Death had wrapped its fingers around his soul long before he was yanked into this world. The weight of grief was still heavy in the air as his parents greeted their firstborn. His brother, his namesake, had not made it to full term, and thus his entrance was something of a bittersweet blessing.
Understandably, he was a quiet child. Unassuming. His boyhood was spent in the wheat fields communing with nature and the crows. There, he would talk to the clouds of his dreams and aspirations, and they in turn would shape-shift into his manifestations, giving him the answers he longed to yield. There was church on Sunday, of course, where he would listen to his father sermonize which, more often than not, gave him more questions than answers. The clouds weren’t much use with those, and so he contemplated faith and religion in his prayers before bed and occasionally as he wandered alongside the serpentine path of the river. He liked water, though mostly he focused on the sky.
As he grew into manhood, the question of vocations and life plans was barely addressed. There was no discussion, nor very much thought. His uncle knew a gentleman looking for an art broker, and so it would be that he fell, quite unwittingly, though not particularly reluctantly, into the world of dealing in the wares of artists.
However, with little tolerance for the airs of the Parisian hoi polloi and the Bible increasingly capturing his interest, he quickly removed himself from the scene. Opting for a less extravagant existence, he returned to Belgium to work as a missionary, spreading the word of God to the people. It’s funny, really, how genius finds itself.
At first, there was nothing. No burning fervor of the creative, no grand desire to embolden a canvas, but there in a small mining town, he began to see people. Not how you or I might see them—visually, their eyes, their mouths—an outward manifestation of a human. No. He saw faces as they really are. Souls waiting to be seen. And so he began to sketch in earnest, his portraits holding up a mirror to their recipients.
Art quickly became life. His heart fed his hands the stuff of dreams and nightmares; he gave vision to the peasants he had seen as a boy and the underprivileged he had later walked past in the city slums, head bowed. When he had mastered the art of the visage, he branched out to include rural scenes. He worked late into the night, his pencil detailing the quintessential charm of The Cottage he had wandered past earlier that week. It was then, by the light of the oil lamp, that he knew he had found his home and his calling.
He moved to Paris not long after, his heart filled with revelation and hope. His brother Theo welcomed him gladly. The pair lived together in a harmonious commune for the most part. Enlivened by his newfound passion, Vincent began to search out more challenging projects, his mind awash with possibility. He fell into the steady monotony of the city, breaking the drab fog of morning with works by the Impressionist greats. Monet and Picasso quickly became his muses. Their vivid strokes and flashes of ostentation broke through his solemnity. Still, even there amongst the genius of his time, he longed for more.
Seeking warmth and light, he moved to Arles. France gave him inspiration and the freedom to craft—the rolling hills and summer flora, a living tapestry, and he a character walking amongst the silken dewy threads. And there were dreams. Looking out of the window of his little yellow house, he saw amongst the trees the artists’ colony he would create. A utopia. Even introverts seek comfort in like minds—connection. And he would, he decided in a flash of misguided inspiration, start right there and then. He immediately invited his friend Paul Gauguin to join him. An artistic, collaborative experiment of sorts, The Studio of the South.
Despite the most innocent of intentions, the arguments ensued quickly. Neither creative was willing to compromise, each intent on their own vision. Vincent retreated to pastoral inspiration, and Gauguin remained stoically determined to bring his imagination to the fore. Sinking deeper into himself and finding that rather than being invigorated by the presence of another artistic visionary, he was constricted. All that he had dreamed the collaboration would be was now a charcoaled smudge of the colors he had envisioned.
Vincent sank deeper into himself, and this time the clouds could not console him, their movements as arbitrary and useless as his perceived failure. Gauguin, for his part, became more overbearing, willing his friend to think outside of himself, believing his vision to be the better of the two.
“You are not listening to me!” he would scream from the top of the stairs.
“No, no, it is true, I am not listening to you! Who are you to tell me who it is I should be?”
Before he realized what he had done, the blood poured from the side of his head, streaming down his embittered face, his ear hanging by sinew.
The hospital, recognizing his anguish, relocated him to the psychiatric wing. Under the care of doctors and with the help of medication, he slowly began to see the sky again. The stars replaced the clouds that had once placated him. And so there, behind the barred windows of his ward, he would muster all that he had to try again. The sterile, suffocating walls of the hospital became the canvas of his redemption. His way home. The deft brushstrokes of the swirling night skies, the lush, pulsating fields, and the tranquil beauty of sunflowers gave him hope of peace.
With creativity awakened once more, Vincent left the hospital with a renewed vision. He would start over.
But the tigers come at night. The darkness of depression and the visions that had haunted him for much of his adult life refused to subside. As his anguish grew, so too did his frenetic pace of creation. His heart, sensing that his soul could not endure this world forever, painted with unrelenting focus. Each canvas, a knife wound of captured beauty. Released like a nightingale. Free.
The morning air rustled through the wheat field, his feet crushing the dried stalks as he walked. He looked upwards to the skies. The clouds were unmoving. The sun beat down upon his back.
“The sadness will last forever.” He muttered, not a cry of despair but a gentle acknowledgement of truth. There would be no escape. Not in this life.
As he pulled the trigger, the crows ascended into the sky,
His legacy would become one, not of tragedy but of a dark and powerful beauty. A soul not of this world, Tainted by madness, perhaps, or a divergent mind, unable to walk alongside the inequity of this world.
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