Black and Blue

“What did I do to be so black and blue?”

We talk about the blues as sadness and transcendence of sadness. As an American Black, my experience tells me that it certainly seems to be both of these things simultaneously—contradictory things existing together, something we psychoanalysts know about. To me it's about acceptance of the inexorable challenge and difficulty of being alive. We all know about this in the experience of the elusive happiness or contentment we pursue in life. It often does not arrive, and when it does, it's often in a form we hadn't expected. There's the possibility of the constant presence of frustration and lack of fulfillment in our accomplishments and in our relationships, though we keep trying. There's a hopelessness in this also because we know that death will come, yet we act like being extinguished is a distant, abstract construct.

In an immediate way, the blues is about life's inconsistencies: one can say that yesterday was hard, and I didn't think I'd make it, and thought I'd die, but I woke up still alive this morning, and in this moment I'm grateful. Or my lover and I had a bad argument, said hurtful things, but we made up; it's the sweetest thing, and I can't help singing about it, whether with my voice, piano, saxophone, guitar, or harmonica—tomorrow I may not be here or may be loveless, hopeless, and bereft once again. The blues is a response to the most basic pleasures and agonies, the simplest of things yet the most profound.

We know that love is wonderful but may not last or is complicated by ambivalence. The same could be said of truth, faith, loyalty, endurance, fortitude. Exhaustion and betrayal may arrive. Yet there is something indomitable about the human spirit, as we call it, that faces adversity and strives to endure, as William Faulkner said, even overcome—at the same time, in the end, we know we will finally be forced to succumb.