Excerpt: Notes on a Field in July
THAT DOESN’T STOP ME FROM HAVING A TERRIBLE NEED FOR – SHALL I SAY THE WORD?
I want to be clear: I am not interested in Van Gogh. I am interested in the two-inch, shell-shaped, and impossibly complex piece of flesh which was securely bound, by blood and sinew and cartilage for the great majority of his life, to the left side of his head. I am interested in the machinery there, the cochlea and the hammer, the vestibular apparatus responsible for telling one where, and when, and if, one exists.
THE SCENE: A FIELD IN JULY. THE LAND LIES FALLOW, GREEDY STRIATIONS LIKE THE TEETH OF A FORK SNAKING AND HORIZONTAL EN PERPETUEM. SUN RUNS LIKE AN OVER-EASY EGG YOLK INTO THE CLOUDS. HORIZON AS A BOB ON A LOOM, SHUTTLE SLIDING TO AND FRO. HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A LINE SO FLAT?
Sight takes precedence. Last paintings become synonymous with last months, last months, everyone always chasing last like it’s a precious creature, like maybe the fields held a clue. It wasn’t the clue of a mad man, some mercurial nothing-thing. It was a clue that the rest of us were missing – that’s why they bothered to look for it at all. What had he seen?
OR ELSE FULL TO BURSTING, SO IN BLOOM – NO LONGER SOMEWHERE BETWEEN GROWTH AND DECAY, WHICH IS WHAT IT MEANT TO BE A FERTILE THING. BEES WEFT THEIR WAY THROUGH THE FRONDS, SO SURE OF THEMSELVES AND SO STRONG. THE WHOLE WORLD FITS BETWEEN THE WINGS OF A BEE, AS A RECEIPT IN A POCKET – CRUMPLED, WARPED, WHOLE, THE DISTANCE FROM ONE EDGE TO THE OTHER HALVED.
His last –
WHEAT FIELD WITH CROWS (1890)
Black flock of starlings taking off into the purpling night, ripe as any bruise, and a path cutting without destination into the high grass. How wonderful, as Camus wrote, “to be a tree among trees, a cat among animals,” perhaps to be a crow among crows, scraping oneself against the sky. A fitting way to mark one’s grave, with a headstone at once mundane and yet unutterably unordinary. At least, it would be nice to think so. For once an intelligible explanation, narrative impressed upon a senseless world.
THIS LIFE WOULD HAVE A MEANING, OR RATHER THIS PROBLEM WOULD NOT ARISE, FOR I SHOULD BELONG TO THIS WORLD…I SHOULD BE THIS WORLD TO WHICH I AM NOW OPPOSED WITH MY WHOLE CONSCIOUSNESS.
CAMUS
For someone so mythologized, which of course is just another way of being forgotten, it is curious that no one ever addressed the last fifth of him – a fifth from which he so gruesomely removed himself, an act of self-blinding. What brings one, as in the case of Van Gogh, to halve oneself? Take off the skin, if it burns; the eyes, if they lie, or find the world too bright; turn away from the noxious fumes of the field. But an ear?
Evidently he was mad; it is not his madness with which I am concerned. I just wanted to know what it sounded like, the field half-smiling, when he wrote to his brother: that doesn’t stop me from having a terrible need for –
ONE THEORY: THE EAR WAS A PHALLUS. TO CUT IT OFF WAS TO SELF CASTRATE.
Which strikes me as odd – if only because the ear and the phallus occupy such very different spaces in our often-shared diegesis of symbolism. What relation, between the curled ear and the humble penis? The former primarily a recipient, inwards-turning as an inlet by the sea, an abrupt tear in the primordial fabric of one’s surface; the latter, groping and dexterous, a jettying emission into greater space, a stretching. Though of course the attachment of agency, of pursuit and initiative, to any phallic symbol is a dangerous one – bearing the curious side effect of delegating to the yonic state only spiritlessness, torpor, some fundamental inertia.
I should belong to this world.
Or, was it a matter of displacement? Never mind the difference between taking the waves of the world into you, and ejecting yourself onto the world like a Pollock; see, instead, their shared audacity. To grow like some ill-mannered youth into space where nothing, especially an ear, ought to have existed – to hear such brazen things drifting through the wind, small useless miracles, like flies. All bodies, and all of the body, so plucky and devil-may-care. The similarity then being: the likeness of miraculous things. Never mind that the latter resembles a maggot and the former curls like one when both can be spoken of, exist as referents in a world which, like a fine garment, becomes them. Never mind, never mind.
The ancients had a word for this: contumelious.
CONTUMELIOUS. ADJECTIVE. ARCHAIC. (OF BEHAVIOR) SCORNFUL AND INSULTING; INSOLENT. FROM LATIN CONTUMELIOSUS, FROM CONTUMELIA, ‘ABUSE, INSULT.’
As with many, perhaps most, the story returns to some sort of abuse – namely, in Van Gogh’s case, of the self. ‘Abuse of the self,’ which can mean so many different things; an act of self harm, perhaps flagellation, an endless series of choices inclined towards self-destruction, the bad kind, also the good kind, even the ordinary rhythm of masturbation. Was it pleasure that he derived from the act, or something else? Can relief from pain be understood as pleasurable, some unexpected calculus between the asymmetries of experiential qualia? Or perhaps we ought not to distinguish between that which pleasures and that which pains – and instead understand them both only as things which are felt at all.
One wonders: how sharp the knife? How jagged the edge?
Most fail to distinguish between acts of self-harm and acts of self-destruction. Both, like masturbation and the removal of one’s ear, oscillate hesitantly between acts to be understood as either disgusting and unnecessary or of some biological necessity, crucial. Both devote themselves to cyclicality, i.e. insufficiency. They are conduits, temporary fixes, always in a relationship of supervenience upon some greater endeavor.
One wonders: how red the blood?
So, suppose: the removal of one’s ear conspires as an act of castration. And if this act, an act of castration, doubles as an act of masturbation, does the act then become at once an act of opening and closing, shunning oneself? One ought not to take the world into oneself; one ought not to project into the world; one ought not to exist, an imploding explosion as with a black hole, the immense gravity of a unitary dyad, an impossible thing.
THAT DOESN’T STOP ME FROM HAVING A TERRIBLE NEED FOR –
So, the ear and the penis together achieve outrage. Consequently, they must both be done away with. But why the ear? And why not both?
ONE THEORY: HE HEARD SOMETHING.
To read more, or to view a full list of citations and works cited, please contact Teatum Crowe.
Teatum Crowe 