Vincent Had My Eyes

Posted on April 24, 2003 in Biography Prose Arcana Reflections

My Danish friend alina is back from her visit to Holland. She said that she saw my eyes in a self portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. I don’t know how my eyes got to be fixed in that face among the many Vincent brushed or why he put them in his gaunt visage instead of in the plump face of a peasant or a whore; or why he didn’t work them into his Starry Night or some sky overlooking a straw-strewn landscape.

alina was in the museum given over to works by Vincent. The walls were covered with splashes and slashes and whorls, existence as seen through the eyes of a sad madman. And alina said that he had my eyes on that one canvas. He’d put them there before I was born, which was a long time after he died. He’d plucked them from a calf or bought them from a butcher using copper coins. He pickled them, perhaps, and, as he ground up the hard but crumbly brown lumps that his paint formed when he let it sit for too long, he wondered what he was going to paint from them.

Van Gogh had my eyes in that painting, alina said. Somehow they were kept for me all those years, years of work that ended after he painted his last picture of yellow splashes and black slashes — crows in a cornfield. How was it, I wonder, that he never dripped blood on any of those canvases though he slashed off his ear and put a bullet through his angst-softened brain?