And so I took a picture
|
|
of the group of people waiting to take a picture
with van Gogh’s Starry Night; or not exactly with—some just wanted a double of the painting, others a mirror image self-portrait; a finger tap, a half-second and they’d rotate out, one by one, with that high-def souvenir, moving along. Even their trace embarrassment at the ease of it —and others’ watching—finds color in the image my iPhone feeds me. Watching them feel themselves being judged, as a condition, because the whole scene made me feel, on their behalf, as if they’d lost something. If you can lose something you never had it would be this: paint-grooves left by the brush exhibiting dark recency, the painter’s labor fixed in an image itself visibly persistent, there, still, in the stasis. For a whole century it hung, lightstruck object supplying encounter with whatever, now, hours ago, had compelled us to its threshold— a village, steeple-pierced, beneath some hills. The subway spit me out at 53rd & 5th where in moments that looped back through the pain of, earlier, a separation, I’d been trying to get my heart to match my ideas. I was listening to Wim Mertens’ Struggle for Pleasure and it made me feel a way I can’t for the life of me describe now—although full of fear would be its opposite. If reality isn’t layered like music, then van Gogh’s paintings grow necessary. The desire to photograph them doesn’t quite capture it either. Just imagine: you step off the subway platform with renewed purpose or decide you’re in love or simply notice the geraniums dangling through the wrought iron one summer afternoon and there—instantly— are the strings and the oboe. Only it’s never like that, everyone tilting the frame to be included, our color-applied sky filling out to the end of a fixed horizon. Then something like night would descend on us all. Such a world, marked in sorrow, takes up too much space on the wall. CLOCKHOUSE Volume Thirteen
|