The Cry: Cinema, Sentiment, Minnelli

The European Magazine for January, 1783, describes as fashionable: Elliott’s Red-Hot Bullets and The Smoke of the Camp of St. Roche. It is manifestly impossible to identify exactly or to obtain authentic samples of such colors today.
– Aloys Maerz and Morris Rea Paul. A Dictionary of Color, p. 5

Friends: in this day when cynicism rules I plead guilty to being sentimental.
– Kruger, in Two Weeks in Another Town

To make someone look like she belongs in a picture:

Not to compose so that the persona and the frame are coordinated and balanced, nor to select from a population of women the single one who could most heartily repay one’s special consideration through her pose and presence, nor to use technique to glorify her pictorially as she could not be glorified in the everyday…

To cause a unification in which she is joined to the pictorial conceit with such delicacy, firmness, uninhibitedness, richness, utterness, and light that the picture would seem to be, for the moment anyway, all of her existence. More: that she, this particular and unchanging she, would not have existence outside of this picturing.

In Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), his salute to Fellini, Vincente Minnelli is giving us the story of Jack Andrus (Kirk Douglas), a washed-up actor from the Hollywood studio days now working at Rome’s Cinecittà to make a film with the tempestuous tormentor Maurice Kruger (Edward G. Robinson) – and his tempestuous tormentor wife Clara (Claire Trevor). Andrus is a wounded genius. His days of shining success are past, but he lived them in a cocoon with Carlotta (Cyd Charisse) who drove him to the point of attempting suicide. Now, far from Hollywood, he has run into her again, and she is no less seductive than before, albeit wedded to a man with insuperable wealth. Can this Odysseus steer his vessel clear of her deafening call?

It will be important to know that Minnelli worked here under the guiding hand of John Houseman for MGM, in collaboration with cinematographer Milton Krasner, who had in recent years shot for him Home From the Hill, Bells Are Ringing (both 1960), and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962), and set decorator Keogh Gleason, who had done Gigi (1958), Bells Are Ringing (1960), and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) (as well as An American in Paris [1951]); as well, he had the special talents of designer Pierre Balmain. If you are going to create an image of a woman that will be summative, it will be useful to have nearby a person such as Krasner who knows how to light for color, a decorator like Gleason who knows what texture, color, shape, and radiance can do for enhancement, and a creative genius like Balmain who understands that whatever she does or says, a woman’s character in cinema is bound to what she wears.

Andrus has met an enigmatic and charming young girl, Veronica (Dahlia Lavi), who does not want him to know that she is taking a temporary holiday from her boyfriend, David (George Hamilton), the (anxiety-ridden) star of the film. Aware of this, the scheming Carlotta wants to draw him back, very much against his desires, and so she turns on the seduction. As seems out of nowhere, we are catapulted to a view of this femme in full allure, on the telephone, coaxing. But what she says is entirely forgettable, indeed we can have no full idea of what Andrus could be thinking as he listens, unseeing, at the other end. The vision of Carlotta sweeps us away.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The vision that Andrus cannot see. The vision that is entirely ours.

She is supine on her bed, phone in hand, lipstick in full attack mode, eyes made up, golden hair aswirl. But even Carlotta the personage is as though nothing in herself. Because the situation and her weddedness to it have taken over. We are in medium shot, tranquilly gazing down. She is in a pale mint-green peignoir. The bedsheets and pillowcases around her, one could say sloshing around her, are glimmering pale mint-green satin trimmed with lace. The colour mint-green, pale, candied, teasing, somehow questioning fills the screen, swathing Carlotta, encapsulating her, it wouldn’t be misdirection to say flavouring her. A lambent aura is projecting upward from the pale mint-green satin sheets, running over her pale mint-green body; and though her vocalisation is narratively the center of our attention we cannot pay it the attention her position demands. This pale mint-green shine is not a color one is used to in cinema – in fact, this may be its first, or even only usage. And it is not a minor part of the construction, it overwhelms. We are given no option but to swim in pale mint-green shine, as it pulls us to some unimaginable destination in the mint-green universe on the way to some other one in the mint-green wonder to come. 

