In Any Case, I Am No Longer Counting the Days: A Review of Maggie Nelson's Bluets

From the moment I began reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, I knew I had found a very important book. Or perhaps that a very important book had found me:

1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. 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 mention of excrement brought me up short and I read that sentence several times before I could move on. We are so grounded in the body from these opening lines. There will be little, this passage makes clear, that will be held back.

Bluets is composed of 240 numbered passages. Some are longer than a page; some as few as four words:

46. Disavowal, says the silence.

Maggie Nelson is as concerned with the body and its limitations as she is with loss and with the limitations of love in its many forms. Bluets is a meditation on love. This love of the color blue, introduced in the first line, becomes the vehicle by which she can examine many times of love. Erotic:

18. A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck. Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my secret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence. It was the only time I came. It was essentially our lives. It was shaking.

Devotional love. Following a passage that discusses women, who were later canonized as saints, who blinded themselves or plucked out their own eyes to maintain their chastity, she explains:

57. In religious accounts, these women are announcing, via their amputations, their fidelity to God. But other accounts wonder whether they were in fact punishing themselves, as they knew that they had looked upon men with lust, and felt the need to employ extreme measures to avert any further temptation.

She also examines the love between friends. A friend is in a terrible accident that leaves her confined to a wheelchair in constant pain. Nelson considers love through the lens of this pain:

104. I do not feel my friend’s pain, but when I unintentionally cause her pain I wince as I hurt somewhere, and I do. Often in exhaustion I lay my head down on her lap in her wheelchair and tell her how much I love her, that I’m so sorry she is in so much pain, pain I can witness and imagine but that I do not know. She says, if anyone knows this pain besides me, it is you (and J, her lover). This is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid. Perhaps this is because she remains so generous within hers, and because she has never held any hierarchy of grief, either before her accident or after, which seems to me nothing less than a form of enlightenment.

There is love here too of ideas, of abstractions. Nelson calls on philosophers and intellectuals to shed light on her state of grief and pain and obsession. She invokes Wittgenstein and Goethe. Emerson, Thoreau. Jacques Derrida. She calls on the writers and artists: William Gass and Gertrude Stein. Marguerite Duras. Stephen Mallarme. Cezanne and Cornell and Warhol. She turns to science. Isaac Newton.

She inquires of her colleague, whom she refers to as the “expert on guppy menopause,” whether biologists consider the question of the existence of color. His response proves as insufficient and as limited as all others. “In the face of some questions, he says, biologists can only vacate the field.”

Throughout, the pulsing heart of this book is the obsessive quality with which she approaches the color blue – her collections of blue objects, the travels she takes to sites of blue, the time spent in contemplation of it – and with which she attempts to grieve the loss of her lover.

I suspect that Maggie Nelson might flinch to hear me say “the loss of her lover.” I think she might consider that too sentimental an expression. Here is her piercing assessment of what others might consider to be romantic love:

20. Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.

And yet, in one passage, she defines a “blue rush” as when lapis miners use dynamite to bleed a vein, and then in the next she says:

81. What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began.

It is hard to see this as anything but an admission of a profound falling into love, whatever limitations it – the love, the falling – might have.

Bluets is an urgent book. It is alive in its pain and its struggle. It pulses with vitality. It provides a kind of antidote to the toxic conditioning of the cult of happiness. To the dominant exhortation to “fake it till you make it.” To “get over it,” to “move on,” to “self-help” our way into recovery from the condition of human struggle. As if we could set ourselves free from what it means to be human: to feel profound pain and sadness, to experience unspeakable loss, to feel isolation and loneliness. To despair. And to be compelled to continue in the face of that despair.

Here’s what Maggie Nelson has to say about moving on:

100. It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. “There is simple no way that a year from now you’re going to feel the way you feel today,” a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven’t really changed.

As a reader, I am always looking for redemption. Redemption in Bluets is quiet and beautiful, but stunning in its power:

237. In any case, I am no longer counting the days

and then:

239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not a consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.”

What we are left with is only this: Perhaps the beauty we find in our struggles, in our grief is not so much consolation as it is light.

Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is a bright and shining light.

After Claude by Iris Owens and Zipper Mouth by Laurie Weeks

I’m going to cheat and recommend two books, even though I was asked to recommend only one. I’m cheating in part because I can’t decide, and in part because I think these two books are interesting when read together, or remembered together, or placed side by side. Or so they have sat on my mental bookshelf for the past several months. The first is After Claude by Iris Owens, which was first published in 1973, and which was republished by the New York Review of Books in 2010; the second is Zipper Mouth by Laurie Weeks, published in 2011 by the Feminist Press, under the excellent editorial direction of Amy Scholder.

