GC6 17908

Green d’or

Verdegris door

 

 

 

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

 

Drives my green rage; that blasts the roots of trees

 

Is my destroyer

 

                                                                 Dylan Thomas

 

Biographies help me sleep… now a box of library disposals

…last month or two, have read two Poes, a Melville, a Hunter Thompson… which had the beautiful Colleridge bit … Peter O’Toole auto… as a child in foster care, playing Green Man in forest away from blitz London….

 

Don’t know the original source.  Found the DT quote by coincidence yesterday, in an unlikely biography (Wired) on John Belushi by Bob Woodward… Also a rare piece of verse in the journalistic bio…. Belushi drank at the NYC bar where Dylan Thomas died (after drinking 23 whiskies?… The White Horse, 11^th and Hudson).

 

 …but its great in relation GC ideas…

Here creative lifeforce is linked to green like chlorophyll to light, but an illumination which is also the exterminating flame… no?

(Pathological obverse?)

 

 A strange way to look at colour? About LIGHT, but a different approach

What we have been doing with this text…like Russell’s essay ?... is about words too.

 Ideas to do with some visual experience( to come?)

 

Whats it made of?…Light-eating lead… light and wax ?... but what made it happen is something else… the process without a specific object…the procedure generates becomings/possibilities?

 

Visual, textual, practical research prompted by wordplay and association?

 

UBU, king of ****

 

Green candle title… UNgivens – green, light, number?

 

In some sense parameters are absolutely ambiguous…mysterious?

Something elusive (but not evasive?)

 

From an inexplicable… wordless place, colour can be as strange as Wittgenstein says

but if one wanted to take a literal path… it can suggest a very restricted spectrum… a single colour and a single illuminating (or not?) object made of wax.

 

Call and Response being an unlimited, satisfying and productive process….productive for its own sake?

 

The possibility remains of everything except the Green Candle…the absence…

 I think of Gertrude Stein’s Yellow Vase (?) cubist poem…attempting to define an object in space, and avoiding the words vase and yellow.

 

This Collaboration

I like the feeling of freedom from individual responsibility…mutual…but not presumptive…a different kind of creative method… surrendering some kind of authority?

 

 

 

GC5           8-8-8

 

VERDIGRIS

Cupric acetate…. ‘Cupric’ adjective meaning containing copper..

A cupric carbonate that forms ‘in the atmosphere’ of copper, brass or bronze

 

From French… ‘vert-de-gris’… green of grey?

‘gres’ is sandstone

‘gris’ is grey

 

Hey, John Barbour!...                                       

Some linguistic verdigrisson!   ( made that one up)

 

GRIS 1.M:

   (a) grey-haired…  Barbe grise - grey beard,

   Barbu is bearded.

   (b) dull weather - temps gris

 

GRIS 2 Fem..: strangely…

         Intoxicated

 

                                                          FrenchGREEN BEARDS

 

Following on french ‘Barbu’ connection… (Ubu barbu would be bearded Ubu?)

 

Barbier… barber;

 

Barbon…greybeard;

 

Barbillon… (a) wattle; (b)fishhook

 

A Barbouilleur is a dauber… an inferior artist, a scribbler

 

Barbouiller… (a) to daub; (b) to smear; (c) to blur (in printing).

 Eg - se barbouiller – to dirty one’s face.

 

 9-8-8

What is IT?

What gas or substance is it… that when ignited, makes a green flame?

 

15-8-08

Although ( full circle?)

It hasn’t been mentioned so far in this correspondence… and an unlikely unconscious source… the coincidence of the Dr John record, John… I haven’t been able to locate the exact meaning of the title, but given that it has voodoo associations… and French language derivation… “GRIS-GRIS”

(as grey-grey)

                                                                                                                    

 

 

 

28-8-08

                                                                                     So far

 find a definition

 

 GRIS_GRIS…

(Monosyllabic Tautology… as Jarry would say).

… related to the literal meaning of the word (grey? Or intoxication?)

Pronounced greegree

 

IS A HEX,  A talisman, amulet

a small cloth bag worn by person… inside might be mixtures of various herbs, oils, stones, bones, hair, nails…

 

Seems parallel to Yoruba ‘Nkisi’? …( or even in form to Catholic scapula?)

I have heard of Nkisi objects syncretised in Brazilian Candomble trad… made of a small styrofoam block wrapped in a prayer written on red cellophane…

…script backwards…turned in. 

                                                                            A magic charm

Akin to ‘Mojo’ … which commonly red flannel cloth tied with draw string, containing botanical, herbal, mineral, and petition papers… worn under clothing.

Rabbit’s foot is a zoological curio used in some.

                                                       “John the Conqueror” is a root used in Mojo bags

 

Gris –gris (magic spell object/artifact) is referred to as ‘iron fist’ of voodoo

…associated with relentless pounding …

which precedes final effect.