Two Travelers

“The world concerns me only in so far as I have a certain debt and duty to it, because I have lived in it for thirty years and owe to it to leave behind some souvenir in the shape of drawings and paintings – not done to please any particular movement, but within which a genuine human sentiment is expressed.” 
― Vincent Van Gogh

TW: Today’s newsletter is about pregnancy loss. If that feels too tender for you today, skip ahead to the frivolities. Sending lots of love to you, always.

Art is the most innocent form of coquetry; it is beautiful, alluring, elusive—and rarely, if ever, explains itself. With each trip into the corridors of an art museum, the walls seem to whisper: what new parts of your soul are you going to meet today?

I can say this with certainty because it is what I have felt each time I have visited a new museum. And most especially because, when I first beheld a Van Gogh, I was introduced to a whole new layer to my soul. I saw my very first real-life Van Gogh in 2004, right before I went away to college. It was Vase of Roses at the Met in New York City. It was my first big girl trip and it ripped my soul open in innumerable ways, but that painting had me captivated for years afterward. It was an awakening that has never once taken a repose. I once made a promise to myself that wherever my husband Jay and I traveled, if there were a Van Gogh there, that I would see it. About five or so years ago, this vow took us to the MFA in Boston where there resides two whole Van Goghs. I love seeing the ones I’ve known about; I love even more seeing the ones I didn’t know existed!

One such of these was his Ravine-- a swirling, descending landscape of navy and mint and mauve, with only a pinch of barely discriminate sky. When you compare this piece to some of Van Gogh’s others, it seems quieter, non-demonstrative almost. Still with his tenacious, distinct brushstrokes, of course, but they are more tentative in this piece. And that is just how I found this work of art amongst the countless others in the museum; it didn’t beg to be seen. And yet, I was instantly drawn to it. It is hushed, almost reverent, in its cascading strokes- the colors managing to be both vivid and reticent at the same time. Amidst the flush of blue and gray hues, it can be hard to discriminate the sky from the water, the water from the stone. One thing that is apparent, however, is that it is indeed a ravine. The entire canvass is sloped in descending mountainside.

Because this was painted in 1889, I knew that Van Gogh was in the asylum in St. Remy when he painted these strokes, but I didn’t know where he was within his mental struggle. It seems that no matter what the subject matter, no matter the hues, he was always forging through his own inscapes, charting them into brushstrokes, his very own emotive form of introspective cartography. Titles like Sunflowers, La Soleil, and The Pietá-- can give us hints into the inward destinations at which he found himself, or, at least was hoping to find himself. And so, then, can The Ravine. By definition, a ravine is the result of something that has asserted its purpose over what was already there. It is a carving out, a deepness. And depending upon where you look, it is either a hopeless destination… or it is something from which you were called to ascend.

Life is often defined by its peaks and valleys. With a brimming heart, I confess that for the most part, and for at least four* years now, my life has been a quiet singing stream of blessings. Though indeed the valleys have come, they have been few, and they have been shallow. And even in the deepest of those shallow valleys, I have never felt that I didn’t have everything within me necessary to climb out of it. My heart is desperately hopeful. It has always provided me the way out of the valley, always looking up, up, up toward the resplendent peak. And so, when I found myself in the first truly unrelenting depth of my life, one that shattered my hopeful heart, I had to decide where to look.

A baby is a joy from the moment you discover it. All babies are blessings, but the first baby is a whole new realm of heavenly hope. Once you sense its presence, all your wonderings, all your intentions, all your purpose, it seems, revolve around that little life budding within you. You dream, you wonder, you muse, you hope, you plan, you pray, you praise, you sing, you sigh, you dream and dream and dream some more. But it is all so very delicate and precarious; like you are sitting on an overly inflated balloon just enough for it not to pop. So when that little sprout stops growing before it really even starts- that pain, too, is so very fragile. The reality of that delicate little tragedy is a juxtaposition, because delicate though that life was, its loss is a decimation.  It isn’t just the wonderings, and the intentions, and the purpose and the hope that all get displaced. You yourself get displaced. And the joy does, too.  Perhaps it is transformed altogether. Perhaps the joy unravels itself into the grief. I read somewhere that grief is just love with no place to land, and that is maybe the truest way I can think to say it. That balloon you were being so careful not to pop implodes and its pieces are little agonies. Because they aren’t the kind of pieces that can be put back together. There are no connecting shapes to form a beautiful picture when you figure out where they go. Ultimately and cruelly, they have to be discarded. The deflation and the pieces and the discarding-- it’s so very ugly and brutal and harrowing and it’s a kind of territory you don’t understand how to navigate even after you’ve made your way through it. (But maybe you never really do make it all the way through. Sometimes our travails leave their footprints on us, instead of the other way around.) The ugly, biting, taunting truth? My body failed to hold the very thing it was designed to hold. And the irony and the shame of that was infuriating and demoralizing and deafening. The letting go gripped me and my white flag of surrender was clawed to shreds. The release was not a release at all. I was no longer pregnant with a budding life. But I was pregnant with emptiness.

