By Sunil Sharma
The Starry Night
Forced by the power cut,
Suburbanite went up
To his deserted terrace;
Was hit by the immensity
Of the starry night,
Felt overwhelmed by
The primeval beauty
Spread out,
The breath-taking magnificence
Of the swirling night sky
Stretched taut overhead
The eternal space
That glowed with twinkling silver bulbs,
And beckoned the little child gaping
At this rapturous sight, along with his mesmerised dad,
The huge moon and the pale-white light
Washed the blue of the vast sky and produced
Strange lights that streamed down on a French village,
In a different era, when things were more quiet,
The darkness mild and the well-lit sky
Was an enthralling discovery by Vincent van Gogh,
Who had painted and immortalised this ethereal spectacle,
Through his Starry Night over the Rhone and The Starry Night,
The poetic painter, committed to sanatorium,
Suffering from delirium and what not,
Studied the curious effect of darkness and light,
The two paintings still transmit
The same sense of first-time wonder and delight
To the subsequent viewers, living in polluted cities,
Breathing fumes and pure carbon dioxide;
As the cold wind of November buffets the
Father-son duo that stood silent,
Before gods of yore, now not recognised,
The two felt standing in a pagan shrine,
Found accidentally,
In the heart of a commercial city,
And
Overawed by this rare divine sight,
Stared at the infinity and felt their own
Small size,
They then understood that
There exists a unique mysterious realm
Beyond the sodium vapour lamps,
For centuries,
That has been trying again
To communicate
With humankind but in vain,
This rich world that was once deeply understood and captured
By the likes of Gogh and Wordsworth,
Now lost forever for the ever competing,
Rude,
Aggressive,
Utilitarian,
Raider
Called
Homo Economicus.
.
The lofty view from the barred window
May 1889. Saint-Paul Asylum
Through the east-facing iron-barred
Window of the second-floor bedroom,
The familiar sky grew into a revelation
That electrified a young inmate fighting
His own private demons;
The ether got suffused with luminosity
And the stars and the moon orbited
In swirls very bright;
The other side of a mundane sky!
The vision uplifted the gloomy mood
Of a self-mutilated and starved artist, and,
The scene was painted and preserved as the iconic Starry Night.
That canvas still alive, despite the intervening time
And is part of a marvellous series and it
Forms a luminous summit of
World culture, easily recognized;
The sky was always there for those living
In the Saint-Remy-de-Provence and
Still there stretched out for other mortals in the world,
Yet its mystery, its spiritual dimension could only be
Captured by someone considered nuts
By the rest of the proper and the civilized,
What arbitrary cultural and social categories
To imprison and destroy tender creative minds!
Vincent van Gogh could see vividly the other side of the
Brilliant star-studded sky, and, the
Essence of the grim reality of his time and
Could easily locate its soul pristine in meadows
Sunflowers and the sky.
Asylum walls could not restrain his soaring spirit
And he drew furiously through his inner eye.
.
Madness was never so lucid
So receptive to the beauty innate
In things ugly/ordinary!
.
Like the famous Don Quixote and the cat in the Wonderland,
Dear Vincent—and rest of us through the Dutch artist—can
See things only the crazy can see
Yes, the other side,
That the sane and practical always dislike!
.
Nightly visions granted to the blessed!
When night suddenly becomes
A brilliant image inspires
An inmate that went by the name
Gogh
And begets brilliant visions
Of heavenly bodies and playful
Mix of colours— light-n-dark
And restive hands, in creative
Frenzy, caught on an oil canvas
Delighting by now
Millions of lonely hearts
Trapped in hopeless situations
.
To-night, the same sky
Looks similarly beautiful
As it was for those red eyes
In the year 1889
.
The dim space, a-wash
Stars redeeming the dark
And the boughs, all lit
Creating patterns divine
On the
Uneven walk.
.
Rare! This Spectacle, seen in another age, as well
.
…at this precise moment
when the sky is in a flux
.
drenched in a riot of
dark-blue- grey colours
and a flowering tree, backlit
.
the composite elements
of the heavenly composition
grab the fleeting attention;
.
the viewer- concentration
divided between the two metaphysical
entities that uplift
the viewer
reads the live space and writes
lines on such an out-of-world canvas
that firmly echo
refer back, back of mind,
collective consciousness,
to a “mad” painter who goes by the name of Gogh!
.
Sunil Sharma is Mumbai-based senior academic, critic, literary editor and author with 21 published books: Seven collections of poetry; three of short fiction; one novel; a critical study of the novel, and, eight joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism, and, one joint poetry collection. He is a recipient of the UK-based Destiny Poets’ inaugural Poet of the Year award—2012. His poems were published in the prestigious UN project: Happiness: The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, in the year 2015.
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