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Jul 13, 2008

Van Gogh searches high and low for his missing ear.

It's been years. He's heard tales, through his good remaining one and his ragged earhole. How it was seen in a Shanghai marketplace, sold to a coolie for an aphrodisiac; how it was esteemed a dried relic of a saint, pinched by monks and locked away in mossy old church outside gray Kiev; how it washed up on the the cold shingle of an Arctic bay and was disdained by a shuffling, narwhal-scarred walrus.

Not being a complete stooge, Van Gogh never really followed up these leads. But he could have, for he is sentenced to walk the earth and never die until he can find and reattach his missing ear. So he's got the time. When he finds it, the legend says, it will spring up from its dried and dessiccated state and become new and pink again. All he needs to do is place the husk next to the hole, next to its former perch, and it will magically reattach, magically cleave again to the skull which sprouted it.

In the meantime, Van Gogh has made do with various contingency ears. Driving along in his van, he spies the ear from the David Lynch movie. Just lying in a field. (Nearby is the penis of an unfaithful man, hurled from the car window of a righteous housewife.) This ear, however, only hears Roy Orbison's "In Dreams", and the hrrrrr of some gas or other being inhaled from a face mask.

Outside Hiroshima, 1945: Van Gogh had gone there to paint the atomic blast. He missed it by a couple of hours because of a sleepy river ferryman on the way over. But he did find a bunch of ears that were only slightly singed, so he fitted one on. This one heard shamisen music and the sound of screams, and a kind of subsonic thundering which never quite went away, and it sort of burned and felt funny...his hair started to fall off, so he had to remove the ear and drop it into a volcano before the household gods of the woman to whom it belonged forgave him and cured his radiation sickness.

He had a scrap of dusky ear from outside a boxing match...that one only heard flat, hard, packing sounds and the roar of a consterned audience. He had a scrap of a pointed one, which was latex-like and discerned very high frequencies, but only logic. He had a little beany with big round black circles on it which he got from a park in California...but those ears didn't hear anything -- and the effect, when viewed in the mirror of the men's bathroom, was more frightening than comical, so he went around calling "Vincent!" until some kid turned around, and he thrust the ears at him and walked off quickly.