Dear Theo notes

More notes.

The reading begins to get tough for me because it's so similar in weird ways to my own patterns of thinking. VanGogh must have been bipolar, as I am. I'm fighting against the urge to skip ahead and read the last letter to get a gauge of the depths of the descent into madness and despair which might lie ahead just because I don't know if I can handle it.

I hear the optimism and the sheer force of will, pushing ahead and, just before age 30, striving so very hard to be true to two contradictory forces at the same time. On the one hand Van Gogh was struggling to do everything that was expected of him. He lived a good portion of his life by the expectations of others.

At cross purposes to this, however, was the drive to remain true to his own inner vision, his internal quest.

Oy. Resonates kinda deep. Especially since this afternoon was a depressed afternoon for me, when I was struggling with the question of "What am I doing wrong, and why do I struggle so very hard just to be this poor?" Egads, what a shock to settle in for some reading and find that -exact- question reflected in the pages from Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo from 1881.

I know that I have made several different choices in my life so I'm not reading this as some kind of soothsayer's path before me, but it's still a phenomenal cautionary tale. In another time and place, I would not be far off from dear Vincent's plight. Although I have to admit that I don't obsess about painting and drawing to the same level he did.

And that's a good thing.

Still, hearing how he wore out his welcome from the painter/mentor Mauve and the fact that he used turns of phrase which I've written myself, often in letters to my own brother Tom... this continues to be a difficult read because it is so exceedingly eerie in its similarities across time and space from then to now. Perhaps it's just that I'm bipolar, or perhaps there's something to the notion of being an artist which brings this kind of mind set about. I don't know. I haven't studied the daybooks and biographies of artists yet, but I'm looking forward to those continued studies.

I just wish I could absorb it all faster, because with how similar the phraseology is and the bipolar outlook and the sheer desperation to somehow find that point at which the inner vision and the outer expectations meet in a glorious combination of economic support... and knowing as I do with the gift of hindsight that Van Gogh never finds it in his lifetime... reading this begins to get exhausting because it triggers intense sympathy from me, and I really don't want to prolong the slow spiralling descent into another man's madness. I've got to work so hard to prevent that from happening to me with my own life.

Van Gogh is definitely a bohemian ahead of the bohemian revolution. And I'm some kind of reluctant bohemian of the postmodern sort, who can point to their life and say "I work very hard to be this poor," with some kind of self-bemused ironic appreciation underlaid with the faintest stirrings of despair.

Yeah, reading on, but struggling between the urge to skim and the need to bear witness to the tortured existence of an unrecognized Master as he passed through this lifetime.

And I hear the phrase attributed to God's response when mortals cry out in suffering, "It'll all be over soon."

If I do end up skimming, forgive me, but since I'm living a modern variation on this kind of hell, I don't know if I have the heart to endure the burden of another... even one long gone.

Reading on.