Read Online On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William H. Gass - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: William H. Gass
Tags: General, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Art, Color Theory, Aesthetics, blue, color, Semiotics & Theory, Sex in Literature
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susceptible to the blue disease, so that even those whose mastery of their medium is otherwise incontestible will—with a serious air—plait flowers in their hero's pubic hair and stumble over a little fornication like a tod-dler climbing stairs. Any author's wisdom here consists of the correct assessment of his own weaknesses and the discovery of technical ways to circumvent them. Not an enterprise for amateurs. Colette used the blue paper she wrote on to shade her writing l i g h t . . . to shine bluely through the curtains at pedest-rians crossing the Palais-Royal a notice of her presence day and night.
But we are perfectly familiar with these things.
* * *
Those dressed in blue
Have lovers true;
In green and white,
Forsaken quite.
Touch blue,
If you love me, love me true, Your wish will come true.
Send me a ribbon, and let it be blue; If you hate me, let it be seen,
Send me a ribbon, a ribbon of green.
It is intriguing to wonder whether the difficulties children have with color, the quickness with which they pick up forms and functions and learn the names for bye-bye, truck, and auntie, yet at a late age (even five), without a qualm, call any color by the name of any other, aren't found again in the history of our words, for oysters could not be oozier than these early designa-tions. Blue is blue or green or yellow: what the hell. Or so it seems. Colors flood our space so fully that there isn't any. They allow us to discriminate among otherwise identical things (gold and green racing cars, football teams, jelly beans, red- brown-blond- and black-haired girls); however, our eye is always at the edge, establishing boundaries, making claims, so that colors principally enable us to discern shapes and define relations, and it certainly appears that patterns and paths—first, last, and in between—are what we want and what we remember: useful contraptions, useful controls, and useful connections.
Yet the pig in the pigment is missing. Well, what do we need with all that fat? Our world could be gray as the daily paper and we'd not miss much in the way of shapes and ,,izes. An occasional bluebird might be overlooked fleeing ext'nction through a meadow—so what. As much an afterhue as afterthought, colors came to the movies as they came to the comics, and there they remain—surreal in their overlays—like bad printing. Hoopla is hoopla however it's hollered. Tinting that weed green or its trailer silver would not have improved my naked girl's gray and white image. No. Who cares for color in a world of pure trans-missions?
Children collect nouns, bugs, bottlecaps, seashells, verbs: what's that? what's it doing now? who's this? and with the greed which rushes through them like like rain down gulleys, they immediately grasp the prepositions of belonging and the pronouns of possession. But how often do they ask how cold it is, what color, how loud, rare, warm, responsive, kind, how soft, how wet, how noxious, loving, indiscreet, how sour?
Measures, not immersions, concerned our sciences almost f r o m the beginning, and we were scarcely out of the gate before Democritus was declaring fiercely that 'color exists by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention; in truth nothing exists but the atoms and the void.' Although Anaxagoras had already claimed that we see nothing but light reflected in the pupil of the eye, the real organ of perception, all along, was Mind. It was the soul that saw for Plato, too, yet color was a dissembling cosmetic, the tinted 'marble and the gilded thigh, perfume for the iris, spice for spoiled meat, and when the mind put a public face on, as Protagoras might, or Gorgias did, in pursuit of persuasion, it painted itself like an old whore for the light, and with one finger gooey from the color pot circled its sockets with the pale cream and gray-blue grit of the shaven pubis, smearing on each cheek a paste'which matched the several pallors of de-bauchery, though these undertoning
But we are perfectly familiar with these things.
* * *
Those dressed in blue
Have lovers true;
In green and white,
Forsaken quite.
Touch blue,
If you love me, love me true, Your wish will come true.
Send me a ribbon, and let it be blue; If you hate me, let it be seen,
Send me a ribbon, a ribbon of green.
It is intriguing to wonder whether the difficulties children have with color, the quickness with which they pick up forms and functions and learn the names for bye-bye, truck, and auntie, yet at a late age (even five), without a qualm, call any color by the name of any other, aren't found again in the history of our words, for oysters could not be oozier than these early designa-tions. Blue is blue or green or yellow: what the hell. Or so it seems. Colors flood our space so fully that there isn't any. They allow us to discriminate among otherwise identical things (gold and green racing cars, football teams, jelly beans, red- brown-blond- and black-haired girls); however, our eye is always at the edge, establishing boundaries, making claims, so that colors principally enable us to discern shapes and define relations, and it certainly appears that patterns and paths—first, last, and in between—are what we want and what we remember: useful contraptions, useful controls, and useful connections.
Yet the pig in the pigment is missing. Well, what do we need with all that fat? Our world could be gray as the daily paper and we'd not miss much in the way of shapes and ,,izes. An occasional bluebird might be overlooked fleeing ext'nction through a meadow—so what. As much an afterhue as afterthought, colors came to the movies as they came to the comics, and there they remain—surreal in their overlays—like bad printing. Hoopla is hoopla however it's hollered. Tinting that weed green or its trailer silver would not have improved my naked girl's gray and white image. No. Who cares for color in a world of pure trans-missions?
Children collect nouns, bugs, bottlecaps, seashells, verbs: what's that? what's it doing now? who's this? and with the greed which rushes through them like like rain down gulleys, they immediately grasp the prepositions of belonging and the pronouns of possession. But how often do they ask how cold it is, what color, how loud, rare, warm, responsive, kind, how soft, how wet, how noxious, loving, indiscreet, how sour?
Measures, not immersions, concerned our sciences almost f r o m the beginning, and we were scarcely out of the gate before Democritus was declaring fiercely that 'color exists by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention; in truth nothing exists but the atoms and the void.' Although Anaxagoras had already claimed that we see nothing but light reflected in the pupil of the eye, the real organ of perception, all along, was Mind. It was the soul that saw for Plato, too, yet color was a dissembling cosmetic, the tinted 'marble and the gilded thigh, perfume for the iris, spice for spoiled meat, and when the mind put a public face on, as Protagoras might, or Gorgias did, in pursuit of persuasion, it painted itself like an old whore for the light, and with one finger gooey from the color pot circled its sockets with the pale cream and gray-blue grit of the shaven pubis, smearing on each cheek a paste'which matched the several pallors of de-bauchery, though these undertoning
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