Van Gogh Flow

Beth and I once visited my friend Nat in Brooklyn for a week.  While there, Beth and I took a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Images completely flattened to 2D -- whether images on a screen or a print -- cannot do justice to the large pieces they have of Monet and Van Gogh.  With paintings of a sufficient size, the tiny involuntary moments of your eyes (called saccades) can give the work a dynamic quality, which can be used by a master artist to great effect (even affect).  Beth's favorite was a Monet that featured water.  In the painting-as-experience the water moved around but with the harmony and shimmer of a perfect day.  Golly, just imagine . . . a perfect day, captured forever [1].

I, however, was moved most by Van Gogh.  Afterward, I told Nat that perceiving a Van Gogh in real life felt like a walk in Nature (mind, I don't mean to say that every time I go outside I feel this way, just when I am really grooving).  Putting this into words is difficult -- and that's why we need visual arts...  But to put in a good word for language, visual pieces of the scale I am writing about, like all complex experiences, would have to picked up and physically moved to each perceiver, which is unwieldy in best case scenarios, but in practice usually impossible.   Thus we need writing.  Though writers are often left saying "it's more complex than I'm making it sound" or "I can't put this into words" at least we writers can make those gestures.  A bad picture, or even a print of a great picture, leaves the impression that it contains all there is.  Language can connect concepts and can warn us of the unseen (or of the existence of the unseeable, or even the unwriteable, unthinkable, unfeelable (perhaps), etc).

Again, a Van Gogh perceived live is an experience beyond my ability to reduce.  There are lots of those kinds of experience, but not all of them remind me of a great walk, so to try to explain further I want to invoke a concept, an imperfect tool [2].  The concept is flow.  Van Gogh  -- Live! -- gives flow.  You can get an outline of the flow from a print, but the experience live is the kind that breaks the lines of separation, through non-linear movement.  Most people who describe breaking separations talk about moving past "dualism," but I don't like that phrase because I don't just see Two; I see many, many parts liable to break down and flow into each other.

So how is that like time spent in Nature?  Please imagine --  or better yet, try -- the following experiment: just look at any segment of nature and see how long it can stay unchanged, without any movement.  (Or, if you have practice with imagination and empathy, you can just ask the nature-segment-which-I-don't-want-to-call-an-object).  Many things will move right before you, even at human time-frames.  The bird will fly, the blade of grass will bend to the wind.  Develop your patience a bit and you can watch a cloud formation unfold.  And with each level of greater patience, memory, and ability to see connections, more and more will change.  For me, Van Gogh invokes that flow.  Find it in Van Gogh, find it in Nature, find it with the aid of substances, if you must.  I just want you to find it and then we can talk some important truths.

Ego-death?  I don't know much about that.  I know that I can take the totally sober (though perhaps deeply neuro-atypical) ability to trace flows and their ability to break separations and apply it to myself.  That breath I just took -- borrowed oxygen and carbon, only borrowed, and then given back.  It seems preferable, at least more gentle, to give them back as breaths later on, but one way or another, I will be giving them back.  Perhaps the understanding that people return breath requires a culture with scientific knowledge, but even there I am not so sure.  But I am sure all humans have had at least the opportunity to see "liquid in/ liquid out."  Substance in, and substance out. . . Then plants can grow in that substance.  However you want to look at it, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything you can keep. . . but only if you are open to seeing that truth.  You can learn to see what is bigger than you, but instead of feeling small because of it, you can, and should, feel intertwined.

I close with the Van Gogh painting First Steps, after Millet 1890. [backup]  The interplay of painting and my soul brought tears.  It's still all about flow, but now it includes a little human and the harmony with caregivers.  I have seen no more beautiful image of human life.  I bought a print in the gift shop.  It is a reminder of a deep aesthetic experience.  And if I ever have children, that print will go in the nursery. Update: and it did.



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[1] I wonder if virtual reality will ever render a copy with high enough resolution to give the effect.  I  imagine the technology could be there one day, but will it ever fit the design philosophy of those with the means of mass distribution?  In our weird times, the important thing is to not pretend it's there until it is.  Many people have deprived themselves of real Quality and driven themselves crazy by the lack.  Eco-therapy is real.

[2] Aren't all tools imperfect?  If they weren't, someone would own a God-stick, or a Marvel-style cube or gauntlet, or what-have-you.