Vincent's Yellow

Words for paint

For Vincent

I.
Smooth silky serpentine
Swirl of the tongue
Of the brush
Around and over under
Just up over the back of my ear
Wet
Salacious
Voluminous
Tickling me with
Color-saturation

Vibrant forceful virile
Thing
Like the crest of a wave
Overtaking you
Turning you over and around
In its insides
Like a lick of fire
Singeing the hairs on your neck
Yet you are inside the wet
Inside the insides
Like pins pricking
and daggers dragging
spilling your blood into the
mixture until
you are both
Inside Outside
Consumed Consuming
and we are dancing
swimming
rolling
fucking
eating each other alive

II.
You roll me around in your mouth
like nothing
like tumbleweed on rolling hills
and I fall deep into your chasms
and I bounce
Flying –
Fiercely –
Over your peaks

with long, wet, heavy seaweed arms
you wrap around me
and pull me over under into
your water dreams
the surface of which
impacts me with a bruising
strength
A slap in the
face
in the body

I’d go tumbling backwards
but your tendrils
yank me through
as though fastened to my
skeleton directly

There is no escape
From you
As you apply me to your canvas
Like paste
And string me through
Your fingers
I am your liquid color

And you will shape me use me
At your will
You layer me on thick
Or let me just barely drift on
Stretching
Till there is nothing left but a drop
A trace left
And then I am gone

You fill me
You buoy me
And then unravel me
into
nothing more
than
a sigh

I wrote the above poem just over two years ago, in reaction to these paintings. It was the first time Vincent elicited poetry from me, and it would not be the last. In fact, it is my favorite way to respond to him. Or as I once put it, I write back to him.

What some people do not know about Vincent, and something I surely did not know, was that he was a voracious reader. In one letter from June of 1880 he compares writing and painting, as he saw them as linked, and perhaps two of the highest art forms.

But you see, there are several things that are to be believed and to be loved; there’s something of Rembrandt in Shakespeare and something of Correggio or Sarto in Michelet, and something of Delacroix in V. Hugo, and in Beecher Stowe there’s something of Ary Scheffer. And in Bunyan there’s something of M. Maris or of Millet, a reality more real than reality, so to speak, but you have to know how to read him; then there are extraordinary things in him, and he knows how to say inexpressible things; and then there’s something of Rembrandt in the Gospels or of the Gospels in Rembrandt, as you wish, it comes to more or less the same, provided that one understands it rightly, without trying to twist it in the wrong direction, and if one bears in mind the equivalents of the comparisons, which make no claim to diminish the merits of the original figures.

If now you can forgive a man for going more deeply into paintings, admit also that the love of books is as holy as that of Rembrandt, and I even think that the two complement each other. [full letter]

The first time I really saw Vincent nearly four years ago in the Musée d’Orsay, my instinctive reaction was that we saw the world similarly, and that… as ballsy as it may sound, I write like he paints. I think what I really saw was that we had similar spirits and similar goals with our work. A passionate, spiritual non-fiction, if you will. For Vincent insisted on always painting from life, in fact on occasion he destroyed paintings that he had not painted from life because of that very fact. Except for the short period of time where Gauguin convinced him to do otherwise, Vincent was a man of the actual, the real, but also about reaching something higher… I have always felt the same about my poetry and my prose. And so, in this project, I try to reflect Vincent. I try to exchange paint for words.

I hope you enjoyed the poem, Reader. Now, I return back to my sisyphean task (as least that’s how it often feels) of composing a first draft of my play by the end of the month. I think I can in fact do it, but it will take an enormous amount of effort this week.

So, I speak to myself and to all my fellow artists out there now when I say… onwards!

Tags: art, cypresses, love, museum, nature, painting, poetry, Research, sunflowers, trees, writing

Time

August 25th, 2009
Hotel, first night in Arles
9:45am

I had a dream where I time traveled. However, this was no run of the mill time travel. I used no power other than my own force, my will power. I sat in a room and said to myself, I will go back thirty years to before I was born – 1979 – and I had some things to tell my parents. It was my first attempt, a first test. The room began to swirl, my heart pounded, I fell to the ground. I felt myself continuing to fall and fall, down through a series of spirals, then climbing up to a plateau. All this time I never physically left the room, my oldest friend sat there and watched me. It was as though the room had turned into a falling elevator – but she felt nothing.

Once I had recovered, was on said “plateau,” I began to write. I said nothing to my friend, but scribbled notes nonstop. She asked me if I was okay, I nodded gruffly. My head was somewhere between the past and present, what I wrote could affect the past. I took notes on truths I discovered, about what my parents did or thought. My words created the past, changed the past, knew the past like I never could…

Perhaps someone else out there knows what I mean when I say that writing is time travel – particularly nonfiction. I feel that I have always tried to bring my reader into my skin with my work, but with the subject of Vincent van Gogh, well… If his paintings transport me, then my writing must transport you too, Reader. If his licks of paint touch me through the threshold of his paintings, I must bring your cheek within his reach. The more I write about him, the more I have come to understand his spirit. It is not the details of his life so much that interest me, nor the details of his paintings, nor of his fame. I gather all those pieces, and bend them into mirrors. I use them to reflect his light from around the sphere.

