Vertical Drop: Readings and Responses
Weaving between the thematic threads of literature, popular songs, lived experience and the natural world with non-linear intertextuality, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets paints a world lived through a single point of focus, the color blue. Greater than a list of Baader-Meinhof-inspired instances where the color shows up in the world, but more a lens through which the world is experienced and recalled. It’s blue as heard in the melancholy songs of Jonie Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Blue in the arthouse films of Derek Jarman and Andy Warhol. Blue in the philosophical writings of Goethe and Horace. It’s blue as a means of experiencing the world around us as much as it is a shaping framework for how we pass through the environments within it. It is the macroscopic azur of a clear blue sky concurrent with the atomic blue of our physiology. Nelson uses blue to paint the world around her and to show us our own world anew, but it’s more than just showing us how omnipresent blue is. It asks us to find the gendered agony in the deepest blue. The suffering blue of intense loneliness. The coldness of a blue which doesn’t love you back.
’Goethe is not alone in turning to color in a particularly fraught moment. Think of filmmaker Derek Jarman who wrote his book Chroma as he was going blind and dying of AIDS, a death he also forecast on film as disappearing in a ‘blue screen’. Or of Wittgenstein, who wrote his Remarks on Color during the last eighteen months of his life, while dying of stomach cancer.’ (Nelson, Bluets)
As Nelson describes in Goethe, a blue ‘may be said to disturb rather than enliven’, where our falling in love with such a disturbance where we might find happiness. It’s a joy which escapes Goethe himself, characterized by ‘nothing of distinguished note’, and turning to color theory in efforts to navigate a challenging period in one’s life. Here Nelson associates blue with the final chapters of life. First with film maker Derek Jarman slowly going blind as a result of the experimental treatment he was receiving for his AIDS diagnosis, and then with Wittgenstein, who similarly chose to write about color during the last eighteen months of his life while suffering from stomach cancer. Across the intertextual threads woven between Goethe, Jarman and Wittgenstein, but also Mitchell, Cohen and Warhol, Nelson draws a powerful correlation between color and pain. Nelson associates blue with the forecast of death, but also that of disappearing, something Jarman in particular immerses the viewer in during his 1993 experimental film Blue.
More last testament than love letter, Derek Jarman’s Blue was as unique and challenging then as it continues to be today. More radio play than movie, it’s 79 minutes of an entirely blue saturated screen, over which two interwoven stories braid together to weave a story of Jarman’s recollected, daydreamed, restless experiences of living with AIDS in 1990s London, and the adventures of blue itself as a color and a character. Punctuated throughout are the ghostly names of Jarman’s former friends and lovers already lost to the disease.
’I’m walking along the beach in a howling gale. Another year is passing. In the roaring waters I hear the voices of dead friends. Love is life, it lasts forever. My heart’s memory turns to you. David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul.’ (Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993)
At the time of making the film, Jarman was losing his sight to the treatment, and only able to see in shades of blue, rendering him partially blind as the medicine, still highly experimental in the early nineties, struggled to ease the suffering of those affected by a condition few understood, and for whom society was still fearful. Jarman documents these complications, both as patient but also documentarian, leaving behind a witnessed record of lived experience that’s as tender as it is heartbreaking. The narrative often slips into sedated, dreamlike, lost modes, where the viewer, consumed by only the voices of the story but immersed in the visual sensation of the blue screen, takes Jarman’s hand and joins him on his journey to who knows where. We hold his hand as he dreams of being an astronaut, and wonders what it’s like to walk across a deep blue sky. But these beautiful moments are always swiftly contrasted with the numbing deterioration of Jarman’s body and eyesight as the side effects of treatment grow ever aggressive. Jarman would die of the disease in early 1994, mere months after the film’s release.
’The worst of the illness is uncertainty. I’ve played this scenario back and forth each hour of the day for the last six years. Blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.’ (Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993)
Nelson’s deeply rich intertextuality offers a broad spectrum of blue. The color of the pain brought by illness as much as pleasure of an illicit afternoon spent at The Chelsea Hotel. The blue of the natural world as much as the tone of fantasy and dream. An elastic blue which seeks dignity in loneliness and euphoria in the light of love. A blue which has spent a lifetime of attempting to reconcile her lived experience with the chromatic tones around her. Ultimately she collapses all of these colors together into a single point of light, and concludes that it is better ‘to be a student not of longing but of light’.
