I am ready to take the woman with the white scarf
in my arms and stop her moaning,
and I am ready to light the horse's teeth,
and I am ready to stroke the dry leaves.
— Gerald Stern
If rain won't change your mind,
Let it fall.
The rain won't change my heart
At all.
1
In Pale Fire, Professor Pnin stands next to a young instructor named Mr. Gerald Emerald, who wears a bow tie and a vivid GREEN VELVET JACKET, in a house. Or a villa. At a party. The way Nabokov binds his characters to a color that grows from an idiom.
2
The GREEN QUEEN who threads the seams of Wallace Stevens’ seemings in the first section of the delirium-inducing marvel titled “Description Without Place”:
The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.
Thus things are like a seeming of the sun
Or like a seeming of the moon or night
Or sleep. It was a queen that made it seem
By the illustrious nothing of her name.
Her green mind made the world around her green.
The queen is an example. . . . This green queen
In the seeming of the summer of her sun
By her own seeming made the summer change.
In the golden vacancy she came, and comes,
And seems to be on the saying of her name.
3
The unappeasable VIRESCENCE and VERDURE of the chlorophyll-infused SIGN OF THE WEED in Bruno Schulz’s “The Republic of Dreams”:
Just now, for example, the yards are drowning in nettles and weeds, tumbledown moss-grown sheds and outbuildings are up to their armpits in enormous bristly burdocks that grow right to the eaves of the shingled roofs. The town lives under the sign of the Weed, of wild, avid, fanatical plant life bursting out in cheap, coarse greenery-toxic, rank, parasitic. That greenery glows under the sun's conjury, the maws of the leaves suck in seething chlorophyll; armies of nettles, rampant, voracious, devour the flower plantings, break into the gardens, spread over the unguarded back walls of houses and barns overnight, run wild in the roadside ditches. It is amazing what insane vitality, feckless and unproductive, lives in this fervid dab of green, this distillate of sun and ground water. From a pinch of chlorophyll it draws out and extrapolates under the blaze of these summer days that luxuriant texture of emptiness, a green pith replicated a hundred times onto millions of leaf surfaces, downy or furred, of veined translucent verdure pulsing with watery plant blood, giving off the pungent herbal smell of the open fields.
In that season the rear window of the shop's storage room overlooking the yard was blinded by a diaphragm of green glitter from leaf reflections, gauzy flutterings, wavy foliated greenery, all the monstrous excesses of this hideous backyard fecundity. Sunk in deep shade, the storeroom riffled through all shades of virescence, green reflections spread in undulating paths through its vaulted length like the sibilant murmur of a forest. The town had fallen into that wild luxuriance as into a sleep raised to the hundredth power, supine in a daze from the summer's heat and glare, in a thick maze of cobwebs and greenery, empty and shallow of breath. In rooms greenly lit to underwater opacity by the morning glory over the windows, platoons of flies struggled on their last wings, imprisoned forever as in the bottom of a forgotten bottle and locked in a dolorous agony that they proclaimed by drawn-out monotonous lamentations or trumpetings of fury and grief. In time, the window became the gathering place of all that lacework of scattered insectdom for one last premortal sojourn: huge crane-flies, which had long bumped against the walls with a subdued drumming of misdirected flight and made a final torpid landing on a pane; whole genealogies of flies and moths, rooted and branching out from this window and spread by slow migration across the glass; pullulating generations of meager winglings, sky-blue, metallic, glassy.
4
The soft chroma of PEA-GREEN WALLS in The Dreamers —
Eva Green with Louis Garrel in The Dreamers
5
The first page of Donald Barthelme’s “Florence Green Is 81” . . . with its lentils, new girls, and geostrategizing of the “strongest possible move” — the TERRE VERTE feel of that muddy, brownish undertone. As if Barthelme was looking at lentils when he wrote:
6
The treacherous GRASSHOPPER among the litany of refusals in Gerald Stern’s “Blue Skies, White Breasts, Green Trees” —
7
On the writing desk of Lev Tolstoy sat the GREEN CRYSTAL PAPERWEIGHT given to him by the workers of a glass factory in Bryansk, engraved with the message: “Let the Pharisees and the Holy Fathers excommunicate you as they wish; the Russian people will always hold you dear.”
