Van Gogh: A Portrait of Missing Thoughts— Mikra Namani
She woke with a gasp, disoriented, lost in the darkness. A feeble light, like a fading smear, hovered on the tiny parsonage window. Breathing hard, she paused and listened to the sighs and howls of the wind outside as though they’d leaked out of her nightmare. The scenes lingered: the dark waters moving around with astonishing speed, snaking around the houses, engulfing them, smothering everything, silencing the city.
When Dorus was still alive, sleeping and snoring beside her in the attic bedroom, Anna Cornelia Carbentus would wake up from the same nightmare and find his guttural sounds reassuring, safely anchoring her in the night, in the world. She’d often ask Dorus if he ever had those dreams of biblical flooding, where the sea roared back with vengeance. He’d give her a puzzling look and say, “Well, yes of course. The sea swallowing the land was a recurring Dutch nightmare. The nation had eternal dreams of drowning.”
She was thirty years old when she married Dorus in 1851. The marriage was never easy from the first day. At first the shock of leaving behind the worldly Hague and arriving in a lost village in the wild heath threw her into a prolonged melancholy. Her husband, newly settled as a parson in this frontier outpost, was bewildered by his bride’s sudden transformation—her sleeplessness, her pallor, the way joy had drained from her face. He took her walking in the countryside, hoping the open land would ease her sorrow, but it only deepened her despair. There it was, the endless wasteland of wild grasses, swamps, a few stunted and dead trees, undistinguishable from the ghostly figures of deformed peat diggers poking the land from dawn to dusk, like damned souls in an inferno. She dreamed of The Hague. Her girlhood years. She tried to mix with the people of Zundert, understand them. They repelled her with their coarse demeanor, barbaric dialect and filthiness.
That first summer Anna left Zundert and went back to the Hague for a lengthy stay with her family. She wept with joy in the arms of her mother and sisters. She told them she wasn’t sure she could survive in that village. She hoped to dissolve the marriage and secretly prayed for Dorus’s death. Her mother reminded her that life would find a way to make her happy. Happiness demanded patience, sacrifice. Soon she found out she was pregnant and returned immediately to Dorus in Zundert.
Once home, she began suffering from mysterious and intolerable pain followed by severe vomiting. And that pain and the mystery inside her became clear months later, on the night of March 30,1852, when Anna gave birth to a stillborn boy. A ghost. A hand at the town’s registrar wrote: “Lifeless. No. 29.” They buried the baby in the Zundert cemetery, but not before the grieving young mother could give a name to that number: Vincent van Gogh. Weeks later, Dorus commissioned a headstone for the tiny mound, and he chose some biblical poetry to mark the torment: Let the little children come to me, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. The plaintive epitaph was carved in large elaborate letters in black ink against a grey marble stone. Under the name across the top of the stone figured the single year of 1852—a testament of a canceled life, a memory of a ghostly passage.
Not long after, Anna became pregnant again. And again, the mysterious and unceasing attacks in her body returned. She couldn’t eat. Dorus stood by unable to do anything. He prayed and got angry. He summoned the best doctor of Zundert. He took her discreetly to the Hague where they saw a doctor who diagnosed Anna with “hyperemesis gravidarum.” A malady with many causes—physical, psychological, moral. Something more mysterious, sinister, far-reaching. The doctor mentioned hysteria, pursed his lips and shook his head, undermining his own thoughts. He asked Dorus vexing questions about Anna’s dreams. Was she self-hating, suicidal? He prescribed some laudanum, sun, open air. What creature was growing inside Anna’s body? No one had an answer. They returned to Zundert. Like a despairing insomniac, Dorus walked back and forth in the attic room at night with his head on his hands. Laudanum pushed Anna into deep lethargy, sleep. Her body twitched. Delirium. Was she dying? The due date approached. Dorus kept murmuring to himself God works in mysterious ways; glory be to him. One early spring day he took her for a walk in the heath. She was too weak. There was a warm wind. Clouds moving fast. Intermittent sun. She wept. The first anniversary. Was she carrying another ghost inside her. When they returned from the walk, they knew. Dorus rushed to the midwives. Murmured to himself for a good part of that evening. Walking up and down, next door groans, like knives. Late in the evening he heard a brief pause from the other room and then baby cries filled the parsonage.
