There is anger in the eyebrows knotted above his nose, a mutinous mouth, the deep bed like a warm pond…
He opened his pyjamas on a chest that was lusterless, hard and curved like a shield: and the same pink high-light played on his teeth, on the whites of his black eyes and on the pearls of the necklace.
Not a 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 Chéri’s glistening hair are the colors Colette has chosen for Léa’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 from 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 ‘luminescent.’
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 borealis.
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 irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered with cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive 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; speak of arrogant bananas; command someone, as Gertrude Stein once did, to ‘argue the earnest cake,’ and the mind will do more than mix them in its ear. It will endeavor a context in which the command is normal, even trite. Our grammars give us rules for doing that, but sometimes these are no more than suggestions. Our interests do the same. Just as a man who is sick with suspicion may suppose that even the billboards are about him, any text can be regarded as a metaphorical description of some subject hidden in the reader’s head. In that blue light which lust (or orgone energy) is said to shine on everything, we begin to see what an arrogant banana might be. Adolescent boys may live for weeks within a single sexual giggle, and when political life feels the thumb, then any innocent surface (poor Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook) can conceal a call to arms. Suppressed material contaminates the free like fecal water. Ernani or The Marriage of Figaro become revolutionary.
Out of aching puberty, I remember very well a burlesque skit to which I was a breathless, puzzled witness much the way I once watched, through a slit, slogans scribbled on a washroom wall by a large rotund little man who held his hand to his heart as though he were warming it, and rolled down his lower lip. Pressed Pants is telling Baggy of his wonderful trip to Venice, and how a beautiful woman invited him to take a ride in her gondola (a word which both pronounced gone-dough-la).
You’re kidding. You actually got in her gondola.
She invited me, I told you. She practically insisted.
Listen… hey… tell me: what was her gondola like?
Oh, you know, they’re all pretty much the same — long and narrow,
a bit flat-bottomed, with a tall ornamental stem.
Boy. Oh boy. I can’t believe it. And you got in?
Spent the whole afternoon.
In her gondola?
Sure. Saw all the sights.
Ah, come on… naw… not all afternoon.
Sure. At first we went fast but later we just took it easy and lay
there kinda lazy. She was well built, soft and cushiony inside.
We had tea and cake, too, and a good long discussion about art.
While you was still in her gondola?
Certainly. She didn’t rock much. And there was a fiddler — huge guy
— who played lively little tunes the whole time. And sang a few
romantic songs, and pointed out the points of interest.
Wow. I’ll bet. But he wasn’t in her gondola too?
Sure he was — where would he be?
Ah, come on now… Naw… Naw… He was in there while you
was? at the same time?
Naturally. To fiddle. Yeah. It was a big gondola. There was plenty
of room.
For the prude, or his political equivalent, there are dangerous suggestions in the most carefully processed air; there are lewd insinuations, Commie connivance; any word may yawn indecently, or worse, a gondola may engulf us; yet unless we are privately obsessed, something in the text or context must sound the proper political or sexual alert (Condition Blue is the second stage of any warning system), and if the soberness of some occasions is sufficiently impressive, even loud alarms may clang quite vainly, as you often have to tug the reader’s sleeve before he’ll hear a bladder making Joyce’s Chamber Music, or, while fingering one of the Tender Buttons Miss Stein has designed, feel somewhere a little tingle.