Preview: Chronic Attentions of an Obsessed Mind by J. E. Sunderland

Reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets through a Polaroid Picture by J. E. Sunderland

Fig 1: 1.1.21: St Mary’s Churchyard. Captured with Sonar SX-70., J Sunderland 2021

Nelson is, undeniably, obsessed. Her Bluets1 are an ode to infatuation with a colour, a singular journey exploring this relationship with the metaphysical, through her own life and those of others who have pondered, fixated and realised their need to touch, embrace, absorb, b l u e. Nelson’s attentions in Bluets are surrounded with habitual practices, personal and abstract anecdotes, and questions around this seemingly primordial sentiment- something perhaps slightly sardonic considering the modernness of the word ‘blue’, compared to other primary colours which have a long established history, and contemporary considerations of its existence in the lives of humans- it was only about 6,000 years ago that blue started to become a colourant, that it ‘became’ a colour2, and only later still till it was named by the Egyptians, 14,000 years after the first cave paintings emerged3 .

1 Maggie Nelson, Bluets (London: Wave Books, 2009).

2 https://www.dunnedwards.com/colors/specs/posts/color-blue-history [accessed 3 January 2021].

3 David Alan Warburton, ‘Ancient Color Categories’, in Encyclopaedia of Color Science and Technology(New York: , 2014).

Similarly, the Polaroid ‘1.1.21: St Mary’s Churchyard’, taken by myself on the first day of the New Year, directs its attention towards something both abstract and very real, a metaphysical concept and physical truth that envelopes everyone in their entirety at some point. Much like blue, blueness, b l u e s: death, dying, the noth hh ing exists in two states, the real and the other, and this is why I direct your own attention to the two, to the interweaving relationship and divesting – something – that exists between Bluets and A Polaroid Picture: ‘1.1.21: St Mary’s Churchyard’. This little piece will tangle and untangle and likely blur your thoughts at parts, but will ultimately revel in the universal attention we pay to things and the things that are on the outside of our peripheral, waiting to be noticed, and how some of these are born (death, dying, nothing) and some are imbued later (blue, bluets, blueness).

Where to begin?

It can be safely assumed that the past year (2020), the global population has thought about one thing more than they may have before. The coronavirus (COVID-19) has caused an increased awareness and attentiveness to death, dying, the in between

(incubated, in-tubu-lated). A pandemic that halted the global economy and made the majority of the world start obsessing about hygiene, bringing about the idea that you should have some basic form of it. I start off directing your attention to your personal reactions to this virus. Atten tion was initially raised through news that a virus had broken out in Wuhan in China, global governments refuting that it was already in the western world, that it did not s p r e a d like they claimed it did ‘we’re safe’ and ‘not at risk at this moment’. But we became more acutely aware of every cough (I am asthmatic, I justified as I coughed into my elbow after running to catch the bus. No one seemed to believe me), taking steps away from people as they displayed possible symptoms. Then, when the United Kingdom finally entered a lockdown, in March 2020, lagging behind the rest of the world, our attention was drawn towards numbers and the consequences of a virus that had travelled across the globe to our tiny island. Less than a month after national lockdown, the UK reported its highest daily death toll, 948 people dying due to COVID-19 in 24 hours4 . The response to this was mourning and incredulity (this was diagnosed COVID-19 deaths, and at this point testing was not yet rolled out en masse). Why, though, do I mention this? Why do I stop there, and not mention how many have recorded to have died to date in the UK of COVID-19 – over a 97,000 at the time of writing, by the way. I mention this as it is context for the bubbling congestion of an obsessed populous with death, our minds tapping away at us telling us constantly that the person next to us could kill me with that cough or contemplating the restraining-order we have imposed on ourselves not to visit our elderly relatives and loved ones, because what if they caught it and it was I, who killed them? What if I killed grandma? This tapping, constant niggling and worming obsession with death that has burrowed out of our normal subconscious can be truly likened to what Nelson presents in Bluets, the constant niggling desire to attract (or to repel, in the case of COVID-related attentions) the source of her attention, to elucidate on blueness like I myself am on death.

‘I got the blues, I got the blues, I got the blues…’5

4 British Foreign Office, COVID-19 Timeline (2021) <https://bfpg.co.uk/2020/04/ covid-19-timeline/> [accessed 3 January 2021].

5 Saint Louis Blues (2020) <https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/louisarmstrong/saintlouisblues.html> [accessed 10 January 2021].

To feel mournful, depressed, despair, is to feel blue. Nelson brushes against this mourning early on in her work. Starting with Mallarmé, she processes us through his turmoil – through the mortal attempts of reaching, gr a sssssssp ing, throttling, the concepts of God, religious piety and purity, immortality and choicelessness. Nelson eventually diverts and skirts away from mortality and consequentialism of the relationship between her personal obsession and The Inevitable, only to circle back to a friend who had been in an accident, and the blueness of dying. To talk about Wittgenstein and his own mortal relationships with colours that represented his pain, the urgency of dying. To talk, also, about Derek Jarman’s own Chroma and deathcolour relationship, the blueness of his films and forecast of his death in a torrent of blueness in his films. The decay of seeing in colour, of one of the last colours to remain in vision often being blue. Nelson talks of obsessions with colours, of the knowledge of mortality and your ending passage as a person, as this person. For Nelson she ex udes blue and oozes it on every surface that she touches, yet she has not touched (directly) the blueness that she fears the most, but she recognises its presence, its immortal hold over us all. Even the blind feel blue eventually, the blueness of body warmth failing to keep yourself temperate and consciousness fading, or simply the blueness of nothing, of darkness.

This grasping of colour when faced with mortality can be seen outside your window as you look out at the street, as you walk by neighbours houses or pass public buildings. Rainbows for Heroes, bright colours, the symbols of hope for biblical-fanatics, for the mundane mind and for queers who have clutched the eight colours (now eleven) to their chests whilst simultaneously raising it in the air since the late seventies. You also see other mortal colours as a passer-by adjusts their ribbon with their infinite associations with AIDs, cancer (of every monstrous strain), mental health disorders and various other conditions that causes us to confront mortality earlier than expected. We obsess over these colours, the forcing of recognition of something bright to escape the darkness that death brings, to fight and bring light to it. Blue ribbons can have over one hundred different meanings, depending on the personal circumstances. This is not a critique of mourning and colours, but a side line to a greater tangle, complication, of questions about the mentality of humans and our obsessions with colouring things in, especially when thinking of death, or at least on the precipice of death.