“Many people seem to think it foolish, even supersti- tious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still

have hope.”
– Vincent van Gogh, 1888 ***

The walls of the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum are void of color. They are sick and lumpy — mere blank reflectors of their inhabitants’ misery.

This morning, the fragrant, sunlit France of my fancies is nowhere. Instead, a haze seems to obscure all Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where the illusory comfort of my squalid, itchy sheets shatters; my dreams escape to the night held hostage by my nightmares; and I awake to be greeted by a grey day and those pale walls.

The paper is unevenly textured with swelling bulges spread throughout, as though slugs are crawling underneath the plaster and causing the ever-present stench in the room of madness and tears. It is the worst sort of monotony, tedious and nauseating. I feel an arcane desire within me to escape this. It propels me, before thought, to sit up and throw away my covers to vacate the place I languished all night, upon which sorry attempt, I find the thicket of tragedy only denser all around me. For my view of the dreaded wall sharpens, and my eye catches a break in the pattern — right at the edge. The wallpaper has peeled to reveal a yellow underneath. Not the golden of sunrays or flowers but the putrid, unripe lemon of decay and illness. These walls are falling apart; the very world is deteriorating.

My drab clothes wait for me to dress, but all the wonder and feeling I have labored so hard to convey my whole life are gone — everything. What was colorful and bright, those white walls have consumed, leaving me with their mocking, smug uniformity.

My eyes and ears seem to bleed from the way I have strained them to observe every detail of the world’s beauty. Now, their object having perished with the suddenness of the time, they are bereft and reeling. The hours my hands have spent in devotion — nay worship — of the picturesque, the divine, are countless as the stardust in the sky. They seem to stretch out before me now as an empty and wasted infinity. Distantly, I hear the forever interrupted by a knock on old wood, then the squeak of rusty hinges being strained.

I pull the shirt over my head, so I am in darkness as a man of the order enters and places my breakfast upon the shabby stand near the entrance. Fully dressed, I approach the stand — the sludgy food that is plated on the tray, and beside it, a chipped cup of water — and all I see are the little, white cylinders that are powdery at their edges and have left their chalky dust on the tray under them where they lay.

The monk has places to be. Perhaps he asks me to drink, to swallow the pills. But I am already gone — the pain that was born from the moment I awoke crescendos now, and I can see nothing beyond it.

It is unbearable — or, at least, I cannot bear it.

My head is tormented with sharp, pounding aches; my senses, in a deep stupor, are depressed. At times, it is like a dull butter knife is being forcefully dragged through my mind in a migraine that ails me for hours. 

At others, it seizes the whole of me, like a sword, sharpened to be paper-fine, cutting my soul in a singular moment of agony.

And, always, there is the fog that remains over my senses, another way of pain. It makes the merest exertion exhausting and gives everything the appear- ance of black grief — like no happiness will be known to man again.

I feel it is for forever.

There is a window, whence — when the Sun finds my part France, cloaked in despair and madness, and deigns to shine upon it — the misery of the room is slightly lightened.

But my gloom — a mad, dolorous thing that wreaks havoc with its wilful and wicked ways — has veiled the splendor of this light with slashes of blackness across the blue aperture. They have the banal way of evil about them — as the walls, the furniture, the fabrics do; as does everything in this den of insanity. They rip apart any last respite I have from the agony, any lost vision of the beauty I still possess.

They are tears — pin-straight, metallic, the black of wells and holes and voids. Just like bars.

The day, the next, and perhaps many others, pass away — like a forlorn life — to bring me here. To this night, before this window.

I am exhausted from waking for long hours, and the pain — my pain that is for forever — accompanies me here as anywhere else.

But I can see it.

In this moment, the misery is just dust behind the lush curtain of outer space whispering sad dictums, unheard, and I am before the wonder and artistry that sings of abundance and livens the world.

The pinpricks of silver in the sky overtake its darkness with their multitude like someone crushed those foul tablets wholly and sprinkled the powder across the onyx blanket to bring it alive. Where they touch the heavens, the space brightens and turns blue to become a place of dreams and whimsy.

I feel the deep soreness of my eyes — from constantly begging cruel, crumbling time to return to them the sight of beauty — slowly healing as the salve of longheld tears washes over them. I want to reach out, clutch this silk blanket of the heavens so that it pools between my fingers, and drape it over these pained eyes.

It appears the bars, the previous barricades to my vision, are gone — that I am beyond them.

And in this place, beyond the sadness, my fatigue overtakes me — gently, from my window to my bed, into sleep. It is not the sleep of restlessness and bitter cries but the sweet respite of calm breathing, relaxed limbs, and bountiful, beautiful dreams.

I picture it: where the sky is soft and velvet, full of swirls of clouds that melt into stars that flow, radiant and pulsing. It is so vivid I could brush it with my fingertips. Here, the beauty is endless and endlessly growing. I see a cypress growing from the ground, like the fervent flames borne of a burning passion. It stands strong and towering over a hamlet which sits beneath rolling hills that change in the light of the sea of stars in the heavens, like waves from oceans home to grand and glorious things. The homes in the hamlet are small, with thatched roofs and askew build, each of them a little universe of domesticity and peace. With the somnolent glow of oil lamps illuminating the dark cobblestones in irregular patterns, it all comes together as a field of scattered stars on the Earth.

One moment at the edge of this splendor, I find myself awoken the next.

Sitting up in the same bed as before — squalid sheets over me, lumpy walls opposing and all — I face an entirely different world; it seems to pulse with the ghost of my dream, the ugliness everywhere banished from my vision. Instead, I feel that familiar call. The tendons in my fingers tingle with the feeling of brushes and canvas — a live memory calling them to action. The world I left behind, I can sense here in the warmth of the sunrise and the aroma of rich oil from my paints. I must bring it to life.

The day does not pass like those before it.

I crouch before the chest and stare at the bottom drawer where my palette and easel are stored. It is a simple drawer, faded and chipped from years of use with lack of care; perhaps it was rich chestnut, once, and the home of a greater artist’s tools. I pull it open to find where mine were abandoned before. They lay there — still and hauntingly elegant, the skeletons of forests, exactly as I left them — and I feel that to leave them, from now until forever, would be unthinkable.

As my heart pumps the blood my lungs breathe life into, the motions come to me. It is an art once learned and never forgotten.

My fingers place themselves upon the aged wood as if fondling an old friend, with exactness, finding the old grooves of forgone time well spent there. I hold the brushes, heavy with paint of wild hues mixed from messes on my palette, and watch as the streaked white of canvas changes to full, vibrant strokes of color at my hand. Warm yellow tones of vast sunflowers of the sky, dying stars, and melting candlesticks; the indigo of a sky with nebulous shapes of darker and lighter blue shading the Earth beneath it; the dense, verdant green of a tree with rings in its trunk that run the length of the universe — the dream brought to life.

*

The painting, as all the things of life and beauty that inspired it, takes its time to become.

Forever behind it — if one pulled away the curtain of swirling stars and sky, the peaceful night air, the quiet music of the cosmos to come upon what is at times dust and at times stronger — there remains the soreness, the suffering, the torturous pain. There are odious walls, wilted flowers, and desolate days; foul food, disturbed sleep, and madness in my mind.

But there is also a window that lets in sunlit days, brushes not abandoned, pain that is bearable after all. And a painting that is slowly born — one that brings repose and composure, that wars nightmares and catches dreams.

The pain is as it was, always — it is nothing different. It is only that, where the starry night has bars across it, now, I can see beyond them to gaze at its beauty and bring it back to keep close, as the pulsing, throbbing life inside me.