Wind at the edge of the heart, thoughts about Van Gogh and ourselves
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Wind at the edge of the heart, thoughts about Van Gogh and ourselves

During the spring of 1967, on my way to lunch at the University of Alaska Student Union building in Fairbanks, I came across a recently published Popular Science magazine featuring a story about a new French invention. The article described a device that used infrasonic sound waves controlled in such a way that they emitted varying degrees of intensity, and depending on the level, the weapon could cause vomiting, fainting, seizures, and even death. Scientists had discovered these ultra-low frequencies in the prevailing winds of southern France, known as Mistrals.

I was particularly excited to stumble upon this article. As a student of painting and music, he had no interest in weapons and, at the time, little interest in science, but I was captivated by what he read. Like many young art students, he was under the spell of the French expressionist Vincent Van Gogh. Perhaps it was the general tragedy that his life ended so young. What other artist looms large as the archetype of a creative and suffering genius? I read everything I could find, including the letters he wrote, most of which were to his brother Theo, but also to others. There were numerous letters to him and to others about him, particularly from the French painter Paul Gauguin, who briefly lived with Vincent in Arles, France.

I felt like I had stumbled upon the clues of my little Rosetta Stone. No one has been able to give a precise reason for Van Gogh’s journey towards madness and final suicide. It has often been suggested that he was an epileptic. When he was treated clinically in 1989, two doctors diagnosed Vincent with epilepsy, seizures consisting of acute mania with sensory hallucinations, particularly affecting sight and hearing. However, there is no indication that he suffered from epilepsy before his arrival in Arles. Others have long argued that his daily intake of absinthe was essentially what pushed him over the edge. Absinthe is a strong alcoholic beverage made in part with a poisonous and hallucinogenic ingredient called wormwood. I tend to agree that the latter is the strongest candidate, but in my opinion it was a combination of everything: the absinthe, its upbringing, the genetic fingerprints, and the environment of it, ie the winds.

In a letter to Theo, Vincent recounted that when he first arrived in Arles, as he was getting off the train, a man getting on the train advised him to go back to wherever he came from because the people of Arles were just a little weird. . This is not unusual and similar behavior has been reported in other areas where extreme winds prevail for long periods of time, causing anxiety and depression among local residents.

It should be noted that Van Gogh did not cut off his entire ear. He just cut off a portion. Some say the helix, the top of the outer ear, and some say the lobe, what we call the earlobe. In any case, doing so and sending it to a prostitute in a small box, as well as his general antisocial behavior in the small town of Arles, led the good citizens to lock him up in the insane asylum in nearby Saint Rémy. Later, during his recovery, he asked permission to go out for the day to paint in the field. Earlier, during his time in Arles, it was not uncommon for him to spend hours every day struggling with painting outdoors, his easel nailed to the ground and his canvases tied to the easel to prevent the mistrals from knocking everything over. In this case, since he was mostly recovered, the asylum allowed him to spend a day. During this long afternoon of painting, the winds picked up quite strongly. It was reported that later that night, Van Gogh became terribly distraught and prepared to drink the turpentine from the painting of him.

I rather doubt that Vincent’s suicide can be attributed to a single event, but I find the poetic imagery imbued with the possibility of the artist being dismantled by the winds compelling. It is not a great leap of the imagination to see the mistrals appear in the paintings he painted while in Arles: the swirling energy found in the application of the pigment as if he were hearing the inaudible as much as anything he could see before. . to the. Did he feel the destructive forces of the winds? I’m sure he did. What a poignant irony that he tried to sever the organ that helps sound enter the brain and shape our mental perceptions.

When Vincent was released from the asylum and left the south of France, he went to Auvers-sur-Oise, fifteen miles northwest of Paris, and was somewhat under the care of Dr. Gachet. Within a few months of arriving, it is generally held that Vincent went to a small wooden shed, shot himself in the heart, collapsed, revived, and returned to the Ravoux house where he was staying. He died the next day. Monsieur Ravoux’s daughter, Adeline Ravoux, who was twelve years old at the time, wrote an account of the event some years later. However, buried in the original published letters, there is an account that he shot himself in the groin. How can this be reconciled? A plausible explanation: the date, 1890, was during the last decade of the Victorian era. This was a period of such enormous sanctimoniousness that even pianos couldn’t tell they had legs. Anything sexual or anything to do with those body parts was hugely taboo. It is more than likely that if Vincent’s injury had been to the groin, this would not have been discussed or disclosed to the general public, much less to a twelve year old girl. According to Vincent’s statement, as he lay dying, when he recovered from shooting himself, he tried to find the gun to finish the job, but couldn’t. The weapon was never found. In her accounting, Adeline suggests that Vincent did not kill himself; that he, in fact, was murdered. For whom?

