Lovers who reuse this incantation are Argonauts. However often the ship was repaired and made anew, it retained its name. The title of Nelson’s latest book, The Argonauts, is taken from French philosopher Roland Barthes likening of the phrase ‘I love you’ to the refitting of the ancient ship Argos of Greek legend. Blue here refers less to their colour than to their deliberateness, their oddness. The term bluestone, for example, is used to describe the various types of often fragmentary rock found at the site of Stonehenge which would not otherwise be found there geologically. The eclectic range of meanings that a single word can accrue reminds us that language is as much a creature of convenience as precision. The cumulative effect of it cut through my man-flu like a pointed chisel. Comprised of 240 fragments, Bluets suited my state – too blurry for any high lyricism but still feverish for epiphanies in small deliberate chunks. Her slim 2009 volume Bluets is a bare and consonant appraisal of blue – as a colour, as music, as meaning sexual content and the fuzzy indigo of depression. I first read Maggie Nelson in the April of last year, during the early feverish stages of an autumn cold.
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