Weak and half-delirious, Anna whispered: Vincent Willem van Gogh. That was the name. The day was March 30, 1853.
Dear Edmond, August 10, 1875
Have you read Zola’s La Faute de l'abbé Mouret yet? I received the novel last week and since he asked me to give him an honest assessment, I put myself to the task of reading it. It’s a strange sequel to La Conquête de Plassans, treating the topic of priest celibacy as a new motif in literature. Haven’t we beaten that thing to death by now? I hear some rumors that there are whole passages in this book that were lifted from Imitation of Christ—which I haven’t read. But, as you and I know, in fact as the entire literary Paris knows by now, Zola’s plundering of other people’s work and passing it as his own is no longer an intrigue. Also, I found the book overwrought, even by his standards. The ending vexed me. What is it with the ear-chopping twist? That body mutilation just comes out of nowhere with that poor character. I just don’t get it. I’m supposed to see Zola this week. I must tread carefully; his ego has become too fragile. It always surprises me that the more famous we become, the more insecure we feel in our profession. Zola is the epitome of this artistic cancer. Let me know your thoughts, monsieur.
Your disciple,
G Flaubert
Paul Gauguin, Private Journal
With time things become clearer, but for now I am still wondering why he went after his own ear. What bizarre violence to a completely innocent organ. I mean if it was his hand that he’d chopped, maybe I’d be more sympathetic. Because it was exactly his hand that was failing him all the time. Those daunting, obsessive brushstrokes, the heavy and muddy impasto, the dashes and dots, scratches and squiggles— all that brought havoc to his canvases. His feverish hand. No wonder he couldn’t sell a single of those paintings. Nobody wanted them. Even his own brother couldn’t sell Vincent’s paintings. He kept shipping a steady stream to Theo who, in turn, stacked them in a closet in his apartment in Paris. Two of those paintings miraculously made it to the 1888 Salon des Indépendants. What where they? I remember one of the two, Roman Parisiens—which was sad. The most flattering words anyone could summon for that painting was critic Gustave Kahn who I think said something to the degree of: “oh, it’s a fine motif for study, perhaps, but let’s not pretend it’s much of a painting.” Yes, very painful and on point.
And mysteriously that was Vincent’s best foot forward in the Salon. It’s beyond me. Theo was mortally embarrassed. After all, at the same show Theo was exhibiting masterpieces from his more famous clients. When the Salon closed its doors for the year in April, Theo had to run across Paris and extract Roman Parisiens from a trash bin in the hallway, while Vincent was in Arles making plans to take a knife to his ear. As Theo returned that night to his apartment with the trashed painting under his arm, he concluded that it was all hopeless. Vincent would never sell a thing, except outrage. Theo confessed to me his embarrassment with his brother’s poor technique and intransigence. All that reputation and work Theo had built for himself. All those artists he had helped be discovered. All those paintings he had sold for them. Not even one by his brother. Maybe he should have sold his ear.
Private diaries of Sien, “a public woman”
He never washed. Smelled like manure or sewage depending on where he'd spent the night for his “perfect drawing.” He was mad. I know these days I hear among the fancy artists in this house that madness is genius and that it’s the rest of us who don’t understand, but in my experience, madness is madness. Plainly put. I’ve seen madness in flesh too many times in this city. Sometimes they haul in here a type of madness that doesn’t even seem to belong to our species. Or our time. He was that sort of incarnated madness. He’d wake up in the middle of the night and suck on his brush, like a long lingering and slithering slurp that would wake me up with a shiver up my spine. He insisted on painting the darkness. I’d tell him to throw some black paint at the canvas; he’d snap back: “no, no, no. I mean darkness in here,” and he’d pound his temple with his fist. I told him I disagreed with his theories. He said I was too smart. No other person who laid with me had ever said such a thing to me. So maybe madness is not genius but love. I think he adored me. We'd make furious love and then he would draw my naked body—always with a swollen belly. He wanted a baby with me, but my body said no to another pregnancy. Certain nights he cried like a child, but with a haunting wail, burying his head in my chest. My dear poor Vincent, how I miss him.
