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. 

Bluets

Maggie Nelson’s style in Bluets is very unique and interesting. Reading each passage is almost like hearing her talk, where she interrupts herself and talks in fragments and goes off on tangents. What I like about her style is that you can almost hear the tone of her voice and feel her emotion. She’s very forward, especially when talking about her romantic relationship, and isn’t afraid to say exactly what she is thinking and feeling, which I find refreshing. She is talking to someone, or to many different people, throughout the book, which makes it feel as if I am having a conversation with her. For example, one of the passages says, “I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke—take your pick—an apprehension of the divine. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)” She interrupts herself to invite the audience to “take their pick” and uses second person pronouns. By doing this, she makes her stories more relatable for any reader. I wouldn’t think that I would enjoy a novel devoted to a color, but she interestingly relates everything back to the color blue, and it has a huge presence in her life.

This book seems to be a compilation of Nelson’s thoughts, almost like passages in a diary where she would write down a special thought or feeling that she would have throughout the day. She writes as if she is speaking to someone, and her thoughts are not planned out. It seems almost as though she is writing each word down as they come to her. She uses a lot of short sentences and even fragments. Some of her sentences are very abrupt and bold, which I think says something about her personality and gives me a sense of who she is. She seems like she would be a flighty person. I think at the time, or at one point in her life, she was at a strange and still spot where she was frustrated and trying to figure out who she was and what her purpose was. She seemed to be struggling in her relationships, even in her relationship to God, and was dealing with a lot of pain following her friend’s accident. She was writing down these thoughts and telling these stories in hopes of creating a sort of road map for herself that would lead her to peace. Throughout the book, she references many writers and puts herself in a sort of conversation with them. I think this is another way for her to deal with her emotions, by “talking” to people who deal with their problems in the same way she does. I also think that the color blue is supposed to represent something or someone in her life that was very important to her at the time.  At one point, she talks about a job interview where she was asked, “Why blue?” and she responded by saying that we don’t get to choose what we love. She’s talking about more than just a color.

Bluets

I had never read anything similar to Bluets before reading Nelson. I feel like by making the stanzas, she is able to cover a lot of ground in her writing. Her breaks are consistent with her ideas as she progresses from one topic to the next. If it were a regular novel with traditional paragraphs for narrative, there would have to be cohesion and transitions between ideas. In writing with propositions, she is able to digress from point A to point B without explanation. To me, that is what the book seems to do. Nelson writes in complete digression. One point leads to another, which leads to another and soon you are on a topic that had nothing to do with what you read a few pages ago. The book is a little difficult to read because of the constant jumping from one idea to the next. In writing in stanzas, Nelson is also able to detract that point directly from the story. If you open up to a page, you can read an individual stanza and still understand what she is trying to say without having any background knowledge of what was previously mentioned. Each part is sort of a story in itself. One story discusses colors, another sexual encounters and the next literature. At this point in the book, they do not relate well to one another, but as the story unfolds I expect to be able to make more connections between each stanza and each idea that Nelson is writing about.

As the book progresses, so does the story. Nelson ties connections back to previously mentioned ideas and gives meaning to colors. One wouldn't think it possible to write an entire book on colors, but Nelson is able to portray the color blue in a variety of ways. She explains the color in terms of sex and other past experiences in order to help the reader feel what she has felt. It seems as though Nelson’s work is one that each time you read it it exudes different meaning. Depending on the phase of your life and what you have gone through, readers might interpret it completely differently from one another. Although each stanza can stand alone and suffice as a short excerpt, it feels like each stanza indirectly relates to one another. The parts about sex are intertwined, as are the excerpts about writers. Nelson incorporates here the blues into her own stories in order to gain more emotion from her audience. The romantic aspects also tie into the blue theme indirectly when Nelson discusses her deepest emotions of a breakup (177). Though the story is very abstract, there is a story here and it develops as the book unfolds.

Bluets

     The form of Bluets allows Maggie Nelson to freely convey the information she wants to the reader, without making or breaking any commitment. The numbered propositions free her from having to work transitions in between ideas, or setting up information that explains the background. For example, when she begins to reference a character as “you,” it is unclear who she is addressing, or whether they are a real person of a more abstract “you” until bluet #18. Once the thought is completed, Nelson starts a new proposition that may have nothing to do with the last, which breaks the reader from getting dwelling on the details. The impressions and tone of the propositions matter a lot more than any plot or detail. A more traditional form would leave the writer confused if that information was left out, but the propositions allow the reader to accept the statement that is presented and move on.

     This form works very well with her use of first person and intensely personal details in her writing. More traditional writing styles feel like the thoughts of the author are contained within the form of the writing, but this gives more of an impression that she wrote her thoughts and the form followed. After I read this for a while, I felt like I had gotten into her mindset and empathized with her more.

     I imagine that this book was written one or two bluets at a time, as the author was living the emotions that she was writing down. It feels almost like a journal where she is recording her thoughts. It maybe could have been written in larger chunks, or all in one sitting, but I do feel like she was genuinely experiencing her emotions as she wrote them. It did not feel like she had recorded the emotions earlier or planned out how she was going to write them down. I did get the impression that she planned her word choice and thought about a lot of the words carefully to make sure that they sounded somewhat poetic and conveyed her feelings accuracy. At many points in the book, she criticizes word choice on the part of others, and says that certain words that people use do not accurately describe blue or emotions. I think she was very deliberate about her own words.

From her writing, I get the impression that Maggie Nelson is a somewhat impulsive person rather than a planner. She also seems emotional, and analyzes her own feelings while still accepting them for what they are and having a sense of humor. All of the other people that she mentions in the book seem similar to herself, in that they are emotional and can have discussions about personal things. I imagine that she is the type who can open up deeply to close friends, and does that with the reader as well through her writing.

