White Marble, Green Leaves

three diary entries from sculpture gardens: versailles, elisabet ney museum, allerton park

“Green is what is left when ardor fades, when passion dies, when we die, too. When you go, your footprints will fill with grass. Moss shall cover your tombstone, and as the sun rises, green shall spread over all, in all its shades and hues.”

- The Green Knight (2021)

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Gardens of Versailles. Versailles, France. 5/27/2022.

On the last days of my first ever trip to Europe, I took the train out of Paris to Versailles. The Eurotrip was my family’s first time out of the Midwest to a new place in years. Already from trips to the British Museum and the Louvre I was experiencing the raw wonder of an American truly seeing European statues for the first time, getting the Rilkean urge to change my life while gazing at fragments of ancient white sculptures. On the train I listened to Bladee’s “Nike Just Do It” and thought about the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

People often talk about how ancient statues were not truly white, they were painted over with bright colors, but it’s the pure white marble we see them in now that makes ancient statues so otherworldly. White is the color of the moon, or clouds, or milk, or snow. Things that aren’t always there.

We got off the train and walked up to gates of Versailles. Versailles was the palace of the Sun King, Louis XIV. We walked through high-ceilinged drawing rooms that previously hosted French royal parties, and now hosts signs that explain French history to tourists in a variety of languages. The largest room and climax of the tour is the Hall of Mirrors, where the treaty to end World War I was signed and where it’s fun to take pictures for Instagram. Then we went outside to the sculpture gardens.

I don’t think I can do justice in writing to the Gardens of Versailles if you haven’t been, but luckily lots of people go there precisely because they’re so special. They’re big, and the plants are perfectly manicured. Hedges separate different sections of the gardens, but it never feels artificial like a hedge maze. The hedges feel like they’re dividing the garden into sunny green rooms.

I walked through the sunny green rooms slowly with my mom and my youngest sister. My dad and my older younger sister went out further, to the Marie Antoinette estate, but I knew I’d really like the gardens so I wanted to spend more time there. I explained to my mom and sister as much as I knew about the Greek and Roman god statues with my English degree, and they could hang with me thanks to the works of Rick Riordan. We sat on the grass by the Neptune fountain for a long time, watching the water spray through the sunny French spring air.

The white marble statues in the Gardens of Versailles date to the 17th century when Versailles was built. They aren’t ancient statues, but they’re deeply inspired and indebted to them. They were made to be in white marble. Some of the statues are in fountains, but most fountains are only run rarely so that the water doesn’t erode the statues. The Neptune fountain that we sat by is one of the few that runs consistently. The statues are mostly Greek and Roman gods, even though Louis XIV and his descendants did not believe in those gods. Even though they didn’t believe in them, they believed in their elemental fantasy.

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Elisabet Ney Museum. Austin, Texas. 4/21/2023.

She told me about the Elisabet Ney Museum, before we met, as part of idle Twitter direct message conversation. We weren’t even certainly going to meet at this point. I had some free time on my Friday afternoon in Austin, so I walked north to get to the museum through the University of Texas’s campus and then further through residential neighborhoods with yoga studios and Montessoris. Towards the end there were no sidewalks so I was walking on cracked Texas pavement, next to plants sprouting green in the spring.

The Elisabet Ney Museum was the Texas residence of sculptor Elisabet Ney. Born in Europe, she came to America in 1871 at age 39, halfway through her life. In Europe, she sculpted famous 19th century European figures: Otto von Bismarck, Wagner, Giuseppe Garibaldi. When she came to America, she sculpted Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston in the same way, sometimes for statues that now sit at the Texas capitol building. Alongside real people she sculpted Christian figures and Greek mythological figures in the same white marble. All these genres are represented in the Elisabet Ney museum.

The museum is not a sculpture garden, strictly speaking. It’s a house, with a native plant garden outside and statues inside. But the house is old and drafty house so the inside feels like part of the outdoor world, and I think it counts.

I spent an hour in the Elisabet Ney museum, and was very struck by the way Elisabet Ney brought Europe to America but kept America intact. I walked around the old creaky wood floors on the middle of that Friday afternoon, with the museum almost entirely empty. A woman called out her daughter’s name when the kid went into a different room, and her daughter’s name was Artemis.