“I thought I could be understood without words.”

-Vincent Van Gogh

 … And so it was that while keeping all of this locked up tightly inside of me, that I stood in front of The Ravine, for the very first time, surveying the downward, determined brushstrokes, and felt my motherhood ache. It was like staring into a mirror. Whatever ravine Van Gogh was in when he painted it— these brushstrokes were my insides now. Grief was all that was left behind. And that precious grief had carved out a ravine within me. It pushed its way through all the hope, happiness, and optimism like that river carving out the mountainside, asserting itself through the stone. Before now, hope had always been like a stone for me; I rested everything upon it. But now that stone was carved and disfigured. I have always believed that there is a grander purpose to our pain. But what could possibly be the grander purpose of a pain this pure? And what was the pain that pulsed within this canvas? Something within me just yearned to know. Because, maybe if I could understand the pain that compelled these brushstrokes, I could have a better sense of how to proceed with my own.

It is no little known secret that Van Gogh’s struggle was a violent one. He is, perhaps, even more famous for his psychosis than he is his art. Marc Edu Trabaut‘s biography on Van Gogh was the first book I ever checked out from my university’s library (for fun, that is) and I devoured it from cover to cover. To this day it is the most definitive source of Van Gogh that I have encountered. It was in those pages that I learned of the intricacies of his ache and the beautiful energy of his soul. He checked himself into several asylums in his short lifetime, but his tenure at Saint-Remy was by far his most prolific, serving as a backdrop for some of his most famous paintings. (Irises, Blossoming Almond Tree, and Starry Night Over the Rhone were all painted during his tenure here.) I can’t remember who said it, but one of the most incisive things I think that has ever been said about Van Gogh: “Van Gogh is able to use means of great simplicity; and we see one again how very alert his art is in spite of the turmoil in his spirit.”

After spending months in a hospital in Arles, France, he admitted himself into the Saint-Paul de Mausole psychiatric institution, originally a 12^th century Augustinian monestary, some twenty kilometers north of Arles.  According to Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings:

“Saint-Paul-de-Mausole was an asylum, monastery, and studio all in one, which was why Van Gogh so gladly opted for the isolation… The brooding melancholy of the monastic environment was just the thing to heighten van Gogh’s mood and leave him more radical than before. Saint-Remy was a vacuum. Sealed off from airy, colorful life, the artist could devote his whole attention to himself and the psychological forces that had him in their grip. He attempted to come to terms with them in his paintings and was the better able to explore the depths of his life and art because he had no distractions, no contact with other people, and none of the drink or tobacco he had been addicted to.”

He stayed there for a year. Much of what is known about Van Gogh’s inner life comes from the heartful correspondence between him and his brother Theo. One such passage from this punctuation in his enduring, undulating struggle reads:

“But as for many of us — and surely we’ll be among them ourselves — the future is still difficult. I do believe in a final victory, but will artists benefit from it, and will they see more peaceful days?”

In another letter, he wrote: “So life goes by, and time will not return, but I am getting to grips with my work, precisely because I know that there will not be another opportunity to paint. Least of all in my case, since a more serious attack may do permanent damage to my ability to work.” He died the year after this painting was finished, at 37 years old.

