In [On Being Blue] poetics and philosophy pull apart, emerge from, and re-enter each other in eros—primordial blueness. Poetry at its best, at its bluest, does not paint images of sexual acts, but with reverential attentiveness to the being of language, makes language present as lovers make themselves present to each other. Philosophical thinking at its best, blue reason, attains concepts in the same way. The erotic logos of lived-through-thought reaches its conclusions and insights not through the constipated step-by-step-premise-to-conclusion-thinking represented by academic philosophy but with the multifaceted and multi-directional vitality of life lived to its fullest.

Blue is not simply a word or symbol that designates the color blue or some interior mental state; it is a mode of being in and of that which is. It is a mode of being around which Gass hopes "to wind my Quink-stained mouth" thereby aiming at making flesh...