Bluets

Nelson’s form, her numbered musings and propositions, allows her to create a discussion with herself. All of her thoughts center around the subject of blue things, but not all of them have to do with color and most follow no particular order. It is almost as if she has numbered her thoughts to keep track of them in notes that she has made to herself, but that do not require numbering at all. She hasn’t created a list or steps to follow, she has written a jumble of thoughts. However, the style makes for an interesting read of the content. Because she isn’t writing a story that readers are meant to follow, it is possible to jump around following the numbered list and to contemplate each musing individually. Some are happy, some sad, and some make little sense to anyone save Nelson. Her writing’s main point seems to have been to act as a catharsis for her, so it can be interpreted in a number of ways by readers. She isn’t  trying to prove anything, it’s merely contemplative. It is deep and speaks of sadness and pain, but also of beauty. “He found the world drab, and was upset by flaking paint and other blemishes; he liked bright colours, but became depressed when they faded.’ Not long after he gained vision and saw the world in full color, he ‘died in unhappiness” (13). “Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it’s orange, that we’re normal” (15). “Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing’ (Leonardo da Vinci)” (23). “Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the old Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment. ‘From the mountain you see the mountain,’ wrote Emerson” (30).

  I do not imagine that Nelson’s composing process intersects her life. I think she lives her life normally, keeping an eye out for things of the blue hue, and writes about things that she comes across, learns, and discovers. Maybe it is simply the life of a writer/academic/researcher, or maybe it is a side effect of her depression, but Nelson’s flighty, disjointed life manifests itself in her list of thoughts. The thoughts don’t follow an order, or provide anything in particular—there is no common thread. Other than the blue that appears in the majority of her thoughts, there is no central theme or clear point. However, is possible to extract meaning from her words because each individual bullet contains a small story. Some are important only to her and some are stories from history, science, philosophy, art, etc. When she learns something, or thinks something she writes it down. We then read a list of her thoughts.