The artwork lets us know what shoes are in truth. Art a circle; circles in this circle. Artworks shipped like coal from the Ruhr, Hölderlin’s hymns packed in soldier’s knapsacks during the First World War. Beethoven’s quartets lie in storerooms like potatoes in a cellar. The far-spreading, ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. A thingly thing-being, the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. A workly work-being, the silent call of the fallow desolation of the wintry field. The certainty of bread. The menace of death. We hesitate to call God a hankering after the irrational,…