Joan Mitchell: Les Bluets (1973)
Oil on canvas (281 x 580 cm) [f]
NB: part one of this post (reflecting on selected propositions from 1-120) can be read by clicking here.
131
This makes smile:
"'I just don't feel like you're trying hard enough,' one friend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan?"
134
Once, I began assembling a book of fragments to do with the practice of joy before death - suicide notes, if you like. This proposition would've made a welcome addition:
"If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones [...] and head down to the river."
Philosophers, however, from Empedocoles to Deleuze, usually like to leap to their death like iridescent jumping spiders.
150
"For Plato, colour was as dangerous a narcotic as poetry."
And, many centuries later, the Puritans also hated colours and "smashed the stained-glass windows of churches, thinking them idolatrous, degenerate".
I knew both these things.
But I didn't know that, before becoming a holy colour - one particularly associated with the Blessed Virgin - blue "often symbolized the Antichrist" (i.e., he who comes out of the blue to deceive mankind and deny the Father and Son).
156 - 161
According to Lawrence, it's a terrible thing to educate children into abstract knowledge, so that they may understand the world. For adults to solemnly explain to three-year-olds why grass is green is, he says, inexcusable stupidity and will arrest their dynamic development [g].
As there is always something a bit childlike about poets, it didn't surprise me to learn that although she had been told the answer several times to the question 'Why is the sky blue?', Nelson can never quite recall the explanation.
The only part she does remember is that "the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it".
Never mind the scattering of sunlight and the length of waves, etc., for Nelson the blueness of the sky "is something of an ecstatic accdent produced by void and fire".
I love this thought: as I do the idea of divine darkness and agnosia - the latter being a form of unknowing that one discovers (or accomplishes) within the former: 'Explanations', as Wittgenstein once said, 'come to an end somewhere' [h].
164
I agree with Lawrence that the proverbial ideas of beauty as something sinful and shallow are all of them false [i].
And because I agree with this, I also very much like Maggie Nelson's proposition that, "despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said", beauty "neither obscures truth nor reveals it".
And that blue - the colour of sex [j] - is perhaps the most beautful of all colours.
167 - 168
When - like Cézanne, Artaud, and the American artist Mike Kelley - you've had enough of psychology and the narcissistic pleasure of seeing your own reflection (on film screens, for example), then it's time to attend to colour:
"Perhaps this is why I have turned my gaze so insistently to blue: it does not purport to be me, or anyone else for that matter."
171
Philosophically, this is at the heart of my project to do with the Ruins: gathering fragments of blue has nothing to do with paying tribute to (or wishing to recreate) some ideal model of blue wholeness; "a bouquet is no homage to the bush".
183 / 185
Readers might recall that in proposition 20 Nelson stated: Fucking leaves everything as it is.
Here, she echoes this by writing: "For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all. For the most part, I think it leaves everything as it is."
That's an unusual thing for a writer to say: usually, like Goethe, they are anxious about the possibly destructive nature of language; the fact that words can kill the essential quality of a thing.
If for Warhol sex was just another (occasionally quite satisfying) way to pass the time, then that's pretty much what writing is for Nelson [k].
204
And now, finally, thanks to Nelson, I have an answer when someone asks why I can never be bothered to have things repaired (even when this will cause significant damage and expense in the long term): I have little to no instinct for protection ...
"Out of laziness, curiosity, or cruelty - if one can be cruel to objects - I have given them up to their diminishment."
Notes
[f] Maggie Nelson names this as her favourite painting in proposition 145 of Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), p. 57. She later admires Mitchell for her chromophilic recklessness, that is to say, for choosing her pigments "for their intensity rather than their durability". See proposition 154, p. 61.
[g] See D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 123.
[h] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell Publishers, 1953), §1. Nelson quotes this line in proposition 161 (p. 64).
[i] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Artcles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 182 - 217. Lawrence writes: "Beauty is not a snare, nor is it skin-deep, since it always involves a certain loveliness of modelling [...]" (p. 192).
[j] Again, see Lawrence; 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, pp. 143 - 148, where he asserts that "sex and beauty are one thing, like fire and flame" (p. 145).
[k] Later, "upon considering the matter further", Nelson admits in proposition 193 that writing does in fact do something; namely, it replaces the memories it aimed to preserve.
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