Fade into blue: A Review of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

Over the past few months, Joan Didion’s quote “fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes” has been stuck in my head like a refrain. Not merely because her dazzling Blue Nights is one of my dissertation texts, but in these cold winter months, blue seems to characterise the dwindling days. However, in researching Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, I was drawn to the deep blue hue of another one of her books, the small print of ‘bluets’ stamped into a cream square at the centre of its cover. Bluets, sometimes discoverable in the ‘Poetry’ section of Waterstones, sometimes ‘Biography’, ‘Essays’, or, more nondescriptly, ‘Non-fiction’, achieves Nelson’s usual “genre-bending” qualities that is praised of most of her works. Consisting of 240 numbered small prose ‘poems’ or ‘pensées’, her lyrical essay investigates the long artistic fascination with the colour blue; a larger cultural, psychological, but also deeply personal meditation on its significance. 

Blue is a colour that artists – writers, painters, musicians alike – are intensely preoccupied with. From those that play the blues, that sing of having the blues, that write, theorise, name books, albums, paintings over the colour, it is clear that ‘blue’ is rich with philosophical and personal feeling, with emotional signification. But what is it about the colour blue that makes it so fascinating to artists – that makes it so contemplative and elusive to require being pinned down into some ‘permanent’ art form? To have the blues is described as feeling melancholy – defined as a type of sadness that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “pensive”. Blue is a colour invested in a sadness that is often aestheticized – intellectualised, even. Written in the aftermath of her relationship with a man she names “the prince of blue” (his affiliation with the colour left unclear if his own or her imposition), and her close friend’s serious accident, Bluets considers the common associations of blue with sadness, loss, or periods of suffering.

However, when I think of the colour blue I think of the sea, where my friend thinks of the sky – another, sadness. Our associations with colours are often both immediate and long-lasting, deeply resonant, or sensory. Another friend I asked said she thinks of mosaics; the azure tiles of a swimming pool, the sapphire glow of the sun piercing through a stained-glass window. Etymologically, the word stems from the Germanic ‘blao’, meaning “shimmering, lustrous”. Whether the sparkling topaz of a gemstone, or the glittering aquamarine of the ocean, blue was a colour first noted for the way it catches light; for how it moves, its shade flashing and changing with it. Nelson notes “a matte turquoise”, a “tepid, faded indigo” do not “thrill” or “interest” her. The blues that encapsulate us are often those with a depth and transparency, that invite you to touch, or break through them. Nelson’s Bluets takes the form of a mosaic, fragmentary yet cohesive, as she combines snippets of love songs, poems, encyclopaedic and anecdotal details. Weaving in intimate scenes of sex, love, and cruelty, addressing both the reader and her ‘prince of blue’ with the intimate second person ‘you’, she muses on Goethe, Berger, Emerson, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, piecing together all the little accounts of blue into one shimmering, lustrous lyrical poem.

Her initial dedication to Pascal’s Pensées where he argues “were it true, we do not think all philosophy is worth one hour of pain”, she reflects later in context to her recent heartbreak, musing that “there was a time where I would have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world”.

Bluets is not just a meditation on blue, but the extremities of emotion, of how even the most important things in the world to us – a lifelong dedication to the colour blue, the act of writing that she elsewhere describes as her ‘most intense love affair to date’ – can become secondary to “one hour of pain” or heartbreak. In her careful prose and lyrical contemplations, she demonstrates how our experience of blue is as much one of calmness, wisdom, loyalty as it is sadness or despair. In the extremity of emotion, Nelson shows how even in the depth of fading, we can choose a blue not of loss or transience but rather of the enduring sea and sky – “not of longing but of light”.