Lycanthropia

1

Vincent van Gogh started reading the Gospel with comprehension around 1876. He asked the local religious Corporation to give him a flock. They took one look at his unruly red hair and his unruly hazel eyes and they shipped him off to Wasmes, in the Borinage, the poor mining district of Belgium, figuring, if they couldn’t shut him up, they could at least get him out of earshot.

Van Gogh lived among the poor as a poor man. Taking literally the instruction to “sell all you have and give everything to the poor,” he gave away all his belongings, his fancy Corporation preaching suits and his modest Corporation stipend, followed the poor into the mines, dug coal with them, ate their blackened potatoes with blackened hands, and relentlessly sketched their faces on paper scraps with charcoal sticks salvaged from the fireplace. He took to heart the Beatitudes, and he loved the poor.

The poor, accustomed to slick words from fancy Corporation men, were at first mistrusting of van Gogh. “Why don’t you have a television ministry?” they asked him. “Or at least a radio show?” Van Gogh shrugged his shoulders and kept digging coal.

On Sundays he preached simple sermons about sheep taken from green pastures to work underground, and about a Shepherd who loved the sheep and left the pastures and the fat herd of ninety-nine to find the the one lean stray shoveling coal. The poor eventually adored van Gogh and came from deep beneath the surface of the earth to hear him. They presented him with tithes that he refused.

When offerings from the Borinage dried up, the Corporation feared the poor, in a fit of rage, had killed unruly van Gogh and deposited his corpse in an abandoned coal tunnel. They couldn’t abide revolution. So they sent representatives to investigate. What they found was their ultimate nightmare: A blackened and emaciated van Gogh living underground and, worse, refusing tithes. The Corporation representatives brought his ministerial trial to a close.

“Why couldn’t you toe the line?” they asked. “You should have screened the Mel Gibson film we sent you.”

“Violence is easy,” van Gogh answered. “Love is hard.”

“Come with me,” van Gogh urged them. “Dirty your hands.”

The corporation men examined their carefully manicured nails and sneered at van Gogh. In a public show of disdain, they stripped van Gogh of his flock and demeaned him before the poor. “This isn’t love,” they told the poor. “This is insanity. After all, who would choose poverty over luxury?” The poor nodded in agreement and watched The Passion of the Christ and cringed and felt even smaller and sorrier. Their trickle of tithes resumed on schedule.

Van Gogh worked the mines, sketched potato eaters, and took in a prostitute and her child. His drawings grew more certain as his distance from the Corporation increased.

2

In all, Vincent van Gogh painted hundreds of self-portraits, more than 20 during a two-year stay in Paris alone. Because he was poor, he could afford no model and used himself instead. Some say this is narcissistic. I rather think it was an exercise in self-discovery.

In all the images, van Gogh’s eyes are heartbroken. In several, his ear is bandaged. These are the same thing. Postmodern psychologists maintain van Gogh suffered from manic depression. This is evident in superhuman fits of productivity when he painted skies swirling with stars or made crude sketches of selves shimmering with color, when he painted bedrooms with red bedspreads or drew psychedelic fields of wheat, and (of course) when he lopped off parts of his anatomy. It is also evident in spells of crippling depression when he lamented his manic behavior and painted sad, bandaged selves or old, dour men barely emerging from black backgrounds. Sometimes van Gogh was paralyzed with depression and painted nothing.

Van Gogh stood in art shops and imagined thousands of colors on a palette of eternal grace, spilling onto an infinite canvas in shapes of the poor and shapes of the working class and shapes of the land he loved. He coveted pigments and often wrote his younger brother begging money to buy them. He craved friendship and got, instead, Gauguin. He longed for the security his brother, Theodorus, has earned: The assurance of marriage and home and hearth. He was condemned, instead, to genius. He painted France as a dream of Arles and as a nightmare of Arles. He painted Belgium as a dream of Belgium and a nightmare of Belgium. He always painted his eyes full of heartache.

In 1967 the ghost of van Gogh sang “All You Need Is Love” with John Lennon and the Beatles on the BBC’s Our World special; also present were Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful. Van Gogh subscribed to John Lennon’s vision of the world as one and was horribly disillusioned when, in 1969 and again in 1972, the Summer of Love was truncated by corporation tee-shirts and the world turned out just as imperfect and greedy as everyone said it was.

On the flip side of the “All You Need Is Love” single was a tune called “Baby You’re a Rich Man”. This time Lennon and McCartney got it right: All you need is not love. All you need is cash. The ghost of Van Gogh considered the wealth of pigments cash could have bought him and wished he’d stayed in the religion racket for the money.

3

A pigment killed the artist in 1890. Historians say van Gogh was depressed, and after threatening his doctor with a pistol, he went for a walk and shot himself in the chest.

He lived a while — long enough for his brother Theo to arrive and cradle him in his arms until Vincent died. “I wish I could go like this,” Vincent said. A half-hour later, he went.

His coffin was covered with a white cloth and was surrounded with sunflowers and yellow dahlias. As Emile Bernard wrote to Albert Aurier, “…yellow flowers everywhere.”

Theo wrote his sister Lies, “Maybe I should call it one of the great cruelties of life on this earth and maybe we should count him among the martyrs who died with a smile on their face.”

Modern medicine might well have saved him. But for what? More poverty? More depression? More of the cruel genius that drove him?

Alizarin crimson killed him. He needed it to round out his palette but could not afford it. Only one source was available to him: Blood from his own heart. But fate had a last wicked laugh at van Gogh. The ironic bullet missed his heart and bile erupted from his wound.

It was green.

The color of money.

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