Magic Lantern
Sunday, February 21, 2016
Andrew Moul-Bluets-Response One
At first, it was very difficult for me to adapt to Maggie
Nelson’s style of writing. I liked the way she uses numbers to separate her different
thoughts and anecdotes; however, I thought that the book at first was very hard
to understand. As I continued to read, I felt that it became easier to put
things together because I now had more pieces of the puzzle, or puzzles for
that matter. It seems to me that she jumps from one story or one author’s ideas
to another and eventually circles back to each one to give us more of the
story. In part 42, she poses the question, “Was I too blue for you?”. I think
that at this point in the story, this is one of the main issues that she is
trying to understand. She is trying to figure out what went wrong with a
previous relationship. Often, it seems that she relates love to blue, but at other
times she relates blue to something else. It is almost as if each of the
separate stories and others’ ideas that she shares, blue means something different.
It could be love, or pain, or confusion. She doesn’t seem sure. I think that by
writing this book, she is trying to uncover what ‘blue’ actually is and what
role it plays in her life. Is it a color that she finds appealing, is it
representative of her feelings and emotions? What is ‘blue’?
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201. I believe in the possibility-- the inevitability, even -- of a fresh self stepping into ever-fresh waters, as in the variant: "No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." But I also sense something in Heraclitus's fragment that allows for the possibility of a mouse shocking its snout on a hunk of electrified cheese over and over again in a kind of static eternity.
ReplyDeleteThis passage struck me with regard to the comparison of the brevity of a moment and the repetition of an action. A person undergoing consistent change, as with the Heraclitus quote, plays off of your passage "Was I too blue for you?" This could be entirely possible that yes, she was too blue. Because within the thoughts about their relationship, her fault, the ending results with an endless amounts of questions. Blue means something exquisitely different with each story, whether it personal or historical. The overall form of "Bluets" with the numbering style adds an additional relational value. Her topic is blue; she is writing about blue, yet nothing is precisely about it. No number repeats, they are continuous. The differences between each numbered section may each be different, but you cannot deny their relation. Blue as a color, feeling, or love means little if you look at it all separately. As a whole, the color and the story are steady.