What Is Real
The sky above our meadows
Blares through canopies
Which enfold a land where grasses
Almost touch the April sun,
A weave that Van Gogh
Called the tangle of the masses,
The bristles of a dozen suns,
Scattered sheaves of wheat
Matted in the spectral wind,
Nothing in its proper place,
As people who have seen
St.-Rémy up close report:
But without such visions,
Braided galaxies in his head,
The mistral’s whorls in the mire,
He never would have made it
To another level: the spiral
View of fire in his mind,
The ecstatic day and night,
Where oranges and cobalt blue,
Pigments of the light show,
Wind through a world
Certainly as bright as ours,
Their hopes not real, although
Close enough to stars.
May 8th, 2022
Kaiholu
Explanation
Things that we invent often affect our lives more than most things we consider real or certified by custom.
Van Gogh thought his painting Starry Night a failure, as he wrote to his brother Theo: “Once again I allowed myself to be led astray into reaching for stars that are too big—another failure—and I have had my fill of that…I know very well that the studies drawn with long, sinuous lines from the last consignment weren’t what they ought to become, however I dare urge you to believe that in landscapes one will continue to mass things by means of a drawing style that seeks to express the entanglement of the masses.”
In a letter to Gauguin in January of 1889 he wrote, “The reds moving through to pure oranges, intensifying even more in the flesh tones up to the chromes, passing into the pinks and marrying with the olive and Veronese greens: as an impressionist arrangement of colors, I’ve never devised anything better.”
Van Gogh wrote to his brother of his art: “The hope is in the stars.”
Critics of the painting Starry Night point out that the village is in the wrong place, and that Van Gogh couldn’t have seen the cypresses from his room at the asylum.
Bristles are the awns, the needles, the spikelets, the strands of the wheat pappus, the shreds in shredded wheat.
Heat waves which oscillate the air divide objects into lines. Myopic people can see traffic lights fizzle in flinders, like the molten dripping of ingots in a blast furnace (see my poem “Sparklers”). Optical illusions sometimes combine with genuine phenomena like the hot foehn or the mistral in Provence to form comet tails on stars. Van Gogh had possibly as well seen the swirls drawn to describe galaxies by William Parsons, Lord Rosse, which the astronomer Camille Flammarion had popularized in France, combining genuine science with occultism, so that the swirls took on an ectoplasmic or ghostly mantle. Thus Van Gogh’s swirling stars are easily interpreted as partly psychosomatic.
At a certain age my granddaughter believed that only blood relations were real. I am more a fan of the Turing test: if it talks like a relative, it’s a relative. We come to resemble our pets, let alone the people we live with. We live in an Einsteinian age, where even reality is relative.