From Emilé Zola to Edmond De Goncourt
Dear Edmond, April 21, 1886
I am exhausted. I can’t stand this wet weather. April showers? More like a spring deluge actually. I can’t even stand the city these days. My wife, looking my way, complains bitterly. There is this unyielding resentment in her voice. Too wet, too gray, too cold. I ask her, what am I to do? Write a letter to scold God? Renounce my hopes in art? I endure the same horrid days. Even my routine is messed up. I haven’t been to my favorite brothel in four weeks. The other day I briefly left this oppressing home atmosphere and walked through the damp streets hoping to get a drink somewhere, and I noticed a lot of strange looking people huddling under their rags on street corners. What has happened recently in the world? Has there been a war I haven’t paid attention to? Are these people refugees from another land? What is it with all these foreigners flooding our city in recent times? Paris looks like Constantinople or ancient Rome, full of haggard, grim, hollow-eyed strangers. I mean don’t get me wrong, I love all those Oriental & exotic beauties in our brothels. But do we really need this horde of bearded lunatics who sleep on our streets? Some even pretend to be artists. Recently I received a letter from a certain Vincent vanh Gock, or Cock, or whatever—it sounded Dutch; you know. Anyway, in broken French, he wrote that he had read The Masterpiece and though he said he liked it— “was engrossed by it”—he also offered some sharp criticism that my famous protagonist Claude Lantier was somewhat cartoonish and sloppily put together. I mean, I’d created this character with some real anxiety in my chest, so much so that at times I thought I was dipping the pen in my blood to render his complex emotions. I lost real friends when this character made his appearance in my book. Haven’t I suffered enough?
And this Dutch lunatic, this nobody, tells me I’ve created a cliché! Who does this imbécile think he is? If he has read me, does he not know that I grew up with painters, know their soul, how they breathe, dream, suffer. Cezanne was my best childhood friend. I swam with him in the Arc. I dedicated much of my career to painters, writing about them, drinking with them, consoling them, encouraging and scolding them. I alone with my pen dragged the French painting from its dark and ashen shabby studios into the light and nature, while overcoming the wrath and slander of the bourgeois salon judges and their moth-eaten tastes.
To make matters more comical in this missive, my mysterious Dutch fan had even sent me a little sketch of his own. He wanted to show his talent to me in the hope that he might answer my call for art “of flesh and blood,” as I’d supposedly said somewhere before. And what do I see from this “painter” in the mail? A doodle of sorts depicting what looked to be deformed monsters with bulging eyes and pointy noises munching on potatoes. The ghastly scene was infused in muddy darkness, out of some god-forsaken, Dantean, fog-choked Dutch swamp. I felt an onset of sadness on this idiot’s behalf about Holland and her sons of the Golden Age.
This isn’t the first time I am misunderstood, but clearly this was some kind of lunatic who thought that scrawling on a piece of paper constitutes art of “flesh and blood.” He continued: “As you monsieur once wrote: ‘what I look for in a picture before anything else, is the man.’ And in all my drawings and pictures I paint the man I am inside. I paint the feelings.” The drawing he’d sent to me represented, in his words, “one of the proudest works” he’d done, and one that reflects that man inside him.
Though I respect the sentiment, his pitiful sketch didn’t match his rhetoric. Which brings me to say this: in my life I have seen and met all kinds of wannabe painters, scoundrels, insufferable bores, amateurs, and I have supported a whole lot of them. After all, you know that I am for helping those sparks of geniuses who come from nowhere and burst into the scene with their new ideas about art, their craziness and idiosyncrasies. I may have been wrong in some cases in judging an artist too fast for their lack or abundance of talent, but most of the time I got things right by studying not the actual brushstrokes, but the invisible hand that brought those lines to the light. I am a tireless admirer of such outcasts, deviant artists who with sheer vision and courage can displace and demolish all the bourgeois values.
But for some reason, in recent times I seem to have run out of such generosity and patience.
