The Green Lion Devours the Sun
Green followed me all summer. The wind blowing off the Great Salt Lake was mild and low. Our winter was so unusually wet that June banked all the snowmelt in its leaves, turning my neighborhood into a thick green sponge. One afternoon, with a few hours to kill, I put on Éric Rohmer’s Le rayon vert. When the central character, Delphine, says a psychic told her green would be the color of her year, I felt a little jolt. She tells a friend: “It’s strange because since then, and maybe I’m just noticing it now, I keep finding little green things.” The friend responds: “It’s the color of hope. So it’s a good year!” Later that day, my husband happened to be translating a poem by Rocío Cerón that included a list of twenty green pigments—“Heliogenic green, birch green, felt green, verdigris green, linden green, frond green, mold green, chromium oxide green, reseda green, moss green, jungle green, bronze green, bile green, sap green, cadmium green, opal green, loden green, Umbrian green, victoria green, poison green”—and a final word: “endure.” He looked up each one, sending images to me of green powder, brilliant green chalky substances, piles of green murk. Endure: perviven: to survive, persist. I felt enverdured. The next morning, out with the dog, I pull out my phone and remember I had paused in the middle of listening to a recording of scholars discussing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. One of them says: “The green knight is frightening because he’s green. Not because we know what green signifies, but because we don’t.”1
Then again, it is not difficult to be followed by green in the summer. I dug out a green ribbon to put in my green typewriter—how had I never noticed it was green? I checked out a book about green, bought a green notebook. Friends texted me facts about green, pictures of them writing in green ink. Did you know T. S. Eliot wore face makeup with a green tinge? Did you know Catholic and Anglican priests wear green vestments during the summer and fall, what’s known as “ordinary time”? Did you know? I did not, nor did I know why green was following me. Maybe, as Delphine suggests, I was imagining things, biased by the attraction of the idea.
In Le rayon vert, Delphine is unexpectedly stuck in Paris during the summer holiday and desperate to be anywhere else. Invited by a friend to the seaside at Cherbourg, she finds she’s the only single one there and leaves early in dismay. Friends and family invite her to join them in Ireland, or in the Alps—she refuses them all, or accepts at the last moment only to regret her decision and leave early yet again. Restless in Biarritz, having finally gotten up the courage to travel alone, she overhears a book club discussing Jules Verne’s novel The Green Ray. Green is one of the last visible wavelengths of light to be scattered by the sunset, and is only visible under certain conditions and for an extremely brief flash. In Verne’s novel, Delphine learns, when one sees the green ray, the truth of one’s thoughts is suddenly revealed to oneself.
By the end of the film, Delphine sees the green flash while sitting on a bench overlooking the ocean in the company of a man she met in a train station. He asks her: “Doesn’t [seeing the green ray] bring you luck?” She replies: “Not exactly. It helps you learn…” She trails off as the sun approaches the horizon. “What do you learn?” he presses. “I’d like to know.” She replies, “So would I.” She begins to cry, and he moves to comfort her. Suddenly, the two pause to look at the sun, breathless. It is going. It has almost finished sinking. At the very last instant, a brilliant green caps the edge of the sun’s disc before it disappears entirely into the waves. Delphine gasps, points, and laughs in surprise. The sky has darkened. The film ends at that moment, ends before we see the promised knowledge arrive in her face, the knowledge that comes after the shock of recognition. We only see the shock. This is as it should be—for, in watching her see the green ray, I have seen the green ray too. I must attend to my own learning.
I found, though, that burying myself in green led to only tangential flashes of knowledge. Unconnected vignettes, frames through which green escaped. Colors, like the alphabet, only mean something in combination, in context—and I didn’t know what green wanted from me, or if I was only having fun imagining that some important message or clarity might arrive, one day, in green clothing. Physically, the green flash is essentially an atmospheric mirage, the last strange gasp of our perception in the half-light before night falls. The kind of knowledge not usually understood as knowledge, both unreal and measurably real—real phenomena that, being mirages, cause all manner of unreal visions.
