Wheatfield with crows (July 1890)

I am writing again about Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with crows (July 1890) because it popped up (I was looking through an art book and then I saw it online and then one of my students decided to write about it out of the blue) and saw clear as anything that there are two moons clear as moons in this painting, something completely unmentioned in all the commentaries, even my own, mystifying in terms of brushstroke and Van Gogh’s suicide. Didn’t someone write a whole book about how there was no suicide? How some peasant boy accidentally dropped a rock on the poor guy’s noggin as he took a nap in a strawfield with his straw hat over his face? Or maybe on purpose? It’s upsetting. What defines the human condition: resilience, adaptation and forgetting. Doesn’t Giorgio Agamben have a quote to the effect of “the concepts pessimism and optimism have nothing to do with thought”? On purpose or by accident… It’s just the two moons I can’t get over in this painting which are there clear as moons and I’ve seen this painting at least fifty times seriously and never noticed because of all the barnacles of context and floaters in my eye and it gives me a mind that something’s gone horribly wrong in my emoter, I mean whatever it is in my body (I always, and maybe this is what’s gone horribly wrong, imagined it as a kind of pineal gland) that converts artworks, life, etc. into feeling, the kind of feeling that really makes its slow way through my organs. 

Two of my closest friends “don’t like poetry” and it makes me sadder than anything and gives me an ache in my emoter. I read this in my most naive voice to H. “Time is filled with beginners. You are right. Now / each of them is working on something / and it matters. The large increments of life must not go by / unrecognized. That’s why my mother’s own mother-in-law was often bawdy. / ‘MEATBALLS’ she would shout.” But my reading voice is never naive enough. I don’t get it. Sure, I don’t get it either. And my inadequacy wiggles its proboscis.  “Close reading” is part of the same CIA Iowa Writer's Workshop Paris Review Pollock Psy-Op that naturalized “show-don’t-tell” and with the muzzle of MFA WTF soft power choked in its crib the honest American prose of “Stop the killing Stop the killing Stop the killing.” I mean something that could be called poetry, where directness goes to die of neglect. The point of this piece is not to show off that I like poetry and this painting with two moons as clear as the moon but to wiggle my proboscis a little at the feeling of getting it and its relationship to not being able to get over it. They’re the same.