Some Blue
"Am I Blue" by Alice Walker is a poignant short story that explores themes of freedom, empathy, and the human-animal connection. The narrative centers around a conversation between a woman and a horse named Blue, revealing deep insights into the constraints imposed by society and the innate desire for liberation. Walker's use of vivid imagery and tender dialogue invites readers to reflect on the parallels between human and animal experiences, emphasizing compassion and the questioning of captivity. The story's introspective tone and emotional depth make it a compelling piece that resonates with readers sensitive to issues of autonomy and kindness.
Embracing choice but not risking the rash, how to best curate some loved-with-use stock for the online shop. And while there are no secrets, there are attachments. That I’ve paused. And paused again it’s a wonder I’m up and running at all. Keeping the Nadine Gordimer’s to one side; I hadn’t realised how many I had until recently, and maybe more on that later having re-read Something Out There. I’ve let an older but most winsome edition of Colette’s short stories sojourn overnight on the kitchen table. And overnight, again. Clearly, I’m not ready, yet, for that edition’s exit and it’s made me want to look at other older and newer editions. Which leads to Living by the Word by Alice Walker. It’s a first edition. And like many books, it was a book I tried to read carefully but at the same time use. As in handle.
I bought the book when visiting someone who had no actual books in their home other than a few cookbooks or those I might have previously bought and left. A disorientating experience, such an amount of mental blank canvas that my head kept asking: but a house with no books? Walker’s Living by the Word is linked with that visit as it was found in a moment of respite. The duck into a serendipitous bookshop while other convictions & conversations carried on and I sometimes think of the safety I found on Walker’s face that graces this edition’s front, and back. Was it safety, I later asked, or Walker’s sound sense or nothing but another version of being in safe hands? Somewhere between acquiring the book and later travels that included something akin to a lite version of Planes, Trains & Automobiles meant the dustjacket suffered a tear here, then there. And then here, again. I will of course plea that it’s a dustjacket of times gone: there’s no protective seal to the linen.
Years later and I might have thought better the day I went down to the bottom shed (another serendipitous respite) so down in the reality of the dark of a situation, life being life, and that convinced that only Walker’s piece Am I Blue? would soothe. Because I wasn’t thinking better, or maybe I was precisely thinking best, it strikes me now that I reached for Walker that day to understand: this thinking-by-way-of-reading thing I’ve been at since I was a young girl. I’ve always thought that to understand would afford a grace, glean a meaning, give clarity. And reading again that piece on that day I understood a little more the human-animal connection, the animal-human in us; primal elements, to be held captive and the desire for freedom.
Autonomy, and kindness. What it means to attend, and take care. They too are other qualities that I’d ascribe to Walker’s piece Am I Blue? I’m quite sure there were other books I could have reached for in both above-mentioned circumstances. But I didn’t. It simply happened that way. Walker and a horse called Blue called into my thoughts, and I needed to pull the thread. Maybe with more care I might have kept this first edition of Walker’s Living by the Word on a higher shelf or behind a piece of obscure glass. And I mightn’t have later brought it down to the bottom shed. I imagine it would mean that the book might be worth something else entirely. It would have meant no glean of another blue on blue, and it would have meant sans for the not-for-fools gold. Sometimes a goodness in letting the good stick. Though a rogue Buddhist might protest.