Für All Das Grün Englands
To search! To want! To long! To possess a memory and bring it, kicking and screaming into the present, and so into reality! All this you will find within the words of this packaged story.
Gabriele Münter. 1908
When The Painter had been little and not someone who painted, or did much of anything at all, she’d been taken to a field of scutch grass perched smack bang in the middle of a sea of golden wheat fields- a great big field of the stuff that wasn’t flat but that had a little swoop right in the centre of it, a crest, like that of a tidal wave mid adolescence- and been told to play while the ones not so little drank from flasks and bottles and got progressively sillier under the hot, yellow as an illustrated sunflower in a illustrated children’s book about botany, sun. She had always been one to accept an invitation to play just as soon as one had been issued and she did then too, immediately taking off, running with no thought in her head other than that it was fun to run in a playful manner on grass because she could tumble however she liked and how often she liked and it didn’t hurt a bit because the grass was almost made to be tumbled on, being as healthy and thick and deep as a crashmat masquerading as a shag carpet.
She’d never had thoughts about capturing colour before that day and she often thought to herself as an adult attempting to understand motivation and how it worked and how it applied to her, a person compelled to do a thing that, beyond her doing it, had no real comprehension, that it was on that day after taking a purposefully big tumble to get a nice big streak of green down the front of her small and lightly creased top, banging her head quite hard on a hidden stone residing like a fat toad in the depths of the grass, that she’d really had her first real thought. Lying there, breathing hard to not cry because shouting would follow the cry if said cry interrupted fun-in-the-sun drinking time for those not so little, face down in the strands which emitted a green glow that began making up the full encompassment of her vision, she had her first real thought in the shape of some words she’d heard her father say in wonderous shock when he’d tried to open a jar of pickles everyone else in the house had been struggling with and then broke the jar and cut himself pretty badly, ‘Oh wow’.
‘Oh wow,’ had been the thought, and, ‘Oh wow’, had been the feeling that gripped her heart as the thought came and she subsequently plunged her face as far down into the strands as it would go as if by doing that she could steal the green glow coming from them, tattoo it into her skin, not moving again until the hot yellow sun began turning a cooler orange and she’d been picked up- kicking and screaming with multiple clumps of the grass falling brokenly from her gurning jaw- and carried away from the hue. Her thoughts hadn’t veered for a second away from the memory of, ‘Oh wow’, since then because since then she’d been constantly searching to find the green of that field which she’d returned to many times over the years but failed repeatedly to see it as she’d seen it then, it never quite being as she remembered and never quite as good as it should be, nothing being quite as good and green as that first, ‘Oh wow’, except for the brief second after she finished a new painting and gazed at it in its entirety for the first time, because for that second she was in a limbo of consideration, exploring the feelings travelating across her heart which ultimately always revealed that no, it was not quite right. The green The Painter needed was a green she couldn’t describe, it was a green that lay like a blanket across her whenever she tried to sleep and made it so she slept as infrequently as an insomniac insect investigating illicit incidents impassionedly, it smothering her with itself like spring taken smother-loving form, it was a green she needed more than anything to put down on canvas just so she could harness it, just so she could look at it whenever she wanted, just so she could possess it, the it of it making her an Ahab with a consuming interest outside of white.
The latest painting she’d attempted wasn’t right, it was some as of yet undiscovered direction that went neither side to side nor up nor down nor diagonal to diagonal but in indetermined angular directions, she’d been trying something new, but it’d turned out so wrong that it was quite unbelievable she’d ever conceived that it could have possibly ended up right at all. The final result of the latest painting was such a shitty type of green it may as well have been yellow; it was a pathetic shamble of a painting trying to be the right kind of green because it was barely green at all and didn’t glow at all and her hands shook with the effort not to behold it, her eyes clenching into tight balls that resembled knots being pulled way too tight whenever she beholded it anyway. It wasn’t right, it just wasn’t right at all, and so she picked what just wasn’t right up from its home on the easel and tossed it to its grave on the other side of the room where a viable mountain of other not right canvases mounted the floor, the latest wrong’un sliding down to the bottom of the pile, being lost in the quantity of green that assailed the eyes like a flash of magnesium if one looked too long at it. The Painter swiftly drew out another canvas, a larger canvas than the ones she usually worked with, twice the length of her body, three times the height, straining with the weight of it as she plopped it down on her suddenly dwarfed easel, blobbing a single paint dollop of indiscriminate green in the centre of it once it’d settled and she’d settled back herself on a little wooden stool, waiting for a real thought or idea to appear in her mind’s eye for the next attempt.
