VINCENT THE OUTSIDER

vincent van gogh

Am a little over a hundred pages into a relatively new biography of Vincent van Gogh, 2012, by two researchers who write very well. It is a thousand pages, enough to put me under. It's a paperback so big I can't hold it while reading with one hand. I stepped into it a bit uneasily, wondering how far I'd get in it before putting it down the last time. I've read a history of Africa that thick and a history of China that thick, and Tolstoy's War and Peace. It's not that I'm inexperienced with long books, just that experience tells me there comes a time in a really long book that I need a break. Reading War and Peace, I took a month in the middle of it, because I didn't want to finish it any time soon. Closing in on the end of it, I did not want it to end. At the end, I was at a loss. Couldn't read anything else for a month. After a long time of living in Tolstoy's writing, all other was so piddling, it's hardly worth the bother to read. I wanted more Tolstoy biographies, memoirs, letters. I even keep a National Geographic magazine among my books because it has a colorized photograph of Leo in it. He was some kind of wild man. In his younger years, he was military academy, fought in wars an officer on horseback, very well off and had a gambling addiction that took much of his land and fortune. He wrote stories that made him a popular Russian writer from the beginning. When War and Peace struck, he became a Russian icon. He was so beloved by the Russian people, even the Czar had no control over him. Anything the Czar might do to admonish Tolstoy for his independent minded writing would bring the wrath of the Russian people down on the Czar. His power would end that moment, which he knew very well. Tolstoy knew it too. The Czar could censure Dostoevsky and other writers at will, but had to concede Leo Tolstoy carried the real power in Russia.

vincent van gogh

It wasn't because Tolstoy was a great guy. He was not a great guy. It was his writing. He can create a world in your mind's eye that sees everything going on. I remember a girl dancing a mazurka to her uncle playing the balalaika. And I remember a wolf hunt, riding a horse, on the horse's back, the mane flapping. He put me on the back of the horse running all-out after a wolf with the wolfhounds leading. He put me on the back of a horse in Anna Karenina, running in a race on a dirt track. I don't remember his description of it, but I remember the feeling well. This was half a century ago. When I read his writing, I feel like I'm experiencing the apex of the human ability to tell a story. His characters come to life, live throughout the story and later in memory. I'm recalling the appearance of Anna Karenina. The man telling the story, a Leo Tolstoy sort of character, a version of himself, was standing before a painting of Anna Karenina painted by the Russian portraitist of the day, moved by her beauty which became universal beauty. A door opens, and Anna, herself, enters the room. The portrait was as nothing in relation to the living Anna Karenina. Tolstoy's long short story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, had a moment that has stayed with me like a part of myself. When Ivan's spirit was leaving the body, he felt like he was sitting in a train at the station waiting for it to start rolling. He thought he was facing forward, and when the train started moving, he was going backwards. I pick up a book by Tolstoy, and that's it. Finish one, start another. I think I have just about everything he wrote, including letters, on my shelves. He was a major positive influence in my life. I think I picked up Tolstoy the first time inspired by the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Martin Luther King's non-violent protest movement referred back to Gandhi and Thoreau, who were in line with Leo Tolstoy, the first non-violent activist.  

vincent van gogh

I've jumped into a thousand page biography of an artist who has spoken to me over my time visually close to how Tolstoy spoke to me mentally. In some ways, for the same reason, in most ways not. I find "the same" in them that they both are making pictures of life itself. For me, van Gogh's images have the breath of life in them. I feel his painting as I feel Tolstoy's writing. I feel like van Gogh painting flowers was a search for how to show their living energy with paint on canvas. His faces have living, conscious energy. It is the spirit of life I feel like he is attempting to paint on each canvas. I'd been curious about van Gogh for most of my adult life. Irving Stone's writing did not hold my interest. I never paid van Gogh much mind other than appreciation of his painting. I never took an interest in reading the letters with Theo. Didn't even want to see the movie with Kirk Douglas from 1957. I must have missed it when it was new. That was the year of the move from Kansas City to Wichita, during which I missed a lot. It seems like a time outside time. Foremost memory of that time was two weeks before the move, Kansas City tv evening news told about a nineteen year old guy killed in Wichita by a motorcycle gang and left in a ditch. The Fifties was a time of switch-blades, rumbles, motorcycle chains, white gangs and black leather jackets. The Fonze was not even a caricature of that time. Time went by and I decided to see the Kirk Douglas vision of van Gogh, Lust For Life. Did not expect the movie to be anything other than something to get information from, a brief pop culture rendering. Big surprise. It was quite a good film, directed by Vincente Minnelli. By the time it was over, I realized I probably did not see it then because it was an "art film" not shown in mainstream theaters, the only kind I had access to. Or maybe I did see it and forgot it like I forgot hundreds of movies seen in the 1950s.

