MY FIRST VAN GOGH
“It is
sometimes so bitterly cold in the winter that one says, `The cold is too awful
for me to care whether summer is coming or not; the harm outdoes the good.’ But
with or without our approval, the severe weather does come to an end eventually
and one fine morning the wind changes and there is the thaw. When I compare the
state of the weather to our state of mind and our circumstances, subject to
change and fluctuation like the weather, then I still have some hope that
things may get better.” – Vincent van Gogh, letter to his brother Theo (1879)
My first Van Gogh,
a crumb
toured o the provinces from the table
of Solomon R. Guggenheim
Landscape with Snow, Paysage enneigé
1888, two years before
his death. A man walking his dog in the distance
the pain applied like stab
wounds and the raw
canvas peering
through as the dirty slush
grey
like yesterday’s newspaper.
Not as alive as the
whirling stars
and dancing cypresses of
Arles, but you see
through that tiny
window 38.2 x 46.2 cm
what he saw
long before neuroscience
realised that the brain
draws no
distinction between
physical and emotional
pain
that the world hangs together with
sutures of colour
and the colour
cries out in agony
if you
have eyes to hear.
That’s not madness
(he couldn’t work
when he was bad):
that’s absolute crystalline
sanity.
It tells us that snow is
cold
but human hearts burn.
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