Not sure why but it may have to do with the fact that The Masterpiece, this roman I am most proud of (and in my heart the crown achievement of my career) has been severely attacked by just about everybody. By my friends, old and new. Even people who I don’t know and mean nothing to me have joined the chorus. This is to say that one can run out of kindness when one is filled with indignation. There was more in this letter that built on this assumption that there is a conspiracy against me among the artistic community. The Dutch sketcher of potato eaters had the audacity to suggest a meeting between us. I was so annoyed. I am still annoyed. I approached Huysmans with some trepidation on the account of him having some Dutch blood—I asked him if he’d ever heard of such a madman. He just said who—didn’t even wait for me to repeat—shook his head, burped, and walked away. Even he, the most faithful of my disciples, seems to show less respect for his mentor. His theories about the “death of naturalism” and “end of a stale era” after his success and praise with A Rebours have become louder. He’s become haughty. I have more thoughts about his curious book, but never mind, this isn’t about Huysmans.
So, why am I going on about this? Why am I bothered with a thing of no consequence? You’d think I should care in the least about the opinions of a stranger with a funny name, but to be honest with you perhaps I am presently isolated, my hands over my ears, alone in my head swatting away a swarm of ghosts who are forcing me into a paralyzing self-doubt. That’s likely why I am reacting so forcefully to a trivial missive. Or do you think more is going on here? Ha, ha, ha.
Speaking of going ons, I want some all-night talk with you and Daudet. Last time things got heated between us, but we can’t hold grudges for too long. We are artists. We should know who to hold grudges against and hate. Not each other. We are all we have in this era of empowered plebs. I wish Flaubert was still around. Ah, that “provincial corpulent ox” as you called him once—yes, yes, I know and agree he was a bore, but I miss him, his night-long ramblings about this and that, his idiotic takes on politics and government, his contempt for democracy of which he knew nothing about. I can still hear his booming voice in my head: “The entire dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity. That dream is partly realized. They read the same papers and have the same passions as us.”
Sure enough, he’d gotten angrier as he approached death. Debts, his niece, the dry page. One word a week, as you charged him. He took it all on politics, all of it. I am almost becoming him in that sense. The loathing for this society and politics that brings us war and more stupidity is getting to me. That’s why I miss Flaubert’s outbursts. Also, seeing him laugh with that elephantine body, that childish gaiety, even his uncouth manners at the table, burping repeatedly and then licking his mustache at the corners of his mouth. Christ! He was such a giant glutton. I miss his gossip about the princess and the decadent royalty. Our world seems empty without him.
Anyway, sorry. It’s just that increasingly these days I feel like I take one step ahead and three back. I see I already complained enough for today but seriously don’t let me go down that road. Shall we say dinner at our place in Médan on Sunday at seven o’clock. My wife is mad at you for your criticism of my book, but then again she’s mad at everyone, criticism or not. I’ll try to convince her that you mean well, though sometimes I am not so sure you do. Ha ha ha.
Your man,
Emilé
My dear sister, February 1, 1890
In my heart of hearts, I always knew there was something wrong with him. A mother knows things about her child, things that come from beyond. When he was small, he already behaved like a ghost, dissolving before my eyes, a strange little creature, forever restless, irritated and out of place. I’ll never forget the agony I felt from the moment he began to walk. He had a habit of slipping away from my view and sitting by himself on gloomy corners where I could barely see him. Then he’d suddenly emerge, like a creature of night to make me shudder with terror. I followed him as he made his way through the parsonage garden and the little path that led straight to the cemetery. He was barely four-years old. From that day on he began these mysterious excursions to visit the dead, a morbid fascination that to this day the memory gives me a chill. From those early beginnings, I knew that he was not a real boy, but the stillborn ghost I had buried in that awful morning. Oh, it was like he was returning to the place he belonged, and that his temporary existence in this world was nothing but a shadow to torment us. When he grew up and could walk farther out, he’d quit the house at odd hours and wander aimlessly in the heath before finding a graveyard to spend the night. The villagers whispered about the mad boy who slept among the dead. Sometimes they brought him home.
And yes, as you know, it wasn’t long before this pain turned into a humiliation. The shame that fell upon our family because of him has never gone away. I have long stopped visiting our neighbors and ignored most correspondence from friends and family. The steady gossip about his madness is like receiving regular injections of poison in our hearts. It killed Dorus. He died of a broken heart. For a long time, I’d wake up at dawn and pray, like a monk. I prayed but felt always emptied afterward. God’s absence was overwhelming, almost physical.
