Self-Portrait in Green

A Self-portrait emerges as a series of fragments. It is an assemblage, or a collage, or a montage. 

In Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion, El Greco’s Assumption of a Virgin emerges as a tableau vivant. A camera circulates the mass of feathered wings. The viewer ascends with the actress-turned-angel. Each body stands in careful pose, trembling ever-so slightly. Feathers shuffle. Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, a Catholic Mass for the dead, plays. It is all a bit absurd. It is humorous and strange. It is an intrusion into hyperreality: actors, standing still, bearing the weight of blue, white, yellow, orange cloth—the armature of feathers. Staging this tableau promises return to set of former conditions. First, one returns to the precarity of depiction: a time when forms tremble, oily pigment slips. Second, one returns to a moment of encounter, of beholding the image anew.  

The memory surfaces: I, age eleven, gaze upon the stretching bodies of El Greco’s paintings for the first time. I am bewildered. He’s from an island called Crete, my mom whispers. Some people say he couldn’t see straight.

And then there is that brilliance of color, of green. 

In second grade, I have a color collection. I use various combinations of colored markers to draw along the bottoms of Tupperware containers. The markers deposit their chemicals within the plastic containers: bits of blue, and red, and yellow. Then, after creating the right assortment of bits, I fill the little containers with water. I cherish this unnamed pigment for a day or two; and then my mom patiently reminds me, I will need that container to take my lunch to school.

Passion is about the making of a movie in which extraordinary works of art are reproduced, El Greco’s Assumption among them. This fictional movie is never finished. Its director—Godard’s double, a man named Jerzy—is never satisfied. Jerzy has no concern regarding the film’s plot. He cares only about light. And, to his constant dismay, “the studio light is always wrong” [1]. Vincent Canby’s 1983 review of Passion titled the film an “An Essay, on Art.” Canby described the film as self-absorbed, funny, without a real story, uncertain, and, most importantly, fractured [2].

My Self-Portrait would appear similarly. The fracture illuminates the whole as a conjunction of parts. Assemblage, collage, (Godard’s) montage: each involves a series of cuts. To make a stone shine, you have to be quite certain of where to cut. An emerald without cuts is a mineral. An emerald with many cuts, in just the right arrangement, is something you put on a ring. 

Faure’s Requiem accompanies Godard’s “Essay,” but another symphony would accompany mine.  It is a “Symphony in Green,” a “Sinfonía en Verde.” 

Agustín Acosta, poet laureate of Cuba, and my great-granduncle, says his “pupil is flooded with green” [3]. Green is the vision of the Vision’s iridescent cloth. Color lives within the folds of El Greco’s garments. It shutters from skin, to flesh, to field, to skin, again.  

Agustín describes a series of similarly reflective greens. “My eye is filled,” he writes, with the “green of the field.” The: 

Green of flower buds, 

sweet like children… And the strong 

thistle-green of plants wounded

by the bitter solitude of the road. [4]

It is the “green of ocean and of hope.” It is the green of seas traversed. The blue-green of my oceans: the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. This diaphanous Green is in the eyes of my grandfathers, Samuel and Suheil. I picture each of them looking outward on their respective coasts: from Matanzas, Cuba, and Acre, Palestine. 

I imagine the fragility of this green rippling before them:

—A green to which Samuel would submit his body, cocooned by boat—

—A green which Suheil would dive into as a boy, plummeting from the Crusader’s Wall, twelve footsteps from the Lighthouse, thirty-seven from the Mosque, forty-two from the Franciscans’ Church— 

Did he count those steps to dive, once more, at night, before he fled forever? I travel there—to the wall, to the lighthouse, to the mosque, to the church. I am still unsure as to what I might find… 

Green stands in the middle of the color spectrum. Green is where you hope to reach another side. Green is what you throw your body up against. Green is what you sink your body into.

Green is a field for projection, imagination, and poetry.

Several years ago, I discovered a set of photos of Suheil. The octagonal vignettes place him as a model in his family’s photographic practice over the course of several years, first in Acre, and, later, in Beirut. 

He occupies the hand-built sets of his family’s imagination: Mediterranean and New England seascapes, Swiss chalets and “cowboy portraits” of the American West. Young Suheil would be responsible for the hand-coloring of the photos. His landscape is the site of his projection. The octagonal vignettes suggest an imagination sustained—and made fertile—by familial and societal displacement. His family’s sets create a space to be filled by the model and his props: a guitar, a toy gun, a railing, a small palm. 

Barthes describes the photograph as producing an illogical conjunction between what is now and what once was [5]. It is like Godard’s montage: a series of fragments set upon film. This octagon serves such an illogic most beautifully. The hand which paints the mountain—in yellow, red, blue, and that most intense of greens—retains the freedom to dream. 

I picture my grandfather painting. Maybe he moves with care, hand trembling. Maybe he knows those peaks by now, and would rather move on. In any case, I, like Agustín, long to see this green, which:

. . . brings 

to my heart and my memory

the ineffable memory, [6]

once in another’s eyes.

[1] Silverman, Kaja, and Farocki, Harun. Speaking about Godard. New York (1998), 170. 

[2] Canby, Vincent. “Film Festival; ‘Passion,’ An Essay on Art, by Jean-Luc Godard.” New York Times (4 October 1983). 

[3] Acosta, Agustín. Ala: poesías. Habana (1915), 135. 

[4] Verde de los capullos en la flora, / dulce como la infancia... Y agresivo / verdor de cardos que la planta hieren / en la agria soledad de los caminos. (My translation, above).  

[5] Barthes, Roland. “Rhétorique de l’image,” Communications (1964): 40–51. “La photographie installe en effet, non pas une conscience de l’être-la de la chose (que toute copie pourrait provoquer), mais une conscience de l’avoir-été-la. Il s’agit donc d’une catégorie nouvelle de l’espace-temps: locale immédiate et temporelle antérieure; dans la photographie il se produit une conjonction illogique entre l’ici et l’autrefois.” 

[6] Acosta, 135. “Amo todo lo verde porque trae / hasta mi corazón y mi memoria / el recuerdo inefable de tus ojos…”