On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry Read Online Free PDF Page B

single indecency defines this indecent scene.
    Colette has the cat's gaze. Unhurried contemplation is her forte". Hunger cannot give us such precision.
    Meanwhile the shadows lengthened on the beach; the blackness deepened. The iron black boot became a pool of deep blue. The rocks lost their hardness. The water that stood round the old boat was dark as if mussels had been steeped in it. The foam had turned livid and left here and there a white gleam of pearl on the misty sand.
    The nouns in this passage are all nailed too firmly to their thes; otherwise Virginia Woolf's construction here is sensuous in the same way as Colette's: observant, thoughtful, loving, calm.

    * * *
Pink and white and the blackbird black of Ch£ri's glistening hair are the colors Colette has chosen for Lea's and his encounter
    —pink, black, and white, and the copper decoration of the bed—
    but blue is our talisman, the center of our thought. Yet what blue? which? the blue that settles in the throat before the cough?
    that rounds f r o m our mouth like a ring of smoke as we announce A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu? Not the blue of place names like Blue Island or Blue Bay. The Blue Hens Chickens. Not the blue of all the fish or flowers which have obtained it, the trees, the minerals, or the birds, not even the blue of blue pigeon, the sounding lead, which is none of these. Perhaps it is the blue of reality itself:
    Blue is the specific color of orgone energy within and without the organism.
    Classical physics tries to explain the blueness of the sky by the scattering of the blue and of the spectral color series in the gaseous atmosphere. However, it is a fact that blue is the color seen in all functions which are related to the cosmic or atmospheric or organismic orgone energy:
    Protoplasm of any kind, in every cell or bacterium is blue. It is generally mistaken as 'refraction' of light which is wrong, since the same cell under the same conditions of light loses its blueness when it dies.
    Thunder clouds are deeply blue, due to high orgone charges contained in the suspended masses of water.
    A completely darkened room, if lined with iron sheet metal (the so-called 'Orgone Room'), is not black, i.e., free of any light, but bluish or bluish-gray. Orgone energy luminates spontaneously; it is 'lumi-nescent.'
    Water in deep lakes and in the ocean is blue.
    The color of luminating, decaying wood is blue; so are the luminating tail ends of glowworms, St. Elmo's fire, and the aurora bore-alis.
    The lumination in evacuated tubes charged with orgone energy is blue.
    (Wilhelm Reich: The Orgone Energy Accumulator—Its Scientific and Medical Use)
    The word itself has another color. It's not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and I, the relief at the end, the whew.
    It hasn't the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow's deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn't violet's rapid sexual shudder, or like a rough road the ir-regularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pan-cake covered with cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the as-sertive brevity of red, the whine of green. What did Rimbaud know about the vowels we cannot also find outside the lines in which the poet takes an angry piss at Heaven? The blue perhaps of the aster or the iris or the air a fist has bruised?

    'The lights burn blue; it is now dead midnight,' Shakespeare wrote. 'Pinch the maids as blue as bilberry . . . ' 'Her breasts, like ivory globes circled with blue/A pair of maiden worlds unconquered . . . ' And so to the worst: 'Her two blue windows' (here he means the eyelids of reviving Venus) 'faintly she up-heaveth.'
    Blue Eagle. Blue crab. Blue crane. Blue pill. Blue Cross.
    But our sexual schemes scarcely need the encouragement of a common word, the blues with which I began, for instance: blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies . . . Throw down any pair of terms like dice;