On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William H. Gass

never does that. Every article of air might look like cobalt if we got outside ourselves to see it. The country of the blue is clear.

    * * *
It is not simple, not a matter for amateurs, making sentences sexual; it is not easy to structure the consciousness of the reader with the real thing, to use one wonder to speak of another, until in the place of the voyeur who reads we have fashioned the reader who sings; but the secret lies in seeing sentences as containers of consciousness, as constructions whose purpose it is to create conceptual perceptions—blue in every area and range: emotion moving through the space of the imagination, the mind at gleeful hop and scotch, qualities, through the arrangement of relations, which seem alive within the limits they pale and red-den like spanked cheeks, and thus the bodies, objects, happen-ings, they essentially define.
    The condition I describe is not, as one might initially suppose, like that ascribed to Eva Flegen of Mors, the Maid of Germany, who lived without meat on the smell of a rose, but, paradoxical-ly, every loving act of definition reverses the retreat of attention to the word and returns it to the world. The landscape which emerges from the language which has made it is quite as lovely, vast and curious, as rich and prepossessing, as that of the deity who broke the silence of the void with speech so perfect the word Tree' grew leaves and the syllables of 'sealion' swallowed fish.
    The misleading miracle of the movies can nevertheless instruct us about prose. The silent film was full of magnificent action and exaggerated gestures as the actors strove to overcome the mute-ness of their medium. A Chaplin might occasionally manage, but most emotions cannot survive breast-beating. The talkie, on the other hand, while showing us how complicated thoughts and subtle feelings had been nearly snuffed out by the airless absence of speech, also demonstrated how cheap, thin, and stupid both became when the script was weak. Of course the camera fidgets in front of the speaking face. The telephone, a tire screech, the smash of glass, a ringing exchange of shots: these sounds issue from their images; but any conversation which rises above cliche like the first bird requires every photo in its neighborhood to be obedient and serve it. Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal. The camera understands its enemy, and shuts its eye.

    When Leo Feldman, Stanley Elkin's awesome merchant, enters his department store and is at once assailed by "perfumes and facepowders, the mascaras, and polishes bright as sodas,* will we enter? only if his language enters us the way God's did Adam at whose bare word, as Sir Thomas Browne reminds us, "were the rest of the creatures made.* Then the language fills the mouth as it was meant to. We feel the need to speak it. Accepting the words as our own, speaking the words as our own, we believe at last in their denotations. "Art, art, thought Feldman, impresario of deep disks of rich rouge, pastel as flesh, of fine-grained dusting powders like soft, fantastic sand, of big plush puffs and cunning brushes.* This silent head-hummed sound we make is not a use-less and annoying wail which has been wrenched by lack of oil from the machinery. When we hear 'big plush puffs' we do not have to see them., and "deep disks of rich rouge' replace the feel of the tinted grease. Through the physical qualities of the language, Elkin moves his "things' as if to music.
    He was obsessed, by it, the merchandise laid out like a city, patterned, zoned as neighborhood, and missed nothing on the fluorescently tubed yellow wood and glass horseshoe counters. He knew without touching them the feel of the glass, greasy as plastic from the precious contact of shoppers, their leaned, open-palmed sur-renders on the cotmtertops, smudged from their groped investiga-tions, their excited jabs at the glass: 'There, there —next to the white one.* (The counters, washed each night, bore a now intrinsic