“What’s the difference between the greens I’ve painted previously and the green I want to paint?” Began the thought process of The Painter once the blob had begun the stirrings of possibility in her heart, the shapeless shape of it coaxing the stirrings until with a, “Well, the green I want to paint wasn’t paint, it was a glow emitted from the innards of a field’s grass,” the thought process of The Painter ended and was immediately replaced by the real idea process, the real idea process making a grinding whirring, like the idea it was processing was a loose cog in his machine, as it produced an idea so simple she hadn’t had it before. “Well, what if I gather some field grass, no matter how green, and do something to it to make it paint? What if right now I go to a field and take a large quantity of grass and bring it back here and mulch it with water until it turns into a paint-like thing? What if I immerse myself in it and just see what happens?”
Hitting the right hand of herself with the left hand of herself in the physical embodiment of a vocal, ‘By Jove!’, The Painter ran out of the house and to the nearest bus stop, shouting as she boarded the vessel, “To a field of grass, driver!”, and being taken quite near indeed to a field of grass as the bus she’d chosen, quite by mistake, did just happen to go near to where one lay, stretching across a stretch of land like a fine toupee. There was a worker on the field, a small woman, that could have been anywhere from forty to one hundred and forty in terms of age and appearance, pushing an electric mower four times the size of her in zig zag directions, shrivelled and crooked fingers wrapped around the handle of the beast with the tightness a child’s around a particularly good stick. WHIRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOM went the mower as it worked until it was stopped mid-WHIRRRRRRRROOO- by The Painter jumping atop of it, surprising the worker by kicking open the mechanism to reveal a volume of shredded grass held inside.
“My grass,” The Worker protested as a portion of the volume of grass was drawn out by a hand shaking as if belonging to a bear skin enthusiast about to come into contact with some of the very best bear skin around, a black bear skin oh so black and clearly from a bear.
“No, no,” The Painter shook her head in worship. “My grass,” simultaneously pulling a black bin bag from her coat pocket and beginning to fill it with the shredded clippings, nodding her head at The Worker as she did until The Worker, confused as to whether or not her boss, The Owner of the Field There, had given her a helper whose help was to take the grass from the beast and prevent it from clogging, began to work with her, pouring her own handfuls into the bag.
When they had over three bags of the stuff and the beast was nearly empty- waiting like a vacant pot hole in the road does for the rain to come and fill it and again make it that man-made beauty, a pond- The Painter sped back to the studio, bursting in with hands and heart filled to the brim with clippings and motivation and running over to the stained and yet unused bathtub that lay in the corner of her studio- for reasons unknown, it having been there when she’d first rented the place- and pouring the moist clippings in. Once the bath held all the grass, The Painter got to the real work, going to her storage cupboard and pulling out a humungous hard-plastic pestle and mortar that had been given to her as a joke by the residents of the studios’ surrounding her own one prior Christmas and that she’d never before had call to use because if it was a dog then she certainly didn’t want it to return, leaving the useless-to-her mortar behind in the cupboard to crush freehand with the club sized pestle, mulching the grass in the bath right down to the molecules and then letting the ancient cold tap on the bath do its thing. Several moments after it was turned, rumbling and groaning, echoing like the belly of a severely faded and famished statue, the neglected tap began to pour, water spilling into basin and making the crushed mass of grass a delightful paste of green so very much green it was hard for The Painter to admit to herself that it still didn’t seem quite right.
