Blue (adj): The name of one of the colours of the spectrum; of the colour of the sky and the deep sea

Re: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (Wave Books).

Nelson’s meditation takes place through 240 poetic prose pieces (some feel like prose poems, most feel like a mixed essay/journal/response), what she calls “propositions”. The range of blue swells out from a general obsession with the color to the figurative feeling of the same name, to historical and philosophical implications for color and our experience of it. As with her poetic non-fiction project about an aunt who had been killed before she was born, Jane: A Murder, Nelson reaches out to other texts and contexts to increase her understanding, to work through the thing at the center of her focus, inserting herself in the conversation (as any good academic does).

In the first instance, she tells us how to read the project:  ”Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession… It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.)”

The project is indeed quite personal — as always there is no distinguishing between Nelson and the “I” in her work. It is born from her and despite the literary turn of the text the self remains contained, and, in fact, the text depends on it. I feel her working through emotions deliberately, as if bouncing them off of all of this other material will help define or describe the indescribable, what feels inaccessible. There is plenty about the pursuit that is acknowledged as futile — that the color (or this meditation) does not necessarily increase wisdom or offer change, it accumulates clarity, a sense of things… and Nelson’s gone to every corner for that sense.

Here are some moments that resonated for me:

You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world…. But you still wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.

17. But what goes on in you when you talk about color as if it were a cure, when you have not yet stated your disease.

54. Long before either wave or particle, some (Pythagoras, Euclid, Hipparchus) thought that our eyes emitted some kind of substance that illuminated, or “felt,” what we saw.

Loneliness is solitude with a problem.

75. Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.

It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise.

It is tempting to derive some kind of maturity narrative here: eventually we sober up and grow out of our rash love of intensity…. But my love for blue had never felt to me like a maturing, or a refinement, or a settling. For the fact is that one can maintain a chromophilic recklessness well into adulthood. Joan Mitchell, for one, customarily chose her pigments for their intensity rather than their durability–a choice that, as many painters know, can in time bring one’s painting into a sorry state of decay. (Is writing spared this phenomenon?)

I feel confident enough of the specificity and strength of my relation to it to share. Besides, it must be admitted that if blue is anything on this earth, it is abundant.

For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it.

Writing is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer. I could have written half of these propositions drunk or high, for instance, and half sober… But now that they have been shuffled around countles times–now that they have been made to appear, at long last, running forward as one river–how could either of us tell the difference?

Often [writing all day] feels more like balancing two sides of an equation–occasionally satisfying, but essentially a hard and passing rain. It, too, kills the time.

229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.

Commonplace Book (n): A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement

In my composition and literature course this spring I am having my students keep a commonplace book. As I told them on our wiki:

The tradition of keeping a “commonplace book” goes back for centuries. Through the process of gathering words, phrases, and quotations from the texts we encounter we are able to create an image of our thinking in the gatherings we put down on the page. Before the “copy and paste” ease of the internet, commonplace books were the storage containers of a reader’s thinking. Many authors and readers still keep commonplace books to this day, though some have moved their books to public forums like blogs, facebook, twitter, and social readings sites such as goodreads.

Sometimes (often) my thinking process is not very linear, so the concept of blogging is a little difficult for me sometimes — the ominous vertical stretch of post space to fill is daunting and lately I find myself resisting it because I think about linear narratives all day (well-crafted emails, assignment prompts, working with student essays, etc). That was a very long sentence.

I am going to try to get over myself, and take a lesson from my own lesson plan. Sometimes, in lieu of reviews, I will write a commonplace entry. There, I’ve said it. It is on the task of this blog, along with field notes and ramblings and event notifications (of which there are many I have missed as of late… my apologies).

The beauty of the commonplace book is that, by definition, it does not have a particular order. It is a gathering. My handwritten commonplace books are separate by project, and serve as some kind of physical reminder of all of the work I’ve done. Sometimes I write a lot of reflection on what I’ve gathered. Sometimes I just let quotations and lists stand for themselves, resonating in their own space by the mere fact that I took the time to write them down.

The first commonplace book entry my students are working on is for the essay Against the Grain, by David Bartholomae. This is my own commonplace entry on the article:

“How I write is against the grain” (192) — against the wood grain, opposite of the expected — but doesn’t everyone do this? I think so often we are TOLD what a writing process should look like, and the reason it takes so long for us to figure out what our own writing process is like is because those things that people told us to do didn’t make any sense. I often wondered, for example, how the hell I was supposed to write an outline when I didn’t know what I was going to write about yet. I never knew… so I wrote the essay and THEN wrote the outline.

“Writing gets in my way and makes my life difficult…” (192) — but I love it, even when it is hard.

“…I’m not making history, but… I am intruding upon or taking my turn in a conversation others have begun before me” (193) ahh, the conversation. Response is key. This is all I ever want to teach my students, is to enjoy the response, to find the compulsion to respond.

Words and phrases he uses to describe his writing process:

• resistance
• “help me speak”
• historic moment
• “letting the paper bounce around in my head”
• things, never ideas or theses
• discourse
• conversation/confrontation
• pressure
• challenge
• add, subtract, rearrange
• “dump and revise”
• interfering
• multi-layered — adding layers
• someone who speaks
• “to borrow authority”
• “struggle free from the presence of others”
• “giving over and giving up”
• “surrender and betrayal”
• compelled
• project
• NOT invention or originality
• “a most difficult grace”

“This [the personal confrontation with another figure] is the most powerful influence and it is the influence of another writer, a person represented by a verbal, textual presence — a set of terms, a sound and a rhythm, a sensibility — that I cannot push our of my mind or erase from my own writing” (194)

(His dissertation advisor REJECTED his dissertation!? It’s really incredible this guy became such a leading scholar in the composition world).

“The problem here was not so much what I had to say about Thomas Hardy but what I did with what I had to say and how, in fact, I went about saying it. It’s hard to learn how to deal with this — with the pressure of language to be so pat, complete, official, single-minded; with the pressure of language against complexity, uncertainty, idiosyncracy, multiple-mindedness — and it’s very hard to teach students to work against fluency, the “natural” flow of language as it comes to a writer who has a grasp of a subject” (196) — I think this grasp of a subject thing is key.

“I try very hard to interfere with the conventional force of writing, with the pressure toward set conclusions, set connections, set turns of phrase” (196) YES! I have been resisting convention for so long… but so often conventions are comforting, they tell us what to do. What they don’t tell us is WHY they are telling us to do the thing they are telling us, or HOW that convention makes logical, organic sense (often it does not).

“I often think of writing as multilayered, although not in the sense that there is a center, like the center of an onion, that can be revealed or discovered once the layers are peeled away and sloughed off. I think, rather, that I revise to add a layer, often discordant, over a layer that will also remain — so that there is a kind of antiphony” (196). Who told us that there was a “hidden meaning” in the first place? Why was it hidden? What amount of writing could uncover it? I like this — layers added, not layers surrounding.

“I revise… so that it seems to assert the presence of someone who speaks as more than the representative of an institution or a brand of research or a discipline” (196) — I do not agree with this. Writing is so different than speech. We think differently in written language. What about poetry? Poetry is not (necessarily) linear, narrative, even in grammatically correct sentences.

Western tradition of writers and theories “good writing is efficient writing” — resisting this (197).

“My academic life has been marked by people, not by ideas or theories alone or in the abstract” (198).

What he needed was a “project” (199) — what is the project for us in this class? What project might the students undertake in their college careers? How does this course fit into that? This is definitely the key motivating factor — how do I inspire that in my students? Can I?