Nelson lists insights, hers and others’, to convey her learning and her vexation. The text is fragmentary but not disconnected, certainly not a series of discrete contextless meditations or aphorisms in the style of Marcus Aurelius.
Despite the exhaustion, Bluets wears its hybrid/fragmented dress well, showing its seams and much enthralled by its wanderlust, an aesthetic runway that constantly leads Nelson to find new ideas, images, and expressions. The book is a philosophical and personal exploration of what the color blue has done to Nelson.
As she crisscrosses sorrow and wonder, doubt and desire, her tone darkens. Nelson combines spiritual inquiry with erotic obsession, searches for beauty, and gets hung up on memories. She’s not the only artist so smitten by a color. Subjects include an ex-lover and a friend who’s been paralyzed, but the majority of the text features her analyzing her reading, often deferring to others’ comments (including Leonard Cohen, Joseph Cornell, and Joan Mitchell) on blue. Nelson utilizes memoir, philosophy, quotation, analysis, scientific exposition and query, meditation, and more, each in stylistic miniature. The themes of lost love and existential aloneness come to dominate, bathed in a kind of blued longing. The work hybridizes several prose styles and verges on the lyric essay. The book totals some nineteen thousand words. Each numbered fragment is either a sentence or a short paragraph, none longer than two hundred words. It is a set of 240 loosely linked fragments.
The author Maggie Nelson, born in 1973, has authored half a dozen books, among them poetry collections, memoirs, and nonfiction.
This is the second in a series of four nonfiction craft essays adapted for TriQuarterly Online from a panel Subtext, Sidetext, Sound Tracks and More: Layering in Creative Nonfiction which was originally presented at the NonfictionNow conference on November 6th, 2010.
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