Endormie--Strive to Guess and Gass

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So blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if
the blue genii were its belly, the lamp's breath the smoke of the wraith. There is that lead-like look.
There is the lead itself, and all those bluey hunters, thieves, those pigeon flyers who relieve the
roofs of metal, and steal the pipes too. There's the blue pill that is the bullet's end, the nose, the
plum, the blue whistler, and there are all the bluish hues of death.
Is it the sight of death, the thought of dying? What sinks us to a deeper melancholy: sexual
incompleteness or its spastic conclusion? What seems to line our life with satin? What brings the
rouge to our cheeks? Loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness, grief...each is an absence in us. We
have no pain, but we have lost all pleasure, and the lips that meets our lip is always one half of our
own. Our state is precisely the name of precisely nothing, and our memories, with polite long faces,
come to view us and to say to one another that we have never looked better; that we seem at last
at peace; that our passing was--well--sad--still--doubtless for the best (all this in a whisper lest the
dead should hear.) Disappointment, constant loss, despair...a taste, a soft quality in the air, a color,
a flutter: permanent in their passage. We could not retain it. It will never be back. Joy-breaking
gloom continues to hammer. So it's true: Being without Being is blue.

William Gass