Arsenic is present in small amounts in nearly everything that lives. It is woven throughout much of the earth’s soil and stones. Yet, there is no safe level of arsenic consumption for humans. Without chemical testing, it is almost undetectable by the senses: It has no flavor, scent, or color. Its widespread use in green pigments for paint, fabric, wallpaper, and candies in Victorian England caused the world’s first mass poisoning event,2 forever associating the particular luridness of Scheele’s green with toxicity in the English-speaking world. Arsenic’s undetectability and high presence in the environment also made it the perfect Victorian murder weapon. If everyone is being dosed with arsenic, how could one know for sure which poisonings were intentional and which were environmental?3
The first time forensic toxicology was used as evidence in a criminal trial was in order to solve this very problem. The Marsh test was relatively simple, and allowed investigators to test evidence and the bodies of the deceased for levels of arsenic that could definitively prove intentional poisoning. In the test, if arsenic is present, a black stain is deposited on the bottom of a cold ceramic bowl when held in the jet of a flame. Green, put to fire, goes black. The accused poisoner’s guilt is established, or their innocence. Clean as a fresh bowl.
Which poisonings are intentional and which are environmental? A tricky question. Arsenic is the byproduct of many mining processes, present in the rocks that harbor valuable metals such as gold and copper. It must be separated from them and discarded. As industrial copper mining expanded, green dye was one way to use up the surplus of arsenic that followed—meaning copper was “involved in environmental poisonings” during this time on multiple fronts.4 Though the poisonous green dyes have been abandoned, copper can’t be. More recently, some workers at the copper smelters of Chile’s Chuquicamata mine became known as los hombres verdes, because prolonged arsenic contamination due to unsafe working conditions caused “‘a gelatinous green substance’ [to flow] from their bodies.”5 Exhuming workers who died, families and investigators found that the “clothes of the deceased had become green (probably due to the slow release of arsenic from the bodies after death), and one of them had even exploded inside the coffin.”6 One of the fingers of capital is green, and it tears a hole in the boundaries between apparently solid substances: mine and body, earth and blood.
Chuquicamata is the largest open-pit copper mine by excavated volume, and the second largest by area. My local Bingham Canyon Mine is the first, and one of Chuquicamata’s open-pit sisters. I see the Bingham Canyon Mine every day, and it has also deposited its tasteless, odorless, colorless arsenic into my valley and, to a much lesser degree, my body. However, its journey to me has been roundabout. For decades, the mine dumped heavy metals, including arsenic, into the Great Salt Lake. These substances are still with us here—they are taken up by various plants and invertebrates, which are themselves eaten by the large numbers of migratory birds that use the lake as a stopover. Whatever is left over settles on the lake bed. Great swathes of this lake bed, under pressure from drought driven by climate change and agricultural water use, are now exposed to the sky. The wind, which picks up around sunset and sunrise, blows eastward into my town, kicking the metals out of the dry lake bed and shoving them into the streets of Salt Lake City. There, dust wanders wakingly, and makes its green way into my lungs.7
Alchemists used a deep and complex set of symbols to communicate with each other and to hide information about their experiments from prying eyes. Their goal was to determine the relationships between materials; to ascend the ladder of noble metals to heaven; to identify, combine, and change the spirits within solid materials as one would breed plants in a garden. Isaac Newton marked his alchemical notes with the phrase “hunting the green lion,” a reference which would be obscure to outsiders but which other alchemists would immediately understand. For them, the green lion, commonly portrayed eating the sun,8 was a symbol for aqua regia, a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid that can dissolve gold and platinum. They believed aqua regia held one key to the ultimate alchemical transformation of base metals into gold, because highly refined versions of these metals can be dissolved into and then precipitated from these liquids. Once, chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the solid gold Nobel Prize medals of German physicists James Franck and Max von Laue to prevent Nazis from confiscating them. The men who searched his lab mistook the jars of gold suspended in aqua regia for unimportant chemicals, and the medals rested safely dissolved in their liquid for years. After the war, de Hevesy returned to his lab, precipitated the gold from the acid, and turned it back over to the Swedish Academy, who recast the medals and returned them to Franck and von Laue.9 In alchemical symbols of this process, the green lion sits in a field, mouth half full of sun, which pours from its jaws like water. “In me,” the green lion says, “all the secrets of the Philosophers are hidden.”10
