Green & Blue, By Pearl Iona Eustice

 Green & Blue is an event of light and color. There is no clear narrative content, but the story (or prose poem) is more than just a list of things that are green and blue. It's an impressionist painting being described, a diverse spectrum of the forms that color can inhabit and the ways color and form can be envisioned. Green begins as an adjectival characteristic, but it isn’t just the color of the glass—it becomes an imaginative experience. The pools of green light on the table transition to the feathers of birds and their cries, then palm trees are glittering in the sun. Then the pools are in a desert, with camels. Color is an arc connecting forms, from the feathers and skin of animals to mirages in the heat. These things are subjective within the mind of the reader—all the deserts pictured vary among individuals, as do shades of green, but it allows both interpretation and a particular color and scene to be painted in each individual mind. 

Color is changeable within form. The glass morphs from green to blue when the night comes. The evolution of color becomes more than just shifting from image to image, it becomes life and death. The fish breaks the blueness of the water into pieces as it moved: beads and lines, and it consumes the blue water through its mouth and nose. Yet when he is on land, he himself goes from black to shedding blue shedding his scales and dying the iron of his surroundings with them. The fish breaks blueness into pieces while alive and moving, and sheds blue when dying, just as the ribs of the rowing boat are blue. The glass turns blue in the night, in the dark, and things are blue that are broken or dead, not in their natural habitat. Both fish and boat are seafaring things dashed ashore. We see light cast greenness onto marble, we see death and night dyeing things blue, and dying things shedding blue. Do we feel the fish? We certainly feel it more than we feel the glass dripping green—that it something we more see than feel. Woolf does not explain color but allows it to affect the mind of the reader in various snapshots of life, adjusting perception subjectively, showing the myriad ways it can manifest and affect.


Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshFebruary 28, 2021 at 8:22 PM

    Beautifully observed. Yet why describe something like the death of a fish as an event of color and light? If it were the death of a human being, one might find it alienating and, obviously, dehumanizing. Is it to distance the event, to gain a more objective perspective on it? -- because beauty IS dehumanizing? On the other hand, it actually is an event of light and color.

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