I met the girl who told me about the the Elisabet Ney Museum the next day, on my last night in Austin. We met for dinner at a millenial brunch bar on the western end of Sixth Street, because the place where we planned to go was closed for a private event. The only vegan option they had was avocado toast but I couldn’t eat it anyways because I was full of so much after fifteen minutes of talking to her. We talked a lot about the Midwest, which meant a lot to me. She told me she had been to Versailles on her own trip to Europe last summer, and I thought it was special that we had been in the same physical place before we ever met each other. It fit with the prophecy of her telling me about the Elisabet Ney Museum, and other prophetic coincidences of the moment. We had two drinks each and paid separately. We messaged for a little bit when we each got home but I had to go sleep because my flight was really early.

I woke up with a lot of energy, and restrained myself from texting her again as long as I possibly could. But the barricades quickly wore down and I sent her a gushing message from the airport at 5am. In the plane I was the only person in my row, which I was grateful for because my emotions were really going and I was really tired from the weekend. The plane was white, my AirPods case was white, and outside the plane the clouds were white. I landed back in Chicago, where it was less green than Austin because the Midwest is further north than Texas and spring arrives later.

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Allerton Park. Monticello, Illinois. 6/3/2023.

A month and an half after my trip to the Elisabet Ney museum I was still thinking about the same girl. I had her reading something long I was writing, something I had started writing in September 2022 a little after I’d returned from Europe and then spent a summer in the Midwest. Parts of it were about elemental Greek gods intruding as fantasy on the green Midwestern countryside. It had a brief section about Versailles. Though I’d started writing it six months before I met her, it felt like I’d written it for her. She wasn’t consistently timely in reading the segments I’d send her, but when she read and gave feedback it felt like life-changing guidance.

I woke up on this Saturday morning in my Illinois prairie tower apartment. I had been really feeling bad the night before, but checked my phone to see a message she had sent late that prior Friday night while I was asleep that made me feel better all at once. It wasn’t much of anything, but when you’re desperate all you need is a tiny push.

It was once again 5am. I hadn’t been planning on getting up, I had just been anxiously checking my phone, but I was totally awake now. I didn’t know what else to do besides drive to the closest place that had white marble and green leaves. So I got out of bed and drove to Allerton Park. I brought my DSLR with me to film high quality footage for TikTok of the park. Talking with her made me feel so at peace with the world that I wanted to work in the media forms that people compulsively watch, so I could share what I felt with as many viewers as possible.

Allerton Park is the former estate of Robert Henry Allerton, heir to 19th century businessman Sam Allerton. Located about thirty minutes west of the University of Illinois, it was donated to the school in 1946. The property contains a mansion with an adjacent sculpture garden, and large forested grounds. It’s clearly inspired by Versailles, calling back to Versailles’ European dignity, the fantasy of a sunny green estate full of art and ideas. But Versailles is the apex of white marble green leaves, and everything else is imitation. The sculpture garden of Allerton Park is smaller, because Robert Allerton did not have the budget of French royalty. One small corner of the park is dense with statues, and a few more statues are spread out over a long walking trail that runs through the forest, along the Sangamon River. Like Versailles, some of the statues are of Greek gods, but in his American ambition Allerton tried to incorporate other cultures too, so some gardens have an Oriental and Egyptian flare. Many of the statues are not marble, because marble is expensive. They’re 20th century concrete, or metal. But concrete is still sort of white.

I walked along the long river trail, seeing every statue I could, filming them with my DSLR to share with the world. The Sangamon River was high from late spring rain. It was going to be a hot day, but I had woken up early and it wasn’t too hot yet. And of course the woods were so green.

What can I say about green? Green has always been there for me, even before I went to Europe and started seeing the white marble fantasy on top of it. Of course, green has no choice but to be there, as plants can’t move. Green is quiet, wordless, and unchanging, eternally pulsing with passive but unstoppable torrents of life. Green can never be driven out.

Walking around the forest at Allerton that morning I felt cosmically whole. Summer had arrived in the midwest, she was liking every tweet I posted, and the statues were just as beautiful as my last visits but I understood them more now. The wholeness I felt contained the fact that deep inside I knew that the story I was making in my head of things turning around with this girl was a fantasy, and it probably was not going to work. The greenness of this one sunny day in Allerton Park was all I needed. I wished she was there, but feeling like someone else understood it was enough. The green already belonged to me and always would, but I could share it.

By the time I was driving home, the cosmic green fantasy was fading too, and I was feeling sick and anxious again. My phone died because I had gone to sleep without charging it the night before, as I had been feeling really sad. Because my phone was dead, I listened to NPR on my car radio on the drive home. A long interview segment about anxiety came on. “People are often negative about anxiety, but anxiety is a superpower,” the interviewee said. “If you’re anxious about something it often means your brain is telling you something is wrong, even if you don’t consciously understand why yet.”