Then I stopped praying and turned bitter. Where the prayer had left me deflated, the anger filled me up, hardened my heart. I didn’t want to see him or hear from him. I hated his ridiculous pictures he sent to me. I trashed most of them. I wrote to Theo in Paris and asked him to stop helping him in the hope that he was going to somehow disappear and spare us from the never-ending nightmare. But my dear Theo has always had a good heart. He loved Vincent even when his mind was ruined and threatened the stability of Theo’s life. I know we come from a long line of devotees to art, but lately I have been wondering what good is that art which robs us off our sanity, our peace, respect and love from family & friends.
Now he’s in chains in some mad house. Like an animal. I think about this every minute of the day. I despair. I can’t help it but blame myself or something beyond me. I remember the horrible ordeal of my first two pregnancies. My body remembers them. The mysterious pain never came back with my other children—with Theo, Lies, Cor, or Will. None of them tormented me the way Vincent and his ghost had. What am I to make of this, my dear sister. Is it foolish to question what cannot be explained? The ineffable? Was God trying to punish us for some unknown sin? I reread the Carbentus Chronicle, going back through ages and generations. Too many lifeless babies in our family history. Ghosts. Cryptic lives. Estranged sons and daughters. Minds lost to incomprehensible mysteries. Our own sister Clara, our brother Johannes, our father. How far back does this curse go? What am I to make of all this? Maybe I too was marked to birth a monster.
Forgive me, but I hope & pray this is his end.
With faith & hope,
Anna
***
Mercure de France
The Isolated Ones: Vincent van Gogh
G. Albert Aurier January 1890
Beneath skies that sometimes dazzle like faceted sapphires or turquoises, that sometimes are molded of infernal, hot, noxious, and blinding sulfurs; beneath skies like streams of molten metals and crystals, which, at times, expose radiating, torrid solar disks; beneath the incessant and formidable streaming of every conceivable effect of light, in heavy, flaming, burning atmospheres that seem to be exhaled from fantastic furnaces where gold and diamonds…beings and things, shadows and lights, forms and colors…trees, twisted like giants in battle, proclaiming with the gestures of their gnarled menacing arms and with the tragic waving of their green manes their indomitable power, the pride of their musculature, their blood-hot sap, their eternal defiance of hurricane, lightning and malevolent Nature.
Cypresses that expose their nightmarish, flamelike, black silhouettes, mountains that arch their backs like mammoths; white and pink and golden orchards, like the idealizing dreams of virgins…stones, terrains, bushes, grassy fields, gardens, and rivers that seem sculpted out of unknown minerals, polished, glimmering, iridescent, enchanting, flaming landscapes, like the effervescence of multicolored enamels in some alchemist's diabolical crucible. Foliage that seems of ancient bronze, of new copper, of spun glass; flowerbeds that appear less like flowers than opulent jewelry fashioned from rubies, agates, onyx, emeralds, corundum, chrysoberyl, amethysts, and chalcedonies.
It is the universal, mad and blinding coruscation of things; it is matter and all of Nature frenetically contorted . . . raised to the heights of exacerbation; it is form, becoming nightmare; color, becoming flame, lava and precious stone; light turning into conflagration; life, into burning fever. Such . . . is the impression left upon the retina when it first views the strange, intense, and feverish work of Vincent van Gogh, that compatriot, and unworthy descendent of the old Dutch masters.
Oh! How far are we…from the beautiful, great traditional art, so healthy and very well balanced, of the Dutch past…their charming canvases, a bit bourgeois, so patiently detailed, so phlegmatically over finished, so scrupulously meticulous! How far from the handsome landscapes, so restrained, so well balanced, so timelessly enveloped in soft tones, grays, and indistinct haze, the somber colors of the northern countries . . .
And foremost, like all his illustrious compatriots, Vincent van Gogh is indeed a realist, in the fullest sense of the term. Monsieur Emile Zola defined naturalism as "nature seen through the temperament." Well, it is this "homo additus," this "through a temperament," or this molding of the objective unity into a subjective diversity, that complicates the question and abolishes the possibility of any absolute criterion for gauging the degrees of the artist's sincerity…it is difficult for an unprejudiced and knowledgeable viewer to deny or question the naive truthfulness of his art, the ingeniousness of his vision…its excess of strength, of nervousness, its violence of expression. . . . daring, very often brutal . . . yet sometimes ingeniously delicate . . .