This green – as I will proceed to refer to it, abjuring any connection at all with forest green, grass green, Kelly green, sea green – is almost precisely the color of certain lime sorbets, but also derives from the green pieces that could in the 1960s be found in the “lime” components of a package of New England Confectionary Company lozenge-shaped wafers, generally produced as Chase and Co. “hub wafers” between 1847 and 1912 and henceforward as “Necco wafers” until 2018, with the green variety disappearing as of 2009; and it is the association with this wafer green that perhaps aligns Minnelli’s with sweetness, mintiness, and candy. Pistachio ice-cream is pale green but it lacks the sprightliness, the ting of this green. Were it much more severely restricted we might conceive it as a medical green but here there is too much of it for that. It reverently calls up childhood, the earliest childhood memories of color, the soda fountain at which one swooned in abstraction as the world of the everyday slid toward the forgotten, the magical soap tinted somehow by the chlorophyll of a thousand gardens and then bleached in the sun. The butterfly’s chrysalis brought into the classroom by the otherwise stern, foreboding science teacher who would be swinging her yardstick threateningly but for now, as she plans to delight the children. Even more than the nature of the colour, its very presence. Since we are in a medium shot, the edges of the bed are offscreen and so the pale mint green floods over the entire image, puckering over the Charisse body, undulating away from her. The irony: she expresses herself on the phone, uses facial gesture, all in relation to the Andrus she does not at present see (while through intercutting we can) and is perhaps recalling some halcyon days the cataclysm of which has passed into her oblivion. She is talking, he is the person she is talking to, and she not only does not seem to notice the pale mint green on and around her but it is an essence that for her has no value whatever. Not a shred of value, not a tincture. Whilst for us, the value is oceanic.

One must look at this picture as a picture, of course. Not as a journalistic record of an important happening.

Oceanic how? All-absorbing as regards our concentration of gaze, since we cannot manage to find her more interesting still, nor stray from her. Yet also prodding, since it calls up an age and a history we must struggle to remember, or a future we must contort ourselves to imagine. And stunning, too, as the sublime is stunning, because it defies ontology and tacks us into the present of experience. One understands how this green leaks away from the frame, how the frame is insufficient to contain or support it, how in this moment it stains every aspect of the universe that we have been imagining as Andrus’s Rome. Is this not a way for Minnelli to show us that Andrus cannot get her out of his mind, Veronica’s ineffable young charms notwithstanding? Veronica’s charms, Davey’s mischief as he acts out his despondency at losing his girl, Kruger’s abject dictatorship and then collapse in what seems a heart attack. All of this pulsing in Rome – Fellini again, the Rome of La Dolce Vita (1960), with its traffic-filled, gaiety-filled streets – while Andrus is chained to the horror of Carlotta, driving into a brick wall, the blood turned green.

Naming

The power of colour sensation to elude language is easily enough seen in perusing Maerz and Paul’s Dictionary of Color (which I have thanks to Vladimir Nabokov) where, after noting that Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours by Patrick Syme (1814) contained 110 color samples; William Hallock’s 1892 listing for the Standard Dictionary contained 388; the French Répertoire des Colours (1905) had 1,356; and Robert Ridgway’s Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (1912) had 1,113, they themselves Index 4200 names (ranging from “Abbey” to “Zuñi Brown”) and still come to the conclusion that “it is urgently to be desired, and herein is earnestly recommended, that these names of pigments never be used as names for specific color sensations.”¹ With Carlotta we are having a color sensation; Andrus is having merely a sensation. Maerz and Paul’s “opaline green” (17.A.6 on page 57) comes very close to this one. At any rate, they remind us that “color has no objective existence.”² Tell Andrus about objective existence.

Colour slips away from language, but language surely refuses to capitulate. Here is a fabulous description from Augustin Challamel’s History of Fashion in France (1882), quoted in wonder by Maerz and Paul:

A great sensation was caused at the opera one night by the arrival of a lady dressed as follows. Her gown was “a stifled sigh,” trimmed with “superfluous regrets,” with a bow at the waist of “perfect innocence,” ribbons of “marked attention,” and shoes of “the queen’s hair” embroidered in diamonds, with the “venez-y-voir” in emeralds. Her hair was curled in “sustained sentiments,” a cap of “assured conquest” trimmed with waving feathers and ribbons of “sunken eye,” a “cat” or palatine of swansdown on her shoulders, of a colour called “newly arrived people” (parvenus), a “Médicis” arranged “as befitting,” a “despair” in opals, and a muff of “momentary agitation.”³

“Some of these,” Maerz and Paul remark, “are delicious […] and the world would be the poorer without them. […] What profound significance they have for one who looks below the surface, and how exactly do they reflect the thought and conditions of their time. […] Among the various groups into which words may be divided, that which concerns colors is not the least valuable. Some of its members are ludicrous, to be sure, but they are not the less instructive for that reason.”⁴ Colours are magical; colour names are not.  