Though we now know colors are a result of light waves bouncing off objects and hitting the eye’s cones, Plato, Aristotle, and the alchemists believed colors to be intrinsic to materials themselves. Aristotle argued that “the boundary between solid-seeming objects and the air or water that surrounds them is not so firm as it might appear.” For Aristotle, color marked the boundary between solid and gas, or solid and liquid—and these boundaries were not firm but something more like spectrums of transparency.11 If color is smoke from a fire, green’s limit and mine activate each other like flint on stone. My friend Nick, an icon painter, tells me that sankir green is the base layer for painting human flesh in the traditional methods—an olive green that, as the other colors are layered on top of it, gets gradually obscured. One of the final steps to finishing an icon painting, one of the steps which breathes life into the image, is to connect this olive ground to the painting’s surface by clearing the layers down through the center of each eye. Green burns at the heart of the saint’s gaze and is, perhaps for all living things, the ground upon which we are painted. Not being a saint myself, however, I wonder if I am more like Eliot: painting a pale green tinge on my face, affecting the divine unchanging visage of death to make me feel beautiful, serious, and important. I am alive; look how dead I am!
June passed. In early July I took a tour to the red heart of Kennecott’s Bingham Canyon Mine. On the way, the tour bus driver told us that the waste rock out the window—she pointed nonspecifically to the ground we were driving on—had been post-processed to yield incredibly high-grade copper. The mine, it seems, had learned how to eat its own waste, at least part of it. She pointed to a hillside, smoothly graded and covered with a few months’ growth of grass, and said, “The mine has used all this material, so it can now be planted to prevent erosion.” I glanced at the other passengers uneasily; the road beneath the bus’s tires suddenly felt unstable.
When we arrived in the center of Kennecott’s massive orange and gray spiral, watching the machines collecting and dumping ore, I was reminded of one of the mine’s eeriest features. In the strange transference of physics that can happen when scales strain human perception, rock and soil in the mine began to appear liquid. Areas not currently being mined have softened and steepened over time, so that they look like rainbow ooze, arrested in the middle of their pouring down the surface of the mine. Even the hauler engines, one of which was on display behind an info placard, suggested ocean: Someone said, “I’ve never seen an engine like that outside of a ship.” The haulers themselves, so huge they can run over a pickup truck without noticing, seemed to move silently along their courses. The machine shoveling ore from the mountain—really the mountain itself—is called a dipper. As I watched it scooping ore from below, it too seemed to be liquifying the surface of the mine with its very touch.
Kennecott was the first mining company to patent the use of a microorganism called Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans—which facilitates iron oxidization and is found naturally in acid drainage—to extract copper from mine waste too low-grade to extract in the traditional way.12 Mining, long assumed to be a geological industry, to which living things are at best incidental and at worst barriers to be overcome, has gotten into the biology business.13 Today, A. ferrooxidans and other bacteria are most often used in heap leaching, where mine waste is mixed in a tank with a cocktail of specially chosen bacteria and heated to increase the microbes’ productivity. After the tiny creatures have done their work dissolving and reassembling chemical chains, more useful material can be pulled from the waste that would otherwise be lost—copper ore, gold, nickel, and more.
Despite this advancement in technology, one substance eludes the extraction companies: chalcopyrite, a yellow-green sulfide mineral that contains about 70 percent of the world’s unexploited copper. Chalcopyrite eludes the capitalists not because it is difficult to find, but because its copper is not yet worth the cost to extract. The ore is extremely low-grade, deposits are relatively small and isolated from one another, and the material itself is “recalcitrant, complex,” requiring high temperatures and containing impurities such as cobalt, silver, gold, lead, nickel, and arsenic. To use microorganisms to unlink these ores, metabolize them, and purify them—to run rocks through the sorting mechanism that is these single-celled machines, their microscopic bodies—is the dream, the “‘holy grail’ of biomining.”14 But because these bacteria can’t survive the high temperatures required to make this process economically viable, it is a green ladder to the sun that cannot yet be ascended, a door that remains closed for now. Beyond that door is something like the philosopher’s stone—the living substance that will turn the very earth into gold.
