Lost at Sea with Vincent

Posted on May 19, 2006 in Biography Hope and Joy Mania

I should be very glad if you could see in me something besides an idle fellow. Because there are two kinds of idleness that form a great contrast. There is the man who is idle from laziness and from lack of character, from the baseness of his nature. You may if you like take me for such a one. Then there is the other idle man, who is idle in spite of himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action, because he seems to be imprisoned in some cage. A just or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, fatal circumstances, adversity — they are what make men prisoners. And the prison is also called prejudice, misunderstanding, fatal ignorance of one thing or another, distrust, false shame. One cannot always tell what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us, but nevertheless, one feels certain barriers, certain walls. Such a man does not always know what he can do, but he feels by instinct: Yes I am good for something….There is something inside of me; what can it be?

Vincent Van Gogh

I imagine myself reading a passage out of Van Gogh’s letters to certain friends of mine. The exclamation sounds “Boy you can hear the mania in that!” and I say “Yes, but isn’t that what we miss the most?” Vincent’s words brush through like the colors in his paintings. He splashes us with his unceasing attempts to speak about his madness as a dispassionate observer of oceans might as he drifts in the maelstrom-wrenched north Pacific.

Forever and forever we deny our constant passions when we recall what we were in mania. I write now to seize the old intensities while in a spirit that will not go on and on, that is not shoving me out of my bed and shaking my legs back and forth along the length of the hall while I wave my arms and declaim a romantic clang of sounds to which my mind is inspired.

It is the loss of the madness that caused me to bore the brush through the canvas that I no longer mourn. The impulse to write remains as certainly as there is a nave beneath the tortoiseshell glass of the Saddleback Church. Some still call my ideas strange.

Two years ago, I was more focused and directed to the words at hand. I went places even if I did not always know where I went. Now it seems that I know that I am nowhere. Or perhaps I just prefer to not know where I am at? Perhaps that derelicting panic is better dispensed with.

Vincent Vincent Vincent. How well I apprehend you. The course of your disease does not surprise me. Your rants, your pain. They didn’t understand you is the common rebuke to the ages and those who say it are right. They beat you with indifference and starved you of affection. All you needed was art supplies and a room to sleep in.

And knowing myself now and remembering myself then, I think you would still have been a great painter had you been put on lithium. There was that village in Switzerland, but no one speaks of the calming effects of certain waters, only those of alcohol and absinthe.