Perfect

VanGogh 2

View of Arles with Irises in the Foreground

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VanGogh-View_of_Arles_with_Irises.jpg

But the landscapes!
"Like Cezanne he dreamed of painting the world's virginity."
His emblematic irises dividing a field of buttercups
And behind the fig trees a glimpse of the red tiled roofs and towers.
He is jubilant in Arles: "That sea of yellow
With the band of violet irises and in the background that
Coquettish little town of pretty women!"
Motion and emotion dominate yet human misery is absent.
He paints with brush using the technique of pen, ink and pencil:
The first colors are organized,
The petals of purple iris individual with deep reds and blues
Outlined in a smile of luminous joy.
The buttercups become a mass of yellow dots, gold and brown
In front and behind.
The trees branch the leaves up and up to
The topography of painted sky.
It's a painting of diagonals of happiness;
An Ode to life.

VanGogh 1

What did he feel while he painted? He wrote that "in a picture I want to say something comforting as music is comforting." We have his rolling clouds, winding cypresses and sunflowers; his visions of used shoes.  Painting is a dirty and difficult occupation, he said.

A Pair of Shoes

Those shoes seem to have tramped hard
Through muddied trails and graveled paths.
The untied leather laces wind
Like used wire.
In front on the scuffed toe
Lines calculate the miles traveled.
The tongue leans over the side,
Stiff but bending in an obstinate crease.
Beside, its partner flops heel up
Hobnails white against the sole
Worn to an oddly-shaped display:
An engraving of intimate obscurity that
Keeps the secrets of the trudged paths.
The rootless traveler, weary,
Drops these companions of his wanderings
On a blue rough surface.
He does what has become natural:
Brushes oil on canvas.
Old worn shoes--the model of his life.
But what did he feel while he painted?
He claimed that we wanted to convey
"Les petites miseres de la vie humanie."
A compassionate painting?
A compassionate man?
Shoes seen without illusion,
A still life of fanatic fidelity
To human pain.

http://www.artquotes.net/masters/vangogh/vangogh_shoes1887.jpg

A Rubaiyat

Shall I make for you an omelet
Of lark's eggs and truffles
Here in our garden of eden?
Shall we use as our table the moss-covered rock

In the glade, in the shade of the oak?
Shall we drink mellow wine
From the pink goblet shells
With the rose reflections of dew?

And shall you play on your lute
While I dance all around you
Twirling on grass-covered meadows?
Shall we sit in the sun

And dream of our laughter
To come in these days of enchantment?
And shall we be happy forever and always
In this chamber, our garden of love?

Original Sin

Cointreau glazing the sides of a crystal glass--
Bitter orange was the fruit of desire
That deceived the mother of mankind.
The pungent liquid rind
Coiled to the glass bottom:
The clear melting fire kissed her lips,
Burnt her tongue
And consumed the heart of Eve.

What a Pity to Waste it on the Young

 

When we were twenty and would never die, 

The world held grand prizes, ours for the taking.

Our feet trampled about.

We knew no fear.       

We were free, not yet stunted by experience.

We had forever to do our great deeds

And could tarry for a time…

A side road here, a short cut there, no matter.

Our eyes glowed with goals; we had power;

We knew the answers.

We were twenty and fresh and beginning,

Holding the world as a ball—ours to play with.

Desiring…discovering…experiencing everything

And welcoming it without fear.

Then, we threw the ball away,

Without thought, without care,

Because we were twenty and would never die.

The ball went farther and farther from us

Into the darkness beyond.

We didn’t notice; we weren’t looking.

Until one day it was no longer ours,

Just a speck in nothingness,

Untouchable, uncontrollable,

And we opened our eyes as saw Life.

Time

 

Are those lines of age upon your face?

Is that what time is?

You have tried to grasp the moment

And the moment is as nothing,

Like grasping the present--

At a touch it is gone….Gone,

Forever to be remembered.

And there is nothing left

But the lines of age upon your face.