8
In a clearing among the darker greens of the surrounding forest, a smattering of grass-green shawled round the mound that marks Tolstoy's grave. This is the spot where he wanted wished to buried, “near a ravine where he and his brothers, when they were youngsters, believed that a GREEN STICK had been buried on which was written the secret of happiness for all human beings,” as Alexander Theroux tells it. No cross, no grave marker: only the stickiness of the green twig from childhood.
9
“. . . a warm trickle of coffee seeps through the cracks onto my forearm, and a constant CHASM OF GREEN owns the air to my right.” A different trip to New Orleans. One that reminds me of the BLISTERED DARK GREEN in Laurie Anderson’s For Instants, a color that catches my eye after she mentions Glenn Gould’s favorite battleship gray because, yes, “It's sunny today” and Laurie is starting to “sand down the four beams that hold up the roof” in her new loft. “The first layer of paint is battleship gray, cracked and flaking. Underneath the gray is a sturdy layer of dark brown, thick and tough as leather. It spews off in tiny hard chunks that ricochet against the walls. Underneath is an even thicker layer-blistered dark green. I sand it away. Underneath is an oozing liver- colored substance, which gums up and breaks the sander. I start to scrape it off but the stuff begins to slither down the beams with a horrifying kind of liveliness.”
10
The site where the green that opens Ana Božičević’s poem, “About Nietzsche” —
Softly, Nietzsche landed on earth. He found
it green. He was alone, save for the horse—
it stood off to the side of a fallen wood
fence. There they had this talk.
— meets the CHROMIUM OXIDE GREEN and the CADMIUM GREEN that tears through the night sky of John Longstaff’s Sirens (1892) —
11
The way Michael Taussig’s suburbs emblazon greenways through my head in the extraordinary turns and torques of his take on the realness of real estate:
The Greeks and Italians left, for the leafy suburbs, I guess, and now those same inner city suburbs, such as Paddington, are among the wealthiest in the world, the vivid colors painted over by ochres, greys, and white or else stripped back to the original brick. You can’t get realer than real estate.
The leafiness of SAP GREEN, with its slightly yellow undertones, and the sign of the dollar in that green as Taussig traces this ‘realness’ — this profit-based, capitalist ‘reality’ — to the life being “sucked out of the blue-and-green mountains in the distance” in the oscillations of staging:
As for the ambiguity tied to color as both deceitful and authentic, take the mural painted by John Pugh as described in the New York Times the other day; his recent work Drain shows “a big rusty drainpipe etched with the letters LADWP, for Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, sucking the color and, metaphorically, the water out of the vista.” Here draining color stands for the belief that for close to a century the evil city of Los Angeles has been stealing western rivers and, as depicted in the film Chinatown, lying about it, while at the same time color in this mural also stands for authenticity, for the lost vitality of nature being sucked out of the blue-and-green mountains in the distance, foregrounded by that nasty, ever so efficient-looking big rusty pipe decoloring ever more parched flatlands.
“For them color is fluid, the medium of all changes,” wrote Benjamin with reference to what he took to be the child’s view of color. Tying color to water as John Pugh has done is useful because, like a river, color is a moving force, and like the world’s water supply under the present climatic regime of politically enhanced global warming driving our planet to destruction, color like heat is now subject to unpredictable oscillations that, in the case of color, amount to oscillations between deceit and authenticity, something that does not seem to have been factored in by Isidore of Seville, when he drew attention to the similarities between calor and color.
It is this oscillation that accounts for color’s magic, thereby attracting that energetic stage magician, conjuror, and trickster, that master of deceit, George Melies. No sooner had he begun to make films in Paris circa 1900, pulling rabbits out of hats thanks to the film editor’s scissors, than he found it hard to resist painting color over the black and white of his films. To the reality-effect of film was added the magic-effect of color. To the truth-effect of film was added the deceit-effect of color. And so it goes. I don’t know how they looked then, but now a century later the color is filmy and faint, like the whisk of a horse’s tail, flourish of the color spirit, not painting by numbers, but that true excess of the heart that can only come across through the untoward hint.
Could it be that in this scheme of fear and desire, truth and deceit, color is the excess that allows forms to come alive and that this is why my Webster’s tells me color is both pretext and sign of the authentic?