For look: people used to think that the earth is flat. That was true, and still is today, of, say Paris to Asnieres.
But that does not alter the fact that science demonstrates that the earth as a whole is round, something nobody nowadays disputes.
For all that, people still persist in thinking that life is flat and runs from birth to death.
But life too, is probably round, and much greater in scope and possibilities than the hemisphere we now know.
– Vincent van Gogh, June 1888

The sentence I usually use to describe Vincent’s Yellow is that it’s about Vincent van Gogh, and the relationship I feel I have with him. I was recently asked if I feel that relationship existed when he was alive too.

Here’s the funny thing about coincidences: as they increase in quantity, they transform. A few years ago, I would have been wildly skeptical of most of the things I now say with ease, but Vincent, and Yellow, have stretched me. I have not seen his ghost, but I have felt his heat. I have had coincidences build up beyond reason. I don’t have a name for what’s going on, but I assure you, it exists. In reaching towards Vincent, I reached towards Nature, towards the Sun and the stars, towards the past, towards something greater and higher. Something has reached back and holds on to me, and has made my path very clear. I have continued and will continue with this project, because I don’t see any other choice for me.

So my answer as to whether this relationship existed while Vincent was alive is simple. Knowing this connection exists, means I know it existed before me. If it existed before me, it certainly existed before him. Honestly, I think it is beyond time. I’m not sure where he is exactly, except that I feel him near.

But to look at the stars always make me dream, as simple as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.
-Vincent, July 1888

Tags: death, letters, life, light, memorial, nature, stars, time travel, writing

Here we go…

But I must continue on the path I have taken now; if I do nothing, if I don’t study, if I stop searching, then I am lost, in misery. That is how I see things, persevere, persevere, that is what I must do. But what is you final goal, you may ask. That goal is becoming more clear, it will take shape slowly but surely, as the scribble becomes a sketch becomes a painting. As one works more seriously, and embroiders on the initially vague idea, the thought at first volatile and transient – until it takes on a concrete form.

Vincent van Gogh, July 1880

I opened a book this morning at the beautiful Deering Library at Northwestern University, and these were the first words I read. I thought it was quite fitting, given that today, as another playwright put it, the great work begins! By that, I mean I have begun a focused writing regimen of going to the library every morning (since I work in the afternoons), which includes voluntarily getting up at 7am. Not something I generally embrace.

Why do this to myself? Well, I have a self-imposed deadline to finish the first draft of the play, Vincent’s Yellow, by the end of the month. It’s necessary given the decision that the play will happen this summer. I spent all last weekend typing up all the various scenes I had tucked away in different journals, and all the ideas that I have been conjouring up for almost four years now. Yes, I remember it was April 2006 when I first stood in the Musee d’Orsay and my heart began to pound wildly. It still strikes me that that day I wrote in my journal that I had fallen in love with Van Gogh… Though really it was Vincent.

You see, for quite some time, as I read Vincent’s letters, it seemed there were two people existing: this idea of the man “Van Gogh”, and then the man who wrote these exquisite letters. Then I read his letter from 25 March 1888:

But — although this time it makes no difference at all — in the future my name must be put in the catalogue the way I sign it on the canvases, i.e. Vincent and not Vangogh, for the excellent reason that people here wouldn’t be able to pronounce that name.

A perfect metaphor for the misunderstanding of his character. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that he signed all his paintings Vincent, signs his letters Vincent, and yet we keep calling the guy Van Go — not even pronouncing it correctly (as was his very fear). Since then, I started calling him Vincent exclusively — except when people might not understand who I was talking about.

So, it was Vincent who took the blinders off my eyes, showing me color and Beauty. If it weren’t for him I never could have taken this video, of the sun emerging from behind the clouds on my last day in Amsterdam, and revealing one tree’s true colors.

The difference between dark and light often reminds me of the difference between a lot of art, and Vincent’s…

So one last thing before I go, Reader, I wanted to ask you: what would you like me to write about? My travels throughout Europe have, since I started this website, dominated the discussion. I’d really like a bit more dialogue between us, ideally, and fewer monologues.

Do you have any questions? Do you want to hear more about my writing? My research? I can easily continue on, giving you fun and (hopefully) meaningful tidbits as I go, but I would love to hear from you.

Please, let me know. It gets a little lonesome on this side of the screen sometimes… :)

Tags: letters, library, light, playwrighting, Research, sun, theater, trees, Vincent, writing