So back to the cupboard she went, taking her lack of admitting with her before dismissing it by drawing from the cupboard a novelty sized wooden spoon- gifted to her the same Christmas as the pestle and mortar- and dolloping the spoon inside the clover-like paste, taking care as she did that nothing green touched her fingers because they, she, wasn’t ready yet to touch the stuff, wasn’t ready to let the whole thing come to a head when her head wasn’t fully comprehending what would happen once, and if ever, the stuff was ready for her to touch. With the limited grip she had, like it was a pot of broth made to warm the cold-as-coal bellies of miners, amount untold, emerging from the dark cavern of the earth just in time for broth time, she began to stir, the paste, thick and lumpy at first and wafting up the smell of a market day gone mouldy- the water that’d come from the bath’s long-time-since-used taps having the scent, strangely, of raw fish aged in oak smoked water- slowly getting more and more pleasant to be stirring. The lumps in it breaking down and a glossiness, with the hard holding fingers of someone whose declaration to every prospective partner was, ‘We must love each other or die!’, infecting it, increasing itself until there was gloss here, there, and everywhere, the smell changing drastically too as it did, taking on the musk of a Victorian sauna, steam and sweat and fungi and company all mingling into something intoxicating.
As if the mixing was removing something, the paste began to reduce, retreating meekly towards the half way point of the tub with only an occasional bubble of trapped air rising, pooting petulantly, getting thicker and thicker as it sank until it had the feel of swiftly hardening tar, forcing The Painter to add more water just so she could keep up her movements, turning the tap that had a small flame rather than a small ice cube engraved on it just in case any hotness would emerge. And hotness did emerge, steam arising from the pouring water until steam arose from the bath itself, making it resemble as well as smell like a sauna of times gone, The Painter turning the hot water off once the thickness had reduced but stirring still, harder and harder, faster and faster, until a whirlpool formed that mesmerised the eyes and promised more than just a locker.
Mesmerised to the point of transcendence from the whirlpool and as woozy as a watermelon missing all its seeds from the steam and sauna smell playing, partying, within the confines of her skull, individual scents of the overall sauna smell mating, physically and emotionally, in there with other individual scents, forming children, new individual scents in their own right, which all snuck out of the skull and down deep into the forbidden zones of her body where they sat on the lungs and the heart and jumped on the stomach until The Painter wretched and pulled away from the bath and threw up a dull green liquid which even in her nausea she compared to her memory of the green she sought, and found it wanting.
Rising from the floor once her stomach had settled and looking back into the tub, she saw with looking-glass eyes that what was in there was as complete as it could be, considering, and so began undressing, throwing off her smock and trousers to stand naked and pure before the liquid, the heat of it, as heat oft does, rising, wrapping around The Painter, slowly but surely removing all the shivers and timbers running across her skin. The heat was of good nature, kindly, and the colour it emanated from was good enough for The Painter to take her plan to the next step and take a deep breath and also an actual step and just see what would happen, raising a leg inside the tub and lowering herself into the green which engulfed her feet and then her behind and then her torso and then her shoulders, engulfing all in its way until only her head, like the cautious white tip of a magician’s wand attempting a great solo escape from an abandoned top hat, was out.
The scents which had made her heave before didn’t do that once she was in the thick of them, once in the thick of them the smell of them made her smile instead of grimace and gag and, with the memory of when she’d lay face first in the field and discovered purpose dancing in her mind’s peripherals, she lowered her head beneath the surface of the liquid, a perfect green glow playing against the backdrop of her closed lids once lowered, a perfect glow that wasn’t wrong about its perfection, it being a greener glow in fact than the green glow of that day in that field all those years ago, a green glow that hurt the heart to see and hurt the mind to comprehend.
Rising from the liquid, she reached for her cast aside top and rubbed specifically at the skin of her lids with a hoping to see the same green glow imprinted on the fabric but getting no such luck, getting instead only the same non-glow green of the liquid from the outside that wasn’t the non-glow green she needed at all. With a grunt of irritation, but also of relief as her lungs had begun aching since she’d risen and wiped with the near time up ache a professional underwater breath holder has when doing their profession professionally, she dropped straight back below the surface, her lungs stopping their aching when back being unused in the green. Down there with no oxygen they didn’t feel like lungs desperate for that sweet H2o, they felt as needless and peaceful as stars gazing approvingly down at abandoned battlefields, in there the beauty of the green glow bathing against the thin skin protecting her eyes robbed them of need and also caused a wonderous opening of her mouth which invited the green in to colour her tongue and her teeth and gums and part of her throat.
