Medicating Van Gogh

I am making my way slowly through the massive (900 page) new biography of Vincent Van Gogh, which begins with a chapter about his mother - who didn't like him from the beginning, it seems, and persisted in disapproving of him and his art long after he was dead and his paintings were critically acclaimed and wildly popular.  The biographers have framed this book with that relationship, in other words.  They see his life as being one of desperately trying to Be Someone his parents could approve of.  I see that.  I tend to frame it just a little differently, as a man desperately fighting himself, his true self and his vision.

He went through intensely religious periods in his life, and tried to study for the ministry, to be like his father, but just couldn't make it.  At the point where I am in the book, 200 pages in, he has been increasingly envisioning It:  the divine essence, which he could see in everything, including the starry night.  And shoes. Below is one of many pictures he painted of shoes, which are discussed in this article in Harper's, if you're interested. There you can also see this picture large enough to enjoy the brush strokes.

Van Gogh's mother was thirty when she married, and first gave birth to a stillborn son, who was named Vincent Van Gogh and buried with a headstone.  Exactly one year later she gave birth to Vincent - think about it - getting pregnant three months after the labor and death, and gave him the same name.  He was a scruffy looking child from the beginning, with rough red hair.  But there was much more to her dislike of him than that.  He was odd; he just didn't fit in anywhere, school or work.  Weird folk, take heart.

His father, a Protestant minister, didn't prize him either, but I gather there is evidence that it was his mother's love he so craved. She represented Home, the insular parsonage, in which he never felt at home, so he carried a great nostalgia for it.  I am now reading about his early twenties; he is abusing himself with fasting, not bathing because soap is a sinful luxury, and going barefoot in winter. He is drawing more.  And painting pictures in words, in his copious letters to his brother, Theo.

Here's the interesting thing I keep thinking about:  Vincent suffered greatly from this rejection, and his temperamental inability to fit in anywhere.  Wanting to be like his father he descended into fierce religious studies.  He washed out of school, and began to experience the divine, to see and paint it - which he called It - in everything in an absolutely unique (insane) style.

And he would not have been that person if his mother had loved him.  (There's a whole backstory about her sad life, by the way, and the important influence of Dutch culture and politics.)  It seems to be his suffering from that profound wound that motivated his art.  People love and live with prints of his paintings who know nothing about art. I think we feel or intuit that visionary mind, that saw the divine in a sunflower and a star, and a pair of shoes.

So was that good or bad, that miserable childhood?  Were those descents into hellish depression and mania  and psychosis necessary to produce this art that brings a drop of spiritual insight into many lives? 

Thinking about all this I was quite struck recently when a friend posted a bit of psych nurse humor that said, "You can't fix stupidity - but you can sedate it."  Of course, madness has nothing to do with stupidity.  But it spoke to me, as a bipolar who had long hospitalizions in the hands of psych nurses. Scrolling through Facebook I sometimes hit on a land mine like that.  I didn't comment, but I thought, Just make sure you're not sedating Van Gogh.

The Nirvana Fallacy

Imagine my delight when I ran across the nirvana fallacy on Wikipedia!  (There, that's my one exclamation mark for this post.)  I am not making this up - here it is, not as a Buddhist idea, but one on the list of accepted fallacies.  It is the error of  -

comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives. . . . [in working any problem] the choice is not between real world solutions and utopia; it is a choice between one realistic possibility and another which is merely better.

Now, turn from Western philosophy to the Tibetan teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, which I did yesterday on my iPad, for a while back I bought vol. 2 of his collected writings, a big book, a great bargain. I love reading it on this thing, being able to leave notes and highlights and not bother Tom if I'm reading in bed (it is backlit). And I really enjoy his unique, colloquial voice, which has been preserved in these carefully edited talks.  I happened to have left off last time reading about work.

Strangely enough the transcendental thing, the profound thing, exists in the kitchen sink, in the factory. It may not be particularly blissful to look at; it may not sound as good as the spiritual experiences that we read about, but somehow the actual reality exists there, in the simplicity of people and working with people and dealing with every problem that we are given. . . . The people who wrote the Vedas and the Dhammapada and all the scriptures were not intellectual, high-strung people.

Just the other day I found myself in an interesting conversation about this at brunch.  My friend, who teaches yoga, brought up the subject of nirvana, and stages of levels of bliss, or perhaps higher consciousness, that they work to attain in her discipline.  So I tried to explain how Zen teachers work to get us grounded in this. I quoted the line from Hakuin's Song of Zazen:

         This very place is the lotus land!

All this seemed to be news to the man sitting beside us, who had been talking about how bad a particular bar is to do karaoke in, and who asked a lot of questions that encouraged us, not to spar, but to explain our particular spiritual paths.

Most certainly I do not reject bliss when it comes my way, don't get me wrong. But you need to be careful with it. A well-rounded spiritual experience can leave you with your feet barely touching the ground and a disinclination to take the trash to the curb. But life is about carrying out the trash.  In fact, we are made of what was once dirt and (as the Zen Masters like to say) shit.  Trash, and these bodies will become trash again, to enter the great cycle of fertilizing life.

About Stanley in the cartoon above - what is his true self at the end of all his effort?  The guy with a briefcase and umbrella and morning news, in a suit, on his way to work.  Getting to know and be that guy through and through, or that crazy poet or politico or accountant or dog breeder that you are, that's the work.