Starry Night Over the Rhone

 

Paging through the Taschen compendium of Van Gogh’s complete works a couple of weeks ago, it brought up a poem that will appear in the new book, The Next World (out in January 2025) from Shanti Arts.

 

I have a memory from the the end of second grade where I am standing in the Musee D’Orsay (it may have been the Jeu de paume back then), mostly bored, and suddenly found myself in front of one of Van Gogh’s star-oriented paintings: Starry Night over The Rhone.

 

Starry Night - ink sketch/study

 

And something happened.

 

There is something that happens to me, probably to most of us, when we encounter a work of art that speaks to us. I usually call it an “illuminating the nervous system” moment, when everything inside me suddenly lights up. Sometimes it’s a cool light, sometimes it’s a warm light. I like to believe that I walked away from that painting inexplicably changed.

 

For years, I believed the painting had been the more famous Starry Night that is now in the MET. 

 

 

But when I was writing the poem I did some research and found that the only one with starry patterns that would have been in Paris during my childhood was the Rhone painting. Interesting. When I found this out, I began to question the memory itself.

The memory was vivid, and yet…

 

Starry Night Over The Rhone, 1889

 

Starry Night Over the Rhone

(by Vincent Van Gogh)

 

Harsh yellow gaslight sent gold ribbons across the Rhone.

I followed those ribbons up into Ursa Major’s seven

 

aquamarine-soft haloes: seeing as spinning out every-

where threads of light. Look: the hands, green stars.

 

Look: the heart, gold gas. I was eight and I heard him

say: night is richer in color than the day. I was eight, and

 

for one second, maybe two, I knew someone else who

sensed night in the same way. And I reached up, almost

 

touched the thick paint, and for one second, maybe two,

my muscles were freed from fear, could articulate how

 

dark and light feed, and are fed. I stood on my toes and

made starlit ripples in the air, mimicked the feedback

 

loop between my finger bones and distant star-gas threads.

And I saw the couple, almost in shadow, maybe an after-

 

thought, maybe in love, at the bottom of the painting,

walking back to their hotel, to get out from under that

 

intense mirror of their hearts, hands, eyes. And I knew,

for one second, maybe two, that there is no escape, no

 

matter what we do. Is this memory true? Night is richer

in color than the day.

 

(This poem originally appeared in The Wilderness House)

 

Night is richer in color than the day. The quote from Vincent came from a letter that he sent to his brother, Theo, while he was painting Starry Night Over The Rhone. It can be found in Vincent Van Gogh, The Complete Paintings (Taschen, 2020).