Perhaps I hope somehow that green, always found at the border between the unmeasurable real and the measurable unreal, can act as a guide, a marker, where the truth of capitalist accumulation and the destruction of the earth can be seen clearly, and, once seen, acted upon. Then again, green is everywhere, and so is destruction. And it is summer, and the wind is mild, and the lake rose several feet this spring. I am not looking for signs of the apocalypse. I am buying an ice cream cone. I am sitting on the grass listening to Art Garfunkel’s version of “Waters of March.”
Perhaps I could go to the Great Salt Lake evening after evening and face westward and watch for the green ray. I’d watch for the green boundaries of the world to burn out bright, outlining its many wounds. When will we change ourselves, revolve, and poison the capitalists back? It was a good summer; will it be a good year? Or maybe I will stand on the shore and watch for some truth about myself—why I cannot look too long into death’s green gash before I gasp and turn my gaze back toward summer. In the meantime, the foreground sinks into the background, green into green. Somewhere a priest holds the Eucharist up to a strip of sunlight that comes from a nearby window, painting his green vestments a brilliant green-gold. The bread becomes the body, the wine the saving blood. The sun sinks into the water like a wafer, and darkness quickly muffles all color. The Gawain poet writes: “For men may be cheerful, mulling their wine, / But a year runs fast, and always runs different; / start and finish are never the same.”15 Perhaps it is the green knight I should be looking for, murky figure of balance and transfer, not the green ray. And when he comes to the feast there will be no flash of epiphany, but only “for better or worse, an exchange.”16
Then again, it is not difficult to be followed by green in the summer. I dug out a green ribbon to put in my green typewriter—how had I never noticed it was green? I checked out a book about green, bought a green notebook. Friends texted me facts about green, pictures of them writing in green ink. Did you know T. S. Eliot wore face makeup with a green tinge? Did you know Catholic and Anglican priests wear green vestments during the summer and fall, what’s known as “ordinary time”? Did you know? I did not, nor did I know why green was following me. Maybe, as Delphine suggests, I was imagining things, biased by the attraction of the idea.
In Le rayon vert, Delphine is unexpectedly stuck in Paris during the summer holiday and desperate to be anywhere else. Invited by a friend to the seaside at Cherbourg, she finds she’s the only single one there and leaves early in dismay. Friends and family invite her to join them in Ireland, or in the Alps—she refuses them all, or accepts at the last moment only to regret her decision and leave early yet again. Restless in Biarritz, having finally gotten up the courage to travel alone, she overhears a book club discussing Jules Verne’s novel The Green Ray. Green is one of the last visible wavelengths of light to be scattered by the sunset, and is only visible under certain conditions and for an extremely brief flash. In Verne’s novel, Delphine learns, when one sees the green ray, the truth of one’s thoughts is suddenly revealed to oneself.
By the end of the film, Delphine sees the green flash while sitting on a bench overlooking the ocean in the company of a man she met in a train station. He asks her: “Doesn’t [seeing the green ray] bring you luck?” She replies: “Not exactly. It helps you learn…” She trails off as the sun approaches the horizon. “What do you learn?” he presses. “I’d like to know.” She replies, “So would I.” She begins to cry, and he moves to comfort her. Suddenly, the two pause to look at the sun, breathless. It is going. It has almost finished sinking. At the very last instant, a brilliant green caps the edge of the sun’s disc before it disappears entirely into the waves. Delphine gasps, points, and laughs in surprise. The sky has darkened. The film ends at that moment, ends before we see the promised knowledge arrive in her face, the knowledge that comes after the shock of recognition. We only see the shock. This is as it should be—for, in watching her see the green ray, I have seen the green ray too. I must attend to my own learning.
