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

his Nativity, too. Nor did the Lorenzettis neglect her, Giotto neither, though he colored his pit-of-hell devils blue as a soul dismantled. Con-tending that art is a product of pain, Picasso passed through such a period, painting The Blue Room, Woman in Blue, and many others: stem-like bodies on which long faces gather like solidifying smoke.
    'For our blues,' Hoogstraten says, 'we have English, German, and Haarlem ashes, smalts, blue lakes, indigo, and the invaluable ultramarine.' It is of course the sky. It is the sky's pale deep endlessness, sometimes so intense at noon the brightness flakes like a fresco. Then at dusk, it is the way the color sinks among us, not like dew but settling dust or poisonous exhaust from all the life burned up while we were busy being other than ourselves. For our blues we have the azures and ceruleans, lapis lazulis, the light and dusty, the powder blues, the deeps: royal, sapphire, navy, and marine; there are the pavonian or peacock blues, the reddish blues: damson, madder and cadet, hyacinth, periwinkle, wine, wisteria and mulberry; there are the sloe blues, a bit purpled or violescent, and then the green blues, too: robin's egg and eggshell blue, beryl, cobalt, glaucous blue, jouvence, turquoise, aquamarine. A nice light blue can be prepared f r o m silver, and when burned, Prussian blue furnishes a very fine and durable brown. For our blues we have those named for nations, cities, regions: French blue, which is an artificial ultramarine, Italian, Prussian, Swiss and Brunswick blues, Chinese blue, a pigment which has a peculiar reddish-bronze cast when in lump-form and dry, in contrast to China blue which is a simple soluble dye; we have Indian blue, an indigo, Hungarian, a cobalt, the blues of Parma and Saxony, Paris, Berlin, and Dresden, those of Bremen and Antwerp, the ancient blues of Armenia and Alexandria, the latter made of copper and lime and sometimes called Egyptian, the blue of the Nile, the blue of the blue sand potters use. Are there so many states of mind and shades of feeling? In a dress riddled with polka dots, Colette, arthritic and frizzy in her final photographs, sits with the profile of Cocteau, le fanal bleu, her papers and her pain. And for our blues we have those named for persons, processes, and earths: Hortense, Croupier, Blackley blue and Chemic, Imperial or spirit-blue, Raymond or Napoleon blue, Night blue or Victoria, Leitch's blue, Schweinfurth's or Reboulleau's blue, Monthier's blue, which uses ammonia, Elber-feld, Eschel, Gentiana blue, Gold blue, Guernsey, Guimet, Hum-boldt and the coal-tar colors, Aniline, Alkali, Anthracene blue.
    Alizarin blue, paste blue, vat blue, fast blue, the fluorescent re-sorcinol blues, milori, vitriol, blue verditer, slate and steel blue, all the grays, gun-metal, asbestos, and then the bluish shades of verdigris appearing subtly in the same way that our attitudes slowly acetify our bodies. Fra Angelico, that sweet man, did not ignore the Virgin either, though her mantle, alas, is never blue, but sometimes lavender or even green. 'Green' is another name, though now forgotten, long unused, for things obscene.
    Long unused. Still, the disappearance from literature of words and subjects (or their appearance there) simply because writers and readers have strong feelings about them is never an aesthetically promising cause. And the principal difficulty with using sexual material in literature is that the motives of all concerned are usually corrupt.
    Because of the values we place on sexuality in life, because of the terrible taboos which surround it, the endless lies, the for-lorn wishes, the sad fantasies we wind around it like gauze about a wound (whether these things are due to the way we are brought up, or are the result of something graver—an unalterable quality in our nature), everyone's likeliest area of psychological weakness is somewhere in the sexual. Writers, whose work is actually an analogue anyway, are still more