Like Davenport, Taussig always reconfigures the possible ways of naming and framing, leaving us (in this case) with an inventory of effects: the magic-effect of color, the truth-effect of film, the deceit-effect of color . . .
12
The vintage texture of GREEN METALLICS that demarcate the hue of Phillip Morris in David Antin’s Three Musics for Two Voices —
13
The vexation of countless theologians who needed answers about eternity. Theologians who needed to know what color angels could inhabit without losing their supernatural distance. The perplexity of poets among them. Tomaž Šalamun being one of them:
14
The SONOROUS SHRUBBERY in John Ashbery’s poem, “Caravaggio and His Followers”:
The song of the shrubbery
can’t drown out the mystery of what we are made of,
or how we go along, first interested by one thing and then another
15
The chorus of yellow-greens in painting. Articulations of VERIDIAN in the final layer of paint on the wall, with streaks of CHARTREUSE beneath it, as in John Hiatt’s album cover for Mystic Pinball — and the hint of iron oxide in the hue of his hat pulling out the CELADON. Or not. The sense in which something keeps moving and pinging, even when frozen.
16
The muted warmth and earth tones of Mahmoud Darwish’s olives linking arms with the OLIVE GREEN that recurs through every memoir of a stolen homeland authored by Palestinians . . .
17
. . . returning in the hue of the OLIVE HARVEST that became a glue in Jean Genet’s self-portrait after living with Palestinian fedayeen, as given in three sentences from The Thief's Journal: “Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flowerbeds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all interrelated, had a meaning: my exile.”
18
The PHTHALO EMERALD brushstrokes that resemble fingertips in Egon Schiele’s Self-Portrait In Green Shirt With Eyes Closed (1914).
And the GHOSTED GREEN of Raoul Ubac’s Fossil of the Eiffel Tower (1939). The possible Eiffel-fossil energy. The desaturated hues that remind me of the fin de siecle’s death portraits.
19
The blue-green orientation sketched by John Updike in his little “Shipbored”:
That line is the horizon line.
The blue above it is divine.
The blue below it is marine.
Sometimes the blue below is green.
20
My goosebumps when happening upon Alexander Theroux’s connection of ALBERTINE-GREEN to LOLITA-GREEN:
Just as Proust tended to see shadows in terms of colored tones, so at times he also often viewed sunlight, not conventionally as white or yellow or orange, but the impressionistic way it happened to appear at specific times and places, as for example in Albertine’s despair, when seen through an open window, above the shimmering Venetian waters of the canal, as weirdly greenish: “le soleil verdâtre.”
What about a green sun? Nabokov—or Humbert— knew his Proust. Remember the poem in Lolita?
My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister?
21
The FLAT EMERALD FIELD of Pablo Picasso’s Green Still Life, painted as he summered in Avignon in 1914, perhaps in response to Henri Matisse’s Red Studio (1911). The way the pointillist spider web captures the yellow light and links up with the light falling on a surface in Stephen Merritt’s song, “One April Day,” before becoming solid in the fragment of pear-flesh held by the outline of a pear. The green and black circles forming a cork in the bottle. The dots shading the letters J O U, eliciting the French verb for play, jouer, or the shorthand for a toy, jou-jou, or even the sparkle of jewelry in bijou. And the absence of grenadine in the cut-glass vessel that serenades the hand wrapped around a grenade in the lower right corner.
22
The TRANSGRESSIVE APPLE-GREEN evinced by Michael Taussig in the context of modernity, WB, profanity and “the holy,” a category which “can be also impure, evil, and accursed—dependent on continual infusions of transgression—as with [Walter] Benjamin’s observation that ‘the language of color’ was characteristic of the posters that flourished in the shopping arcades of Paris in the early nineteenth century but that these posters were the cousins of ‘obscene graphics’.” WB “recalled an advertising poster that reminded him of opera with Siegfried bathing in dragon’s blood; the cape was crimson, the sylvan solitude green, the flesh, naked.” WB thought ‘falser colors are possible in the arcades’; arcades being the spaces where red and green combs were naturalized. WB said “Snow White’s stepmother had such things, and when the comb did not do its work, the beautiful apple was there to help out—half red, half poison-green, like cheap combs.” WB said — and keeps saying.