I found, though, that burying myself in green led to only tangential flashes of knowledge. Unconnected vignettes, frames through which green escaped. Colors, like the alphabet, only mean something in combination, in context—and I didn’t know what green wanted from me, or if I was only having fun imagining that some important message or clarity might arrive, one day, in green clothing. Physically, the green flash is essentially an atmospheric mirage, the last strange gasp of our perception in the half-light before night falls. The kind of knowledge not usually understood as knowledge, both unreal and measurably real—real phenomena that, being mirages, cause all manner of unreal visions.
Arsenic is present in small amounts in nearly everything that lives. It is woven throughout much of the earth’s soil and stones. Yet, there is no safe level of arsenic consumption for humans. Without chemical testing, it is almost undetectable by the senses: It has no flavor, scent, or color. Its widespread use in green pigments for paint, fabric, wallpaper, and candies in Victorian England caused the world’s first mass poisoning event,2 forever associating the particular luridness of Scheele’s green with toxicity in the English-speaking world. Arsenic’s undetectability and high presence in the environment also made it the perfect Victorian murder weapon. If everyone is being dosed with arsenic, how could one know for sure which poisonings were intentional and which were environmental?3
The first time forensic toxicology was used as evidence in a criminal trial was in order to solve this very problem. The Marsh test was relatively simple, and allowed investigators to test evidence and the bodies of the deceased for levels of arsenic that could definitively prove intentional poisoning. In the test, if arsenic is present, a black stain is deposited on the bottom of a cold ceramic bowl when held in the jet of a flame. Green, put to fire, goes black. The accused poisoner’s guilt is established, or their innocence. Clean as a fresh bowl.
Which poisonings are intentional and which are environmental? A tricky question. Arsenic is the byproduct of many mining processes, present in the rocks that harbor valuable metals such as gold and copper. It must be separated from them and discarded. As industrial copper mining expanded, green dye was one way to use up the surplus of arsenic that followed—meaning copper was “involved in environmental poisonings” during this time on multiple fronts.4 Though the poisonous green dyes have been abandoned, copper can’t be. More recently, some workers at the copper smelters of Chile’s Chuquicamata mine became known as los hombres verdes, because prolonged arsenic contamination due to unsafe working conditions caused “‘a gelatinous green substance’ [to flow] from their bodies.”5 Exhuming workers who died, families and investigators found that the “clothes of the deceased had become green (probably due to the slow release of arsenic from the bodies after death), and one of them had even exploded inside the coffin.”6 One of the fingers of capital is green, and it tears a hole in the boundaries between apparently solid substances: mine and body, earth and blood.
Chuquicamata is the largest open-pit copper mine by excavated volume, and the second largest by area. My local Bingham Canyon Mine is the first, and one of Chuquicamata’s open-pit sisters. I see the Bingham Canyon Mine every day, and it has also deposited its tasteless, odorless, colorless arsenic into my valley and, to a much lesser degree, my body. However, its journey to me has been roundabout. For decades, the mine dumped heavy metals, including arsenic, into the Great Salt Lake. These substances are still with us here—they are taken up by various plants and invertebrates, which are themselves eaten by the large numbers of migratory birds that use the lake as a stopover. Whatever is left over settles on the lake bed. Great swathes of this lake bed, under pressure from drought driven by climate change and agricultural water use, are now exposed to the sky. The wind, which picks up around sunset and sunrise, blows eastward into my town, kicking the metals out of the dry lake bed and shoving them into the streets of Salt Lake City. There, dust wanders wakingly, and makes its green way into my lungs.7
