Vincent

If you’re reading this, you can learn all you want about Vincent Van Gogh because isn’t every detail of every person’s life online now?

Imagine a medium where you can “Google” someone like the tormented, lovely young Vincent and the likes of Paris Hilton, all from the same sitting position.

I guess I’m just in the mood for Vincent today; his sadness, his health problems, his longing to know the mind of God; his soaring sense of the beauty all around him.

“When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.”

As I’m writing here, I keep playing the song written in his honor; so very melancholy, yet somehow hopeful.

Listening makes me less afraid of my own dark moments. Knowing that someone like Vincent existed and struggled in order to find the beauty in creation, just as we all must do, touches my heart. His noble journey to find the love each of us craves so very, very much is one I’ve undertaken as well.

So, I understand, dear Vincent. In the end, I am no different than you. Don McLean sings, “They would not listen, they’re not listening still…perhaps they never will,” but I bet they will, Vincent. I’m listening.

I read somewhere, “Every child is born with the expectation of being loved.”

As soon as we arrive, “we begin, immediately, to orient ourselves to our special humans, we greet them with adoration, and with the expectation that we ourselves will be cherished. Humans are born ready to love, and to be loved.”

(http://yourparentingsolutions.com/ages-stages/newborns/cherishing)

I don’t know if Vincent ever found the love he searched for. He certainly never seemed to love himself enough, or even his incomparable painting:

“The thing has already taken form in my mind before I start it. The first attempts are absolutely unbearable. I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real direction and purpose.”

He clearly knew, though, that love was at the core of anything of value in his life.

“The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”

He never gave up, either, even though he ended his own life, eventually. Somehow I can’t judge that as giving up, sad as it may be.

“I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may.”

Maybe if Vincent had lived in these modern times he’d have had access to anti-depressants and self-help books. Perhaps he could have taken seminars with Wayne Dyer and cheered himself up a bit. Would that have been a better life for him?

I would never presume to make that judgement. I try to avoid labels like better/worse or right/wrong. Who am I to say?

Vincent on Paxil but no “Sunflowers?” Vincent in doubt but “Starry Night?”

I don’t know which would have been better. You tell me.

“Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”

I wonder how many Vincents are walking around me even now? Who knows what the raggedy man at the quick stop has on his mind or in his soul?

“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything; based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.”

Just as he put color to canvas, he painted himself as well.

“Life itself is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily.”

Vincent sold one painting during his lifetime.