  If, following Heidegger, one attends long enough to the “nothing surrounding this pair of farmer’s shoes,” meditating (with sufficient patience and  care)[56] on “the undefined space” (PLT 33/GA5 19) in Van Gogh’s  painting—the strange space which surrounds these shoes like an underlying and yet also enveloping atmosphere—one can notice that inchoate forms begin to emerge from the background but never quite take a firm shape; in fact, these shapes tend to disappear when one tries to pin them  down.[57] The background of the painting not only inconspicuously supports the foreground image of the shoes but, when we turn our attention to this ordinarily inconspicuous background, we can notice that it continues to offer up other inchoate shapes which resist being firmly gestalted themselves. This intriguing phenomenon is more obvious in some of Van Gogh’s other paintings; that Van Gogh seems to have embedded his own hat-wearing visage into the sole light that illuminates his famous  “Café Terrace at Night” is perhaps easiest to see. It is clear that “Vincent recognized that something important happened in the old shoes painting, for he went on to experiment several times with the theme” (Edwards 2004, p. 51), and if one studies another of Van Gogh’s paintings of  “A Pair of Shoes” (this one from the following year, 1887), it seems hard to miss the faces half-emerging from the background in the upper-right corner of the painting, or the Christ-like figure in the upper-left.[58] 