I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t know anything about Iris Owens until I read a 2011 review of After Claude in Bookforum, in which Gerald Howard describes the book as a masterpiece of female abasement, “a foulmouthed comic tour de force, still capable of offending the offendable and casting a blue-streaked spell of hilarity over everyone else.” I bought it right away to see if I agreed; I did. Weeks, on the other hand, I’ve known for years — I was in fact one of the many anxiously awaiting the publication of any tidbit that could be excised from the obviously brilliant fog of writing that has hovered around her, albeit without any book-length publication, for decades.

Both of these books are drug-addled, downtown New York City abjection narratives with utterly fierce and hilarious first-person narrators, one hailing from the 70s (Owens), the other from the Now (Weeks). Both books are as memorable and caustic as they are slender and rare. By “slender” I mean they both clock in around or under 200 pages, and are compulsively readable in a single sitting; by “rare” I mean that both Owens (who died in 2008) and Weeks (who is alive) have published very little in light of the largesse of their reputations and talents. (This isn’t entirely true in Owens’s case, as she wrote quite a bit of porn as “Harriet Daimler,” but as Howard puts it in Bookforum, “As Harriet Daimler, [Owens] was alarmingly prolific; as Iris Owens she was a dry well. [Stephen] Koch cited to me her ‘capacity for procrastination, indolence, and inaction beyond anything I’ve ever seen in someone so gifted.’” I don’t know enough to say the same of Weeks exactly, and I can’t presume, but it seems that something of the sort is also at hand, which makes the publication of Zipper Mouth a cause for celebration.

So those are the similarities. Beyond that, the books are very different. Owens’s narrator (who is named Harriet, of all things) is utterly awful — self-loathing and loathing of all others — and does horrible things, like surprising a friend by planting a strange, naked man she’s found in a single’s ad in her friend’s bed to “liberate” her, or changing the locks on the apartment of the titular Claude, whose apartment she has refused to leave. Owens gives us keen, often riotous metaphors for how shitty all the drugs, alcohol, rejection, and abjection make Harriet feel, but beyond that invention, After Claude is decidedly sublunary, rooted in the endless, despicable present. Zipper Mouth, on the other hand, is hallucinatory and roving, allowing for dreams, specters, epistolary interludes, lyric and temporal vaulting. Perhaps the biggest difference is that Weeks’s narrator is a romantic rather than a cynic, and remains completely enthralled to desire — most notably, for beautiful, taunting, straight girl Jane, and when Jane can’t be had, for dope. Weeks’s narrator is essentially defined — like the subject of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse— as the one who loves. As a result, there’s a kaleidoscopic longing and poetic range in Zipper Mouth — not to mention a welcome queerness — that After Claude decidedly does not have.

That said, I find both books quite moving, albeit in distinct ways. As some have disapprovingly noted, After Claude reads like two different books—first, the story of Harriet and Claude; then of Harriet’s post-Claude trip to the Chelsea Hotel, where she has a nightmarish run-in with a 70s guru / hippie / creep / cult-y guy who wheedles her into masturbating on (audio) tape, which he then plans to bring back some gross archive he keeps at his harem-cum-Waco outpost. The conclusion of the book finds Harriet totally distraught, as she really did relax and come in the guy’s presence with an unusual vulnerability. The novel’s last line, “I opened a fresh pack of Marlboros and stared at the brown and white circles. I had no thoughts, only a dim awareness of myself listening and waiting,” is haunting. Weeks’s book also has a defiantly non-happy (though beautiful, rushing) ending: “The sun she is gorgeous but the golden tresses of her rays are tumbling into the abyss and are lost.” As witty, likeable, and compelling as Weeks’s narrator is, she isn’t ever going to get the girl, and dope will keep winning its mean game. The past (which involves wincing flashbacks of an alcoholic father) will keep pulsing with trauma; the present will stay alive with a crackling but cyclical pathos (as in the scene in which the narrator ends up bringing home a paranoid homeless junkie she once gave $5 to at the ATM; an interminable night of drugs, vomiting, showering, and insane conversation follows, making for one of the best scenes in the book).

The triumph of both books lies in their language, their sentences, their figures of speech, their unrivaled humor, and their anarchic and wild sound of women taking no prisoners—a still underheard and underrated sound in fiction, as in life. As far as drug memoirs go, either of these two books holds more interest for me than all the On the Roads and Cain’s Books out there. For instead of producing a weary fatigue, that here-we-go-againfeeling I get when faced with an existentially burdened, drug addicted, misogynist male character or writer being made heroic by literary sleight of hand, or by the still rabidly (if unconsciously) sexist forces that create and perpetuate literary history, these two heroines and their creators make me feel endless interest, radical discomfort, a profound sense of accompaniment and recognition, and a totally necessary sense of artistic permission and possibility. Maybe you will feel the same, I don’t know. Read them tonight.