On a Night of Such Endless Stars

My phone alarm went off at 1:15 AM. I had been dreaming about walking along the wavering seam where the Pacific Ocean licked the land, a hallucination so real that I could feel the tiny grains of sand — like golden millet seeds — sticking between my toes. My husband rustled beside me, rasping a long and ragged sigh as I slid my legs over the mattress to avoid tremoring the bed.

“Where are you going?” he yawned.

“Outside,” I said. “Wanna come?”

He reached across his side of the bed and clutched his phone, then threw his head back onto the pillow — arms spread-eagled. “This late? For the love of God, why?”

I wanted to say that it was the Winter Solstice, and that tonight was the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. It was the night of the Christmas Star, and the longest night of the year — enough time to contemplate one’s smallness in the cosmos and the possibility of a posthuman world, i.e. a world without us.

Instead, I said that I wanted to see something beautiful.

In August 2021, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) announced that all visitors (age 12 and older) and workers at the art museum will be required to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination for entry as part of the “Key to NYC Pass” plan. That honestly puts my mind at ease, since I’ve missed seeing one of my favorite paintings this entire pandemic.

I remember the first time I saw Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) in person, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon in Midtown, on the fifth floor gallery. It was a rare moment of tranquility when the storm had just broken, and no one was prepared for the downpour — that is to say that most people had been dressed for picnics at Central Park or catwalking down the avenues while I shuffled about from tableau to tableau in my sensible shoes with only the bored docent keeping me company.

The empty gallery was like a conch shell, and the sound of the docent’s sniffling and wrestling of a broken button on her black blazer washed over me like ocean waves. It was a comfort to be alone yet not completely bereft of another human being, but I kept a wary eye on her just in case she noticed how closely I was standing next to the van Gogh.

From three feet away, The Starry Night looks like every postcard, every college dorm room poster, wall calendar, and desktop wallpaper you have ever seen since you’ve been born. From one foot away, you notice the protective sheet covering the artwork so that your breath and fingertips will not corrode the painting. You can see the detail on Venus, center-left, and the moon on the right of the frame. From a few inches away, you can see the texture of the swirling stars eddying in rippling circles of paint and how the shadows burn with cold light.

The Starry Night was pure hallucination: an imagined view of the divine from his asylum window, the cypress trees bending in exultation to the swirling celestials, coiled snakes of moonglow and wind, the immaterial world made material. You can picture an errant thumbprint — van Gogh’s skin surfing the oil paint briefly as his hands skimmed the canvas during his quarantine year at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, France. He had spent a year in isolation to soothe his fevered, broken mind, and created 142 paintings in solitude.

Some say it had been fits of madness. Others say that it was the result of his failed artist collective at the yellow house, the sliced ear, poverty, and a lifetime of broken relationships. Why couldn’t all of it be true? Misfortune arrives from all directions, and impacts our lives all the same.

I gazed at this famous painting for what it was: a spiritual tattoo from van Gogh’s tattered mind, a few days from a terrible year, stretched like an animal hide within a gilded frame. And I wept for this broken man.

Why paint the moon, after all?

The mythic Moon has worn many masks since time immemorial, and its name has been too sacred to be caged by our clumsy, wooden words. The Moon has been a woman, a man, a cipher. She has been Persephone, Diana, Luna, Hecate, and Kore. He has been Moma — the “father” of the Witoto — who was created from “the word,” the creative force of the universe and all its unknowable architecture.

The Moon keeps cosmic time — is slowly eaten away then is full again — dies and is reborn. A metaphor and a promise of renewal. It was the word that first bore all else: genesis. In the beginning, the word was made flesh. It was the word that created the image of God (and gods), and everything else was afterthought. To behold the Moon, to write the word and make an image, then, is to rebuke entropy and court immortality — a thalassal regression to the womb of creation — and to live on within wonder, inside the profound, and to escape the limits of our fragile bodies.

No wonder van Gogh spent so many nights searching the Moon’s face to describe its precise colors.

“Art is to console those who are broken by life.”

― Vincent van Gogh

I too am scanning the constellations tonight, and searching for the eye of a wild god.

Gazing up at the stars, during the witching hour while the world sleeps, it’s difficult to accept that our world is illuminated by dead light. Or rather, that light travels toward us at 186,000 miles per second — not nearly the speed of infinity — and, of that, only 0.000000000000001% of the universe glitters. Even moonlight from the pale and poet moon glows 1.3 seconds from the past. The comet NEOWISE arced across the evening sky in July 2020, passing 64 million miles toward the sun in its 6,800-year orbit, and all I could see was its burning tail like a blur of lint above the treeline.

Our soft, jellied eyes can only observe these rippling telescopes of time as twinkling stars in a boundless, bottomless, incomprehensible shadow universe. Like memory, that deep psychic ocean, whose occasional episodes and flashbacks emerge crisp and as corporeal as peaks of foam cresting on breaking waves. The sand between your toes. The skin of an old lover, long dead, their fingers enmeshed between yours. The salt of the sea, tears, and the horizon burned away by the sun.

In the morning, I will write everything down that I can remember so that I can live on within you and re-enter the world as words and images. A light burning from the past. A distant flame, still warm.