Paul Gauguin’s Private Journal
Now that I look back from Tahiti and see the world rushing to his art, I have come to convince myself that it was precisely that ear chopping business that launched his career. I was not sure before why he’d done that, but my perspective has changed. Certain as death, his paintings would have molded forever in the dark in various closets and attics of Paris had it not been for that severed flesh, which he gave it to a prostitute. Artists are starved for bizarre stories like this. Critics even more. And here I must single that burst of nonsense by Aurier in his little magazine that cold winter in 1890 which killed many cats in Paris.
The piece, The Isolated Ones, I believe it was titled, contributed nothing to art criticism. It was a mere orgasmic howl, remarkable for its gyrating syntax and cartwheeling sentences, which spoke more about his youthful bewitchment with the world of art than with a penetrating critique of Vincent’s “visionary art.” Aurier thought he discovered something new in Vincent’s paintings, something completely unseen before. Moreover, his gushing and over-the-top tribute is not that original after all. Reading his article feelt like reading Huysmans’s A Rebour in which the neurotic and decadent Des Esseintes extravagantly describes his hysterical and spellbound reaction to Gustave Moureau’s Salome, which, I admit and agree, is one-of-a-kind painting. But where Huysmans’s prose is original and breathtaking, Aurier’s is strained and imitative like a pupil trying to impress his teacher.
Aurier was new to Paris. And the phenomenon of offering a special status to such young arriviste in the city was the most infuriating thing about artsy Paris those days. Still is. The prevailing notion, without any relation to truth whatsoever, was that these new critics offered the art world a completely new way of seeing and appreciating ignored art from painters like Vincent. This theory found support in the hairbrained and dogmatic idea that a neglected artist—on the sole account of his madness and primal response to sensation— must hold clues to a deeper level of human experience. Which became like an edict among the artists and critics, and which is also sheer nonsense. At best, it’s an unartistic response to art. It’s not even critique. It’s a religious feeling or an instinctual reaction to human suffering and shunning, masquerading as a cognitive analysis of artistic achievement. At worst, it’s just pity for the creator, an insult, a sham judgement on his creation.
And also unfair to me when we speak about Vincent because I have been one of his closest friends. In fact, I don’t think anybody knew him better than I did. And here’s the naked truth: he may have been a broken soul of sorts, but a tormented genius he was not, as they are making him to be. His technique, as his own brother Theo (a man of fine taste) put it was “poor,” to say the least, his ideas about art a mishmash, his struggle to “paint the soul” and “the heart” more like juvenile pronouncements high on youth. I know this for sure. I was there with him. Night after night. He would never shut up. Many of those theories of art he held were painfully naïve, much like Aurier’s.
And, finally, the reason I regard the whole Vincent mania nonsensical is because even his ear-chopping stunt, his most genius act to bring attention to his flailing art, wasn’t an original idea. I forget now where he was inspired from, but he’d thought of savaging his ear after reading about a similar incident in a novel—it might have been one of Zola’s stories. And why? Who knows! Like with many of his incoherent ravings about art, he mixed ideas of certain early Christian rituals of bodily vandalisms with his own notions of “sacrificing for art.” Was he mad? Sure, that seems like an especially Dutch disease, but Vincent was more like a ravenous beast for attention. Mad for anyone to like him. So much so that one night before he picked up the razor to attack his demonic ear, he accused me of conspiring against him, spreading all manner of gossip and lies about him. When in fact it was him who after self-mutilation was writing letters to our Paris friends that his wound wasn’t his doing, but I had tried to kill him. Yes, he accused me of attempted murder. An outrageous accusation.
More annoying is that those letters he sent from Arles told our friends in Paris that I, Paul Gauguin, had tried to convince him that murder is the ultimate and finest act of an artist, the most radical rejection of convention and society. I never said that. Maybe I did. But it must have been in a symbolic context. But again, he wanted to be portrayed as a martyr and a victim. The entire world was conspiring against his art. Even by the sky-high narcistic standards of our time, he was the most attention-starved artist I ever knew.
