This is, I've thought, a good first piece for FOND: whatever comes next no longer needs to feel like The First One. /VER/ was written months ago, at the head-end of this year, and takes as its starting point the colour green.1 It wriggles its way - via Joni Mitchell, Derek Jarman, Edmund Spenser, and, among others, Maggie Nelson - through a collection of homophones of green’s French translation, vert.s, somehow ending with a question to Chomsky. Though it doesn’t mention Mallarmé’s 1887 poem “Une dentelle s’abolit”, nor Marie NDiaye’s Autoportrait en vert from 2006, they may well be its mossy roots. But it hops and salads about: I’d been reading Stein’s Tender Buttons at the time. And /VER/ is addressed - albeit quietly - to a friend of mine, in the hopes that any other reader might be, with the envy that can sometimes accompany the feeling of being left out, green. Posted here with minor edits, in April 2024 its ancestor was awarded proxime accessit in the Chancellor's English Essay Prize.2
Here in the spirit of The Order of the Third Bird, “presence to the work may be a kind of end in itself”.3 “[W]e are told that [Zeuxis] saw three birds approach. One, making for the grapes, seemed suddenly to notice the boy and flew off with a squawk. The second, similarly drawn to the fruit, disregarded their guardian entirely, and pecked furiously at the illusory meal. But the third stopped before the tablet and stood in the sandy courtyard, looking fixedly at the image, and seemingly lost in thought.”4 Circuitously I’ll make for the grapes: glassy, green, later eaten, illusory, growing. All there can be with a colour is this kind of looking.
“No more would I tell a green writer all his faults, lest I should make him grieve and faint, and at last despair. For nothing doth more hurt, than to make him so afraid of all things, as he can endeavour nothing.”5 So instead: “a vegetative thread – or tendril – once followed can lead to a myriad different thoughts, associations, and interpretations.”6 Thinking, associating and interpreting: listening, in the French, homophonically – all the following are /VER/ – we’ve vert.s, green; verre, glass; vers, poetry; vers, worms; and vers, towards. Sound better than word for colour. Verging on the edge of the page, gesturing extratextually, a “[n]ote in [the] margin: Only it is possible to be interested in a phenomenon in a variety of ways.”7 Here I am paying attention to the ways I read green: momentarily: mumbling earnestly and remembering, making and sharing, observing, remembering again. Not going anywhere, trying just to (bring) colour in.
First there’s “Little Green” – the third track on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, an ode to a daughter she had to give up for adoption – that reminds me each time I get to hear it of Zadie Smith’s essay, “Some Notes on Attunement”: a writing-up of a realisation that Mitchell’s music held an “exquisite” something; that it really wasn’t just “bloody piping” after all.8 This association, though, between the song and the essay – this tuning, note – was a misremembering on my part prompted by a wholly different consideration of the colour – Smith talks mainly of listening to “River” really, in the car on a drive to Tintern Abbey, building up, though, to a Wordsworthian quotation: the abbey is “[r]oofless, floorless, glassless, ‘green to the very door’”, overwhelmed, that is, by moss-green-grass decay.9 The green worms in, and makes its way, “[l]ike thе color when the spring is born”, “[l]ike the nights when the Northern lights perform”, to the earth’s green.10 “Call her Green, and the winters cannot fade her”.11 I misremember, but it is green that persists. In the end now, for Smith, she and Mitchell “were always going to find each other.”12 “I kept trying to find some kind of circumstance where I could stay with her,” says Mitchell, of her daughter.13 There’s a transparency between them all, mother and daughter, writers, readers and listeners that cast them all in /VER/. I hear them all together in a conversation, in this light. It’s in Transparent Things that Vladimir Nabokov’s protagonist, Hugh (/hju/!) Person, “strolled aimlessly, […] examined the items in a souvenir store. He found rather fetching the green figurine of a female skier made of a substance he could not identify through the show glass (it was ‘alabasterette,’ imitation aragonite […])”.14 Hugh is as unsure as I was, and, like me too, comes back to the verdant object. The same figurine appears much (eighteen years) later, at the end of the novel in a hotel room, “[o]n the bedside table”, alongside “a new package of cigarettes and a traveling clock”, in “a nicely wrapped box containing the green figurine of a girl skier which shone through the double kix”.15 The same again later, though reintroduced. Of course these instances are maybe not the same after all, or are they: “that there are transparent and opaque colours […] does not mean that you would use different greens to paint a piece of green glass and a green cloth in a picture”.16 Is using the same green for more than one thing is either losing or remembering one green in another? Do greens become each other, speaking to one another in harmony? Mergings of different greens might all be in its spirit.
For Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, in their Thought Forms, “grey-green is a signal of deceit”; green more generally, in its “more delicate and more luminous aspect”, “shows the divine power of sympathy”.17 Green even deceives itself. And there’s the “mother colour”, sometimes, in a certain way of painting; all colours that touch the brush having been mixed with the same shade – unifying or flattening, remembering, sympathetic too. Really I’ve thought too long on how exactly to describe some of these greens to you. Some so distinctly make up one of expired film’s favourite palettes – you gave the roll to me I don’t remember when, brought back from Lahore longer ago. I shot them in Paris; I lay the prints out on the floor in Marseille below some from a newer roll – shots of the sea, mostly. The colour picked up by the out-of-date film and those framing the Mediterranean are selfsame. It's true though, that a painter might deceive a viewer, in order to try and be honest to them about what they’ve seen. There’s some wondering over whether the first roll was true or not. “In a greenish yellow I don’t yet notice anything blue”.18 But I might translate vert de peur (literally, green with fear) as white as a sheet. It’s true that a merging like this, putting flowers on Samuel Beckett’s grave, adds green to grey like we might layer white on top of it. And as Alice Buchanan points out for us, the Irish glas – the green of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – might have deceived us, mistranslated.19 Glas referred variously to greys and blues, grey-blues, the silvers of the sea and the sky, the hue (/hju/) of the grass. In modern Welsh, glas is blue. There’s an argument that following the etymology of the modern English, to transparent, sees glass come from this collection of senses, glinting, shining, reflecting.20 Things seem to complicate, things being seen through each other now and are not definitely obstructing. And, if green can be grey after all that, it’s something to picture Gawain’s knight arriving in a rain cloud, or kicking up dust, or gaunt, or weary, tired, calm, or old – a year and a day older already. No longer young and ready. It’s clear that if you “[i]ntroduce to the land a shaping human presence, […] you have a landscape.”21 Beginning the understanding of a colour at home, the colour becomes an intrusion too, interrupting, making and being made in each instance.
Instantly, person-ally: on this desk today in green: one pen, one pencil (grey at core), small notebook, one bead earring (the other yellow), tulip stems, leaves. Not collecting green like this, losing and getting rid of green then, Pablo Neruda would write letters in green ink, naturally sending-on. There are greens I don’t hold on to either: I write to you (this is between us) on green paper in green envelopes. Though green, for Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, is not secondary, as it is for Kandinsky.22 Derek Jarman, in Chroma, wonders whether green itself was the first, Biblical, thought: “Did [Adam’s eyes] open on the vivid green of the Garden of Eden? […] Did he fall asleep under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Spangled with emerald dew. Love was green then.”23 Starting with green, Adam wanted. Later on still, there’s more wanting. There is always wanting or yearning: in 1965 Brian Matthews asks John and Paul about a rumour that they’re writing a musical. George jumps in, jealously, maybe: “Ringo and I are painting Buckingham Palace – that′s our point of interest”. “What colour?”: “Green”.24 Edmund Spenser’s pastoral “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe” is, I like to imagine, a jealous poem – jealous of the attention its big sister, the Faerie Queene, always seems to get. It thinks in green: jealous, grassy. Quoting from “Colin Clouts” to set the scene, George Armstrong Wauchope opines that “sitting under the shade ‘of the green alders of the Mulla's shore,’ Spenser read to his guest the first books of the [Faerie Queene]. So pleased was Raleigh” that he encouraged Spenser to read for Elizabeth I.25 Is there a jealousy of the author who can know themselves? Who needn’t wonder when it was that Shakespeare’s stomach hurt with guilt, or when and where he had trouble sleeping, and, or, whether he did, or didn’t, read Spenser? At the beginning of Michel Pastoureau’s Vert: histoire d’une couleur he asks us, and them: “Aimez-vous le vert?” [“Do you like green?”] – how do we feel? How is it that the moments of green make us feel?26 “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color,” feels Maggie Nelson, of blue.27 A green, in the Old English (also grin, gryn), is a snare, for catching.28
Caught, green signals via the man trapped inside the traffic lights, the one that says “go”. Green moves forwards at least. In amongst all the grey, he echoes “Adam’s murder of green, when in a fury he hacked down the Tree of Knowledge to build the first house, and covered his cock with that fig-leaf. These gestures lead straight to the dead grey of our city streets, which strangle the green parks like the dead serpent.”29 Sometimes there are for us just flickers of greens; sometimes they hide entirely, dug. “I felt that this grey monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins, as you once phrased it, must have something in store for me.”30 Something slightly off might be wriggling underneath the surface of the concrete or the earth, ready for a growth of a kind and ready to get stronger.
