Keys to the Kingdom

My Understanding of the Artist

 

If you hear a voice within you say, “You cannot paint,”

Then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

 

-Vincent Van Gogh

 

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I believe that the origin of artistic expression is the dread that results from contemplating the reality of physical existence. That has been true for me, and from what I can tell, it was the driving force in the creative lives of those artists and poets I most admire �" Never so much as in the case of the Dutch impressionist Vincent Van Gogh. According to his biographers, the artist suffered periods of extreme depression, paralyzing fear, and suicidal thoughts. As a result, he was for a while hospitalized at an institution that would one day bear his name. Not too many things in life went his way.[1] But he was given a talent that few men have. He used it.

 

He was a man of art �" A man of God.

 

Parts of my own life are comparable to Van Gogh’s. I, too, have been overwhelmed by existential terror, and far too often wished I had never been born. I can identify with Van Gogh’s despair because I am human. And it does not matter that he was a master of an art, and I am a common poet, or that his suffering was more exacting and, at length, less manageable than mine. What matters is that an artist I revere experienced life with even greater handicaps than mine, and still did what he had been created to do. Now, how “well” I create is unimportant; it only matters that I use the gifts that were freely and lovingly given to me before the foundations of the earth.

To Whom Much Is Given

 

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There came a key 

To mad Van Gogh;

                                     

There came a madman’s eye

That saw a terror in the crows

That swarmed a trembling sky

 

And though mad Vincent

Never knew the gain

Within the gift,

 

He never lost the golden key

That scarcely he could lift!

 

Dwarfed by the trees

That rose like fiends,

 

He painted where he stood,

And through their branches

 

Brushed the stars

 

That swirled

Above the woods

 

And in each star, the face of Man,

He claimed as if his own,

 

And in their beauty found a truth

That is by wise men known

 

For God, in trust, gives not his keys

With charms and binding strings,

But patiently will wait on faith,

The rarest of all things

 

He gives what keys cannot be lost,

But leaves not His consent

 

For gifts to languish in disuse

Or base bewilderment

 

Therefore,

 

Did Vincent turn the lock,

Therefore, did he descend

Into the pit of Man’s despair,

And there, his gift, defend

 

Against the craven beast within

That shudders in the fear

Of those who have not

Keys themselves

 

Or have no business here.

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[1] Van Gogh is believed to have sold only one painting during his lifetime, “The Red Vineyard at Arles.” Maybe he sold a few more. No one can know for certain. But his work was not prized by his contemporaries �" At least by those who would pay money for it. Indeed, Van Gogh once painted a portrait for his doctor, which the physician eventually used to repair the side of a chicken coop.