Sky
Ship
Moon
Womb
(A twinkle in your father’s) Eye
‘Twinkle, twinkle little star / How I wonder what you are!’11 Jane Taylor, ‘The Star’, in Ann and Jane Taylor, Rhymes for the Nursery (London: Darton & Harvey, 1806), pp. 10–11. This poem is quoted throughout what follows.
A star will disappear if you look at it directly. It is too distant, too dim, its night-sky setting too dark to view with precision. To see this celestial body with the naked eye, you should look away from it, to the pitch-black side of it, a little more, a little less (how far from off-centre depends on individual vision), adjusting, adjusting, until it comes into focus. A science lesson… If you move from the front to the back of the eye you pass through the lid that covers the front of its orbit (meaning socket but also elliptical revolution, the curved path of an astrological something—rock, satellite, ship—around a star, planet, moon). From the lid you continue to the cornea, the black hole of the pupil through which light streams, the lens, the vitreous, and on to the retina—blink, blink. Here, in this sheet of retinal tissue, lie the cells that respond to the streaming light to send images to your brain—click, click. There are two kinds of these cells, the cones at the centre that require light to become sensitive to the colour they detect, and the rods dispersed around that operate in the comparative dark, enabling you to see in black and white. To look to the side of a star is to activate the rod cells, which are far more numerous than the cones, extending to some unfathomable 120 million in number. The star comes into sudden, startling, sparkling view through the effect of what is termed ‘averted vision’.
A student working on Vincent van Gogh (The Starry Night of 1889; the view from his room in the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy; cypress, steeple, sky) used this metaphor of sideways star-gazing in the last line of an essay which approached the artist’s late work by turning to a context deemed peripheral to it, in the hope of seeing it more clearly.22 Fiona Saint-Davis’s essay was entitled ‘These Stupid Sketches’: New Perspectives on the Drawings sent by Émile Bernard to Vincent van Gogh in 1888 on the Theme of Prostitution. It was submitted as part of her undergraduate coursework at the University of Plymouth in 2017. The work has since developed into a study of van Gogh in the political context of Boulangism The peripheral context she focused on was that of political—not personal—crisis. In not looking at what others have strained to see—the man, the life, the star—van Gogh appeared anew.
In a letter to his brother of 1888, van Gogh says this:
‘But the sight of the stars always makes me dream in as simple a way as the black spots on the map, representing towns and villages, make me dream.
Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France.
Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star. What’s certainly true in this argument is that while alive, we cannot go to a star, any more than once dead we’d be able to take the train. So it seems to me not impossible that cholera, the stone, consumption, cancer are celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, omnibuses and the railway are terrestrial ones.
To die peacefully of old age would be to go there on foot.’ 33 http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let638/letter.html. Retrieved 8 October 2021.
In a dark little image of 1882 van Gogh drew an old woman on foot, walking alongside a pregnant woman that may well have been Sien Hoornik, the mother of one surviving child (a further two had died), carrying a second by a man who had left her, who van Gogh took into his home in The Hague in the same year. He wrote to his brother about her: her prostitution, her precarity, her need for care.44 http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let224/letter.html. Retrieved 8 October 2021. He had come across her in the street, a peripheral figure who ‘caught my eye because she looked so ill’. He had encouraged her to rest, to bathe, to eat, to ‘take… as many fortifying remedies as I could afford’. She had, he said, attached herself to him ‘like a tame dove’—coo, coo.
The pregnant woman in the drawing is like a bird, her hair and ears concealed under a dark scarf stretched tight around her head, smooth as if feathered; her sharp nose in profile, a beak. She walks in step with the old woman—her mother, perhaps (van Gogh would write bitterly of the ‘too fatal rapport’ between Sien and her mother, ‘those two must go together down the wrong or right road’55 http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let381/letter.html. Retrieved 8 October 2021.)—a kettle of water in one hand, the other resting on top of her pregnant belly. Both women are deep in thought; neither looks at the other or at the artist. They stare instead at the ground ahead, their feet protruding from their long dark skirts. Exhausted, worn-down, drawn, they push on.
On and on… I think of Sien in ‘celestial locomotion’, sick with venereal disease, with poverty, with pregnancy, hurtling towards a star; surviving her confinement in the Academisch Ziekenhuis, a teaching hospital in Leiden that van Gogh took her to where she was treated by Professor of Obstetrics Abraham Everard Simon Thomas, who turned her baby by forceps some weeks before she was due; surviving the birth of her son; surviving van Gogh’s departure for Drenthes; surviving a return to the life she had been living before his protection, with another child to care for; drowning herself in the River Schelde in 1904.
