I AND THE VILLAGE
MARC CHAGALL, 1911
Alright, here we go. A guy with a bright green face, nose to nose with a cow. And they're dead serious about it. Locked eyes, a thin line drawn right between them like they're hashing something out. Then, for no reason, there's a tiny woman milking a cow, tucked into its cheek. Inside its face. Sure. Up in the corner, some lady floats by upside down, sawing at a violin. A house sits on its roof. Nobody in here finds any of this the least bit strange. So. Chagall grew up dirt poor in a tiny Jewish village called Vitebsk. The kind of place where you basically lived on top of your animals. A cow wasn't dinner, it was a guy you knew. You fed it, milked it, grew up next to it. So him, going eye to eye with this animal like equals? That's not a gag. That's how close it was. Now, everybody wants to call this a dream. He hated that. Not a dream, he said. Memory. And memory's a mess. It doesn't line up like a photo. It's everything at once, all the wrong sizes, the important stuff glowing, things floating loose because in your head there's no up, no down, no clock. He's not painting the village. He's painting what it feels like to remember it. By now he's in Paris, surrounded by Cubists chopping the world into tidy gray cubes. And instead of joining them, he paints this. Green and red and completely impossible. Home, the way it lived inside him. And here's what the painting couldn't know yet. Within Chagall's lifetime, the Holocaust would all but erase this whole world. The crooked little houses. The fiddler. The cow that was a guy you knew. The people. Gone. He painted it before any of it happened. Which makes this one of the last places it's still alive. A green man, a cow, and everything he couldn't stand to lose.