Alchemists used a deep and complex set of symbols to communicate with each other and to hide information about their experiments from prying eyes. Their goal was to determine the relationships between materials; to ascend the ladder of noble metals to heaven; to identify, combine, and change the spirits within solid materials as one would breed plants in a garden. Isaac Newton marked his alchemical notes with the phrase “hunting the green lion,” a reference which would be obscure to outsiders but which other alchemists would immediately understand. For them, the green lion, commonly portrayed eating the sun,8 was a symbol for aqua regia, a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid that can dissolve gold and platinum. They believed aqua regia held one key to the ultimate alchemical transformation of base metals into gold, because highly refined versions of these metals can be dissolved into and then precipitated from these liquids. Once, chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the solid gold Nobel Prize medals of German physicists James Franck and Max von Laue to prevent Nazis from confiscating them. The men who searched his lab mistook the jars of gold suspended in aqua regia for unimportant chemicals, and the medals rested safely dissolved in their liquid for years. After the war, de Hevesy returned to his lab, precipitated the gold from the acid, and turned it back over to the Swedish Academy, who recast the medals and returned them to Franck and von Laue.9 In alchemical symbols of this process, the green lion sits in a field, mouth half full of sun, which pours from its jaws like water. “In me,” the green lion says, “all the secrets of the Philosophers are hidden.”10
Though we now know colors are a result of light waves bouncing off objects and hitting the eye’s cones, Plato, Aristotle, and the alchemists believed colors to be intrinsic to materials themselves. Aristotle argued that “the boundary between solid-seeming objects and the air or water that surrounds them is not so firm as it might appear.” For Aristotle, color marked the boundary between solid and gas, or solid and liquid—and these boundaries were not firm but something more like spectrums of transparency.11 If color is smoke from a fire, green’s limit and mine activate each other like flint on stone. My friend Nick, an icon painter, tells me that sankir green is the base layer for painting human flesh in the traditional methods—an olive green that, as the other colors are layered on top of it, gets gradually obscured. One of the final steps to finishing an icon painting, one of the steps which breathes life into the image, is to connect this olive ground to the painting’s surface by clearing the layers down through the center of each eye. Green burns at the heart of the saint’s gaze and is, perhaps for all living things, the ground upon which we are painted. Not being a saint myself, however, I wonder if I am more like Eliot: painting a pale green tinge on my face, affecting the divine unchanging visage of death to make me feel beautiful, serious, and important. I am alive; look how dead I am!
June passed. In early July I took a tour to the red heart of Kennecott’s Bingham Canyon Mine. On the way, the tour bus driver told us that the waste rock out the window—she pointed nonspecifically to the ground we were driving on—had been post-processed to yield incredibly high-grade copper. The mine, it seems, had learned how to eat its own waste, at least part of it. She pointed to a hillside, smoothly graded and covered with a few months’ growth of grass, and said, “The mine has used all this material, so it can now be planted to prevent erosion.” I glanced at the other passengers uneasily; the road beneath the bus’s tires suddenly felt unstable.
When we arrived in the center of Kennecott’s massive orange and gray spiral, watching the machines collecting and dumping ore, I was reminded of one of the mine’s eeriest features. In the strange transference of physics that can happen when scales strain human perception, rock and soil in the mine began to appear liquid. Areas not currently being mined have softened and steepened over time, so that they look like rainbow ooze, arrested in the middle of their pouring down the surface of the mine. Even the hauler engines, one of which was on display behind an info placard, suggested ocean: Someone said, “I’ve never seen an engine like that outside of a ship.” The haulers themselves, so huge they can run over a pickup truck without noticing, seemed to move silently along their courses. The machine shoveling ore from the mountain—really the mountain itself—is called a dipper. As I watched it scooping ore from below, it too seemed to be liquifying the surface of the mine with its very touch.
Kennecott was the first mining company to patent the use of a microorganism called Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans—which facilitates iron oxidization and is found naturally in acid drainage—to extract copper from mine waste too low-grade to extract in the traditional way.12 Mining, long assumed to be a geological industry, to which living things are at best incidental and at worst barriers to be overcome, has gotten into the biology business.13 Today, A. ferrooxidans and other bacteria are most often used in heap leaching, where mine waste is mixed in a tank with a cocktail of specially chosen bacteria and heated to increase the microbes’ productivity. After the tiny creatures have done their work dissolving and reassembling chemical chains, more useful material can be pulled from the waste that would otherwise be lost—copper ore, gold, nickel, and more.
