In reality opposites are one: art shows this.--Eli Siegel

CAN WE BE EXPANSIVE AND CONTAINED LIKE VAN GOGH'S STARRY NIGHT?
By Miriam Mondlin

I first saw Van Gogh's Starry Night at the Museum of Modern Art, when I was about 8 or 9 years old, and I kept going back to look at it again and again. I loved the intensity of the sky, with its tremendous energy and bright, swirling stars, yet the valley below with its snug houses seemed so peaceful. I thought it was beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Starry Night    Vincent Van Gogh

     Ten years later, I met the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel, and I learned the reason I loved this painting, and why it has stirred people for more than 100 years: what makes this painting beautiful is the way it puts opposites together, and these are the same opposites we are trying to put together in our lives. I am grateful to be studying this principle, Eli Siegel's statement:

All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

     Technically, beautifully, this painting answers the central question of my life. When I was a child, though I liked going to museums and to the big movie palaces of the 1940's with stage shows that burst with energy and excitement, I was essentially disdaining of things, preferring to stay close to home, where I could manage my family, which I made into my world. I learned from Eli Siegel that one of the results of my wanting to have contempt for the world, to see it as unfriendly and not worth getting too excited about was that I punished myself by having inordinate fears. Many people are troubled by such fears, and Aesthetic Realism explains the cause so that it can change. The whole world opened up for me in studying Aesthetic Realism. Mr. Siegel described, so deeply, what I felt to myself. Had I not been able to hear the aesthetic criticism of self, I would have remained locked in myself, as many people are. 

     In Aesthetic Realism lessons, which are the basis for Aesthetic Realism consultations given now, Eli Siegel showed how every person has an attitude to the world which affects how we see every particular thing, and he showed that unless we do all we can to like and respect the world on an honest basis, we will feel guilty and afraid. In an Aesthetic Realism Lesson, I asked Mr. Siegel about a fear of fire I had had since the age of four. The image of flames licking out of a window would make me shake uncontrollably. As Eli Siegel talked to a person in Aesthetic Realism lessons, he brought the structure, the grandeur of the whole world to the seeing of a particular question. He explained the cause of my fear so truly, that I never had that fear again. He said, "Miriam Mondlin wants to be self-contained and a cool cat. Fire is as wild as anything. Every perception has order and disorder in it. The idea of being contained and trying to get out is frightening to Mrs. Mondlin." And he related these opposites in myself to the art I cared for most: "Every painter," he said, "is trying to get out of the canvas or be contained. It arises," he said, "from a philosophic idea--in and out; point and line." 

     I am thrilled to see that every square inch of this painting shows Van Gogh was "trying to get out of the canvas," and "be contained"--and both have the same purpose--to see the world truly.

     The houses in the valley are small, close to each other, and snug, round trees are surrounded by low round hills, giving a sense of containment. Then, there is the swirling sky above, and what does Van Gogh do? He joins them with the cypress which rises with its flame-like form from the base of the painting to the swirling sky. This contained village is not just contained, as I wanted to be, within myself, it also goes out to the stars and the sky. 

     While the cypress has the energy and form of flames, because it is dark it has containment also. It is not just wild--its form is going towards something. It becomes a point in the space of the sky. The rising vertical of the cypress seems to anchor the stars, and the slender church steeple near the center joins earth and sky as the cypress does. The double spiral of the nebula is poised in its swirling, above the tip of this delicate spire. I always had the feeling I had to get back to myself as quickly as possible after I ventured out a little. The spiral form of the nebula sweeps out and comes back to itself; it is expansive and contained at the same time, not at different times. And that is true everywhere in the painting. The crescent shaped moon on the upper right of the painting in its brightness expands, yet, by its placement and fixity, keeps the swirling nebula from rushing out of the canvas. 

     The black outlines of the cypress, mountains, houses and trees gives them containment. The downward blue and black brushstrokes of the mountain slopes are both contained and flowing, and there is a moonlight glow which makes for expansiveness. 

     The round forms of the trees curving down, make for a feeling of containment, yet with the light on the edges of these rows of tight curves, they are related to the curve of the stars, and the nebula above. There is a lovely diagonal formed by the trees going from the lower right of the canvas towards a point in the center of the painting near the horizon, almost like a path to the sky.

     A rising mist above the sloping forms of the mountains, hugs the mountains. Yet through it, the mountains expand and rise in space. Like many families, the kind of hugging that went on in my family was used against expansiveness. The hug had the feeling "I have you and you have me, and we don't need anything else." This attitude, I learned, helped to make me so fearful of things. It was the very opposite of what I needed in order to feel safe. Eli Siegel taught me that through seeing my relation to things, I would be more myself. This principle is what we see in Starry Night.

     In another Aesthetic Realism lesson, Mr. Siegel described what people are looking for in their lives in terms of geometrical forms. He said: 

Every person is a center looking for an area and illimitably flexible circumference; if that area and circumference are brought to that center, that center is safe--because a person is saved when self while remaining self, as a center does, takes on this expansion in fact.

This is what we see in Van Gogh's painting. One of the most beautiful things about this painting are the stars.

     With all their expansive radiance they are all circular. There are 11 stars, and the center and area of each star is different; yet each consists of some warm yellow, some having more white, some less. All have, too, the blue of the sky, yellow ochre and black of earth.

Look at the star at the top of the upper left. The chrome yellow center is surrounded by a yellow band then by a thinner, darker yellow band, that simultaneously contains the center and enlarges. Then, as it continues to expand, its area is added to with short, white, blue, blue-green and yellow strokes until they mingle and blend with the dark blue-black sky surrounding this star. Van Gogh has painted each star as he himself and every person hopes to be: a center--as Eli Siegel explained to me--and an illimitably flexible circumference. And the lines Van Gogh painted throughout the stirring sky connect every star to everything else in the picture. Nothing is isolated; each star is distinct and also becomes what surrounds it. 

     Another way Van Gogh joins things in this painting is through allowing the pale yellow canvas to show through. In this night scene, light is within and comes forth in everything--in the sky, in the cypress, in the houses, in the mountains, the trees, the mist--everywhere! The pale yellow glow is related to the intense yellow in the stars, which are so thickly painted, and seem so much on the outside. The houses with their snug, inward quality have bright yellow lights in them, like these stars. So the bright rectangles of light within the houses are like the expanding points of light in vast space. The contained and expansive are made one. 

     There was no limit to Eli Siegel's desire to understand both the feeling of a human being and the world itself. In 1960, as Mr. Siegel said to me in a lesson, "The universe is not big enough to find out who you are. Everything tells you something of who you are," he was deeply commenting on what Van Gogh, one of the greatest artists of any century was hoping to find as he looked for meaning in what he called "My starry sky..."