vincent van gogh

The film made from van Gogh's letters gave such a good depiction of his life, it felt to me that Kirk Douglas brought him to life. It was one of those art of acting jobs where it is Kirk Douglas standing in for van Gogh at the beginning, and by the end it is only van Gogh. Kirk Douglas became him early in the film. Douglas and Minnelli, together, made a living portrait of an artist who painted life itself. I remember arguments from high school years about whether he really saw what he painted. Like, did he really see the sky swirling in air turbulence patterns? Yes, and no. It was how he brought the air to life. He gave the stars the glow we see in them the best it could be rendered two-dimensionally with opaque pigments. So far, in his story, I'm in his early twenties. I've always heard he was insane or something. Though, looking at it from afar, it seemed like in the movie he fell into the place Nijinsky wrote his diary from. I'm curious to see. So far, he's no weirder than a nerd. He liked to take long walks in the country when he was a kid, a loner. AP Carter of the Carter Family took long walks in his boyhood, quit school because he was tired of being bullied as a nerd. Leo Tolstoy comes to mind reading this biography for the clarity of the writing and how the two authors bring characters to life in the telling. Every time I pick up the book, I fall right into it. This doesn't happen very often. It's almost like seeing it as a movie in my mind's eye. By age twenty or so I felt like I knew him, the person, felt like I understood what he was going through. He came from people who did their duty by church and by society, locked themselves into rigid roles. Little boy comes along, whose soul came from a very different experience, whose mind can't reconcile what school and church teach with how he was expected to act within very strict confines. He was born an independent thinker. Nineteenth Century Europe had no more regard for the independent thinker than USA today. He didn't get it, couldn't get it, couldn't fake it, couldn't lock on those chains. His story is that of an outsider. All he needed was understanding. As far as I can see, he never got it. William Blake was the same. He found his understanding in Kate. Van Gogh never found a Kate. 

vincent van gogh himself

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MEN AND OPINIONS

ellsworth Kelly

I woke this morning entertaining the question of how many centuries it will take for men to heal from several millennia of the male role being about war, killing and being killed. I've always disliked the song Onward Christian Soldiers. Marching as to war does not define the spiritual path for me. Yesterday I saw in some brief video an image of soldiers marching in a parade. Such images disturb me deeply. It tells a belief system I don't believe, can't believe, won't believe, and really don't like being subject to. I especially don't like our time now when our corporate government attacks poverty stricken, defenseless countries for the profits of oil corporations, jet fuel, ship fuel, automobile fuel, keeping the stock market going, then loses the war against people with no allies, using weapons taken from dead American soldiers. It's shameless, but it's how police state functions. The prophesy for our time has been fulfilled like a checklist up to the big war that will make survivors round the globe set the determination to be done with war. That's the day I have waited for all my life. I dread the war that gets us there, but like it's said, All's well that ends well. Maybe. I'm not so sure about that, but it sounds good. Its like saying the end justifies the means. Not necessarily. I take them both for self-serving self-justification. All these old bullshit beliefs about the glory of killing and the glory of being killed will fade into history with nationalism and patriarchy. I celebrate it because it's not far away. It doesn't mean the solution to all problems, but it's a solution to a major problem that creates millions of other problems in its wake.

