This characterisation of blue also contributes to one of my favourite themes in the book: the inherent beauty and complexity of nature, regardless of human observation or intervention. This change / development the character undergoes is also similar to Nelson’s own journey / mental process after losing a relationship important to her.

Over the course of the book, the colour is characterized as anger, loss / grief, and depression later, it is painted out to be spirituality, love, enlightenment and darkness, neutrality, universality and independence. One of the things that made the book especially memorable was the way in which Nelson makes a reader fall in love with the color blue, by characterizing it and giving it not only a backstory and its own experience / relationship with other characters in the story, but by giving it a three-dimensional personality. Often referred to as prose poetry or a lyrical essay, Bluets utilises a mixture of narrative styles to document Nelson’s relationship with the colour blue and serves as an honest and powerful narration of her experience with grief, healing, desire and self-discovery.

Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).Bluets, by Maggie Nelson, is a collection of reflections and observations on the color blue. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will at others, of surrender. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone–and then, to actually forget–can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. “I always felt that there was an invisible male seducing the woman I was with, now whether this one was incarnate or merely imaginary I don’t remember.” I find this forgetting quite heartening and quite tragic, in turns.

In a 1994 interview, about twenty years after he wrote “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Cohen admitted that he could no longer remember the specifics of the love triangle that the song describes. But one can lose the memory of whiteness, too. “No whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory/of whiteness,” wrote Williams. This seems unimaginable, but the fact is that it happens all the time. I suppose it is possible that one day we will meet again and it will feel as if nothing ever happened between us.

Maggie nelson blue