On the bookshelves: green: various spines – vertebrae. And the book that I’ve left on the kitchen table has since allowed me to leave more books there, the heap growing, grows. Or, hopefully, the author re-reads their own work, whether using the thing newly again or just nostalgic for the past. What it is that I remember of “The Arnolfini Portrait” is not any longer, as it was when I was younger, her green dress. It is the mirror – the glass – on the wall at the back. This is a recalling again, but first green now glass reused. Now “[a]sk yourself: what shape must the sample of the colour green be? Should it be rectangular? Or would it then be the sample of a green rectangle? – So should it be ‘irregular’ in shape? And what is to prevent us then regarding it – that is, from using it – only as a sample of irregularity of shape?”31 /VER/ or /VER/. There is only more than one green. Being so, “[w]e would say, perhaps, of a green pane: it colours the things behind it green, above all, the white behind it”.32 Slowly moving in and out of one another, two things again overlaid:
They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray,
And laid him on the green,
Or, as a Sylvia Wright once heard the lines:
They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray
And Lady Mondegreen.33
Though Lady Mondegreen, mother of mondegreen, she suddenly misheard into existence, is immediately killed off. The “mondegreen” is born: it is a misinterpretation from a mishearing of song lyrics. Misheard from Adam’s flesh comes Eve; from the corpse of the Earl rises the Lady. Like Sylvia Wright, who hears the “Earl” and assumes the “Lady”, I heard one green in Smith’s Mitchell and assumed another. These greens echo each other, and don’t; they touch naturally one another but can as well be put into competition. Branching out now to reveal some roots, here is Noam Chomsky, who draws, treelike, fingers not pointing mechanically, witnessing, but not listening – “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”.34 There is oddity, disagreement. Hearing the French homonyms again, sounding out the colour, maybe viridescent glass poetry does gesture a soily end, and colourless green ideas might sleep furiously. Amongst more, vers [poetry] moves vers [towards] vers [worms] as lines on a page might wriggle; verre [glass] might be vert [green]; furious sleep, moving via slumber, agitated brief death, vers vers [towards worms; towards, that is, the food of worms]; towards what might be called the most furious sleep. Recall though that regardless, Zeuxis paints his grapes in a green mood and the third bird might see through it, having gotten up early enough to wait around and look. ““What a curious bird!” mumbled Zeuxis, but the bird did not move.”35 Inside furious, thinking therefore misthinking.
I’ve formatted the IPA incorrectly here. Substack doesn’t allow for IPA in a serif typeface, nor will it allow me to lapse out of said serif without giving it up entirely. This is to say: all other instances of “/VER/” mean to be rendered as is the title.
Chancellor’s English Essay Prize: English Faculty, University of Oxford. Uploaded 26 Apr 2024. https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/article/this-years-chancellors-english-essay-prize-awarded-to-constance-everett-pite.
Lecture — “The Order of the Third Bird (D. Graham Burnett & Sal Randolph),” bardgradcentre, YouTube video, uploaded 7 Feb 2012, 7:37-7:41.
Ibid, 6:34-7:02.
Ben Jonson, Sir Philip Sydney's Defence of poetry. And, Observations on poetry and eloquence, from the discoveries of Ben Jonson, (London: printed for G. G. J. and J. Robinson, Pater-Noster Row; and J. Walter, 1787), 107.
Rebecca Armstrong, Vergil's Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine, (Oxford: OUP, 2019), 1.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1953), 47.
Zadie Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement: A voyage around Joni Mitchell,” The New Yorker, published 9 Dec 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/17/some-notes-on-attunement.
Ibid.
Joni Mitchell, “Little Green,” track 3 on Blue, Reprise Records, 1971, compact disk.
Ibid.
Smith, “Some Notes on Attunement.”
Joni Mitchell (in an interview with Bill Higgins), “Both Sides at Last”, Los Angeles Times, published 8 Apr 1997, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-04-08-ls-46389-story.html.
Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things, (London: Penguin, 2017), 13. My emphasis.
Ibid, 96.
Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: UCP, 1977), 26.
Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Thought Forms, (London: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1901; Project Gutenberg, 2005), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16269/16269-h/16269-h.htm.
Ibid, 22.
Alice Buchanan, “The Irish Framework of Gawain and the Green Knight,” PMLA, 47:2, June 1932, 330.
“glass n.” The Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed 3 Mar 24, https://www.etymonline.com/word/glass.
Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture, (Chicago: UCP, 2008), 50.
“colorsystem: Farbsysteme in Kunst und Wissenschaft”, accessed 3 Mar 24, https://www.colorsystem.com.
Derek Jarman, Chroma: A Book of Colour, (London: Penguin, 1994), 47.
The Beatles, “Green with Black Shutters – Live at the BBC / 1965,” track 24 on On Air – Live at the BBC (Vol.2), Apple Corps, 2013, Spotify.
George Armstrong Wauchope, “Introduction” to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, Book 1, (London: MacMillan, 1903; Project Gutenberg, 2005).
Michel Pastoureau, Vert: histoire d’une couleur, (Paris : Seuil, 2013), 9.
Maggie Nelson, Bluets, (Seattle: Wave Books, 2009), 1.
“grin”, sense 1.a in The Oxford English Dictionary, accessed 3 Mar 24, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/grin_n1?tab=meaning_and_use#2487396.
Jarman, Chroma, 48.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 43.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 47.
Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, 6.
Sylvia Wright, “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” Harper’s Magazine, 209 (1254).
Noam Chomsky, “Three Models for the Description of Language,” IRE Transactions on Information Theory, 2:3, Sept 1956, 116.
“Lecture — The Order of the Third Bird (D. Graham Burnett & Sal Randolph),” 7:04-7:07.