Colour wordings, like words generally, can both motor and decorate the illustration of a tale, as can descriptors for quantities of light (in black-and-white films), but in cinema words are never elemental to the form, or shall we say, never present before the experience. We can understand, then, Gorky’s sense that cinema was a “kingdom of shadows” in the last years of the nineteenth century, and the strange, entranced reverberation of early (two-strip) color, say, in Chester Franklin’s The Toll of the Sea (1922) with its garnet pink and chrysalis green. The green in Toll of the Sea is very close to the green on Carlotta’s bed, a little more factual perhaps, a little more attached to the things we feel we already know.

The Toll of the Sea

As image, Carlotta in her bed is, of course, also Style. Not the bent or technique of observative Minnelli on the moment but his rich and well-aged sensibility to form and color, which had been with him long before. Not a preference that could lead to selecting this green of all greens but a feeling for green when it is presented to him, a reception of green. As style, the image speaks more clearly and more forcefully than it could hope to as a rendition of fictional detail – for example, that this woman, this particular Carlotta, chooses sheets of this color and a peignoir to match and takes pleasure spreading herself in this way. All this “factuality” is both expressly clear and irrelevant to the sensation of seeing the image onscreen while one is watching the film. It is possible to commit the error of thinking that watching a film is gaining some hold on a story and going forward with the story elements to have access to some dramatic unfolding or turn of events or climax. This thought leads to fishing through the imagery, constantly, with the aim of locating and tagging out the plot-relevant aspects, enchaining them, stretching out a storyline: to finding the images of a film decorating the omnipotent storyline beneath.

But that kind of approach converts images to words, or chains them to word signs.  Makes images objects to categorise and shelve.

Soon, then, one begins to interpret the dramatic flow according to the serial pronouncements of characters: who said what before?, who will say what next? One begins to think people are going where they say they are going. We take it as read that they feel and intuit what they say they feel. As far as the dramatic flow is concerned, the onwardness of an arbitrary building, one could easily shut the eyes and let the soundtrack ramble us through. Think of Nicholas Ray’s lesson to his young acting students – in I Was Interrupted – to work their way through a scene by what the character is trying to do there, not by what anybody says. Two Weeks in Another Town can certainly be appreciated dialogically; one can certainly feel the tensions measured and mapped and plotted and struck by virtue of the language. But then we come to Carlotta in bed with her telephone and it seems we have struck a kind of underground seam, because what she is saying into the mouthpiece, what she is meaning to say, what her listener (Andrus) is hearing… all these fade away into a nothingness that surpasses insignificance and simple nullity, a vapor that is lighter than air. There is so much now confronted by this mint green, this pallor and shimmering of mint green, this boundlessly spreading pallor, that we neither know nor seek knowledge. Where it comes from – not as chemical coloration but as essence. How a character or someone connected with a character could have (extradiegetically, offscreen) chosen these particular sheets from many others; or did this colour simply appear? To what alluvial substrate in or around Carlotta are we being pointed, to what nuance of sentiment and memory? Even from Minnelli himself, what self-referential plasm of consciousness and desire has leaked, has surfaced here. Certainly with other supremely colored moments in the film we run through the gamut of considerations such as these. Kruger is having a temper tantrum with irate and dominating Clara in their Rome sitting room, and she paces back and forth, toward our static camera and away, in a cherry-soda pink housecoat that speaks her power and motive and blazing frivolity. Davey is splayed on Andrus’s couch and a close shot reveals his chestnut-brown eyes, swollen, hungry: the “conker” of childhood is the perfect chestnut, just like these eyes, swollen, gleaming in sunlight, smooth as breath. But of all this detailing one can say it is purely informative, that it works in an arrangement of conveyance whereby the film is understood as a delivery system for hypothesis (dramatic facts) and conjecture, a stimulus to decoding, even the quick decoding of attitude. As though we come to cinema to gain a knowledge, as though cinema teaches or broadcasts. Anyone can see how such a profoundly teleological approach would be senseless in the face of a Vermeer or a Cézanne, yet somehow Minnelli is taken to be in another, far more prosaic domain.

