1000 Words: Van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Crows"

Prose to the Painting

Vincent Van Gogh’s “Wheatfield with Crows”

“Who knows of the poet? Only the tomb?”

Is it the Raven’s claw, smooth and inviting? Holding a jewel, sucking in all light, belching out its kaleidoscopic fragments, blasted from the guts of sorrow, the illumination of struggle?

I return to here to work. My fate, my assassin is well known to me. Now, do I greet him as a friend? Shall I recognize that soul as my very own? Shall I see him and instantly realize I am only alone, staring back at myself–as if peering into the mirror?

No, he need not look like me. Any physical resemblance is purely coincidental. Where as my hair may be thinning and pulled back, fiery and greased, his may be jet-black, polished from the wind, shiny as hot metal and fine.

I digress. I greet him as a predetermined thing. A fate that one can never escape. To try would be foolish. I must greet this wicked fate, this wonderous climax as an inevitability. Yes, the poet cannot begin to write until he has accepted that his destiny is a damned one. And the forces which are damning are those indecipherable moments of solitude, which morph, shapeshift into liberation. Yes, the tomb liberates the poet as well as the painter. I speak in vague terms to arrive at the specific. I have no use for any type of exactitude, the intense measuring of my own suffering, or what we should easily call “existence”. I have no use in calculating completely what can only amount to a pitiful woe. Just one man on earth! No use in making a big show of it...  

So, it is here that I return to work. What has called me, this time? I ask this of myself. I have legs, luckily! Rimbaud! Poor Rimbaud. From old Charleville to Camden town, Stuttgart and Roche—to Africa! Your poor leg! Your infinite Season in Hell! Have you suffered enough, the crows ask? I am only wishing you and your poor leg well…

This morning, I have risen. I have had coffee. I have had my eggs, though I dislike them, for protein. I am running low on paint. Tomorrow I will go into town. Just down Avenue Marcel Perrin, and across the Oise River, down the road and past the square, the cafés, the Comtesse de Seguir and all, there is a little boutique for supplies. Whatever colors you think of! And if they haven’t the exact color for you, of course, they send for Paris at once! And surely enough, within four or five days, you have your alizarin crimson, your Turkish yellows, your cadmiums–oh, and delicious blues for the most open sky, open with its heart! And the deepest, earthiest of blacks. Incinerated. Decayed. Saturated within the gross stomach of a brooding, smoldering stew. Not that you asked, but a black is never a black. One may start with a little black, yes. Now add in your alizarin crimson, a bit of burnt umber, a touch of ultramarine blue. And now you have it! A black colour worth looking at. A color of black so deep, so intensified, so devastating, the crows all want to come watch. The crows give their nod in appreciation!

So, it is here that I return to work. I have made the field my life, I believe. It contains all the wisdom—of ancient soil, the infinite life cycles of the atrophied, putrescent worm, toiling in his dirt-tomb, writhing in puddles, drying in the purity of the Auvers sun!  And is it not true that whatever you make into your life shall also, in whatever way, ultimately become your death? If that is so, if that is to be the case, I submit it is the only way to die with dignity. And when I am stripped of my own sense of dignity, dear brother, that is when I reach for my revolver.

It is still morning. It is the morning of the day, the hour, the century–the twilight of my vanishing youth is still morning. Every last flash of light that flickers beyond the horizon is a cataclysm, a deluge of the senses. One believes it ought to be captured, but it is fleeting, unable to be readily translated. One must paint in vagaries! The poet must speak universally vague, but personally specific. It is a dance of sorts. A dance among the limitless cosmos, with its burning rings, its icy planets, its smoldering daisies, its exploding sunflowers.

But I return here to work. Lately, my hands have been on fire. I hold the brush, or is it more a cutlass? A scimitar for sculping my vagaries into color, light, form? I have returned here to work!

So too, have the crows! They have returned here as messengers of a puny apocalypse! Their dangling kaleidoscopic jewels are illuminating the infinitude of the field over which they hover, glide, bomb down, terrorize, protect.

For them, I have no malice. For my life, no malice! I can go on from here to paint many more paintings. I can use my legs and hands to carry me on to the plains of Africa if I should choose.

I could sit still as a crepuscular bird in the afternoon. I bring myself to the very brink of experience. I am not experiencing the field. I am not making mere resemblances. I have no use for “resemblance”. Only the thing which I do, which is not idly producing stroke after stroke,  but is stating my marriage–the marriage of act and being. The state of “doing” and the state of “being” shall forever be truly reckoned.

But this morning, I have no need to travel beyond it. Before is a road that reaches the horizon. I should travel it. But first to paint! All this verbiage does me less than single stroke!

“Oh, but Vincent! Have you returned here to work? How can one return to that which they have never departed?"

JSV
2024

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