"Barry N. Malzberg and Jack Dann - The Starry Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

and she tries to remember the faces she saw in the painting in the museum, how the
exploding stars knit into shifting faces, shifting expressions. So she remembers that
and begins to feel funnyтАФa bad feeling in her stomachтАФand wonders whether she
should tell Mommy and Daddy that she might be sick. But, no, they were making
their noise, and so she won't disturb them. She will wait and see. Mommy said that
when Rachel got sick sometimes it was because she was a genius too, just like Mr.
Gogh.

Rachel stands still in front of her desk and raises her gaze to the window. She looks
over the sparkling city. Its gauzy lights are exploding too, but not like stars, in the
watery air of August. She listens to Mr. Air Conditioner making his gargle noise,
remembering the face she saw in the painting. It makes her feel tingly.

I'd better get into bed, Rachel thinks. If she was going to have what Mommy called
"her little episode," better to be in bed; but it's too late for that, too late to move, too
late to cry out. She gazes into the starry heavens at the face. She knows that face
now. Knows that it is not Mr. Gogh, but someone far away, someone burning with
God's true fire, someone just like her who is watching the stars explode again and
again and again.

Mommy and Daddy are thumping.

The air conditioner sounds like a squirrel.

God is knitting.

And her heart is beating so hard: exploding in the epileptic heat.



┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖


Recursion: The Secret Paintings

Winter in Saint-R├йmy and Vincent works in a white heat, producing thirty paintings a
day in his little studio in the asylum. Most of the rooms in the asylum are empty.
Vincent paints inside, in the crackling warmth of the hearth. His brother, Theo, is
writing him once a week. Theo is worried that Vincent is hearing voices and
hallucinating again, that he is overworking himself, overwhelming his fragile health;
but Vincent assures him that the winter light is invigorating and that standing in front
of an easel is a better cure than any medicine. He writes Theo that he is copying
work by Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Millet, and that this has led him to create smaller
versions of his own work, interpretations he calls them; but he gets stuck painting
The Starry Night over and over, even though he considers it a minor work.

Of course, Theo was right to be worried about him; but it is too late for that. Vincent
cannot help himself. He paints over and over the rising, living cypress tree, the
church with the elongated steeple, the swirls of stars in a pigment-swathed sky.
Interpreting interpretation, that is what it is, warding off the ever-imminent epileptic