Life Among the Dead

<p style=”clear: both”>And this from the Writers’ Almanac for Tuesday March 30, 2010

It’s the birthday of Vincent Van Gogh, born in Zundert, Holland (1853). As a young man, he was deeply religious and went off to do missionary work in a coal-mining region in Belgium. One day he decided to give away all of his worldly goods and live like a peasant. But his religious superiors thought he was having a nervous breakdown. They kicked him out of the mission and he had to go home. It was then that he started to draw and paint. He taught himself with art books and by studying the masters.

Will I scandalize painterly and artistic friends if I say Van Gogh has never gotten a lot of my attention? I probably watched a movie about him, and I love some of his paintings, know the same stories about him everyone knows, listened once too often to McClean’s Starry Starry Night because somebody in my family of origin really loved that song, but mostly, well, he is neatly tagged in my brain as painter whose work is essential to cultural literacy, who changed painting. That he’s one of the artists who was having a Moment as I went to college, so that prints of his work were sort of de rigeur for dorm rooms, and that shouldn’t change the meaning of the paintings, but it was easier to pay attention to artists who seemed less iconic? Especially during that 18 year old land rush of cultural heroes as a way of staking out identity?

And lately I have struggled with mixed feelings about what happens when we (by which I mostly mean I) let artists’ (and by artists I mostly mean writers because that’s where I am living right now) lives occupy our imaginations, our attention beyond their work, their personalities ballooning and overshadowing the work by which they attained their immortality, the fetishizing, as if we could make the dead our personal totems and spirit guides. If I sound judgmental, I mean I struggle with it because I have this tendency. Which can obscure what is really there, just as surely as posters hung in dorm rooms.

It might be a whole other blog post, the emergent theme in reading lately of the audience of the dead, the hope offered in the literary biography, or my own observation that there is a safety in the swooning adoration of somebody no longer on this plane, because they’re not going to disappoint you, that the one-wayness of it is a built-in feature, you can identify endlessly, never be rejected.

Which, none of this was what I thought I was going to write about when I went and found that quote, one that startled me yesterday because I never knew that about Van Gogh, after all, and it suddenly threw into clarity for me that religious fervor has in common with the creative impulse and insanity the willingness to step outside of cultural norms, to leave the safety of the flock, and the fact that the three can be a little difficult to tell apart, especially if you have spent your life struggling to understand why you feel different from everyone around you, unsettling.

And I think it is a life’s work, working out what makes you different, what difference means. My eleven year old has a love of the glib right now and threw out at me a few days ago, yes, I am special, just like everyone else. There wasn’t a bitterness behind it, thank goodness, but it does signal, I think, the onset of those tricky years of struggling to define yourself, of being unable to take identity for granted, the increasing particularity about appearance and what it signals, the grade-wide choosing and unchoosing of friends as if they were accessories, the finding relief in expression, whether it is music or drama or drawing.

Lately the word that has settled in my head as a decent way of straddling the feelings of difference and knowing that your specialness doesn’t make you, you know, special, is self-possession. That the self-possession I am working on is the knowing what I know through my own knowledge and not what other people tell me, trusting my own judgement while knowing when to ask for help, and also whom to ask. It’s the skepticism of any thought or system of thought that is incompatible with humility. It’s the attempt to channel the impulse to give away worldly goods, or curl up reciting the Pilgrim’s Prayer endlessly, or to sever ears, into small acts benefitting the people around me. I know it has a ways to go, and also that I do catch glimpses of this quality in certain biographies and memoirs (like M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me!) And I think we are supposed to look for truth in the dust, in the completed examples of the dead, as well as in the struggles of our living comrades.