No answer, of course; they are too many things. They are the cry of an oppressed people, and, as Amiri Baraka argued (in his Blues People), encode its very history. They offer wry wisdom about human predicaments, and became the mother-music of jazz, rock, and rap: America may look European, at least in its more privileged precincts, but it sounds African. And of course– the Blues are just the same three chords, over and over.
Look at this verse of Leadbelly’s:
Well good morning blues, blues how do you do
Well good morning blues, blues how do you do
I’m doing all right, goo morning how are you.
Formally, this is a standard A-A-B, twelve bar blues. The first two lines look the same; but when you hear them, they are not the same at all. Though the first and second lines are often sung on the same notes (Leadbelly does it that way), the instrumental accompaniment to the first iteration moves from the tonic, while that to the second moves from the fourth or subdominant. The music thus tells us what the words do not: the first two lines are in fact not identical, but only similar.
But they are not anything, of course, until the second line is actually there. As with the Homeric simile I discussed in #3, the blues verse compares something already acquired—here, the first line, there the humdrum action of a blacksmith—with something new—here the second line, there the blinding of the Cyclops. Only in the blues, the similarity is much more obvious: it is not even two things that are being compared here, but two phases of one thing.
As it unfolds over time, the verse coheres, not because of an identity, but because of a similarity. The contrast with Aristotle, and so with metaphysics through Kant, is clear: the successive stages of this verse, this blues-thing, are held together, not by the identity of an unchanging essence, but by the mere resemblance of the later stage to the earlier one. And this expresses, I submit, an important aspect of what it is to be in time. For if you are in time you cannot return to precisely what you were before; the circle remains broken. The relation of the two phases is not an identity or a circle, but a path (and the Greek oimos, one of my favorite words.
So path-dependency is incorporated into the very core of the blues-thing, for the second line exists in the verse only as reached from something else that resembles it—the first line.
We are approaching two monstrous insights, explicit statement of which is still almost two thousand years away. First, we see that Plato was wrong to say that changeable things, ta gignomena, are images—resemblances, eikona—of unchangeable identities. In reality, Hegel will try to say one day, what images resemble is only other images. It’s “phenomena” all the way down, and ontology muse become phenomenology in order to keep its spirit.
Second, similarity is in the eyes of a beholder. A similarity, we may say, does not signifcantly exist until it is publicly articulated (#4), and a resemblance is significant only when articulated by someone or something else. A point made by the verse’s third and final line, where the blues—astonishingly—replies, and politely, to the question in the first two, and does so by simply ignoring the fact that the question has been asked twice.
The third line of a blues verse explains, contextualizes, or critiques the first two; here, it contextualizes the first two lines by underscoring their similarity. (For Plotinus, these three functions are not distinct, but merely aspects of the epistrophe. Too bad.).
Once this reflection is articulated, the resemblance between the first two lines is recognized (explained, contextualized, critiqued) and the song moves on. The verse is now over, complete, done with, dead: The blues moves, if not by magistricide (# 7), by “versicide;” its individal verses, moving toward the explanations, contextualizations, or critiquea which hold them together, are revealed to have been moving, from their inception, toward their end. And this, too, seems to be an important aspect of what it is to be in time: to be moving towards your own non-existence. (Nietzsche called this Untergang, going-under: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Cambridge 2006 pp. 159, 233).
What are the blues? Many things, and it is not too much to say that in some of its identities the blue has ontological import. They present an alternative to the metaphysics of identity, problematically founded by Plato (#5) and then fixed by Aristotle (#8). Replacing form and essence with the temporalized notion of path-dependence, they haul meaning—temporary unity and reflection on that unity—out of the remorseless brokenness of time.
Aristotle said that courage is the intelligent mastery of fear. The blues are the intelligent mastery of time itself.