On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William H. Gass Read Free Book Online

feels me shivering.
    Yet in the moment that our situation seems to have become impossible (as bereft of hope as Virginia WoolPs Orlando has imagined it to be), deus ex machina: we recollect the honest masters of our tongue, and in them, on occasion, we find the problem solved, the tribute paid, the vision pure, the writing done. In Ben Jonson, for instance:
    Have you seene but a bright Lillie grow, Before rude hands have touch'd it?
    Ha' you mark'd but the fall o' the Snow Before the soyle hath smutch'd it?
    Ha' you felt the wooll of Bever?
    Or Swans Downe ever?
    Or have smelt o' the bud o' the Brieri Or the Nard in the fire?
    Or have tasted the bag of the Bee?
    O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!
    Initially I wrote of displacement as if it went from thing to thing—phallus to flower:
    Full gently now she takes him by the hand, A lily prison'd in a gaol of snow,
    Or ivory in an alabaster band;
    So white a friend engirts so white a foe . . .
    but I have been dropping hints all along like heavy shoes that the ultimate and essential displacement is to the word, and that the true sexuality in literature—sex as a positive aesthetic q u a l i t y -
    lies not in any scene and subject, nor in the mere appearance of a vulgar word, not in the thick smear of a blue spot, but in the consequences on the page of love well made—made to the medium which is the writer's own, for he—for she—has only these little shapes and sounds to work with, the same saliva surrounds them all, every word is equally a squiggle or a noise, an abstract designation (the class of cocks, for instance, or the sub-class of father-defilers), and a crowd of meanings as randomly connected by time and use as a child connects his tinkertoys. On this basis, not a single thing will distinguish Tuck' from Traise du bois';
    'blue' and 'triangle' are equally abstract; and what counts is not what lascivious sights your loins can tie to your thoughts like Lucky is to Pozzo, but love lavished on speech of any kind, re-gardless of content and intention.
    It is always necessary to deprive the subject of its natural strength just as Samson was, and blinded too, before recovering that power and replacing it within the words. Popeye is about to rape Temple Drake with a corn-cob (in a corn-crib, too, if you can bear the additional symbolism):
    . . . Popeye drew his hand from his coat pocket.
    To Temple, sitting in the cottonseed-hulls and the corn-cobs, the sound was no louder than the striking of a match: a short, minor sound shutting down upon the scene, the instant, with a profound finality, completely isolating it, and she sat there, her legs straight before her, her hands limp and palm-up on her lap, looking at Popeye's tight back and the ridges of his coat across the shoulders as he leaned out the door, the pistol behind him, against his flank, wisp-ing thinly along his leg.

    He turned and looked at her. He waggled the pistol slightly and put it back in his coat, then he walked toward her. Moving, he made no sound at all; the released door yawned and clapped against the jamb, but it made no sound either; it was as though sound and silence had become inverted. She could hear silence in a thick rustling as he moved toward her through it, thrusting it aside, and she began to say Something is going to happen to me. She was saying it to the old man with the yellow clots for eyes. 'Something is happening to me!' she screamed at him, sitting in his chair in the sunlight, his hands crossed on the top of the stick. 'I told you it was!'
    Forty pages pass before Temple Drake begins to bleed.
    It wasn't nice of Thick to beat Margaret either, and I really don't know if he did it beautifully or not, but Hawkes's account is beautiful. Stones will never nourish us however patiently or hard we suck them. What fills us then, in such a passage?
    It is Beckett's wonderful rhythms, the way he weighs his words, the authority he gives to each, their measured pace, the silences he puts