Read On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry for Free Online Page B

red eruption of a swelling), but does one care to see his breakfast fruit as a sweetened milky bowl of snipped nips? no.
    There's something of the thimble to them (not enough), and they are frequently described as rosy or said to possess the color of young shoots, but why take the trouble when the trouble taken is so evident and audible and yields such frigid results?
    Perhaps they are like the lightly chewed ends of large pencil erasers. Yes. When brown, they are another pair of eyes. Or is it the eyes which promise me those rich wide aureoles? I have seen nipples so pulled on and flattened by nursing, they hung there like two tiny tongues.
    D'Annurtzio may write that 'long trailing vapours slid through the cypresses of the Monte Maria like waving locks through a comb of bronze,' and though the comparison is highly decorative, it is not absurd to imagine on the obverse of the metal a maiden's blond tresses, as she prepares her hair for a night of love, passing through the tines of her comb of bronze like trailing vapours through a row of cypresses. But may I comfortably think of those sheep as wandering teeth?
    There's no tit for tat in this poetry, which is, after all, the sort of erotic verse preferred by those who once loved to listen (and if they could, would still, sweet dears) to Madame Melba, freshly risen from her death as Mimi and now surrounded by bouquets, while accompanying herself on a baby grand wheeled opportu-nely from the wings to the center of an emptied stage, warble
    'Home Sweet Home' and 'The Last Rose of Summer' in the inter-vals of silence between applauding palms.
    Oh! ah! ai! alack and alas! ahimi! but what is love? how best speak of the beauty of women? account for the soul's deep swoons without confusing them with the greedy swoops of a gull after herring? explain the blue of serge or chicory, or ordinary sky, the iris and the pansy blue of melancholy, the still intenser blue of the imagination?
    It is Orlando's problem too, and Orlando finds that every subject he (and he will not suffer his sex change until the eighteenth century) wishes to pursue so embroiled, cluttered, and betangled with every other that it appears impossible for him to say a single, simple, clear, true thing.
    . . . he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. 'The sky is blue,' he said,
    'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. 'Upon my word,' he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), 'I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false.' And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.
    Conrad also rather bitterly complained, regarding the precision of his elected language, that writing in English was like throwing mud at a wall. But blueness fuddles every tongue like wine.
    Pierre Louys, whose credentials are impeccable, being both French and pagan, at least achieves originality: Thy breasts are two vast flowers, reversed upon thy chest, whose cut stems give out a milky sap. Thy softened belly swoons beneath the hand.
    However, I fear that Dr. Johnson would find his effort too meta-physical.
    We appear to be reduced to apostrophe: the elegant Gee Whiz.
    Certainly nothing else will do for fellatio, which has never had its poet. Even our aforementioned D'Annunzio, by training perfectly equipt, cannot do much more than moan ornately.
    O sinuous, moist and burning mouth, where my desire is intensified when I am sunk in deep oblivion, and which relentlessly sucks my life. O great head of hair strewn over my knees during the sweet act. O cold hand which spreads a shiver and