The first day of summer rings slightly hollow this year, as so much has turned to shit since 2020 kicked the door in and trashed the place. Some summers feel destined to be haunted, and must be prepared for and set up as if we were battening down the hatches for a winter storm. It’s far better to go in over-prepared and expecting the worst than to go in bright and full of bonhomie only to have the wickedness of the world shut it all down. That’s the mood right now. That’s the summer set-up. On guard. Under attack. Wrecked and ravaged.
Personified by the sorry state of our pool – still unopened, a veritable swamp filled with stinging insects and squirming larvae, and inviting all sorts of nasty critters that feed upon them – the summer begins in less-than-fine fashion, in the very worst ugliness that summer can sometimes embody. I fear that tension and restlessness will portend the way the season goes, and I’m not sorry to start in such a dim world. From humble beginnings there is room to grow, room to get better, room to bloom and blossom into something prettier and more beautiful.
Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and grey
Look out on a summer’s day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land
Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now
And so we begin in a quieter place, a more somber place, perhaps a more mature place, and rather than maturity leading to something more tame, my heart and passions feel more excitable and unpredictable than ever. Maybe it’s just my perspective that has shifted, and maybe that’s the best thing that could have happened.
We are also going into summer with a song already chosen – entering from what is traditionally the ending: I tend to let the summer play out before determining which song will best represent the season that year. Here, I give you ‘Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)’ by Don McLean, named after and inspired by Van Gogh himself. Whatever may come for the next three months, this song will run through its days and nights – rather fitting for the stars that occupy the night, as well as the bracts of the Chinese dogwood that drip and dangle their starry expanse against the sky.
One of the lasting effects of being an English major is the tendency to pick apart and dissect every word of a song, then expounding upon them in expansive, extrapolated form, analyzing even the most unintended placement of words or innocent punctuation and drawing personal conclusions that we try to mold into a different form of art. I was about to do that here, so full of possible meanings are the lyrics, so beautifully dark and deliciously disturbing are the images. An artist embodied by a painting embodied by a song embodied by a passage of writing… and I simply will not attempt it. I will not even begin to try to come close to what has already been created. I will simply listen, and invite you to do the same.
Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent’s eyes of china blue
Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand
Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now
What summers did Vincent Van Gogh see? And how did he see them? Were they a comfort or a distraction? A balm or bit of restless overheated bother? Most summers have a tinge of darkness to them, bringing their own stormy swells and popping them in between all those sun-soaked days. Some summers carry mostly rain and gray overcast days, a waste of a season, perhaps rescued by some early autumn days when it’s already too late, when we’ve already given up. And some summers are glorious, mostly when they are not expected to be. I haven’t entirely ruled out that unlikely possibility, because the heart hopes against reason, and mine is not exceptional in that way.
So we dance, and we rise, and we face the summer sun, still seeking out its warmth and heat and light, still seeking out a happiness most of us haven’t known since the innocent days of childhood, if we were even lucky enough to have a few seasons of innocence. Most of my summer memories are sugar-coated with the sepia-haze of half-remembered sensations – the buzzing of a thousand cicadas, the gentle lapping of water from a pool or a sea, the blooming and delicate sweet scent of a hundred bright snapdragons. I hesitate to probe into how much of it was true; my construction of summers past is generally joyful. I will not tamper with that now.
For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night
You took your life, as lovers often do
But I could have told you, Vincent
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you
What might this summer bring? As the world devolves into chaos, and monstrosities we never would have envisioned as possible come to unsettling fruition, I’ve decided to focus on stillness and quiet, on our home and gardens, on a pool that will once again be filled with sparkling water. While travel remains a risk, we will take our trips just a few feet off our back patio, in the branches of a fig tree or the twining chartreuse trail of a sweet potato vine. In a song about an artist, in a sky filled with the starry forms of flowers and the sparkling forms of stars. In the scent of a beach rose, in the fronds of an ostrich fern.
Surrounded by beauty, it shall be a summer of reflection and contemplation, a way of both stilling and thrilling the passage of time. Strange the way that works, the way heat eventually gets to you, and then the retreating into the air-conditioned comfort of the living room for a mid-day meditation. There is peace within the home. There is peace within the summer. There is peace within the fuzzy purple bloom of a petunia.
Starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frameless heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget
Like the strangers that you’ve met
The ragged men in the ragged clothes
The silver thorn, a bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow
Dear summer, please go easy on us. You begin with Mercury in retrograde, a most inauspicious way to begin, but what say do the seasons have in planetary alignment? What say do any of us have anymore? What say did we ever have…
Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will