Of course I helped bring attention to him. If it wasn’t for me relaying to the Paris world the bloody story of him after I fled from the horror in Arles, he would have been remembered (if at all) among locals as a delirious orange Dutchman hauling his junk to the field and talking to the wind. I bear responsibility for fanning the flames of his story which really should have never become like some Chinese perennial plant, growing more monstrous with each season until one day it will pass into myth crossing oceans, continents, and generations. And sadly, that’s how history works. Which brings to mind Napoleon (Am I actually quoting a Corsican tyrant now?) who is supposed to have said that history is little more than lies agreed upon by most. Which is the story of our art, our era.
On the other hand, I, who embarked on dangerous voyages to most remote and wild places of the world in search of authentic and native art, will likely become a footnote to posterity, while a Dutchman, famous for wrapping his own ear in a towel and handing it to a prostitute, is being anointed a saint of art.
Unfair doesn’t cut it. Scandalous. Even Cruel.
Dear Johanna, December 1906
Now that I am approaching the end, I wanted to take a moment and send you a little word before my hands grow weaker. It has been over sixteen years since we lost them, Vincent and Theo, and seven years since Cor ended his own life in a strange faraway land. And one of the hardest things in life I have learned, watching helplessly as my three sons vanished, is that a parent is never meant to survive her children. Of late they return to me in dreams with an alarming regularity and intensity. I dream of them as boys in Zundert, in the little garden behind the parsonage where Vincent and Theo were always together. Cor came later of course, fourteen years after Vincent, when we’d moved away from Zundert, but dreams upend our reality. And so I dream of Cor being the same age and playing with his much older brothers in the garden. It’s one of those dreams sweeter that anything I have ever known in life. These days I even think that love in dreams is much more poignant and powerful. Or maybe I feel this way every time I wake up and am brought to weeping. Perhaps God is remorseful and wants to grant me these precious dreams with my boys in my final days. Because there are times when I think of my sons never truly belonging to this world, only passing through it like spirits bound for my dreams in old age.
And yet, despite all the pain and disgrace, despite the grief that has weighed on my heart for so many years, I know one thing to be true: it is because of you, my dear Jo, that their names, their lives and memories will not languish only in my dreams. For this, I must thank you. You have done for them what I could not. Where I wished to forget, you insisted on passing their memories to posterity. It is you who have taken my son’s paintings, those dreadful, incoherent works that once filled me with shame, and given them a place in the world, hanging them on walls of strangers in houses across the land. I don’t know what the future will hold for Vincent’s art, but I hope posterity will reward you for your sacrifices. For me, you have been a light in these dark times. Every time you would be generous enough to come and visit and bring with you Vincent, Theo’s son, I felt like not all ended in tragedy. Seeing my grandson with his father’s searching eyes was always a reminder that God never ceases to weave profound mysteries in our lives even when we give up on him.
There is a photograph of the three of us you graciously gifted me in a frame from a few years ago which I cherish immensely and hold to my breast with urgency whenever a sudden melancholy ambushes me. I see the three of us, the survivors, you sitting to my right, my grandson Vincent to my left. There is a serious and composed look on our faces, as if peering uncertainly deep into the future and not just following the instructions of the photographer and his cumbersome machine in front of us. I stare and stare at it for a long time as if I am looking to solve a puzzle or unlock a mystery. It also calms me and gives me a sense of comfort like I’ve stepped into it and reliving that afternoon together, conversing about whatever it was.
The photograph reminds me of the irony of growing old, which is that the closer I get to the end, the farther back in life I travel in my memories. There is a mixed blessing to such backward sojourning. My girlhood years in the Hague, as they come to me in briefest of fragments, bring back sounds of the city, the clammer, the voices—my beloved sister Cornelia’s, mother’s. Sometimes, these sounds are weak as if weary by time-traveling, and other times they simply make me long for that lost Eden. My father’s voice is sadly absent in these memories and that’s because his silence became louder in my life as I grew up. I wonder though if it was his disease that had silenced him or was it me who had muted his voice as he became increasingly erratic and unpredictable in his duty as a parent.
