Bad Poetry

Van Gogh's Other Ear

Hello again from the far side of this semester at OSU. It has been a rough one, and one I'm not going to miss when it's gone. I'll try to post more often now, but I can't promise anything since I'm getting down to the end of my time here and have to worry about trying to get into a Doctorate program... blah blah blah. I know you're here for the poetry or whatever this is... so here goes.


Van Gogh’s Other Ear

You know, the one no one ever talks about, the one that was still intact. I figure it must have gotten pretty tired of all the attention given to the one that Van Gogh cut off in a fit of madness. “What’s the deal Vincent? Am I just not good enough to slice off? I’ve been robbed here, man!” (although most likely this was thought in French or Dutch or the language in which it chose to express irritation). Although some might consider the ear to be somewhat egotistical and unreasonable, consider that ears don’t often have a chance to be famous. I mean, if you were an ear looking for a break, your owner happened to have a disorder in which he chose to carve off a nice bit of cartilage, and you didn’t get the opportunity that was just dangling right in front of your nose (another bit of cartilage that might be a bitter), wouldn’t you have a few choice words to say?
In all honesty, if I put myself in the position of the shafted ear, I would be angrier with Van Gogh’s hands than with Van Gogh himself. I mean, the guy cut his own ear off! He probably didn’t have much control over his hands by that point. I suspect there was a deal between the now infamous ear and the hands that carved it off, hands that had long since achieved the fame and world renown most other minor body parts can only dream about and who were willing to share a bit of it with whatever appendage was willing to pay. I’ve got no clue what sorts of arrangements were made, but they were obviously satisfactory for both parties.
Perhaps the complete ear just didn’t pay up, and was mad because it got beat out by an ear who obviously had more resources and better organization. It knew that once one ear was gone it wouldn’t get another chance, because while one partially missing ear is an anomaly, two is not very unusual because it just screams “I’m trying way too hard to get attention.” In its final years, I’m sure it tried to rationalize the situation, saying that it was better off because it had all of its lobes and… that top part of the ear… and that it was better for hearing (which of course wasn’t as much up to it as up to the eardrum who stayed tucked away inside away from all the controversy). “At least I wasn’t born an eyebrow,” I’m sure it said in its golden years, which is true.
No one wants to be an eyebrow.

posted by Andy W. Anderson, Ph.D Candidate @ 6:21 AM