Lessons from Van Gogh: The Center Is Wherever I Make My Art

…domination is the one thing the soul will flee from.  It will stand up to almost any other trial, but it will depart rather than be dominated.  It will leave the body rather than sacrifice itself to light.

–       Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: The Black Madonna’s Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse

I find joy in sorrow and sorrow is greater than laughter.  An angel is not far from those who are sad and illness can sometimes heal us.  It’s the normal state that gives birth to painting.   A grain of madness is the best of art. 

– Vincent van Gogh

In the last year, marked by the sale of our Cafe in March, Orin and I have been “catching up” on the movies we missed while preoccupied by our business,  all during the earlier 2000’s.  This was not so much intentional, as something to do during this period of being stunned by the loss of the thing we had depended upon – possibly too much  – for the meaning in our lives. As we pay for no Internet services, we continue to cull the DVD selections at the Utica Library, turning up some gems.   Last week we watched  At Eternity’s Gate, (2018, directed by Julian Schnabel, starring Willem Dafoe)  that follows the last period in Vincent van Gogh’s life.  It proceeds on the theory, based on serious scholarship, that van Gogh’s death at age 37 was not suicide but he was killed, probably accidentally.  There’s a foreshadowing scene in which Paul Gauguin, visiting his friend Vincent in Arles, announces he has to leave for Paris;  Gauguin’s paintings are selling and so he has to be there.

By this point in the movie, we’ve already gained a sense of Vincent’s extreme loneliness; the film opens with his voiceover, “I just want to be one of them.”  After imparting his shattering news to Vincent, Gauguin implies that Vincent’s choice to remain in Arles, “surrounded by stupid, wicked, ignorant people” isn’t good sense.  Was Vincent’s death connected to his having remained in a cultural backwater among people who could never see Vincent as anything but weird, an object of scorn, a target for bullying, a scapegoat for collective aggrievement?  

On the other hand, out there in sunlit southern France, among those fields and sunflowers, van Gogh found his subjects.  Where we might want a mountain or an ocean to convince us we’re really seeing something, in those stretches of flat field, Vincent saw “nothing but eternity.” Maybe the darkness in the human beings around him, also in himself, was part of his subject, necessary, like the Bronte’s grimly beautiful moors, to the enduring beauty of his art, the fact that it still speaks eloquently, even to people otherwise indifferent to art.  

In our times of “extinction and collapse,”  some of us understand the move back to localism, including to  “back country” places, to be a means of reclaiming sovereignty and soul against centralized, corporate power and wealth.  Intended or not,  the movie about van Gogh may provide a clue to both the difficulty and the potential resolution for those of us who have committed ourselves to such a re-centering, including to a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, complicated environs of a city-without-glamor like mine.  The change required for this re-centering in a way that is inclusive, not aggrieved and divisive, nor escapist, nor even as foremost an act of resistance, is to fundamentally change the way we westerners imagine our lives.  What may be required is for people to see one’s place as van Gogh saw his, through application of imagination and art; by means of alive imagination to humbly make the place, its streets, people, its strangeness “one’s own,” sacred to oneself first.  To, by our presence and our art, change the relationship, making it, myplace, as the trees van Gogh painted were his trees, leaving room in it for all the others.  The invisibles of connection, worn down by centuries of the center being elsewhere – Jerusalem, Rome, Paris, NYC –   damaged by derogation of heart and loss of imagination, may once more be real.  This, at any rate, was the change Orin and I wrought in our relationship with Utica, by establishing our Cafe.

What the bumpkins of Auvers scorned as weird, possibly frightening,  in an otherworldly “spaceshot” like van Gogh was his invisible soul and its extra-religious mystical expression. Two centuries later, we don’t have to look to the ignorant rubes for that kind of scorn.  While provincialism is still real, raised as we are in neoliberal reality, taught to view the invisible world with suspicion, the scorner is also located inwardly, in – and at –  oneself.  Just when access to imagination and the creative spirit has never been more necessary, the entire society increasingly devalues the “domain” of art, except when expressed in commercially viable forms, such as popular music and movies likely as not made – or at least published/distributed – with an eye to what sells.   

