Those Colors Which Have No Name

After a long few months full of transition and multiple kinds of loss—the loss of two housemates who moved to other seasons of life, the loss of a love, the loss of my dad's job—sharing the following poem from Annie Dillard's book of found poems, Mornings Like This, feels appropriate. In her found poems, Dillard takes already existing literature, everything from the collection of van Gogh's letters to The Boy Scout Handbook, and she re-orders sentences and cuts words, creating poems without ever adding a word. I have a special admiration for this poem, which remains grounded in van Gogh's concrete scenes while inviting readers into larger themes he may have been reaching toward.

I Am Trying To Get At Something Utterly Heartbroken

—V. van Gogh, letters, 1873-1890, edited by I. Stone, translated by Johanna van Gogh

I

At the end of the road is a small cottage,

And over it all the blue sky.

I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken.

The flying birds, the smoking chimneys,

And that figure loitering below in the yard—

If we do not learn from this, then from what shall we learn?

The miners go home in the white snow at twilight.

These people are quite black. Their houses are small.

The time for making dark studies is short.

A patch of brown heath through which a white

Path leads, and sky just delicately tinged,

Yet somewhat passionately brushed.

We who try our best to live, why do we not live more?

II

The branches of poplars and willows rigid like wire.

It may be true that there is no God here,

But there must be one not far off.

A studio with a cradle, a baby's high chair.

Those colors which have no name

Are the real foundation of everything.

What I want is more beautiful huts far away on the heath.

If we are tired, isn't it then because

We have already walked a long way?

The cart with the white horse brings

A wounded man home from the mines.

Bistre and bitumen, well applied,

Make the colouring ripe and mello and generous.

III

A ploughed field with clods of violet earth;

Over all a yellow sky with a yellow sun.

So there is every moment something that moves one intensely.

A bluish-grey line of trees with a few roofs.

I simply could not restrain myself or keep

My hands off it or allow myself to rest.

A mother with her child, in the shadow

Of a large tree against the dune.

To say how many green-greys there are is impossible.

I love so much, so very much, the effect

Of yellow leaves against green trunks.

This is not a thing that I have sought,

But it has come across my path and I have seized it.

Black with Grease and Strong with Gasoline

I recently began re-reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It's a novel written as a letter from an elderly and dying pastor, John Ames, to his young son, telling the story of the boy's family history in their hometown of Gilead, as well as the old man's contemplations about life and the wonder of existence. Of all the books I've read, right now it is my favorite. There's a certain passage at the beginning of Gilead I've especially come to love:

I really can't tell what's beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They're not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They're always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don't know why they don't catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent. (p 5)

I wasn’t sure why that section meant so much to me until I connected it with another page where Ames contemplates Heaven:

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me try. (p 57)

Of course everyone knows we as human beings are transient, but Ames reminds us that our existence is also beautiful, that our daily humanness is lovely, that our mortality is not only fatal, but fantastic. He reminds us that when we expend our wicked laughter and our jokes and our cigarettes, and when we struggle with tears or are black with grease and strong with gasoline and must rest from our hard work in the sunlight, we contribute to an eternal epic, one that is great and bright, even if all this effort might one day seem like it was only a dream. And that is a stunning comfort to me.