Suffering As Sunflowers and Suffering Servants Do
Vincent suffered so that his admirers could enjoy
what he could never sell, but brilliantly painted,
suffering, which can be thought painful, a successful ploy,
even if its victims haven’t by the Church been sainted.
Sunflowers: a favorite object he portrayed eleven
times. Perhaps he thought they suffer, since like Icarus
they try but fail to reach the sun, like most saints’ heaven,
as he tried with his art, not like his father vicarious.
Before they start to wilt, sunflowers follow
the sun calamitously, like Clytie, who when attracted
to Helios was compelled to follow, as a heliotrope, Apollo,
perhaps inspiring Vincent’s art, as painfully redacted.
Sharing Nazi-proscribed yellow stars’ solacious color,
in Sydney Muslims globalized the intifada,
a policy approved far more in Qatar than, I think, by Allah,
whose worshippers Spain expelled before Britannia drowned Spain’s Armada.
Recalling not just sunflowers but Deutero-Isaiah’s suffering servant,
Jews also echo Abraham’s near-sacrifice, though of God’s laws far less observant.
As in four puzzlingly prophetic poems, labeled “Suffering Servant” by Bernhard Duhm, in Deutero-Isaiah we learn that the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his most beloved son would paradoxically inspire the sacrifice whose command God would order an angel to cancel.
In Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, Peter Falk, talking in English in this German movie,sees a yellow star that a Jew had had to wear during the Shoah and says; “Yellow star. I wonder why yellow. Perhaps because of sunflowers.”
In April 1885, the month following his father’s death, Vincent painted a still life of his father’s Dutch Authorized Bible. The Bible was in Vincent’s possession because he was to make sure it got to his brother, Theo. He placed the Bible propped up on a cloth-covered table with a single burnt out candle next to it and a yellowed copy of La Joie de Vivre, written by Emile Zola, sitting on the table in front of it. Vincent’s Still Life with Bible symbolizes Theodorus van Gogh’s faith.
Julian Barnes, reviewing Ever Yours: The Essential Letters by Vincent van Gogh, edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker and Van Gogh: A Power Seething by Julian Bell (“Selfie with ‘Sunflowers,’” LRB, 7/30/15) writes: “The life gets in the way as well. We have become over-familiar with the lineaments of the biography. The poverty, the rage, the despair, the prostitutes, the madness, the ear-cutting, the suicide; the lifetime of apparent failure followed by a deathtime of astonishing success. Back-projecting, we read the painter’s encroaching madness into the paint: those whirls and and whorls and disturbed trenches of paint, those black skies, those blacker crows taking off across the wheatfield.”
He suffered so that we might enjoy. Inevitably, we are tempted to equate the madness with the genius, to propose Van Gogh as the ultimate modern exemplar of the myth of Philoctetes: of the wound and the bow. And if that now feels a little dated, a little obviously reductive, the furious belief in the locatability of artistic creativeness remains, and has lately moved into genetics. A recent study of 86,000 Icelanders purported to find that those with genetic risk factors for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder appear to have a greater chance of being creative. But sometimes the archer pulls the bow despite the wound rather than because of it. This is certainly what the painter himself thought.
Less than three months before his death, Vincent wrote to Theo: ‘Ah, if I’d been able to work without this bloody illness! How many things I could have done …’ One of Van Gogh’s uncles went to pieces and killed himself, while his sister Willemina was committed to an asylum in 1902 and spent 39 years there in near-total silence. Neither of them painted much.
This seems to me to prove that it was madness which ran in the family rather than creativity.