Undeniably the informational viewing of film has its convenience, for a depersonalised exchange of “readings” between watchers – think of what an engineer tells from the dial of a seismograph – so that finally the film is grist for the mill of analysis and discussion. As though Minnelli has made Two Weeks in order that I can take opportunity to express an opinion about it…

The pale mint green does not work this way.

It both suffuses and overwhelms the narrative moment; but take very great care: to label this overwhelming an excess (in the Lacanian style) is already to presume a plenitude sufficient and already present, and that is the aesthetic screen as information load. The “excess”, as it were, is hyperinformative, piggishly emphatic. The green here is not an excess, it is essential. But if we ask the loaded question, “To what is it essential?” we find that all figurations, all prognostications, all implications are without merit, inadequate, off the mark. If one swims in this color – not in a substance which partakes of this color, but in this color – one does not note oneself swimming, or note one’s direction and target, or recall one’s point of origin, or seek to see who else is nearby. It is tauntingly itself, this green. For each viewer it becomes tauntingly of the self.

A dilute tincture, to be sure, tending in the direction of white. The eye notes how the character – whoever she finally is – has surrounded herself, swaddled herself with it, indeed how one must labour to tease out her bodily form against the sheets but also, then, how the labour is forsworn not only because it seems so grievous but also because the lulling pallor seduces the spirit into a far too quickly curtailed haze of admiration. This green is something like the color of a peridot seen on a faded, faded, faded full-color insert among the yellowing pages of a child’s encyclopedia dated 1911. “Jewels of the World.” The ruby leaps forward to address us. The emerald sits queenly upon a throne. But the peridot beckons, without in any way suggesting a range of possible destinations. One has the sense of being subject to a lure. Even beyond feeling allure, one feels the self feeling allure; allure is alluring.

But because allure is a kind of tease, we sense that it works upon the blood, that it prepares us and kindles desire. The green around Carlotta is a bath, cool and refreshing yet without much of a nature, harboring only a trace of nature, and it is the quality of the trace that intrigues and provokes. How very little of an admixture it is necessary to produce in order to tell of a color. How very little poison can be in the wine. Or how much elixir.

Purpose

It will be asked, what is gained in the pseudo-hermeneutic act of abstracting out a moment of color such as this and fixating meditative attention on this single aspect of an overall dramatic presentation. (The film is 107 minutes long, after all.) Much is gained that is, perhaps, not widely received as value:

– First, if we consider the sensation of gazing at this green, this Minnelli green, we see that the shock of it in this moment is no aspect of a dramatic presentation, but the color has swollen as we see it, has become the entire world of the screen. We have (as it feels) long since dispensed with a bed, with sheets laid upon it, with a body wrapped in the sheets holding a telephone, with the purpose of a telephone call, with all this cultural heritage, and have come awash in the green tide that both speaks itself and calls out every other green. Then,

– To experience an aesthetic moment, such as this one, is to float, to bathe, to encounter by being within. From within there is no simple, reductionist perspective. Through one’s sight one senses, one appreciates sensation, more than establishing space and navigating through it. Storyline (as map) is suspended. Further:

– Even asking the question, What is gained?, begs an answer couched only in the exact terms that this suffusion of color overwhelms; an answer only in the supramundane zone of calculated effect, costs and benefits, foci of attention and distraction. Whereas the aesthetic moment is mundane, wholly and bluntly and powerfully what is here now in itself. Mundane, instantaneous, come and gone before it is caught, reflected upon, catalogued. One of the marvels of Carlotta’s bed is the flash of a moment in which we see it, and the horrible abbreviation of this moment in terms of all the rest of the action in the film.

