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Saturday, July 22, 2017

"My Mother, Heidegger, And Derrida" - Featuring Van Gogh's "The Potato Eaters"

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Heidegger

Image result for derrida
Derrida
My Mother, Heidegger, And Derrida
Educated at a school in Queens
whose slim roster of celebrated alums
boasts Don Rickles number one,
my mother knew little about art,
but she took me to a show
where she withdrew into private air
on seeing “The Potato Eaters”
and “Three Pairs of Shoes”
because the shoes resembled my grandmother’s
high-topped boots my mother knelt before
and laced up every morning
after applying salve
to those diabetes-ulcerated shins.
And the potatoes recalled the fires
she and her brothers built
against the curb:
charred skin, raw at the center,
and called “mickeys” in honor of the Irish.
My mother pointed out how the poor
have only potatoes for dinner, their faces
so rough they looked unearthed themselves.
And the shoes, ravaged by labor. Unlike Heidegger,
who said of “Three Pairs of Shoes,”
“From the dark opening of the worn insides
the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth,”
and utterly unlike Derrida, whose note on that painting
questioned what “constitutes a pair of shoes and how
the elements of such combine different forms of reality,”
my mother said they show how hard some people work.

"My Mother, Heidegger, And Derrida" read aloud by the poet: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/24/my-mother-heidegger-and-derrida


Potato Eaters
The Potato Eaters: Down To Earth

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The Potato Eaters
Van Gogh
1885
The Guardian


Image result for steinbeck go to the poor people save

"Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the earth."




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