Poem: Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888)

“Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888)”

I bet you’re surprised

I didn’t pick a Dali.

Salvador Dali,

Surrealism personified,

Poet of the subconscious.

But Van Gogh

Is poet of the stars,

Who knew that life was pale, blunt, sun-warped, depthless color

And zigzags, hard lines—

The barriers that we put up

To protect against those who

Love and Hate

Us.

But Van Gogh also knows

That life is the endless night.

She swallows us in an endless depth of color

And frees us.

We catapult faster than a cannonball,

Ever so slowly

Through seas of deep navy that know no time.

There the cool waves lap gently against our skin.

There we can drink Gatsby’s “incomparable milk of wonder,”

Warm like the comfort of a mother’s bosom,

But refreshingly cool like the wisdom of old age.

Here there is no line, no barrier between light and dark, between us and others:

We are vulnerable, but we are invincible,

There is simply the oneness

Of our beings.

A miniscule couple stands on the water in Arles.

The Rhone is only a river,

But they hear the Sea pulsing with quiet, endless strength,

Smell its salty spray.

The Sea means Forever.

And with the energetic twinkle of the gas streetlights bouncing off their eyes,

They say, “You are my forever. I belong to you.”

But what they mean is,

“I belong

To the Universe.”

Their dark, layered clothing

Restricts them.

But why be restricted

When no natural order governs the world?

The sailboats are swallowed by the river,

The hay they hold looks no different

Than the gaslights playing off the water.

Nothing is its own.

The man’s tiny hat

Matches the hay

Whose crunch means harvest, fall, death.

But it also matches the reflection of the newfangled gaslights

Who mean invention, (intellectual) rebirth,

Whose constant, manmade glow

Make the luminous splendor of our heavenly home

Tangible,

For once,

On Earth.

The stars,

Powerful denizens of the dark, endless heavens,

Are tiny wisps of dandelion,

Whose puffy form signal autumn,

But who glow with the greenness of youthful seed and spring.

The sky,

The wide expanse which God has thrown about the Earth—

In Van Gogh’s impressionist style—

Becomes a confined wall of blue bricks.

And that is why this Starry Night Over the Rhone

Is a meditation on man’s own incomparable tininess

And the deep navy of God’s awesome power,

On how we have only to look up

To “dream,”

To float at peace through the bright and murky depths of the Universe,

To know no barriers against nature, others and ourselves,

To be one with our Creator,

To live His Dream.

url
^That's the link to the image. :p

Star-Spangled Sadness

So, I was really kind of irritated when our class guffawed at Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I mean, I’m a passionate lover of classic rock, and I like to pretend that I’m the artsiest of the artsy. So when people begin to laugh at one of the most raw, genuine pieces of art to spew from the heart of an American, I get somewhat POed.

            Hendrix’s cover of the American national anthem was obviously met with a lot of controversy at the time; his streaking slides and heavy use of distortion gave the impression of un-American sentiment. But these impassioned, classic Hendrix techniques perfectly summed up his feelings as a lover of America and a lover of peace.

            The intense, raunchy use of feedback from the amps (which I hope to one day perfect on the Les Paul I got for Christmas) thundered like bombs and the cries of the injured. In fact, the entire performance captured the hopeless aura of a Vietnam warzone. The muddy slop seeping through the earth the audience sat on recalled the “shit field” described in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. A frightening, deathly silence enveloped Hendrix’s single notes that shone through the light rain that Monday morning. This, coupled with the way he interrupted the anthem to play “Taps,” honored the men eaten by Vietnam, who in ethereal silence were folded into the belly of the land.

            Hendrix’s rendition was pure patriotism. As he played something that at times didn’t even sound like music, he gazed out with hollow eyes for love of his country and pain that its sons were being slaughtered.

            And that’s why Alexie’s father says that even Indians need a lead guitar. This people of “born soldiers” needs someone like a Hendrix to sing its despair. And what  better way to do it than rock n’ roll?

Salvador Dali Knows What's Up

In Spanish class this year, as part of our unit on Spain, we discussed the life and works of various artists from that nation.  Salvador Dali in particular stuck out to me. His art was so deliciously weird that I couldn’t help but marvel at it. (And buy his 2014 calendar. Shh…)

            His painting Swans Reflecting Elephants, in the trademark surrealist style of realistically depicting the unreal, shows Dali with his back to a pond full swans whose reflections look like elephant heads. Thus, Dali illustrates that he does not subscribe to the societal belief that beauty (represented by the swans) reflects knowledge (represented by the elephants).

            And when Ms. Valentino posed a question about the relationship between truth and beauty this week, of course my most random of brains made the connection to this Dali painting. I began to muse on how society could believe that beauty reflects knowledge and/or truth. And then it hit me: the average Joes trust the beauty queens of society. I mean, celebrity endorsements work really well, and JFK—who had a much more glamorous persona than Richard Nixon—won the presidential debate according to TV watchers, but not according to radio listeners.

            I feel that Dali is right in many cases; a beautiful casing can lie and mask a truly rotten core. For example, in The Great Gatsby, Daisy’s beauty seems so pure and on a higher plane than anything Gatsby has ever known, but she lies through her teeth about her devotion to him.

            But then again, perhaps beauty can reflect truth. The great Romantic writers marveled at the purity and awesome power of nature and mused on how small it made us as humans; through beauty, they became enlightened.

            So the question becomes: how does one differentiate between the beauty of truth and the beauty of lies? I believe that only in beautifying our insides—bettering ourselves, reading, doing good deeds, learning to love the pure, honest, and moral—will we know the truly beautiful.

http://www.dali.com/blog/swans-reflecting-elephants-is-one-of-those-dali-paintings-everybody-loves/