My InVincible Van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh has been an important part of my life ever since I read Irving Stone's heart-pounding Lust for Life while a somewhat callow undergraduate music and literature student at Eastern Michigan University in the early 60's.


While plowing through those fiery pages each morning over coffee at Roy's Squeeze Inn, a boxy little diner just off the edge of campus, I got to know both the fabled, quixotic artist and the sometimes colorful, sometimes brooding blue collar laborers who hopped up onto those red vinyl stools and shared fragments of their labor-intensive lives with me.

One of Vincent van Gogh's more than 

40 self portraits -- a tour de force of 

emotional intensity. His weariness glows

like two hot coals from within the 

lined and darkened caverns of his eyes.

Over the weeks that it took me to finish Stone's novel -- while not doing research or working toward proficiency as a musician -- I could be seen trudging around campus with my dog-eared Lust for Life under one arm, a corn-cob pipe in my mouth and, on my shaggy head of hair, a wide-brimmed straw hat that could have been snatched from van Gogh's head as he dozed in a field on the outskirts of Arles after another of his incendiary confrontations with paint and canvas.


Later, as the fruits of my tree of life ripened and I gained perspective on the world  beyond the disturbingly obtuse walls of academia, I came to understand that those humble, unpretentious people, with their gnarled, work-stained hands and furrowed brows, would more than a century ago have been the very lifeblood of Van Gogh's passionate convictions about what is phony and what is genuine about humankind.


All of the truths of the man were brought home to me yet again on the 18th of March, when I drove down to Newburyport, Massachusetts and attended Doug Brendel's masterful performance of Leonard "Star Trek" Nimoy's full length play, VINCENT.


On the tiny, makeshift stage on the second floor of the Newburyport Art Association, the star-struck life and monumental accomplishments of the Dutchman came vividly and movingly to life. In the words of Van Gogh's younger brother, Theo -- and then the words of Vincent himself -- we were reminded in the most elegant and moving way of the almost superhuman strength and resolve of this emotionally scarred artist. How any man or woman could have managed to create such a stunningly beautiful oeuvre of masterworks, while in the throes of such daunting physical and emotional trauma, defies logic and begs an explanation for the mysteries of the human spirit. His end-of-life output, painting by phenomenal painting, was beyond prolific and miraculously brilliant.


And his portraits of himself and others had the very essence of what it means to be human -- to be born, to exhult in life's beauty, to suffer unjustifiably, and then to die -- pouring out of their magnificently rendered eyes. David Hockney, the fabled British semi-abstractionist, who knew his Van Goghs and his Sargents as well as anyone in the Arts, saw the same inimitable greatness in those paintings. " I would go around the corner [of the gallery], and there's a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it's not the level of Van Gogh."


We all know by now a great many details about Van Gogh's life -- his life-long struggle to please his cruelly judgmental parents, his enormous insecurities, his failure to find a lasting love, and his untimely death at the age of 37.


Vincent Van Gogh paid an exhorbitant price for his hard-won understanding of the worst propensities of people. As Don McClean wrote so eloquently in his magnificent song, Starry Starry Night, This world was never meant for one as beautiful as [him]." Let those lyrics stand as a paeon to a supremely gifted but deeply troubled poet of the brush and the palette:

Couple Walking in Evening
by Vincent Van Gogh

Starry starry night, paint your palette blue and grey,
Look out on a summer's day, with eyes that know the darkness in my soul.

Shadows on the hills, sketch the trees and the daffodils,
Catch the breeze and the winter chills, in colors on the snowy linen land.

Now I understand what you tried to say to me --
How you suffered for you sanity how you tried to set them free!

They would not listen -- they did not know how -- perhaps they'll listen now.


Starry starry night, flaming flowers that brightly blaze,
Swirling clouds in violet haze reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue.

Colors changing hue, morning fields of amber grain.
Weathered faces lined in pain are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand

Chorus:
For they could not love you, but still your love was true.

And when no hope was left in sight, on that starry starry night,
You took your life as lovers often do --

But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you!

Starry, starry night, portraits hung in empty halls,
Frameless heads on nameless walls with eyes that watch the world and can't forget.

Like the stranger that you've met, the ragged man in ragged clothes,
The silver thorn of bloody rose, lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

Now I think I know what you tried to say to me --
How you suffered for you sanity, ow you tried to set them free.

They would not listen -- they're not listening still!
Perhaps they never will.


(Song by Don McLean)


                                                                 -- Commentary by Ross Bachelder
                                                                     Berwick, Maine
                                                                     March 21, 2012