Even without medical knowledge, one could easily assume that a man shot in the snout could survive longer than if he had been shot in the heart. Obviously, if he had aimed for the heart, he must have missed to some degree. If we assume it was a muzzle wound, we can only wonder why there, self-inflicted or not. It took him more than thirty-seven hours to die in extreme pain.

For a long time, many have believed that Van Gogh was homosexual. While there is no evidence to prove this, there is no evidence to disprove it. We know that he was enormously fascinated with his painter colleague Paul Gauguin. In fact, after Gauguin left Arles, he wrote to a friend that on two occasions he woke up in the middle of the night to find Vincent standing over his bed. When he asked what Vincent was doing, Vincent turned and ran out of Gauguin’s room.

In her account, Adeline writes: “That Sunday he went out immediately after lunch, which was unusual. By evening he had not returned, which surprised us a lot, since he was extremely correct in his relationship with us, he always kept the food regular. hours. Then we were all sitting on the terrace of the cafe, because on Sunday the hustle and bustle was more exhausting than on weekdays. When we saw Vincent arrive, he had fallen at night, it must have been around nine o’clock. Vincent walked hunched over, holding his stomach, again exaggerating his habit of holding one shoulder higher than the other. Have you had a problem?”

He answered in a pained voice: “No, but I have…” He didn’t finish, he crossed the hall, took the stairs and went up to his bedroom. I witnessed this scene. Vincent made such a strange impression on us that Dad got up and went to the stairs to see if he was listening.

He thought he heard moans, he went upstairs quickly and found Vincent in his bed, lying in a crooked position, with his knees up to his chin, moaning loudly: “What’s wrong,” said the father, “are you sick?” Then Vincent lifted his shirt and showed him a small wound in the region of his heart. The father shouted: “Malheureaux, [unhappy man] What have you done?”

“I have tried to kill myself,” Van Gogh replied.

These words are precise; our father told my sister and me many times, because for our family the tragic death of Vincent Van Gogh remains one of the highlights of our lives. In his old age, the father became blind and gladly aired memories of him, and Vincent’s suicide was the one he recounted most frequently and accurately.

The young woman clearly saw Vincent enter, crouched down, clutching his stomach and in great pain, but did not accompany her father to the bedroom and only relied on her father’s words as to the location of the gunshot wound. This is how history has recorded it.

Here remains an old and unsolvable mystery. Did he, in fact, take his own life or did someone murder him? We have no idea where he actually went or who Vincent might have seen and under what circumstances. As it stands in the story, all of this, his neural highway shattered by infrasonic sound waves and his sexual encoding, could mean little in the shadow of his monumental genius and what he left us. On the other hand, it is worth reflecting on any mystery or the possibility that Vincent ended his life for not finding a way to express the most fundamental of human nature: sexual identity.

Societies and their cultural skin have changed remarkably in some respects since the lascivious era of Queen Victoria. The 20th century ushered in radical changes, such as nuclear weapons, television, fast food, and the great sexual revolution that I witnessed in the 1960s. Many of us believed that out of these winds of change a paradigm would emerge; something more enduring with a greater understanding of the fabulous panoply of humanity and a deeper tolerance for racial differences, religious and non-religious beliefs, and sexual expressions. What came seems short-lived.

In recent months, several young people have committed suicide and many more suffer brutal taunts and physical abuse. The sexual model of these children is given to them by the grace of nature, however, many choose death rather than suffer unwarranted shame and the pain of our ignorance and intolerance. Are we doomed to develop? Our cultural trajectory is never linear and seems weighed down by anxiety, doubt and fear; history reveals how mythical the wings of men are.

Whenever the wind blows, I can’t help but think of Vincent painting in his solitude under the intense sun of the South of France, wondering what his paintings would have been like if he hadn’t gone south, and wondering also what more immeasurable gifts he could have left behind. we had him, himself, he didn’t leave so young.

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