As Louise Bourgeois eloquently states in the introduction to Carmen Maria Machado’s Dream House, ‘memory itself is a form of architecture’, but within that constructed space also comes Saidiya Hartman’s violence of the archive. A violence of intertextual exclusion and editing. That the act of memoir, of remembering, is itself an act of resurrection, constructed through an intertextual lens of lived experience and deeply personal reference which is predicated upon omission. Channeling Borges’ infinite library, Machado explains that a truly comprehensive archive of experience can only ever be mythological, ‘buried under the detailed history of the future and his dreams and half dreams at dawn on August 14 1934’.
Machado uses the framework of the dream house inside of which she populates her archive, but is also keen to distinguish it from dream house as metaphor where the space’s inhabitants, not its architects, give the rooms their purpose. Here the houses are as real as any actual house from our past, and are not the spaces of fantasy but spaces of memory. Intertextual memory palaces which are ‘full of eclectic, nightmarish details’ with ‘blood red floors, walls, and ceiling, further improved by a secret hatch and a nonfunctional landline phone’. They are the dream spaces of the people we were in the past, but seen through the lens of the present. They’re a place we’re able to revisit emotionally, but not physically. They are Bourgeois’ building blocks, deeply coupled with our strongly personal sense of constructed self. As Machado' asserts ‘But this story? This one's mine’.
If Nelson frames experience through the lens of blue, Machado motivates yellows to illustrate our own destruction. A dandelion which ‘yields every time'. It has no wiles, no no sense of self-preservation’.
’And when we die, our bodies feed the hungry earth, our cells becoming part of other cells, and in the world of the living, where we used to be, people kiss and hold hands and fall in love and fuck and laugh and cry and hurt others and nurse broken hearts and start wars and pull sleeping children out of car seats and shout at each other. If you could harness that energy-that constant, roving hunger-you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until it collided heart-first with the sun.’ (Machado, Dream House)
Here Machado uses the galloping style of a single lengthy sentence to turn the dream into a nightmare. The dream which falls in and out of love and rips children from car seats. A racing style which reconciles itself as Machado offers a way to bottle that energy and the time and space-bending benefits it might afford. The sentences here are call and response. If the first sentence offers the broken hearted violence of lived experience, the second attempts to answer it with the hope of doing wonders by harnessing it into something productive. It’s the same call and response Machado ends with when she states "We can fuck," she says, "but we can't fall in love”.
Keith S. Wilson’s Lobster Shy uses intertextuality as carapace to connect gendered and immigrant experiences to a crushing anxiety coupled with emergent sexuality. An anxiety where ‘being surrounded by people fills your stomach with stones’ and where everything is turned around, turned around. An anxiety where ‘everything reduces to feeling’ and where Wilson recalls attempts to set lobsters free as a metaphor for his own claustrophobic emotional imprisonment. Even John Connor, future savior of the human race in the Terminator movies, is rendered intertextually impotent when the actor who portrays him experiences his own emotional episode in trying to set the grocery store lobsters free.
Wilson’s lobsters are trapped, but mighty. Rendered harmless by the glass tank through which they are selected to be eaten each night. Ripper claws cuffed. Wilson draws comparisons with the heteronormative masculinity and painful honor he experiences from those around him growing up, echoing the fate of the lobsters with the intertextual references of the cinema’s heroes willing to sacrifice their lives up on the screen as guidance for a noble life. Wilson searches for biological and intergenerational answers to his sexual shyness in aspects of mercury poisoning, or Mad Hatter’s disease, but finds as much solace in the walls of medicine as he does in the xenophobic curiosity of those on the school bus. As he wrestles with his homosexuality, he finds ‘every gesture is a fingerprint that floats over the world’, saying that:
’Even though you draw from a deep well of depression, or introversion, or intense social anxiety, nothing might stop you from interpreting the noise of a lobster entering boiling water as a cry (they can’t).’ (Wilson, Lobster Shy)
Here Wilson draws closer comparisons with the anxiety he feels in being judged but also the desire to conceal as a gay teenager. How his shyness is personified in the biology of the lobster. How the mercury his mother was so fond of might be the cause of his sexuality, and how both are mirrored by an animal unable to scream as it boils alive. A chemical reaction transforms the lobster from animal to food in a way that echoes Wilson’s own transition from boy to man. He too is silently screaming, but remains defiant that he’d ‘rather be a bullet than a compromise’.
Where Nelson uses intertextuality to draw upon deeply painful experiences of suffering and final days, Machado uses it to turn the dreams of remembrance into nightmares, and leans upon the violence which comes from the unrecalled omissions of archives and memory. Similarly, Wilson uses it to draw comparisons between the violent depictions of what should be which surround him growing up, and the intense, but protected feelings of sexual shyness he feels as a teenager.