Despite this advancement in technology, one substance eludes the extraction companies: chalcopyrite, a yellow-green sulfide mineral that contains about 70 percent of the world’s unexploited copper. Chalcopyrite eludes the capitalists not because it is difficult to find, but because its copper is not yet worth the cost to extract. The ore is extremely low-grade, deposits are relatively small and isolated from one another, and the material itself is “recalcitrant, complex,” requiring high temperatures and containing impurities such as cobalt, silver, gold, lead, nickel, and arsenic. To use microorganisms to unlink these ores, metabolize them, and purify them—to run rocks through the sorting mechanism that is these single-celled machines, their microscopic bodies—is the dream, the “‘holy grail’ of biomining.”14 But because these bacteria can’t survive the high temperatures required to make this process economically viable, it is a green ladder to the sun that cannot yet be ascended, a door that remains closed for now. Beyond that door is something like the philosopher’s stone—the living substance that will turn the very earth into gold.
Perhaps I hope somehow that green, always found at the border between the unmeasurable real and the measurable unreal, can act as a guide, a marker, where the truth of capitalist accumulation and the destruction of the earth can be seen clearly, and, once seen, acted upon. Then again, green is everywhere, and so is destruction. And it is summer, and the wind is mild, and the lake rose several feet this spring. I am not looking for signs of the apocalypse. I am buying an ice cream cone. I am sitting on the grass listening to Art Garfunkel’s version of “Waters of March.”
Perhaps I could go to the Great Salt Lake evening after evening and face westward and watch for the green ray. I’d watch for the green boundaries of the world to burn out bright, outlining its many wounds. When will we change ourselves, revolve, and poison the capitalists back? It was a good summer; will it be a good year? Or maybe I will stand on the shore and watch for some truth about myself—why I cannot look too long into death’s green gash before I gasp and turn my gaze back toward summer. In the meantime, the foreground sinks into the background, green into green. Somewhere a priest holds the Eucharist up to a strip of sunlight that comes from a nearby window, painting his green vestments a brilliant green-gold. The bread becomes the body, the wine the saving blood. The sun sinks into the water like a wafer, and darkness quickly muffles all color. The Gawain poet writes: “For men may be cheerful, mulling their wine, / But a year runs fast, and always runs different; / start and finish are never the same.”15 Perhaps it is the green knight I should be looking for, murky figure of balance and transfer, not the green ray. And when he comes to the feast there will be no flash of epiphany, but only “for better or worse, an exchange.”16
Footnotes
Melvyn Bragg, host, In Our Time, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” December 13, 2018, 51 min., 49 sec.
Andrew Meharg, Venomous Earth, qtd. in Nabil Ahmed, “The Toxic House,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (Sternberg Press, 2014), 615.
Ahmed, “The Toxic House,” 614.
Ahmed, “The Toxic House,” 614.
Godofredo Pereira, “Geoforensics: Underground Violence in the Atacama Desert,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, 600.
Pereira, “Geoforensics,” 600.
Carter Williams, “Hazardous Metals Aren’t Only in Great Salt Lake’s Dust, They’re in the Ecosystem Too,” KSL.com, June 3, 2022.
Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 65.
“A Unique Gold Medal,” The Nobel Prize, first published March 11, 1998.
Smith, The Key of Green, 66.
Smith, The Key of Green, 58.
Mazen Labban, “Deterritorializing Extraction: Bioaccumulation and the Planetary Mine,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104, No. 3, (May 2014): 566.
Labban, “Deterritorializing Extraction,” 562.
Labban, “Deterritorializing Extraction,” 568.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Simon Armitage (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 73.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 89.
Lindsey Webb is the author of Plat (Archway Editions, 2024), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and the chapbooks Perfumer’s Organ (above/ground press, 2023) and House (Ghost Proposal, 2020). Her writings have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a graduate research fellow in the Tanner Humanities Center and PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah. She edits Thirdhand Books.