Rising with it still held in her mouth, cheeks billowed, and mouth pursed to the point of breaking from the sheer volume amount pursed behind it, The Painter, wiping her eyes again before again opening them, faced the giant canvas she’d positioned prior and SPAT, the liquid hosing out of her, colliding first with the blob of inspirational green she’d made before and then with the waiting white.
The Painter had felt sure as she spat and watched the arching green arch from her before colliding with the canvas that that would be it, the moment of truth she’d been waiting for, the moment that would keep her lungs from hurting as they did when not submerged in the glow, The Painter had felt as sure as a steroid-aided souped up sugar packet was at its tooth decay abilities right up until the moment she stopped spitting green and saw again that the settled green she’d spat was subpar to the real deal. With her mouth holding the taste of mangled vegetation and her lungs aching fit to burst again from exposure to everything not the green, The Painter- not falling into despair or annoyance as she would have many times before when the memory of the green she wanted was just that, a memory and a distant one at that- took a deep breath and sank back beneath the surface, opening her eyes that time in the sink, letting the liquid collide with her actual eyes in the hope it would forever ingrain itself into them, sink into the corneas and infect her vision, become her vision. The glow of green, being oh so vibrant when viewed without the shield of her lids, practically blinded her with the intensity of it all, not so much ingraining itself in her vision but certainly imprinting itself there so that when she rose everything had a tinge of the green to it and so was fantastic and phenomenal and wonderful until the moment the tinge started to burn a little and then a lot and she had to wipe and scrub her eyes with the towel and a bit of clean un-green water to get rid of it and when she stopped, the pain had gone but also so had the tinge of fantastic and phenomenal and wonderful.
A new real idea came to her then like a kangaroo, bouncing on powerful legs towards and then kicking her with the same legs to show her what to do, kicking her right out of the bath, first to her completely ruined towel where she rubbed herself as dry and ungreen as she could and then to her work desk where she made the canvases she painted on, grabbing a roll of fabric still waiting to be stretched onto a frame and stretching it instead all around herself. Like mummy of ancient times she became and like a mummy of modern media times she walked from the work desk and back towards the bathtub, hands out and feeling for potential collisions as she’d covered herself completely, not leaving a sole or an eye or a strand of hair free, her vision, compromised by this with only the tiny holes dotting the fabric letting any light in, aiding her only slightly on her way, having to feel at the corners of desks and tables and her easel until, finally, it was the edges of her tub she felt. With her lungs almost audibly screeching and her heart doing little gymnast-in-training jumps and jerks in her chest, she hurried as much as possible in getting in the bath, raising her left leg up, the canvas coating her creaking like the wood of an old ship as its shape changed and contorted and attempted with all the tempted power within it to not break or split, break and split it did not either as she at last got the leg in and then other one too, The Painter and The Painting being the same thing all at the same time as she engulfed herself once more.
The green had cooled since she’d first filled the tub but still, as she lowered herself deeper and the liquid settled against the canvas of her skin and the glow of green weaved into the fibres and fabrics of her being, it felt like a mother wrapping a fresh towel around a body too long held in a chill. The glow was all around as her coated head slipped with a finality beneath the surface, her poor aching lungs ceasing in their poorness and their ache as a joy, like there was a lost percussionist within her, began banging on the drums within her ears, the beat filled with the freedom of a beatnik in boehme school as the green coloured moment she’d wanted had arrived and she sank deeper still, the bottom of the tub vanishing as she went, the sides of it vanishing as well, her body jerking, once, in confusion once it noticed the vanishing but jerking again, twice, as it continued its swim right deep down into the down down down regardless and forgot confusion, the drums of joy beating boom bap boom louder and louder as deeper she swam into the glowing shade.