Shadow Leaves

 

Silhouettes bounce on ceiling, walls, floor.

Grace in movement:

Forms darkened by night

Made black in light

Come alive in mime--

The wind-blown apple trees.

And I, enjoying the show,

Don’t doubt the reality of either: leaf or shadow,

Unlike Platonic heroes in fire-lit caves.                         

Ever Green

How does Daphne feel
Trapped in bark?
The result of one god's desire and another's revenge.
Her father wanted grandchildren from her
And the hunter to fulfill his lust.

Poets have portrayed her
Guilty...fearful.
Her fear overpowered her guilt and she ran.
She prayed for mutation, destruction
Desperate to escape, feeling the god's breath on her hair,
And exhausted from the chase.

Peneus granted her prayer with a laurel cage.
Apollo's passion burnt her.
She shrank from his kiss.
Trapped, unable to move
She recoiled from his touch.

As her human heart flutters still beneath the covering bark,
Beneath the unwanted male hand
Her metamorphosis is her hell.
Disobedience does not become Daphne
And her leaves, ever green, despair.

The Day She Died

 

“How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light and their reflections.” (Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall”)

The sea spread out for miles…and the sand. Her eyes searched  these limits and there was only sea rolling in, rolling in…and sand, cool and wet from the slap of the surf. She gazed at this world and was alone. She heard the wind and the waves, the gulls crying overhead—that screeching cry as if from hunger.

One gull floated above in a gliding gauze. Suddenly, with its head cocked downward to the sea, its eyes piercing as though it could see into the depths of the wetness to the sandy floor below, in a twirling motion with the grace of a ballerina, or, like an arrow shrieking to its mark so quick was it, it came down charging into the water. Then, just as suddenly, it popped back to the surface and flew into the air, its catch in its beak. Then it soared again.  The waves slapped the sand and she felt the cold salt water wash up upon her legs.  There were small shells beneath her feet that were disturbed in their motionlessness by the movement of her toes digging into the sand for support against the slap of water.

The wind that blew through the trees, the wind that the gulls soared through, blew into her face—the same wind.   The same sea that supported the fish hit her legs as it moved its everlasting movement. The same sand that held the shells and all the minute particles of life beneath in the dark recesses supported her feet. She could look at it all—feel it, hear it, smell it—but she was not a part of it. She was alone within her body and  mind.

She could see all of this life around her but she could not see herself. She could picture in her mind a woman alone on a long stretch of beach gazing to the end of the world; a woman standing very still but for the force of water swaying her… looking, listening, feeling, her arms hung limply at her side. Was this woman in her imagination the reality?  Soon she wouldn’t have even the image. She was alone and her separateness overwhelmed  her.

Suddenly the gull twirled in his diving spiral down into the depths of water. Moments passed…the sea kept moving, the wind kept groaning and the sun kept falling into the end of the world. Moments passed…and the gull did not emerge.

She breathed deeply and sighed. Her breath made an invisible ring of air outward and outward. She was the center. She gazed at the spot where the gull had disappeared. The water was swirling in a whirlpool, sending ring after ring outward, away from the center. Her vision pierced through that center—at the still point of the turning world—and she saw into the depths of that wetness, into its mystery. Moments passed…an eternity perhaps. Then she walked into the sea.

 

Note: In his biography of Virginia Woolf, her nephew, Quentin Bell, wrote that on March 28, 1941, “at about 11:30 [she] slipped out, taking her walking-stick with her and making her way across the water-meadows to the river….Leaving her stick on the bank she forced a large stone into the pocket of her coat. Then she went to her death, ‘the one experience,’ as she had said to Vita [Sackville-West], ‘I shall never describe.”  She left a note for her sister, Vanessa Bell, and another for her husband, Leonard Woolf. In that second letter she explained that she felt she was going mad again and that she would not recover this time.  “What I want to say is, I owe all the happiness of my life to you….I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” To the world she left her novels and short stories.