 

 

alex katz

 

I project that men will heal from a culture of obedience training for men. I ask myself what is the problem with men up in years. It seems like their brains atrophy and they go nuts. But I don't think that's it. From childhood, a boy's mind is atrophied. Little man gotta grow up and be a big man, carry a gun, shoot people, get drunk on power over women and children, define any sensitivity to others feminine, thus unworthy of consideration. In the masculine mind as it has evolved unto today, the feminine is outside consideration, not a concern, stupid because women don't know nothin. Art comes under the feminine. It means paying attention to something besides the crosshairs. Shutting off the feminine ultimately shuts down feeling in oneself. In the soul, we have both, or neither, depending on how you want to look at it. To shut down the validity of half of one's self is ignorant to start with, dumb as hell to carry on and just plain stupid to live with. A man gets up toward 70 and a lifetime of believing in obedience over conscience makes an ideologue of the negative mind; hence, Faux News. I've had to tell a few of my friends over time, Rush Limbaugh is not information. Growing up in a world of boys becoming men, I learned at a certain point, late teens, that it is important to have opinions. I tried it. I've finally come to see that opinions are the same as nothing. Someone who used to be a friend made me so tired of his own opinions being fact and everyone else's opinions nonsense, that I called him one day on his superior attitude, which I'd learned many years before was a defensive mask. He turned, walked away and has had nothing to do with me since. I mentally pumped a fist in the air and said, Yes! It's been over two years and I've not missed him a minute of that time.

 

robert indiana

 

We were both of anti-war mind. I went to the 1968 march on Washington over Viet Nam, like it mattered. The next day I learned it did not matter. That event was the beginning and end of my involvement in anything political. He went to U of Tennessee and was involved in demonstrations there, his moment of glory placing a flower in a National Guardman's rifle barrel. I remembered seeing on the front page of the newspaper in that time a photo of a guy at U Tenn with the same color hair putting a flower in a rifle barrel during a demonstration. I've often wondered if that had been him ten years before I knew him. My figuring is it was the hip, cool thing to do and hundreds of flowers were put in rifle barrels. Hippies thought flowers were so cool. They are, but not used politically. His self definition is, "I'm a revolutionary." It was another moment in life of controlling my face so laughing my ass off inside doesn't show. Our "friendship" was much like the friendship between van Gogh and Gauguin. Watching the film, Lust For Life, with Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn, directed by Vincent Minnelli, 1956, I found van Gogh's issues with Gauguin's arrogance very much the same as mine with friend. His two songs are: Anything you can do I can do better, and Whatever it is I'm against it. I laughed seeing the relationship between van Gogh and Gauguin so familiar it was like a reenactment our story. His opinions of himself are quite out of line with what the people around him observe. As one who never learned to trust opinions, my experience knowing him so many years has trained me to give no value to any opinion. It doesn't mean I don't have opinions aplenty. It means I don't value them. I write opinions here, and I speak opinions talking with friends, but I don't believe them, don't hold them dear as Mine.

 

rufino tamayo

 

Isn't it curious: Mine as possessive, ownership, connected to self, and mine, a deep dark shaft with tunnels under the ground. I'm wondering if the cold dark mine makes an image to define the possessive mine. Among the first things we teach babies is "mine" and the next thing is "share." Does this mean I need a miner's lantern to go into what I mean when I say mine. I see a cd case for Santana I call mine, because I paid for it and I possess it. Is it that the idea of ownership mine could be a root system into my own psychic interior made of dark tunnels? I'm thinking that since they are the same word, there must be some connection. It's awfully easy to make a connection, which makes me suspect I'm bullshitting myself. However, I look at possessive mine the way a baby uses it, holding the blanket close to her heart, "Mine." Those roots go straight to the heart, encase it like a net. Then we grow up into the world of everybody having opinions, and the opinions I hold dear to my heart I call mine. A network of root-like shafts around my heart like a net around a glass ball. Much of our language comes from pre-logical times. whoever called a deep hole in the ground a mine might have seen inside self a deep dark place where memories of experience lurk. Yet, in other languages the words are not the same. For me, that settles it. I'll take it for two different approaches to the word as two separate words for reasons to be found in the evolution of language. Somebody can answer that question easily, like somebody can answer where the lightning comes from. Just a passing curiosity around the nature of the ego, which looks awfully much like a net around the heart.  

 

 

tony smith

 

 

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