“In the Midst, or in the Mist”: A Review of Green Green Green

I am reading the book about green in someone else’s house. Early August, 2021—the days are long and the air is warm and hazy. Windows closed, air purifiers running on full blast. The smoke from the nearby wildfires gets worse, better, worse again. I open the windows and I close them. I’m here to write, but mostly I’ve been trying to get my mind to do the thing where thinking feels possible again. Sometimes it works, and a little window opens. I am reading in the summer about someone else’s thinking about summer while reading in the winter. Times are layering over one another, then and now: the reading-time, mine and hers, and the writing-time. This index of past times so tangible I could almost run my hand across it. Of course, I can’t make the layers out. “Over and over,” Osborne writes, “Reading happened. Reading happened to us.” 

Green Green Green by Gillian Osborne. Nightboat, 2021. 160 pages. $17.95.

That’s from this collection’s second essay, “Reading Natural History in the Winter,” which begins with one of my favorite constructions: “For years, I’ve been trying to write an essay about…”—which means the essay is as much about this trying, this attempt, as it is about its subject. Or rather, that they aren’t different things. That forever is composed of nows, but now is, too—or, here, Osborne puts it a bit more clearly: “This essay is about how writing takes place within scenes of experience, and in the presence of other writing, which, through the friction of living on language, produces that seasonal jolt: the unsettling impulse of then within now.” 

That jolt, that spark—isn’t it so often what we’re after? And also what haunts us, unsettles, puzzles, stays unsolved. The memory of reading a particular book at a particular time, and how it mattered in ways that both were and weren’t connected to the words on the page. Or the connections, the accidents—the texts put into conversation because we read them at the same time, or because that person was the one who gave it to you, or because the book seemed, impossibly or obviously, to map exactly onto one’s own life. 

“Reading Natural History in the Winter” starts with seasons, moves to lists, turns to ambiguities, then (wonderfully) to Dickinson, then back to lists by way of reading. It’s a tricky gloss because these subjects are subtly and dexterously intertwined. Something close to the heart of it shows up in Osborne’s description of a character from Melville, who produces a quality he names an “ineffable correlativeness”—Osborne calls it “a feeling that this connects to this that can’t be fully verified because feeling is inevitably in excess of the facts; the head a gaping hole and a cold wind blowing through.” She’s riffing on Dickinson’s oft-quoted (and somehow never-worn-out) definition of poetry. Ineffable response, unverifiable attachment. “That poetry is ice and headlessness,” Osborne sums up a few paragraphs later. 

She ends that essay still wondering about its subject: “Maybe this is an essay about why I never could become a poet or a professor or a gardener.” One doubts Osborne’s professing not to be a poet, though, at sentences like these: “Though the bird is too big, the spindly branch on which it stands erect is static, confident of all that life. In the distance, it is raining or about to rain. A beetle extends its claws. Time stands still and is a circle.” Here, we’re in the book’s longest, wide-ranging essay, “Of the Vicinity Of,” in which Osborne also offers something like an essay-writing mission statement: “There are forms of prose I feel shut up in, but luckily one of the benefits of prose is its puncturability. Like poetry, it can, at times, be relational. Its fine dishonor could be its love for the earth.” 

The prose here, and throughout, is lively; relational; both playful and precise. My best pitch for reading Osborne’s essays is that reading with her, thinking with her, makes one also want to think and read, makes thinking and reading feel glimmeringly possible. You might think so too if you like to think about what reading is; if Maggie Nelson and Rebecca Solnit are among your touchstones; if you like books that are looking at other books but veer just to the side of what gets called scholarly. I’ve called it a book about green, but really, of course, Green Green Green is a book about books—or rather, a book about reading, that magical and ordinary and mysterious and everyday thing that most of us, some of us, do so often we don’t even think about the fact that it’s happening, like breathing. For Osborne, reading is sacred, and potentially transformative: “Reading,” she writes, “is one of the only technologies flexible enough to respond to what it feels like to read in a world in which the material transformations of time are faltering.” 

Reading to respond to what it feels like to read: is this illumination, or tautology? I think it’s both, and think that Osborne does, too. I first found her work as a student in a seminar on Emily Dickinson. I was trying to figure out what the lyric was. I didn’t have a clue, or I did have a clue, and I found the accounts I was sifting through delightful and frustrating, luminous and annoyingly obscure, by turns or sometimes all at once. Osborne’s “lyric materialism,” which surfaces here too, felt like it offered a way out of the puzzles and paradoxes other critics insisted were unsolvable. 

“There is not one thing that accounts for it,” Osborne wrote in that article, speaking about the lyric. Here, her essays wander through various and overlapping accounts—of reading; of living; of mothering; of thinking—while leaving space for wonder, space for what that account can't necessarily contain. In a particularly striking passage from “Imagining Mothering,” she reflects on teaching: 

This class begins: literature takes place in the present, even when what you are reading is medieval, or from a few years ago, or written this week. This is a convention students rarely question. Others they find less intuitive, like whether an “I” should be allowed in. An education has taught them to keep themselves out of an argument. 

Sometimes you can’t. 

Sometimes the best thinking happens in the midst, or in the mist, where thoughts mingle with chrysanthemums, singed vegetal matter, or the vertigo of desecrated loves. 

I hadn’t yet read Green Green Green this June, when I lay in a hammock in a yard overflowing with green and read Virginia Woolf and felt my whole life was there all at once, in the sun, in the dust motes. Everything alive. Time is a circle. The wonder is how we spin across it. Something both irrational and true in how I am now convinced that memory also lives inside this book. “I’m trying to decide whether all these framing devices that signal a person is here, writing to another, are in the way, or are the way,” Osborne writes in “Poppy/Friend,” an exchange of letters with Juliana Chow. I trust this question because she doesn’t try to answer it. In the book’s last essay, “Lichen Writing,” Osborne wonders: “If lichen finds its way into writing, which like everything else it does, or if writing is lichen-like, what is the other thing, outside of writing, still in relation, that stays, singing across the dash?”