Sunflower Obsessions

Another new year’s summary:

The word “depression” has such a familiar ring to my ear. It reminds me of all the words I’ve ever heard that hide more meaning than what is displayed up front in the sequence of those simple letters. The Germans and French may arrogantly believe they set the world standard for words which belie a face-value description but I am particularly blessed to understand to some degree how the Greek and Chinese civilizations humbly set the antique wheels of our western semantics in motion.

In easy Texas-Twang English, two truths were revealed to me in the last few years.

One, rational people agree that my personality is chronically passive-aggressive which I can’t deny. Two, now, they highlight my behavior which is somewhat typical of the clinically depressed. (I can read between the lines of the lower third of most letters, by the way. I’m rather good at weaving my confrontational points into a spot where nobody will find them, too, so I recognize those kinds of hidden verses quite easily.) But if I was a believer in the face-value of all words, then I’d definitely be in trouble.

I fortunately choose to debate such simple distinctions as well as the “goodness” or “badness” of them. I once spent a good day in Greece, as a matter of fact, arguing with a friend about the existence and meaning of any word which sounds like “surreality”. That mindless effort expended a lot of excellent local wine, I might add. My pal prefers that word though I do not. We agree to disagree.

But even if I don’t like that word, I admit I tend to try and project it as often as possible. In other words, don’t confuse a distressed Bamboo with a melancholy me. They are different monsters.

I once met up with a different old friend in Amsterdam and, after a night of routine carousing in the districts, we toured the Van Gogh museum together. I highly recommend that place, if you’ve never been.

Luckily, that week the Van Gogh had a special showing, a comparison of sorts between the forever-connected works of VG and Paul Gauguin.

It’s a lightly guarded secret that long after beloved cousins vacated the house across the street, somewhere later in High School I think, a freshly sullen I discovered Gauguin. His life story affected me deeply and in some ways I probably set out on a path to relive or capture at least a bit of what he sought. In that sense, I became a fan of his art. Not for its intrinsic face-value but more for his passions that inspired it all. So, you can probably imagine how excited I was to finally stand in front of his crude paintings.

If you one day read my true life story, you will most likely see a pattern of what appears to be scenes of escape, “The Run Away, Pt II”, and so on. There is a deceptive but calculated intent to that pattern, I think. I’ve always chose the opposite of any predicted path and I got especially nervous if the expectation implied any hint of success.

(While I was in the service, I knew people who would speak of routine military assignments, visible tasks destined for promotion and so on, and then describe unique underground positions that were cryptically described as “my” kinds of jobs. I didn’t always know what I was doing in all those cases but it is the way I went and most of it turned out well, I guess. It comes to mind that I would never want to be governor of a state but dutifully working behind the scenes as Lt Gov could be my dream job. I recall once thinking I might be pleased to be a professional butler, a humble man-servant serving tea and crumpets to the rich and powerful, warmly tucking the blissful elite into bed each night while murmuring, “Perhaps a little charity is in order, sir.” Maybe that’s just past lives speaking to me across the cosmos or something but, hey, the world needs people like me, too.)

In one favored speech that I save for young lads who are thinking of finding the perfect life partner, I promote the idea of listing out precisely what they believe men are searching for in women and then recommend marrying the first woman they meet who completely fails the test. That method may not lead to instant happiness, I tell them, but it is surely the recipe for eternal curiosity and satisfaction. Such advice is the True Gauguin coming out of me, I suppose.

Anyway, I recall two memorable displays at the Amsterdam museum.

The first display was a line up of the sunflower paintings. For a short while, Vince and Paul shacked up in France or Belgium, I think, and vainly attempted to perfect their art merely for art’s sake. (Another admirable concept, IMHO.) In that tight atmosphere, Paul agreed to Vince’s obsessive, insane game so the simple sunflower was chosen for painting and painting and re-painting. Vince would paint it his way, then Paul would do it his way, and then eventually they would do it all over again. There must have been a least a dozen sunflower creations by each master side by side on one wall of the museum.

Looking at the art side by side like that, it was very difficult to decide which style was better. I naturally gravitated toward Gauguin at first but each had their strengths and their weaknesses. The debate over who had actually perfected the depiction of a sunflower remains unresolved in my view. (Of course, I know that it was this kind of close confrontation among them that eventually drove them apart. Gauguin who saw little value in boring repetition would soon retreat to the South Pacific and Van Gogh would then return to the relative safety of his family’s stewardship. Sure, there’s more to the story. But who really cares?)

The second display, however, laid it out for everyone to see. On a far wall of the museum, over in a dim corner, one particular painting pulled me in. As I neared the painting, it magically changed in a way that forced me to stop my advance towards it. Curious, I recall I had to back up and approach it again.

Sure enough, I found that this enchanting scenic painting of a milk-green swampy everglade almost moved with me as I wandered around the room. It was not a barren still-life snapshot, not the same painting up close as it was far away or even when viewed side to side. It was then that I realized only Van Gogh’s obsession could come close to perfecting such timeless art. It was only through the light of his diseased eye that another person from a different generation could perceive such a dimension. I resolved that my hero Gauguin, in spite of an admirable attempt to be marketable, to use the cliché, was flat and pale in comparison.

So, to the point, both of these characters were obsessed. Their obsessions took different forms, as did their art, as did their methods of ultimate retreat and escape. When evaluating their genius, they may be characterized as chronic but not debilitated or even dysfunctional in any sense of those words. Their unrelenting pursuit of art’s attraction may define our fixation with a form of life-long Su Doku (a curse which I share with Cousin Charlie) as the mathematical gray area between a “love” and a “nuisance”. In fact, it is such shadowy obsession that drives men to recreate lasting beauty in their own remarkable style.

That is my take on all that, anyway. This is all about beauty, chased about in the naturally sad and contemplative way of human beings. And this is a story of beauty hidden in the simple, repetitive vision of a sunflower as a way of obtaining the perfected vision of a silent milk-green swamp. A vision that in some ways has the double-meaning word “I” written all through it while magically removing that word at the same time to the extent that the “I” in it looks different to everyone no matter from which direction they may approach.

As I’ve said before, I once believed my first book would have to be titled “The Most Often Used Word”. But recently, perhaps in memory of Van Gogh and Gauguin, I’ve begun to think that the depressed-action word “Denying” must preface the title in some unusual way.

Don’t know if you’ve ever tried to write 2,000 joined words without using the words “I” or “me” but I purposefully have and believe me it’s not easy.

(It is at this point in the speech that I typically recommend a classic book titled “A Soldier of the Great War” written by Mark Helprin, who is one of the finest writers of our time.)

I agree with you, though. Looking back over this past year, chances are good that Bamboo will take the aggressive path of Vincent. But maybe in silent tribute to Paul, “I” will still passively long for that tiny tropical island home away from home.

It remains very deceptive but please don’t use the word “fear” in any case. These sunflower obsessions are manageable, brought about by more philosophical and rational internal debates rather than any pointless faith in “surreality”, and in many ways positive adaptations with regards to the current “real” environment.

In other words, yeah, this year's production, meager as it may have been, was just as cathartic as the last...

Cheers,
Mb