-numbered propositions—some of which last only a single sentence and none more than a page—Bluets explores Nelson’s relationship with a color she “fell in love with… as if falling under a spell.” Through the writings of Goethe, Wittgenstein, and William Gass, as well as the paintings of Yves Kline and Joan Mitchell, and also the recordings of Joni Mitchell and Billie Holliday, plus some dispatches from a series of anonymous “blue correspondents,” Nelson reflects on her long-held obsession with a color that, according to Goethe, “may be said to disturb rather than enliven.” In response, Nelson wonders, “Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance?” This is not the only moment in the book when the narrator questions her own judgment.

For although Bluets purports to be a work of philosophy—she asserts early on, “How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this”—its personal, even confessional, element is what makes it so intrusive, so shattering. An ex-lover haunts Nelson’s sparse narrative, but although we are allowed to see him only a few times, these unexpected interjections ache with unresolved feeling, staining nearly every word. On the surface, Nelson may be discussing color, but her true subject is human sadness—another, more metaphorical kind of blue.

Bluets does not brim with hopefulness or excessive joy. (Nelson: “Imagine someone saying, “Our fundamental situation is joyful.” Now imagine believing it.”) Nor does it provide a pillow with which to pad your head, but rather it shows that there can be light in sadness too.

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