Watching the green – the reductionist would say, “Watching Carlotta on the phone” – we have at once the alarm and satisfaction of having caught a passing miracle, quite in the same way that when in the old West we ascend to Vienna’s living space above her casino in Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954), say, with its powder blue walls, as the camera moves to gaze and frame we can catch, placid on a sideboard, silent and at the same time screaming a melody, a plastic bust of Ludwig van Beethoven. Or when in Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964) we see at the bottom of Bernice Edgar’s Baltimore street that huge docked ship in what has the look of a painted backdrop, so that for a brief instant the whole transgressive candor of the scene dissolves into artifice and then reconstitutes as narrative. A ship docked in a painting! 

Marnie

One could argue that in such touching moments one leaves the narrative space. And having left it in Two Weeks, still gazing stunned, one notes that these are not sheets, these pallid minty opaline green essences, and this is not a bed. Carlotta is an indiscriminateness, too, her motive and desire unfathomable no matter what she says. It’s all a gift, not a statement.

Atom

If one meditated, even at some length, on some momentary aspect of some film, say Carlotta in the mint green bed in Two Weeks in Another Town, could one legitimately claim to have meditated upon the film as a whole, even upon film itself? How molecular might film be, in other words? Because if one examines a molecule, any molecule of a substance, there is a discreet sense in which one is looking at the structure of everything. Of course the story and action of the Minnelli film are idiosyncratic to the Andrus/Kruger event, but what of the film’s “building blocks” or “constitutive phrases,” the “stuff” out of which the Andrus/Kruger world of Rome is built? 

One helpful case: 

Perhaps, having watched the film, indeed having much admired it, one feels bequeathed a single cinematic gesture, the diamond green sheets. Nothing else stays in residue. And afterward, long afterward, one carries away the shifting, fading, strengthening vision of those sheets as one’s experiential trace of the film experience. Imagine, too, that one has not now, nor ever did have, interest in the biographical history of Minnelli (his aesthetic development), of Charisse, of Douglas or Robinson or Trevor or Hamilton or Lahvi or any of them, and one has no iota of interest, therefore, in how the characters in play can possibly have been infused with anything other than talent strictly situated in the script, so that the characters, too, more or less evanesce. Or that Rome holds no special fascination, notwithstanding how excitingly Minnelli shows it. Or that the film business itself, in many ways the subject of the picture, is none other than a collection of workers doing skilled jobs together – Noah and his sons building the ark. Simply to argue: let us say that one has no conviction whatsoever about being antipathetic toward any of these lines of engagement, no withdrawal, no negating, no coolness, yet at the same time no particular sense of being stimulated or drawn in by them. One watches, then, with extreme interest, open to anything and everything but not having walked in with pre-arranged favoritisms. Then, as one is opened up this way, and while one is leaning nowhere, the thunderclap strikes, green on a bed, pale, shimmering. There it is! Here it is! And its action upon the viewing embodiment is incalculable, spontaneous, bouleversant. One tries pointlessly to hold onto it but already the vision begins to melt and then pulls away. And one cannot go back. Or forward.

In this particular sense, the colour of the sheets could be some token from childhood discovered en passant while riffling through some old boxes. What if that token could be held in the hands, or posed unmoving before the eye: and what it stands for, of what other token or world it draws up recollection – perhaps stinging recollection – is gone, utterly gone, only gone. Because every moment of cinema becomes gone this way, goes, perhaps, to a stratum so deeply buried no miner of the imagination could ever arrive at it sanely. The walls of a high-ceilinged tearoom in a department store, seen with mother, before the age of six (the building now demolished)? The fabric of some tablecloth somewhere forgotten? Some reticent, evasive sprinkle of light on a television screen in 1953, when for the first time one stood before a color set. Or back even further, some feature of a time that is unavailable to working memory. If I cannot remember it – if it is not possible for me to remember it – can such a time have existed, the solipsist asks, because if there was once a world outside of my ken today, should I believe it?

If the green sheets are all that is left of Two Weeks, and if in meditating upon them I feel myself cherishing, am I obliged to find more? 

