Scheele's Green Skies
Im grünen Äther flimmert jäh ein Stern
« Dans l’éther vert scintille brusquement une étoile. »
Georg Trakl, Summer Morning Dusk
Scheele’s Green, cupric arsenite, Cu(AsO₂)₂. A pigment invented in 1778. The colour of the nineteenth century — wallpapers, textiles, toys, confectionery. The powder came loose at the slightest touch.
Outside, the air had that particular consistency of late afternoons when nothing has yet been decided. Neither warm nor cold. A light that came from nowhere precisely, that seemed to hold within the thickness of the air itself rather than fall from any fixed point. The grass along the edge of the path was still. Nothing moved.
The sky was there. Simply there, as it always is — above, indifferent, vast. But something this evening did not quite coincide with what I expected of it.
I raised my eyes, for a long time. Something held the gaze.
I had been told once that Carl Wilhelm Scheele, a Swedish chemist, had developed in 1775 a pigment of singular beauty — a bright, vivid green, instantly sought after by wallpaper manufacturers. The bourgeois households of the nineteenth century were papered with it. Children slept there. In damp conditions, the pigment released arsenic gas, odourless, invisible. People died from their walls without knowing it.
The shade this evening had something of that. Or something approaching it.
Not exactly. But close enough.
There was in that air a quality difficult to name. Something that stagnated rather than circulated. That had perhaps been settling there for a long time, in imperceptible layers, without anyone having noticed. I stood still for a moment. Hands at my sides. The sky above.
Turner kept sketchbooks. Private things he kept to himself, in his coat pockets, in his travelling bags, to be taken out as the need arose. Studies of sky above all, rapid watercolours, states of light noted the way one notes a temperature or an hour. He had titled one of them simply: Skies. Constable said that the sky is the principal organ of sentiment in a painting, that any painter who neglects it deprives himself of his greatest means. Turner had not neglected the sky. He had looked at it the way one looks at what is coming.
In April 1815, the Tambora volcano had thrown a column of ash and gas into the atmosphere that took three years to dissolve. Skies across the world darkened, took on infernal hues. Turner painted. What he believed he saw, the light. What he also saw, without knowing it, was contamination.
Turner, Le Gray, all those who had raised their eyes with that particular obstinacy, knew that something resists up there. That the sky is never only what it shows. Others preferred not to know.
Some photographers decided that the sky did not exist. They excluded it from the frame with the same rigour with which one excludes what disturbs an inventory. What the sky carried above the factories, above the structures of metal and concrete, they had chosen not to see. Too variable. Too charged.
But it existed. It existed and contained something. I stood a moment longer watching that line where the sky met the rooftops, the trees, the edge of things.
Night was coming, now.
The air had a weight. A density I could not name. Something in the throat, not pain, not quite. More a presence. The wind carried sand sometimes, even far from beaches, a fine invisible matter that settles on everything. On leaves. On skin. In lungs. In skies too, no doubt. Particles circulate. What one breathes without knowing it passes through everything: walls, bodies, the air itself.
The light that had been there a moment before had not simply gone out, it had been swallowed. Handke wrote that, somewhere. I had not understood it then. This evening, I knew.
The green deepened, now. The visible had ceased to be certain. Not gone — simply become less sure of itself, crossed by something not yet entirely perceptible.
I went back inside when the light disappeared.
The sky had turned black again, identifiable, reassuring. As if nothing had happened.
But something was there. In the air. Everywhere.
.
Since then, several thousand hectares of forest have burned in the Gironde and across Europe. The smoke drifted for hundreds of kilometres…
Les vignes basses, Lugagnac, July 2026