American Noise

Wheatifield Under Clouded SkySuppose Gauguin had never seen Tahiti. Suppose the beche-de-mer and sandalwood trade had not materialized and the Polynesian gods held fast in the fruit of Nuku Hiva and the milk- and-honey waters of Eiao. Suppose that Europe during whichever century of its rise toward science had not lost faith in the soul. Suppose the need for conquest had turned inward, as a hunger after clarity, a siege of the hidden fortress. Suppose Gauguin had come instead to America. Suppose he left New York and traveled west by train to the silver fields around Carson City where the water-shaped, salt- and heart-colored rocks appeased the painter's sensibility and the ghost-veined filaments called his banker's soul to roost. Suppose he died there, in the collapse of his hand-tunneled mine shaft, buried beneath the rubble of desire. Suppose we take Van Gogh as our model. Suppose we imagine him alone in the Dakotas, subsisting on bulbs and tubers, sketching wildflowers and the sod huts of immigrants as he wanders, an itinerant prairie mystic, like Johnny Appleseed. Suppose what consumes him is nothing so obvious as crows or starlight, steeples, cypresses, pigment, absinthe, epilepsy, reapers or sowers or gleaners, but is, like color, as absolute and bodiless as the far horizon, the journey toward purity of vision. Suppose the pattern of wind in the grass could signify a deeper restlessness or the cries of land-locked gulls bespoke the democratic nature of our solitude. Suppose the troubled clouds themselves were harbingers. Suppose the veil could be lifted.