[APPLAUSE]
Oh my God.
Usually if I'm nervous and there are a lot of people, I might--
I don't usually get the giggles.
But that just totally cracked me up.
So I got to take a minute to recover.
Well, that was funny.
All right.
Here's me in my head.
Here's Tucson.
Hello, Tucson.
This is super exciting.
I've had just--
I don't know, just a blessed 24 hour period here.
And seeing all of you makes it feel all the more so.
So thank you so much to my hosts.
Thank you, all of you guys.
And it is true that--
I don't think I even have a copy of "Pacific."
So you guys made it all the more special.
Yeah.
It's lost in the tide.
So anyway, I'm going to--
let's see, I'm going to read to y'all.
And because of the hybrid nature of the series,
I thought I would risk kind of schizophrenia,
but since we have the hydra headedness as the introduction,
by reading from three things.
And I think--
I don't know, I was talking with Ander's class
today about projects that seem dissimilar
but they actually kind of one feeds onto the next.
And so I'm--
I kind of picked some parts that I think do that.
So since so many of you have been kind enough
to pay attention to this book, Bluets.
So I thought I would read the end of it to you all.
And it's a book that started--
it started when I was very young, collecting blue things.
And then I finally sat down and put all the blue things down.
And it ended up being written in numbered propositions,
I call them.
So there are 240 and I'm going to start at number 222.
So 222.
In January, 2002, camping in the Dry Tortugas
on an island, which is essentially
an abandoned fort 90 miles north of Cuba,
flipping through a copy of Nature Magazine.
I read that the color of the universe (whatever
that might mean, and here I gather
it means the result of a survey of the spectrum of light
emitted by around 200,000 galaxies)
has finally been deduced.
The color of the universe, the article says,
is pale turquoise.
Of course, I think, looking out wistfully over the glittering
Gulf.
I knew it all along.
The heart of the world is blue.
223.
A few months later back at home I
read somewhere else that this result was an error
due to a computer glitch.
The real color of the universe, this new article says,
is light beige.
224.
Recently, I found out that les bluets
can translate as corn flowers.
Now, you might have think I would have known this all along
as I have been calling this book "Bluets" mispronounced
for years.
But somehow I had only ever heard
it was a small blue flower with a yellow center that
grows abundantly in the countryside of France.
So I thought I'd never seen it.
225.
Shortly after finding out about the "Bluets"
I have a dream in which I am sent
an abundance of corn flowers.
In this dream it is perfectly all right that is their name.
They do not need to be "Bluets" any longer.
They are American.
They are shaggy.
They're wild.
They're strong.
And they do not signify romance.
They were sent by no one in celebration of nothing.
I had known them all along.
226.
As I collected blues for this project in folders,
in boxes, and notebooks, and memory,
I imagined I would create a blue tome, an encyclopedic
compendium of blue observations, thoughts, and facts.
But as I lay out my collection now.
What strikes me most is its anemia.
An anemia that seems to stand in direct proportion to my zeal.
I thought I had collected enough blue to build a mountain,
albeit one of detritus.
But it seems to me now as if I have stumbled
upon a pile of thin blue gels scattered on the stage
long after the show has come and gone.
The set striked.
227.
Perhaps this is as it should be.
Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
the first and only book of philosophy
he published in his lifetime, clocks in at 60 pages.
And it offers a grand total of seven propositions.
"As to the shortness of this book,
I am awfully sorry for it.
But what can I do?"
Wittgenstein wrote his translator.
"If you were to squeeze me like a lemon," he said,
"you would get nothing more out of me."
228.
My injured friend is now able to write letters
via voice recognition software to keep her friends
abreast of changes in her condition, of which there
have been many.
"My life can change.
My life does change," she asserts.
And it has and it does often in astonishing ways.
Nonetheless, near the end of these letters
she usually includes a short paragraph
that acknowledges her ongoing physical pain
and her intense grief for all she has lost, a grief she
describes as bottomless.
"If I did not write of the difficulties under which
I labor," she writes, "I would fear
to be misrepresenting the grinding
reality of quadriplegia and spinal cord injury.
So here it is, the paragraph that roundly asserts
that I continue to suffer."
229.
I am writing all of this down in blue ink
so as to remember that all words, not just
some, are written in water.
230.
Holed up in the North Country for the month of May,
a May which saw but four days of sunshine.
The rest of the month was solid gray, drizzling
or pouring rain, rendering everything
green, rushing and verdant, in short, a nightmare.
Each day I took long walks in my yellow poncho looking for blue,
looking for any blue thing.
I found only tarps, always tarps pinned over stacks of firewood,
a few blue recycling containers kicked over
in the streets, a grayish blue mailbox here and there.
I came back to my dark chamber each night
empty handed, empty eyed as if I had been panning fruitlessly
for gold all day in a cold river.
Stop working against the world, I counseled myself.
Love the one you're with.
Love the color green.
But I did not love the green nor did
I want to have to love it or pretend to love it.
The most I can say is that I abided it.
231.
That month I touched myself every night in my narrow bed
and came thinking of you.
Knowing all the while that I was planting
the seeds of a fresh disaster.
The disaster did not come then but it did come later.
"Though six days may smoothly run,
the seventh will bring blue devils or a dun," wrote Byron.
The most I can say is that this time I learned my lesson.
I stopped hoping.
232.
Perhaps in time I will also stop missing you.
233.
That the future is unknowable is for some God's means
of suturing us in or to the present moment.
For others it is the mark of a malevolence, a sure sign
that our entire existence here is best understood
as a sort of joke or a mistake.
234.
For me it's neither.
It is simply the way that it is, whether this accident
be a happy or unhappy one is probably a matter of mood
more than anything else.
The difficulty is that "our moods do not believe
in each other," wrote Emerson.
One can wander about the landscape looking for clues,
amassing evidence, but even the highest pile never
seems to decide the case.
235.
"One thing they don't tell you about the blues
when you got them.
You keep on falling, because there ain't no bottom,"
sings Emmylou Harris.
And she may be right.
Perhaps it would help to be told there is no bottom,
save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging.
You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey
sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild,
some sorry ass grave digger grown bone tired of the trade.
You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug alone
in the darkness and all its pulsing quiet surrounded
by the scandal of corpses.
236.
Do not be overly troubled by this fact.
"Nine days out of 10," wrote Merleau-Ponty of Cezanne,
"all he saw around him was the wretchedness
of his empirical life and his unsuccessful attempts,
the debris of an unknown celebration."
237.
In any case, I am no longer counting the days.
238.
I want you to know if you ever read this.
There was a time when I would rather have had you by my side
than any one of these words.
I would have rather have had you by my side
than all the blue in the world.
239.
But now you were talking as if love were a consolation.
Simone Weil warned otherwise.
"Love is not consolation," they wrote.
"It is light."
240.
All right then, let me try to rephrase.
When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing
but of light."
OK.
So that's how that book ends.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, guys.