Who owns the Starry Night? Certainly NOT technocrats nor governments nor…. but that was what my great grandparents thought about almost everything except plots of farmed land and physical possessions. Gosh, were they ever sentimental idiots….
Anne Sexton wrote this, with its prelude from van Gogh:
Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother:
That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.
The Starry Night
The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.
It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:
into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.
Years ago, in Los Angeles, I worked with a program to divert dangerously delinquent kids away from jail time, with support from the legal profession on all sides and assistance from Sierra Club seniors. We took youngsters on moonless night hikes in near silent wilderness, sometimes in the Mojave Desert, sometimes in the San Bernardino Mountains. We expected and usually had a significant % of the kids completely loose it; they would fall into an extreme tearful crying episode of encountering
The Huge Silent Power of Reality
in the simplest most sublime form available to humans.
We would then have a brief discussion that provided the structure for the counseling that came next in the program.
…Sure, lets, overwhelm the heavens with glaring lights, and turn the surface of planet earth into a glaring prison camp.