"it's the shape of light as it hits another shape"

something something something.

www.figure-ground.com: frank gehry all over. i don't know. it's nifty.


soft and tender
like a leech on a limb
caring for your juices.

i think, personally, from a standpoint of no knowledge whatsoever, that van gogh saw like he painted, even, when he was at his craziest. of course this is damning him as an idiot savant or a child like one of those 19th century white man's burden types who can't help but acknowledge the unnerving effect of primitive religions and art forms, but i'm just going to go with it. that particular despair expressed in the brushstroke is like a graph with x and y axis. on the x-axis you have shape, and on the y-axis you have color, which are the two materials of a brushstroke, as far as i can figure. and i think in van gogh the y-axis, paint, stands in for desire, while the x-axis, shape, stands in for the incontravertable inevitability of time and the nature of things--y-axis is static and x-axis moves (as in proust--this whole thing is borrowed from proust). hence it's like the intense color-saturation of his stroke is an attempt to hold still, to capture in all its incredible reality, the moment-thing, the thing in the moment, all its beauty, intensity, completion--the thing blazingly at rest, because the color causes it to be so whole. whereas the shape of the stroke moves it along--van gogh's paintings, especially the landscapes, are tacitly not at rest, as are not things to those who experience them--the stroke isn't whole, isn't finished, but is defiantly, outstandingly broken, not even sinuously, often, but like the cup of a wine-glass shattered on a floor: the thing won't stay still; the beauty, intensity, completion are mocked by its continual expression of change. i am thinking of van gogh's self-portrait when i say that pointilism is different because it waits; van gogh's stroke reaches at you, broken. it's like lepers in a parable. kind of.

how the fact that the shape of the stroke is also, in reality, static, and that the painting itself is static, works in here, i don't know.

also i know that anyone with the least bit of depression knows how sometimes the objects around you slow down as time speeds up until ears, eyes, taste, touch, smell, speech, motor function, everything just wants to... you can barely blink, and everything is alive--you know? it's a physical sensation by process of elimination: your emotions are too overwhelmed to know whether they're sad or happy or if you feel anything at all. i don't think i experienced it as van gogh experienced it, but i feel a connection to it; said x versus said y is a deep axis--it goes deep, like a mexican ice pick down into trotsky's head.

i'm not sure i know how to spell incontravertable. shouldn't there be another "i" in it somewhere? also i don't know whether the ice pick was mexican-made or not. dude could have brought one over from russia. i might've, had i been in that situation.