23
The moment when a young Hans Richter began going to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and the National Gallery in Berlin in order to copy the paintings of the Masters: Velázquez, Tintoretto, Rubens . . . Van Dyke. “I learned a lot about art in this way; not only the technique the masters used but also what they were striving for,” Richter later said, adding that he was “especially fascinated by a very unobtrusive painting by Velasquez . . . a huge portrait about two meters high and one and a half wide, a portrait of a court lady, very dark reddish-brown hair, the background green-black, the clothes completely black,” a painting that intrigued him “more than any other painting because of its simplicity.” The young Richter wondered “how Velázquez took himself back behind the painting, so to speak; how he invented a black that was more completely black than you ever saw black before; it lived.” How could Velázquez paint black clothes and a black background and yet land with “two different blacks”?
“The intensity of the color, though there was very little color in it,” mesmerized him. “I felt that I had come in contact with something divine, with something that was above the poetry of the person there in the painting, with something that was being said through this painting by Velasquez,” Richter told his readers. This “very distinct impression” made by this painting marked one of the first steps he traced in his “development” as an artist — “this contact with the spirit of Velázquez not only with his technique.”
I don’t know which painting Richter was referencing? Nevertheless, I imagine the BACKGROUND GREEN-BLACK that Richter never got over in that portrait by Diego Velázquez.
24
The “nacreous green-gray light, evoked with lightly hatched strokes of paint” in the room Jed Perl discovered in L’Enseigne de Gersaint by Antoine Watteau.
25
The GREEN FABRIC SURFACE of Franz Kafka’s desk, as described in the self-portrait of his writing desk, tinged by the same disorder that prevents the writer from focusing on the world in his head. “Now I’ve taken a closer look at my desk and realized that nothing good can be produced on it,” Kafka says. “There's so much lying around here, it creates disorder without regularity, and with none of that agreeableness of disorderly things that otherwise makes every disorder bearable. Whatever disorder is on the green desk-cloth, it is no worse than what might be permitted in the orchestra section of the old theaters. But when papers pour out of the standing room section, out of the open compartment below the raised platform in the back— brochures, old newspapers, catalogs, postcards, letters, all partly torn, partly opened, piled up like a staircase— this undignified state spoils everything. Individual items in the orchestra, enormous by comparison, spring into action, as if the spectators in the theater were suddenly given free rein, the businessman to put his books in order, the carpenter to hammer, the officer to wave his saber, the lovers to cast aside their inhibitions, the priest to speak to the heart, the scholar to the understanding, the politician to the civic spirit, etc. Only the shaving mirror on my desk stands upright, as required for shaving . . .”
26
THE PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT of the green behind the horses in my head —
Everything beautiful is indeterminate.
We still know how to mark the hours, but no longer how to ring them. The carillon of our clocks is missing.
[. . . ]
The white markings of the snow, here and there, scattered on the greenness in time of thaw.
— Joseph Joubert in a notebook from the early 1800’s
*
Amy Millan, “Hard-hearted (Ode to Thoreau)”
Ana Božičević, “About Nietzsche” (from War on a Lunchbreak)
Bruno Schulz, “The Republic of Dreams” tr. by Walter Arndt
Clem Snide, “Bread”
Clem Snide, “Joan Jett of Arc”
Crooked Fingers, “Atchafalayan Death Waltz”
Crooked Fingers, “You Must Build a Fire”
David Antin, Three Musics for Two Voices
Diego Velázquez, The Lady with a Fan (1638-9)
Donald Barthelme, “Florence Green Is 81” (from Come Back, Dr. Caligari)
Eef Barzelay, “Love the Unknown”
Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait In Green Shirt With Eyes Closed (1914)
Gerald Stern, “Blue Skies, White Breasts, Green Trees”
John Longstaff, Sirens (1982)
John Hiatt, “I Know How to Lose You”
Mark Lanegan Band, “Love Will Tear Us Apart Again” (Live in Belgium, 2017)
Michael Taussig, “What Color Is the Sacred?” (Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2006)
Pablo Picasso, Green Still Life (summer 1914)
Stars, “No One Is Lost”
Stephen Merritt, “One April Day”
The Magnetic Fields, “It’s Only Time”
Tomaž Šalamun, “Are Angels Green?”
Wallace Stevens, “Description Without Place”