Bluets

Pg 3-4,9, 12, 23, 28, 48

The propositions’ back and forth nature creates a conversational dialogue throughout the entirety of Bluets. In some verses it comes across as Nelson’s free-flowing train of thought as she speaks on a variety of subjects. Surrounding the nature of loving the color blue, Nelson proposes “And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?” She answers her own question, or provides a different narrative, in the following prose, “Are you sure-one would like to ask-that it cannot love you back?” (15). Content arranged in this manner emphasizes the philosophical reasoning one would be grappling with, when attempting to explain their love for an unrequited person, object, or in this case, color.

I imagine Nelson took her time in compiling Bluets. The compositions detail very different life experiences that I’m sure spanned across a year, if not more. Whether it’s the arrangement of the content or Nelson’s flighty manner of story-telling, it seems as if the narrative spans a long period of time, transcending a linear plot. Although initially it may seem jarring, the plot flows seamlessly from one present-day experience, to a memory, to a desire that can only be imagined in the far-off future. The form of numbered, short snippets permits this maneuvering of space and time.

From the narrative presented, Nelson seems to question almost everything. There are no facts, but only starting points for why, how, etc. She also seems to be very detail oriented due to her graphic, descriptive, and sensual word choices.  To view one color so passionately and deeply displays the ability to creatively notice distinctions in one color scheme, whereas others may only view it as that.

Due to the philosophical nature, Nelson also creates a melancholy persona. She never holds onto something that is concrete or factual and is questioning a majority of what she comes across. Instead of grasping what is presented to her, Nelson seems quite lost in her search of “blue” or whatever she is searching for. In this way, she embodies the strangest paradox of both fleeting and questioning, questioning but not thinking, searching, but also finding. It’s difficult to describe now that I’m viewing her writing from this mindset, but Nelson clearly infused Bluets with hearty potions of her own life. 

Bluets

            I had never really read any like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets before. The form and style are very unique and unlike a traditional novel. I thought though that it allowed her to do a lot more than a traditional novel would. They almost acted like individual chapters, each with its own short section about her experience with this color. This gave her the ability to jump around between different stories and moments, which to me gave it almost a conversational feel. Even though there are so many different stories and not really one traditionally consistent storyline, she repeatedly comes back to certain stories as if she was just continuing from where she had left off. This too made it feel more conversational. It felt less like I was reading her words, but she was telling me her own words, which strengthens her connection to the story and the color blue. When I first learned the story behind the novel, I did not fully understand what it would be about, but Nelson’s style allows for such an abstract story to be told in a both interesting and reasonable way. If she had written this a traditional novel, I feel it would not be as interesting. These short snippets to story make something as vague and abstract as the color blue an enjoyable read.

Something that Nelson talked about throughout her novel, Bluets, was her process of writing it. While she did not come out and explicitly say the process she uses, she talks about what went into her writing and things that influenced her. This added to the conversational feel that I had talked about earlier. The short snippets rather than long paragraphs made me feel as though she was writing the novel over a long period of time fitting sections into her schedule when she had time. I can almost imagine her randomly pulling out her notebook in the middle of the day to add a number to the novel. I feel this way because of the seemingly random aspects that flow to make her novel. While each piece is different from the most part, they all come together in the end to create a full story, like she had had the beginning, middle, and end constructed in her head, but wanted to display the story in a less conventional way. She seems like the type of person that does not like the conventional, which is evident in both her style and form of writing along with her storyline itself, one that takes something very abstract and vague and makes it unique.

Bluets

In Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, form is the backbone of her novel. Nelson chronologically numbers her thoughts, comments, reflections, and anecdotes. This seems to allow the reader to specifically focus on each numbered paragraph with greater attention than if it were a long flowing book. Even though the numbered paragraphs don’t always correlate one after the other, her story is still progressing as she works through her pain and answers some of life’s questions. For example, in the beginning of the book she talks about falling in love with the color blue, “And so I fell in love with a color – in this case, the color blue.”(#2) Then as the story progresses you find out a few paragraphs later that blue may have been a metaphor for a man. “You must spend more time thinking about the divine, and less time imagining unbuttoning the prince of blue’s pants at the Chelsea Hotel.”(#19) This then will be the focal point of much of her pain and searching through out the book.

Another way the formatting works is the way in which each paragraph achieves it’s point standing alone, but is enhanced the further you read on. For example, in paragraph 44 she says, “later that afternoon, a therapist will say to me, if he hadn’t lied to you then he would be a different person than he is.” This alone holds significant meaning but when you read on to 45 it suddenly adds a whole new perspective to the previous paragraph. “Instead I say something about how clinical psychology forces everything we call love into the pathological or the delusional or the biologically explicable.”

As the story moves on it’s evident the author is trying to work through something. The book reads as an internal dialogue, almost a diary. It seems as though she writes exactly what she’s feeling when she feels it and then goes on to search for an answer to why she is feeling that way. Many times she ends up with stories or facts that somehow relate to her emotional state. In paragraph 71 she says, “I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.” Then the second paragraph down she uses an anecdote on Newton to further this idea of loneliness. “An assistant to Newton’s discovery, or revelation, of the spectrum. Over time, however, many have questioned whether the assistant ever really existed. Many now believe him to be, essentially, a “rhetorical fiction.”

Nelson is constantly posing a feeling or question and working through it. She does this by adding anecdotes, reflecting on her own experience, or doing simple research and including it to complement her thoughts. The reader is, in a sense, following her journey with her to discover who she is.