‘Then the trav’ller in the dark / Thanks you for your tiny spark / He could not see which way to go / If you did not twinkle so.’
How to navigate the body, sea, sky, space?
Retinoscope
Telescope
Microscope
Speculum
Star
How to see in order to know?
Social histories of art which shift back and forth, adjusting, adjusting, between the work of art and the political crises that surround it are histories produced by the over-one-hundred-million rods of the eye; they turn to the periphery in order to see the centre—the twinkling star of the painting, drawing, photograph…—in ever greater focus.
Averted vision can produce other histories, too.
I lack what is termed ‘visual acuity’ or clarity of vision, My ametropia (meaning errors in how the light is refracted in each of my eyeballs) is so severe that I cannot see anything in any detail beyond the tip of my nose. Myopia did not come to me; it was me, though it was not diagnosed until I was four years old. Before the optician’s gift of vision my world was riven in two: a realm of tiny and extraordinary detail, of safety, intimacy, proximity, and that which lay outside it, an immense, unnavigable beyond.
‘Look left… Look right…’
I cannot think of my childhood optician apart from her terrible death; her daughter, left behind.
‘Up… Down…’
The cool of her fingertips as they lifted my lids; the light in her voice as she examined me in the dark.
She would have loved to have known the mother I would become, to have peered with her lamp into my daughter’s all-seeing eyes.
In a drawing of pencil and watercolour of 1910, Egon Schiele depicts a woman on a chair, naked apart from a gown about her shoulders, one hand also resting on top of her pregnant belly. Her eyes are swollen with exhaustion and yet, she looks back. Though seated, she lists to one side, to stretch, to open out, to make room, somehow, for the baby inside, turning, pressing, pushing against the womb that is closing in.
Confinement.
Schiele, like van Gogh, had taken a pregnant woman he was in a relationship with to a maternity hospital.66 The Body Electric: Erwin Osen and Egon Schiele, Leopold Museum, Vienna, 16 April to 26 September 2021. Co-curated by Gemma Blackshaw and Verena Gamper, it included drawings of pregnant women and newborn babies widely assumed to be completed in the clinic.
7 Walter Schübler, ‘Geniale Sprüche im Literatencafé’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 March 2019, p. 16. Liliana Amon, model, was admitted to Vienna’s Second Frauenklinik II (Second Women’s Clinic)—another teaching hospital—on 17 May 1910. Treated by Professor of Obstetrics Erwin von Graff, she would give birth there three months later. According to an autobiographical novel published later in life, she was already pregnant when she met Schiele.7 She gave birth to a girl who was noted as being handed over to the foundling home, but does not appear in its records.
Is the drawing of the woman on the chair, listing for her child, Liliana? We do not know.
The Frauenklinik was equipped with 200 beds for maternity patients and 52 beds for gynaecology patients. Beds were dispersed through large, open wards and smaller rooms for 1–3 patients. The clinic was for women across the social spectrum but through this spatial organisation, class differences could be observed. The clinic’s facilities and technologies exemplified the processes of professionalisation that were at this very moment in time consolidating the power of the doctor over that of the female institution of midwifery. These processes were bound up with the biomedical, technocratic model of obstetrics which pathologised pregnancy and birth, relocating them as experiences from the home to the hospital.
Liliana was one of many, sitting, waiting, watching, dying in a clinic that is everywhere and nowhere to be seen.
Look to the side of the woman on the chair, listing for the child she carries. Avert your gaze to that which surrounds her, a negative space, an expanse of paper, a context emptied of all referents, an ocean, a sky, a cosmos, an abyss. Activate the rods in your eyes to look at that which encompasses the object you want to see, to know—the woman with the tired, tearful eyes. To look at the abyss she is suspended in is to look at what Schiele—the clinical modernist, erasing the hospital environment that brought the image into being—removed: the chair with the back that could be lowered; the steps to climb up to it; the stool upon which the obstetrician sat; the desk behind him upon which he wrote his notes; the trolley for the instruments of examination; the stirrups for the legs; the window to provide light into the dark recesses of the female body.
Forceps
Speculum
Clamp
To observe
To examine
To see
To know
To be
Inside, inside.
On and on and on…
Look now at the star—the listing body, the turning child—no longer faint but a bright and tiny spark, ‘Up above the world so high / Like a diamond in the sky.’