Read On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry for Free Online

speak of arrogant bananas; command someone, as Gertrude Stein once did, to 'argue the earnest cake,' and the mind will do more than mix them in its ear. It will endeavor a context in which the command is normal, even trite. Our grammars give us rules for doing that, but sometimes these are no more than suggestions. Our interests do the same. Just as a man who is sick with suspicion may suppose that even the billboards are about him, any text can be regarded as a metaphorical description of some subject hidden in the reader's head. In that blue light which lust (or orgone energy) is said to shine on everything, we begin to see what an arrogant banana might be. Ado-lescent boys may live for weeks within a single sexual giggle, and when political life feels the thumb, then any innocent surface (poor Turgenev's A Sportsman's Notebook) can conceal a call to arms. Suppressed material contaminates the free like fecal water.
    Ernani or The Marriage of Figaro become revolutionary.
    Out of aching puberty, I remember very well a burlesque skit to which I was a breathless, puzzled witness much the way I once watched, through a slit, slogans scribbled on a washroom wall by a large rotund little man who held his hand to his heart as though he were warming it, and rolled down his lower lip. Pressed Pants is telling Baggy of his wonderful trip to Venice, and how a beautiful woman invited him to take a ride in her gondola (a word which both pronounced gcme-dough-la).
    You're kidding. You actually got in her gondola.
    She invited me, I told you. She practically insisted.
    Listen . . . hey . . . tell me: what was her gondola like?
    Oh, you know, they're all pretty much the same—long and narrow, a bit flat-bottomed, with a tall ornamental stem.
    Boy. Oh boy. I can't believe it. And you got in?
    Spent the whole afternoon.
    In her gondola?
    Sure. Saw all the sights.
    Ah, come on . . . naw . . . not all afternoon.
    Sure. At first we went fast but later we just took it easy and lay there kinda lazy. She was well built, soft and cushiony inside.
    We had tea and cake, too, and a good long discussion about art.
    While you was still in her gondola?
    Certainly. She didn't rock much. And there was a fiddler—huge guy
    —who played lively little tunes the whole time. And sang a few romantic songs, and pointed out the points of interest.
    Wow. I'll bet. But he wasn't in her gondola too?
    Sure he was—where would he be?
    Ah, come on now . . . Naw . . . Naw . . . He was in there while you was? at the same time?
    Naturally. To fiddle. Yeah. It was a big gondola. There was plenty of room.
    For the prude, or his political equivalent, there are dangerous suggestions in the most carefully processed air; there are lewd insinuations, Commie connivance; any word may yawn indecently, or worse, a gondola may engulf us; yet unless we are privately obsessed, something in the text or context must sound the proper political or sexual alert (Condition Blue is the second stage of any warning system), and if the soberness of some occasions is sufficiently impressive, even loud alarms may clang quite vainly, as you often have to tug the reader's sleeve before he'll hear a bladder making Joyce's Chamber Music, or, while fingering one of the Tender Buttons Miss Stein has designed, feel somewhere a little tingle.
    Mental sets are essential to every art, and various cheap jokes can be made of them. Here is one such which Sir John Suckling, who was capable of better, should never have composed: There is a thing which in the light
    Is seldom us'd; but in the night
    It serves the female maiden crew,
    The ladies and the good-wives too;
    They used to take it in their hand,
    And then it will uprightly stand;
    And to a hole they it apply,
    Where by its goodwill it would die;
    It spends, goes out, and still within It leaves its moisture thick and thin.
    There have been many riddles of this kind, although, led to expect that the answer to the question, 'What is it?' will be