Posted by Mabie
last night sir mark broke my heart.
fresh from my creativity and problem awareness class, i was left reeling and in dire need of red horse beer — grande, please — upon the discovery of the “possibility” that vincent van gogh may not have been the crazed maniac i’ve always romanticized him to be.
this is my favorite painting of his, my favorite painting ever, actually:
in last night’s class, all that was romantic about this painting was ripped and shredded to pieces right in front of me. and all i can do was to don on that glazed, stone-faced mask to keep the tears from falling. i would have been very hard-pressed to explain to the class what the fuck i was crying about, first of all.
here are the things i learned in that session:
1) vincent van gogh could actually have been a very rational man. an utter disappointment, if i may say so myself.
2) december 24, 1889 – he experiences a seizure attack, to which he responds by cutting off his left earlobe (94 years later, on the same night, toffee would be born. and then 115 years later, my stupid dog shiine would be born. wow jesus, you’ve got a lot of company, for sure!)
3) may 1889 – freaked out that he’s got some inexplicable and potentially dangerous affliction, he commits himself into an asylum. take note he did this on his own volition.
4) june 19, 1889 – he paints my favorite painting, starry night, at 4AM (he was also insomniac).
now we’ve come to the crux of the matter. “experts” interested in the life and times of vincent van gogh delved deep into his condition and those around him at that time in order to paint a clearer picture of his psyche, confirm if they could that he was indeed a farkin’ mad genius, or debunk this very same prejudice.
this was what they found — which in turn broke my heart.
1) starry, starry night was not a painting based on his wild imagination, nor of a wonderfully visual hallucination induced by whatever mental illness he purportedly had. it was, in fact, a mere representation of the night sky as he saw it from his asylum window overlooking the town below.
this one guy (i failed to take down his name because at this point i was already immobile with disbelief) took the effort to actually “re-enact” how the night sky looked at that particular time van gogh did the starry painting and found that the van gogh stars were the exact copy of the stars that came out that eve, or at least as far as their positions go.
in fact, everything else was an exact copy of the view outside his window in the asylum. the cyprus tree actually did block a portion of his view, the rolling hilltops were really there in the landscape ahead, and the town did lay peacefully below. the only tweak he did, or the aberration, would be the church. its location was really on the other side of the asylum building, but he instead put it right in the middle of the town, underneath his vast purple-blue sky.
and that was no artistic impulse either, as it would turn out.
he was, in fact, making a commentary about the socio-political views existing at that time. science was making a dash to once and for all defeat religion, and putting the church under the sky, representative of astronomy, a branch of science, was a bold statement to the subordination of religious beliefs to empirical data.
at this point, the only thing left for me to cling on to were the swirls in the sky. unfortunately, even that would be pried away from my limp hands. as it turns out, the swirls were not an effect of his flowery visual imagination. merely, it was a captured moment when comets would form swirls of milky gas clouds in the sky.
sky farts, my bitter self would like to call it now.
i would have wanted to retain the impression that he was crazy. i like him crazy. i prefer him crazy. he was the embodiment of how maddenng it is to burst inside with creativity, that even the most convenient and comfortable of media is never enough to faithfully depict what you want to portray as you picture it in your head.
i’ve always identified this as the mad cow syndrome. you know why cows afflicted with mad cow go mad and end up smashing their heads against the walls? it’s because they’ve got an itch inside their heads, in their brains, that they can’t scratch. imagine an ant bite on your ankle, and you can’t bend down to scratch it because the national anthem is playing during early morning ceremonies at school, and you can’t do shit when the national anthem is playing because then that would just be disrespectful.
maddening, isn’t it? as if you’d just want to pee right then and there, given how listless you are, and how incapable you are of doing anything. of course, peeing in your pants in public is not an option. peeing in your pants is never an option, even in private.
that’s how i pictured it to be. that he was so damned creative, that at that night, he saw the night sky and saw swirls of whites and purples and dots of yellows and oranges instead of the solid blanket of velvet black that normal people would see. that it wasn’t enough for him to paint a straight out depiction of the night sky, he had to fucking prettify it, because reality is always more pretty in the artist’s mind, without being fake. that he was the best damned surrealist there was, thanks to his soft, short strokes, like a foreplay that makes a lover want more, and even when the lover’s lover is already deep inside, and she is left with nothing but to cling on to him for fear of losing herself in heaven, the nearness is still not enough. the oneness is still not enough. there will always be yearning, and there will always be more.
always more, always wanting, always anticipating, always, always, always. filling that unfillable void.
as it turns out, he just might very well have been a fucking fancy realist.
it will take me a while to recover from this heartbreak. and frankly, i am really in no hurry. i feel cheated on, and i know how it feels to be cheated on.
i know i am probably being unfair to van gogh for assuming he truly was a mad, crazy genius. after all, i just heard the rumors and believed it outright. he did not in anyway tell people that, “hey, am great. but am not gay like da vinci, so why don’t i just be known as the crazy one? character sells. that’s what am gonna be.” he didn’t do any of that. it was of my own volition to choose to believe he was crazy beautiful.
then again.
so it will also be of my own volition that i choose to be irrational about my feeling cheated on upon finding out that he just might have been a very sane person, as it turns out.
and later on, after my wallowing is done, i will choose to not believe that he was only a fancy realist, but that he is really the crazy genius i love.