And speaking of my father, it is true, my dear Jo, that certain dark events that mar our history resurface and haunt us to the end. As I look back and see my children not as their mother but as an observer of their fates, I feel the cold breath of destiny on my face. Although Theo was your loving husband and may have told you many things about the Van Goghs and the Dorus’s side of family, perhaps he didn’t share much about the Carbentuses, my side. He may have never told you about the Chronicle, the handwritten diary of the Carbentus family since at least the mid 1700s. The Chronicle was faithfully passed from one generation to the next and even I contributed my part back in the 60s and 70s, before I realized that when the truth got bitter it barely made it into those pages. For example, my sister Clara died in 1866, but long before that she’d been languishing in an insane asylum. If you consult the Chronicle, it only says that my dear sister was “epileptic,” which masked the demonic severity of her madness. How about my poor brother, Johannes, who took his own life at 47. Where the Chronicle registers his death in briefest notice, that’s where the tragedy of my brother and his illness begins. Or my father who was ‘mentally ill’ or as my mother remembered him more like the representation of madness itself.
The agonizing truth, my dear, is that Vincent’s tragic life and the shame that befell our family wasn’t his fault. The Carbentus Chronicle only skirted our strange history and the curse that was passed faithfully from one generation to another. Some of us were spared by the grace of God, but at this hour in my life I feel obliged to share with you that the Carbentus family has always struggled with this monster that has ravaged the minds of young and old going back to the Golden Age. Tragic as it was to lose my own siblings to this plague, nothing matches the loss of my three sons. And the curse never rests. Now it’s Willemina, my daughter, who is confined in an insane asylum. They say she is almost catatonic. She never speaks a word. Like my father in his late years. She’s in the clutches of the curse now. Four of my six children: Vincent, Theo, Cor and Will devoured by this incomprehensible plague. When I think of this and plunge into grief, my anger returns like an all-consuming blaze, and I fantasize that when I eventually meet my maker, I will confront him with the life’s most destructive wrath and fury of a mother whose children have been abducted from her.
Forgive me, my dear Jo, for this untoward letter but when my remorse and sadness depart me, they make room for my rage. It may sound unbecoming of an old woman like me to speak like this, but I am a mother with an undying fire in my soul. But, in the end, when that fire tames a little, I remind myself that I should be filled with gratitude that I still have you and my grandson, and my two other daughters. I lie down and am consoled by a passage that has been with me since those vexing years when Vincent was small, and I was convinced that he was not real, but the ghost, my first born, I had buried years before:
How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?"
With gratitude,
Anna Cornelia Carbentus
Veldwijk Psychiatric Hospital, Ermelo
May 17, 1941
Willemina Jacoba “Wil” van Gogh passed away today at the Veldwijk Psychiatric Hospital in Ermelo. She was 79. She had lived at the institution since 1902, after being diagnosed with dementia praecox. Born on March 16, 1862, in Zundert, Wil was the fifth child of Theodorus van Gogh, a minister, and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. In her early years, she worked as a nurse and was deeply committed to social causes, particularly advocating for women’s labor rights. She played an active role in the 1898 National Exhibition of Women’s Labor, a convention that strove to highlight and improve the conditions of working women.
Wil shared a close bond with her family, most notably her brother Vincent, whose artistic talent was largely unrecognized during his lifetime. Although his work began to attract some attention in avant-garde circles near the end of his life, he remained largely unknown to the broader public. Vincent’s death in 1890, followed shortly by his brother Theo’s passing in 1891, deeply affected Wil and marked a turning point in her life. According to hospital admission records, family and friends had described Wil as exhibiting increasingly strange behavior, including paranoia, for much of the summer and autumn of 1902. Later that year, she became delusional and hostile, before collapsing on December 4, never to recover fully again.
In the decades that followed her admission to Veldwijk, Wil lived in solitude, rarely speaking or interacting with anyone. She refused eating and had to be artificially fed. Her passing marks the end of the Van Gogh siblings, closing a chapter on a family that experienced both extraordinary creativity and profound personal struggles.
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Mikra Namani’s writing has appeared in various publications including the Washington Post, Harvard Review, 3AM, Heresy Press, Balkan Insight, and elsewhere. Mikra holds an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts where he was awarded a De Alba Fellowship for his fiction. Currently, he is working on The Sentimental Monster, an epistolary novel about a war refugee on trial in Virginia. Born in Kosovo, Mikra lives in Kensington, MD, where he runs the 3709 Kensington Salon, a literary reading series.
