Publishing this now even though it was drafted back in September and is mostly rambling, but I want to break the substack seal without overthinking it. Haven’t published in at least a year. Much has happened and there is no time (and probably no interest) in a recap, but wanted to acknowledge the length & density of the gap.
Anyway. September Emmy:
Been thinking about Van Gogh a lot lately. I went to go see the Cypresses with a friend last Friday and they were wonderful. I know he failed as a minister but I also think anyone who is able to paint a landscape where it feels like the trees are taking care of the people walking beneath them has at least some sense of Christianity.
Van Gogh would’ve fought me on this; when he was having his Christian awakening, he wrote to his brother that:
“Feeling, even a fine feeling, for the beauties of nature isn’t the same as religious feeling, although I believe that the two are closely connected.”
Early-twenties evangelical Van Gogh failed ministry because he gave up his parsonage (or the missionary equivalent of a parsonage; he was never ordained? idk what the word for that is) to a homeless man in town. Which panicked the church, who then fired him, he spiraled, Theo suggested he pursue art, he did.
What’s striking to me in these letters is how, in his wildly religious phase before he loses faith with the institutional church entirely, Van Gogh fully immerses himself in his faith, to the point of becoming convinced that art is antithetical to his belief. See:
“Let us do our daily work, whatever the hand finds to do, with all our might, and let us believe that God will give good gifts, a part that shall not be taken away, to those who pray to Him for it. And let us trust in God with all our heart and lean not unto our own understanding. God’s will and not ours.”
And then he goes on to say that he’s going to throw away almost all his books and (presumedly) just read the Bible; in later letters, he tries to get Theo to do the same.
He’s trying to implement a limitation on his attention; he’s trying to sketch boundary lines around what is right to absorb and what is dangerous, undesirable, antithetical. 1
I read the Amen Corner by James Baldwin earlier this year and I think I will be thinking about it for the rest of my life, not just because it is a very good play, but because the assertion at the core of it is that you can think you love god when really you love the illusion of safety. I’m reading a book by a gay theologian atm arguing for affirmative theology (in like, the 90’s lol) and he begins it by saying “the question behind the question that everyone is always asking is what must I do to be saved.” Which is also essentially what Van Gogh is asking (instructing) Theo. Where can I fix my eyes that will cause me the least harm? What can I look at that isn’t dangerous?
Which I think has less to do with “how can I be saved” and more to do with “how can I be preserved?” There is much less interest, for most Christians and humans, in transformation or redemption, than there is in staying safe, staying the same, staying alive. Sustained, not saved. Preserved. Which I think is an issue of both ease and evolution.
Anyways, Van Gogh gave up on all that, became a painter, and remained mentally ill. I really love the way he writes about his illness, because it’s always “episodes”; these sudden, intense, ruptures of mood. Very fainting couch, very “leave me to my despair.”
Again, his letters (this time, to Gaugin):
“In my mental or nervous fever or madness, I don’t know quite what to say or how to name it, my thoughts sailed over many seas.”
And then he goes on a tangent about Dutch ghost ships but I’m cutting that for time.
But for me that’s what those dips feels like. Like a haunting. Like something is happening to my ghost, or my soul (or, in Van Gogh’s words, his “ship”) that I can barely comprehend but can feel playing out in my body in real time, even though the whole thing is transpiring in the same kind of place that Van Gogh describes, a non-physical landscape barely legible to the conscious mind. Lots of images and sensation; very little coherency. Which may be the best way to describe mental illness at all; a rupture in coherency. Horribly and famously unnameable.
Also he’s surprisingly funny?
His letters to his sister have some stellar bits. See:
“Nonetheless I drink large quantities of bad coffee in such cases, not because this is very good for already bad teeth but because my strong powers of imagination in this respect enable me to have a religious faith — worthy of an idolater, Christian or anthropophagus — in the cheering effect of the aforementioned fluid.”
Which I love. But I think my favorite (or one of my favorite) bit[s] of his is this, again to Theo:
“Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way.
So now what are we to do, keep this fire alive inside, have salt in ourselves, wait patiently, but with how much impatience, await the hour, I say, when whoever wants to, will come and sit down there, will stay there, for all I know? May whoever believes in God await the hour, which will come sooner or later.”
My mom always described humanity as something G-d chose to create because the amount of love that was in the trinity was too abundant to be shared solely with three entities, regardless of their infinity, and that love was a muscle that demanded exercise, outlet, object. Hence, humans. Hence, life.
Which is not exactly what Van Gogh is talking about— he’s talking both about love and about direction, connection and observation, finding himself without a way to give form to all of the life he feels he has within him.
But I think what the letter keeps circling around and coming back to is not just that Van Gogh feels himself to be without direction but that he feels himself to be without love. He’s not just idle, he’s lonely.
Ex., later in the letter:
“But without intending it, I’m always inclined to believe that the best way of knowing God is to love a great deal. Love that friend, that person, that thing, whatever you like, you’ll be on the right path to knowing more thoroughly, afterwards”
—and then humorously goes on to name, not people, but three different types of art (Rembrandt, history, the Gospels) that he engages with in love, and how he finds that engagement fulfilling and inspiring— but ends the tangent with an appeal to Theo that hopefully he doesn’t think he’s too boring or idle. Which I feel like says a lot about his priorities.
Idk. I think the man was lonely. I think he had a lot of love and no one to give it to, and so he gave it over to keen and intense observation, which is sort of the best thing to do with love that you can’t give to a person. Give it to your experience, give it to the trees! Try and hope that eventually there will be people, too.
Anyways. The cypresses are closed now, you can’t go see them unless you go leave the country I think. But you can read his letters here and you can love the trees and the people where you are, probably.
Also, update from 2024 Emmy that I think there are like ten people subscribed at this point at most and most of y’all ain’t in Cleveland, but for those who are: my piece, “maundy, baby!” will be in a gallery at Understory opening next Wednesday, 6pm-8pm with a second showing that Friday, same time. Would love to see you, sneak (unfinished) preview below from when I was installing, honestly the themes of the piece are not that different from the themes I was writing about back in September so maybe for all my talk of density, that much hasn’t actually changed. New York friends, I’m preaching at Park Slope on the 26th and then Sawyer and I are performing ag’ape again at the Catholic Worker on June 7th. love y’all.
He does fully go back on this, eventually, and say “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,”