Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

The Hospital at Arles
January 1889

oomed from the start--from before, no doubt.
I can't say I'm surprised. I wrote to Theo--oh, last May--
or was it June?--Gauguin had patience for no one
but himself, of course. A shrewd man, that bank clerk
--but brilliant, that too. Though he
knows it too well for himself, and pushes
his technique--despite which not because of
his paintings are so rich--the swaths of color, impeded
too often by the line he swears makes the canvas whole--
breaking it into forms, parceling the space and calculating
how to place the forms--from memory, of course.
Damn the line--canvas is not the drafting board; let color
supply the line, the forms, as they grow in the eye from the eye
looking directly at the subject--tree or field, arcade
or washerwomen by the pont de l'Anglois in afternoon sun,
the light riding the surface of the Rhône, crackling
in the folds of dresses, gleaming on the laundry fetched
pristine from the current and draped around like souls
seined and sparkling from birth.
We painted there
together, he and I, one facing upstream, the other down,
then shifted easels and each tried the other's angle.
They talked, I'm sure, the townfolk--two ducks odd as us,
how could we not raise their eyebrows. I've known such before,
you know, in the Borinage. The Wasmes Council, those
stuffy fools, dismissing me--me, for practicing only
what the Bible preaches. How they resented me. And how--
I can see this now--how foolishly I pressed the miners there
beyond God's expectation. One--have I talked of him before?--
he reminds me of you, Roulin--let me use a corner of his hovel.
There, I began my first clumsy sketches. Dismissed? Rather,
I left them. What place had God--the Council's God, the Council's
Scripture--in their impoverished lives? I could make God
realer with my pencil, with my painting even then, than all the words
the Council sowed like millet on a field so full of rocks,
so parched.
I trusted too much the line, too much
color driven flat by shadow. Rembrandt and the other masters--
how they loved the dark--the tones of an organ
swelling dour Luther's hymns in the half-lit nave.
It took the Japanese and this brilliant southern light
to rid my palate of muted tones--let the canvas sing!
But keep the colors such that they accent--not overwhelm--
what the eye perceives. Show me flesh was ever
tinted Prussian blue. That's where Gauguin failed
--to understand the world as it reveals itself,
not from the coldly geometric eye, but how it glows
with its own--call it soul, from the inside out.
The trick--not trick, you do not want to sway too far the other way
and imitate those shallow masters of the trompe l'oeil with their
finely powdered hues. See the color as the light
lets it shine. No more. No lines, I see that now.
I listened to Gauguin for a time. I tried to measure what I saw,
to recollect the world I'd seen in lines that
portioned out the paint, to subdue my sense to his
insistence that his damned cloisonné could do better justice
to the world. The line distorts. The line constricts
the flow of energy I see--I feel--in current, in the trees
and batteries of clouds, the fields of Arles rampant in spring,
and the flesh of our Arlésiennes. Who ever saw the world
as a mosaic?
Why ask him here? Ask?
I insisted, I begged the arrogant bank clerk abandon Brittany
and come to our lovely South. For Theo, yes, to ease
his burden--one rent from his purse instead of two; but
more for the Midi studio. I believed--foolishly!--once here
he would come to love the South, to put aside
personality for the sake of painting--yet the power
of his personality that drew others like a flame
moths or a magnet filings--he made
the perfect leader, but not the master and me
cast as itinerant disciple. How that would be!
A colony of painters. Friends--not,
dear Roulin, to demean your friendship--I cannot say
how it pleases me you've come again, and how much
I appreciate your hospitality, your taking care
during my stay of the Yellow House, and how
you've opened your home to me, let me
paint your portrait, paint your family's--
you can tell Madame Roulin that once I'm out, and it will be
soon now, I can feel my strength returning, my eye
already turning out the window to see how light
plays among the trees; on my walk yesterday afternoon
I even made sketches toward a study of the hospital--
I will finish that portrait of her I began
before this sad business.
I've got an idea now, I've got
the sense of how color must flow with the grain,
must convey the electricity--but you'll see; my words fail,
and you, dear, dear Roulin, despite your kindness,
you are a postman not painter, and though he tries,
our dear Milliet, our dashing Zouave, merely fiddles
at the art--and how, so consumed with his commission,
could he do otherwise? Painting demands the life in full.
That, that's why the studio, why I sought Gauguin.
Boch would come, then others, all drawn from Paris
down to where the light plays with such vigor
on everything it meets--watch sometime the sun on a leaf--
on a single blade of grass. You've seen my print
of Hiroshige's "Blade of Grass"?--it's one
that hangs beside my bed. The hours I've sweated over it.
How from that single--that simple!--blade, or leaf
as Whitman, the American, would have it, he extrapolates
a world--fields, flowers, birds, and people.
And how in Whitman's poems, those long, expansive lines like arms
seeking to embrace the whole world, yet his eye turned
always to the smallest part. Yet he seeks
to embrace, to take from the outside
where the Japanese would work from the inside out.
I've read the letters of this English poet who catches
the need to lose the self--to shed the self to find the soul.
To place yourself within the snail, setting aside
our grand ambitions, to become the simplest bird to know
the world as they know it, minutely, then to bring
that knowledge to coloration. To know how the grass itself
feels bathed in light, the blossoms on a tree.

I see that my ranting concerns you. No--don't call Dr. Rey.
A fine man, yes, and caring. They are all pleasant, smiling.
He's asked, of course, about the ear. A moment's lapse.
Poor Rachel, I only hope she does not take it wrong,
she does not take it too much to heart. It was only losing him--
losing more than him, the studio, his friendship,
such as it could be. Nights we'd walk, after the absinthe,
the whores, down to the quai and talk of the day's work, of what
we'd do tomorrow. Sit sometimes, too tired to give ourselves to bed,
on the benches near the bridge and watch the stars
swell in the deep blue sky--how they some nights seemed to draw
the sky in rings around themselves, eddies of brilliance
where we're taught to think of blackness and isolated points of light,
the sound of a night bird far off on the Trinquetaille bank.
The lives we'd left behind to find ourselves here, two painters,
bearing so much, like the trestles of the bridge against
the current day and night--no, more like alyssum, its stalk
swaying in the wind, whipped by storm, yet rooted, the petals
firm--poverty, but more the poverty of response, our lives
poured onto canvas, yes, nothing less, and the slight
return. And then we'd hug.
So soon? No, no--if you must.
Please thank Madame Roulin for the fruit, Madame Ginoux
for the thoughtful flowers. My best to all who asked,
and you, dear Roulin, I thank you for your love.