One does not need actual “stupid wicked” people to afflict one for being weird; for most of us, there’s a default scorner within oneself ready to attack the nascent artist.  Speaking at least for my experience, “the artist” (i.e., the writer in me) is distinctly an other.  Because she does not think or talk just like everybody else;  she depends solely upon me to recognize her.   Because of this dependency,  my egoic will being too weak perhaps, or perhaps due to my having too little of van Gogh-type sweetness, I’m constantly tempted to turn against that other in me for whom the invisibles are real.  The weird one.  This  struggle, in abeyance during the Cafe’s near 22 years of existence,  has renewed itself in the terrible wake of loss of protection it gave my soul.  

That I experience artist as distinctly other is partly due to where I live, in remote upstate NY.  It’s also possible  the discontinuity with childhood imagination perhaps was severer in my case than for some.  The severity  had to do with my father who, like van Gogh, was a painter who spent many of his days sitting out in nature, sketching and painting.  Being his children, my brothers and I did not see this unusual behavior as weird, exactly,  though we had no more idea than anyone else we knew with what – or whom – he was communing as his pen moved across the sketch pad or the brush placed paint just so on the canvas.  His relation to the invisible, never referred to, thus had an effect on all of us.  Although, through personal charm and affability, and the achievement of a degree of local celebrity, he managed to “pass” in conservative upstate society, he could not teach his children how to have a relationship with our weirdness.  He left that up to us, a lot to ask when the culture provides no clues.

The poet Robert Bly, an admirer of psychoanalyst C.G. Jung, would have said my father had not “chewed on his shadow.”  Dad took his mother’s unqualified support for his becoming an artist at face value, (as who would not?) while his three sisters were allowed to become ghosts. Thus blessed, my father could not think of being a painter as weird, nor of creativity as means of transcending dark reality. There was no such thing as dark reality, thus the darkness we sensed in our mother’s unspoken anger, or our father’s, that came out only when irksome household tasks took him away from his customary “easygoing” nature,  turned in my case into menacing creatures of the night. By age 10, my imagination had become my enemy. Scorn, perhaps was our protection against darkness neither parent seemed capable of handling.Though they kept the lighting in our home dim compared to the fluorescently lit homes of my friends, the effect pleasantly chiaroscuro,  they in effect banished oscuro.   When I recall the terror that blackened my suburban childhood, that made me know I was different (defective), that alienated me from my own imagination –  it amazes me the success of our upbringing in barring from our conscious awareness the world of suffering and pain, and of art as necessity, as Vincent knew it to be.

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Despite the fact that the rightwing movement to undo American Democracy has used the symbols and language, clergy and churches of Christian religion to accomplish its aims (and could not have succeeded without Christian nationalist support) a real alternative to the unstoppable rightwing juggernaut will not come from (neo)liberal atheists and scientific rationalists.  Nor will it come from those who are simply indifferent to (or scornful of) the historic power of religion to enliven peoples imaginations and motivate them for good as well as for evil.

It’s safe to say we have the means now, though it has not been taught as it could be, within the grasp of every person, to free those symbols from institutional one-size-fits-all meaning – that is, from their being co-opted and used for evil purposes (for domination).  Based upon what we know from eastern spiritual traditions alone, not to mention from transpersonal and archetypal/depth psychologies, even non-practitioners can know it is possible for ordinary people, by encountering one’s own darkness,  to recover the heart that’s been abandoned.  If the right wins elections by manipulating the symbols for eternal, life-succoring truths that are the real heart of the Christian religion, then it seems obvious to me the left, rather than debunking religion,  has to find its way into the reality behind those multivalent symbols.