Artifice

To hurl onto the screen the image of Carlotta in her sheets! Minnelli knows he is producing a startling moment, something that will sharpen our sensibility intensively in the direction of the aesthetic, as opposed to the communicational. Think how the business of Hollywood moviemaking – his committed subject in the film – is communicational in design, not only because a tremendous amount of communication is required to make a film – memoranda to paper the walls of a palace. (Warner Bros. memoranda forms contained the printed injunction to commit all communication to writing.) Or think how the film works upon its audience – how it doe or does not succeed at the box office – because of some “message” it sends out: as to gross structure, moral outcome, character and social portraiture, political slant. A great number of participants labour in movie-making to press for ideals: the genre that will be most popular (including the stars who populate it); the quality of evil portrayed and the nobility of the good; the recognisable and desirable place or person as rendered in the cinematography; an appraisal of either war or peace. Or think how a film is seen by producers as a money-making machine, by stars and lesser actors as a way of stabilising or boosting a career, since one is as good as one’s last picture (appearance), by cinematographers in terms of what they could shoot next, by the director, who works on the common-sense notion that his name slapped on the picture will be read as a definition of his talent and future prospects. Or how quite mechanically profits are being calculated day by day against expenses logged to the very penny; the meaning of the film is in the bankroll. How, in the midst of all this traffic, to make a form? 

Two Weeks is taking Andrus on set and treating him as a man tormented by his past, tormented even more by conflicting aspects of his present, and trying in his way to work for screen beauty: not the beautification of some worker’s body but the achievement of beauty in a visual work of art, whether the body is or is not involved. This “Andrus” is, of course, Minnelli (andrus = the man; the man who; he). Visual beauty: in the case of Carlotta in bed with the phone, the graceful form of Charisse composed perfectly, as in a Caravaggio. The sequence leaps away from the rest of the film, stands on a plinth, just as Andrus will leap away from Hollywood convention for a brief while, will strive to catch the spirit of the viewer as well as the eye. He must do this with Kruger fawning upon him and hating him, jealous Clara putting up with him and hating him, Carlotta teasing him and hating him, Davey fearing him and fearing himself in front of the camera, Veronica disarmingly unaffected and therefore a siren, and his past suddenly appearing like rocks in the waters he sails. His past, his trauma; his trauma, his creative dream; his creative dream, his intoxication for Carlotta’s green, his utter and pure intoxication, notwithstanding that he cannot see her because she is at the other end of the line. He knows the green because we see it. We mediate for and meditate for the character.

That in being presented with this flamboyant reticence we should find ourselves stunned indicates one of the characteristics of pure cinema. Cinematic continuity is not only urgent, or promising, it is insistent. There is nothing but continuity. And what this driving force leads to is an experiential originality. The instant of experience, integrated both backward and forward, comes as origin to all reflection; indeed not only origin but a constantly revivified origin, a beginning that never ceases being a beginning. There is no possibility of rational operation in this originality, because rational operation must stand upon recollection. No rational operation: no analysis, no matching, no calculating, no estimating, no recognising, no comprehending. The moment in cinema is a flash, and the reception of the flash is an experience of delirium and unimagined hunger. Flow and thrust are conceived to affect us without pressure, even with an inversion of force, something like an exquisite invitation or even a voyage into that ur-memory of the past that is all pasts. One watches in wonder. The watching is wonderful in itself, not by virtue of what it captures.

Interestingly, Carlotta is here, to the eye, all shimmer and ineffability and in the story she is bold, arrogant, ravenous, destructive, even if also, finally, impotent. There may be no clearer exemplification of the disconnect between the viewer’s aesthetic sensitivity to the screen and the logical construction of a narrative, no more directly presented case of the power cinema has to override factuality, than she. It is not the formula of character that superimposes itself on our riding consciousness here, nor her conflict, nor a set of pervasive clues about what she plans to do tomorrow but something entirely artificial, that is, made of artifice, the light of the screen. For Cavell, say in his recurring look at the remarriage comedies, his unending fascination with how it is that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne come back together again in The Awful Truth (1937). The artifice is reduced to character narration, brilliantly shown by him to be inseparable from both luminosity on one side and acting genius on the other. One does not find more sensitive readings than his, yet for all the spectacle and ramification made possible by the ghostliness of black and white, all the vast array of delicacies and hopeless subtractions and echoing courage, and the loyalty to forthcomingness, still, something in Carlotta’s green makes an override, even comes onstage to stand in like the brave understudy who magically senses in a breath that the star is about to collapse. That the moving picture is a coloured affair; that we are seeing not shape but colour moving and crying out as – forward with the film and backward in nostalgia – we gaze, makes the natural, nourishing spring give up this green radiance as a signal we are born again.

Endnotes