Friday, January 28, 2011

vincent van gogh

I am not an adventurer by choice
but by fate.

-Vincent van Gogh
posted by at

5 comments:

Lowen said...

German philosopher Martin Heidegger commenting on Van Gogh's shoe paintings:

"From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself."

-from a passage on the essence of "shoeness" in the essay "Origin of the Work of Art". I took a class exclusively focused on Heidegger during my sophomore year at Covenant. I don't think i'll ever quite recover. These shoes cause me to tremble.

1/28/2011 9:06 AM
Damien said...

thank you. this is the longest non-spam comment fingerpost has ever gotten.

1/28/2011 9:11 AM
Apapum said...

Lowen: have you read any Pat Conroy lately? If so, I'm confident you've not recovered from his wordcraft either.

2/01/2011 12:23 PM
Lowen said...

Really? I read Pat Conroy's novel about the Citadel, "Lords of Discipline", and found the prose fairly laconic and straightforward. Kind of reminded me of John Irving or Marilynn Robinson.

Which work of his are you referring to?

I would submit Cormac McCarthy however, as a contemporary author who does, I think channel that sort of sprawling germanic zeigeist. Little concern for the particular, but an obsession with the universal. In other words, no character development or immediate story to speak of, and yet every other passage attempts to allude to either the genesis or apocolapse of human existance.

2/02/2011 10:41 AM
Lowen said...

Hey Aunt Cath! Just realized it was you when I linked to your art gallery website from your alias.

Beautiful work by the way.

2/02/2011 10:55 AM

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