Traditionally, the task of contacting “eternal” reality has been the work of artists, poets, prophets and mystics.  Most people get no further than secondhand appreciation of that reality through their cultural heroes, which may also include public intellectual “renegades” like mythologist Joseph Campbell and depth psychologist C.G. Jung,  inspirational leaders in movements for peace and justice, scholars committed to removing the historical narrative from the exclusive  hands of the dominators, etc.  I include Utica’s Gene Nassar on this list, for his choice to follow the dictate of his heart and stay in the ethnic community in which he’d been raised, filling a teaching position at a local college  rather than take his scholarly talents to a prestigious university.   

You or I may not be gifted with the strength of will that carried these heroes forward against the dictates of their times.  However, for all of us non-heroes it’s possible to proclaim and act from a different, at once more vulnerable and more powerful truth than that of domination.  The “action” required  is simple: to liberate one’s own creative soul through giving it voice.  This is whether or not it can “sell,”whether or not you have talent – whether or not anybody is reading/listening – but simply making art as one’s duty, or discipline.  The duty, if you will – and I speak as one who’s gone AWOL on it many times –  is to the vulnerability of being weird, or perhaps, as Vincent thought of his art, one creates “for people who aren’t born yet.”

This difficulty I have establishing a “normal” relationship with my poetic soul, is not only mine. Many people accept the “division of labor” as given, leaving art for the charmed – or bizarre, or scorned – few. But  I believe the relationship matters beyond the meaning and sense of purpose in my particular  case.  For herein is the struggle for the “quixotic” goal of the better, interconnected world we of the “left” purportedly strive toward.   Here, in my personal psyche,  is the growing edge of consciousness, of human evolution. Here in my soul, is where the reabsorption of the soul’s knowing – or gnosis – into everyday living in one’s place on the planet occurs.  Arguably, it may be that van Gogh’s “otherworldly focus” as an artist, though such weirdness will forever be opaque to those who do not share it, is necessary for full return to the local if it’s to be not merely a change in geography, or a change in occupation, but a grounding once more in the real sovereignty of the heart.  We need our weirdness.

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Attainment to the reality behind the religious symbols being used so cynically by powerful people pushing a reactionary agenda cannot happen without the journey into the unconscious.  Without the discovery there of painful truth, and without the drive to turn that pain into art, there can be no freeing of the soul.  Until  hearts are restored to their rightful place we will be forever “regulated” by the laws and legality required among brutish people, ever engaged in enmitizing battle between pretend good and pretend evil.  Real evil – the evil of vulnerability refused – will continue to flourish as it did in the completely normal, non-abusive, idyllic  home of my childhood.  Anyone who wishes to dismiss such trauma as trivial compared to the suffering of all the oppressed in history, of immigrants and Gazans today,  is skirting the very meeting place of oneself with brutal history. The struggle for justice has to begin in the personal soul, otherwise, not going deep,  it rests upon hypocrisy; it cannot overcome white supremacy, or any such hierarchical ordering – the ego’s self-preserving lie – except through the revelation and seeing through of one’s own darkness. 

Van Gogh’s soul was traumatized.  It doesn’t matter to us how or why the trauma occurred, it did.  And just because his brother Theo was able to be a loving support for Vincent, does not mean Theo’s soul had not been traumatized. Trauma, in western civilization is universal and generational; both what we term the “good” of our civilization, i.e., democracy, Central Air and travel, etc.,  and also the evil and destruction, have issued from the reality of trauma.

Our Cafe, emerging practically inexplicably from the lives of two teachers, was born of the pain of traumatized souls.  Its beauty and eloquence rose from the ashes and that is why it made a place safe for souls.  In its aftermath,  in the extremity of my aloneness, a kind of self-scorning “thinking” I do has returned to plague me.   Like van Gogh, I write to stop thinking.  When I write, I, like van Gogh when he painted, I “feel I’m a part of everything inside and outside of me.” Though not endowed with a simple and giving heart, I become capable of a different kind of largeness than grandiosity, a different smallness than passivity – capable of simplicity and “happy-to-be-here” gratitude.  It does not solve my problems nor erase my despair, it simply provides a place where my soul is safe.  A place to start again.

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