Never have I had such a compulsion towards a colour as green. As I write this, I wear my green outfit and eat a pile of green things—gingham dress, turtleneck, scrunchie, capers, snap peas, cucumber, spinach pasta. The walls are green. The thin notebook that serves interchangeably as a coaster and a bookmark. The mug. A tile to keep the candles on. Dried rosemary and poppy stems. The stained glass mirror my dad made in the eighties. The evergreen branches out the window.
It wasn’t always like this. For fifteen years it was blue. Ebbing from navy to black, silver and mauve. It was almost never powder or sky or robin’s egg, but lapis, hyperlink, bruise. Something shifted my attraction. From blue to green, water to earth, winter to fall, from beef, beets, kale and red wine, to lemons, dill, oysters and rice. Like the embodiment of the colour reconfigured the route I was on.
I heard this from a friend and thus don’t know how true it is: If it were possible to construct an enclosure of mirrors, a space that’s surface would only reflect, and somehow, still, there was light in that enclosure, the light would be green.
In the 18th and 19th century, the colour green was manufactured with a copper-arsenic compound. Scheeles green was highly toxic and used to pigment paper, fabric and children’s toys. It was replaced by Paris green some short years later, which was equally as toxic and used in insecticide and blancmange alike. Both greens off-gassed arsenic, the poison linked to the death of Napoleon, whose room at St.Helena was painted green. These green dyes were phased out as more stable green pigments were discovered. Through the same error that warps every man-made mirror causing it to reflect green, glass is also stained with the tint.
I’m reading Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey, a meandering love story that, at its core, is about the wager of a glass manufactory. Lucinda, drawn to her childhood memory of a Prince Rupert’s drop, purchases the factory after acquiring a fortune. A Prince Rupert’s drop is a piece of molten glass that’s cooled quickly in water, usually with a long tail the shape of a teardrop. The glass can be struck with a hammer and resist shattering, however, when the tail is pinched, the glass explodes like a firework. The physics of the Prince Rupert’s drop remained for the most part a mystery, until 1920 when it was understood that the quick cooling process strengthened the outer layer of glass while the inside remained soft.
I realize the room I’m in now is nearly the same shade of green as Napoleon’s room of exile. When I painted the room this colour, I thought of it as the imaginary box of mirrors reflecting the imaginary source of light. But green is also about the inability to produce perfect things: the warped mirror, the tinted glass. And while it is a pigment derived of poison, it is also the most natural colour. Our eyes have adapted to recognize shades of green more so than any other colour. Green is a paradox, a pigment of impossibility, its own hall of mirrors.
A green dye, or eco-dye process, made of blackberry, straw flower, fuchsia, rose petals, black-eyed susans, marigolds, and other foraged petals. The mordant is made of chestnut leaves and bark, both of which are high in tannins. One shirt is made for June on the occasion of my departure from Vancouver, one fabric is made for Morgan on the occasion of her 32nd birthday. This process comes from the artist, Sean Roy Parker. The pictures turned out better than the objects themselves.
Three Islands
I.
The islands off the coast of my home town. Dry and alive with sheep, another, further up and wetter. Saunas and hemlock and a beach where the whales sleep. A santucary you can volunteer to eat canned soup and count animals for ten days at a time. You wrote: It was like this for millennia, the islands in lockstep, dotting your thoughts.
II.
You told me that you’re not afraid of the distance between people when they are in love. You said, you’re not afraid that you can’t interfere. You said you’re open to the grief that follows intimacy. In the dark of the evening, in the pause of breath, you had to hang up the phone.
III.
I wanted to be the only one.