Studying the canvass with all energy of sensory exertion I could muster, I left no crag unturned. Sloping brushstrokes conveyed the beautiful chaos of nature left alone; perhaps a cascading waterfall, the gushing river below, weaving in and out of intertwined stone and branch. And then there, barely discernable amidst the curves and crags, the sweeping stone and brush, were two figures. The larger figure turns her head back to the smaller, with an outstretched arm, leading her along. And, this is important: they are not trapped and helpless and flailing in the water. Nor are they still. They are above the current. Their forms face forward and upward. They are ascending the ravine together. Of this part of the painting, Van Gogh’s contemporary, Paul Gaugin, admired: “Two travelers, very small, seem to be climbing there in search of the unknown…Here and there, red touches like lights, the whole in a violet tone. It is beautiful and grandiose." I can’t help but think of that in terms of how I struggled through this heartache; me and my little one. Two travelers through this body, in search of the other. The pain was grandiose, indeed. And beautiful in the way that grief is beautiful, because it is love.

So, maybe the brushstrokes weren’t downward strokes, after-all. What if dear old Vincent began his strokes at the bottom of the canvas, and painted upwards? What if it wasn’t a descent he was painting at all, but a glorious but hushed “final victory”?

I eventually had to leave the painting, leave the museum, but that painting never left me. As I made my way through my own ravine of grief, sometimes lighting a candle to illuminate my view of it, sometimes snuffing out the faint light altogether and choosing to be more comfortable in the uncomfortable coldness, I came to learn that things like these, things that are cold and unforgiving and fracturing, that they serve a holy purpose. Because they are the things most adept at shaping us. The question isn’t whether or not they will come, it is how will we allow them to mold us when they do? Will we let the ugliness, though grandiose, beautify us? Will we let it define us, or refine us? Where will we choose to look?

This was my first miscarriage, but, it wouldn’t be my last. I believe I needed to see this painting, to study its curves and frequencies and quiet hues, and to see my own struggle within those strokes. I needed to see that the strokes could be ascending strokes just as easily as they could be plummeting ones.  And so, as months and months and now years have passed, I am even more grateful today than I was then, that I was able to choose to see upward. It was in the looking up, that I was able to be softened, instead of letting the pain harden me. I learned to be gentle with myself, to embrace the truth that not all dreams are realized in my way or in my time, and that not all failings equate to deficiency. I was taught how to nurture the contours of my fragility, and extend that gentleness to others, for, because of how silent my pain was, I knew that probably most of humanity’s pain is that way. I allowed myself to adjust my expectations for my body within compassionate boundaries. I learned to trust that whatever it is I am given to carry, or miscarry, is exactly what my soul needs to grow, and that the awareness and identity that surfaces from the depths of despair is usually far more melodic than any tune we had composed for ourselves. I learned to appreciate the new shape of my hope. 

There is, also, a past-tense of the word ravine. If a thing is ravined, it is marked or furrowed with ravines. Something about that is resonate with me. Because we are all ravined, in our way. We have all been furrowed by tragedy. So, then. My hope is carved, it is ravined. But it is still stone. I must choose to be like those little travelers painted in those upward strokes. I must choose to believe in those upward strokes.

“The light
in my
body
broke

and the
darkness
changed
me

into
someone
that
could
heal it.”
—Jessica Lakritz in collaboration with Jessica Zucker

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo

*Four years, because my precious, cherished rainbow baby Clyde was born four years ago, and my heart has been healing and brimming ever since. Things will always look up. They’ve got to. Van Gogh himself said, “The beginning is perhaps more difficult than anything else, but keep heart, it will turn out all right.” 

---

We haven’t done this one in awhile! Word of the Day: noetic. I remember absolutely lovvvving this word when I first heard it. It means “of or relating to the mind”.

Might sell an organ so I can afford this sweater.

What do you do with alllllll your kids art?? This podcast was extremely helpful for me: the obsessive compulsive yet overly sentimental purger.

I enjoyed this Radiolab episode about Poison Control a weird amount.

Anyone else listening to Scamanda?? We hate her!

This letter of refusal from Charlotte Bronte is everything. 

I would divorce Jay and then marry him all over again just so I could have another wedding and wear these. (Also, that wouldn’t even be the most irrational thing I’ve ever done.)

My favorite Bob Dylan quote and a doormat had a baby!

My new favorite depiction of Mary and the Christ child. Actually— this is my new favorite Pinterest deep dive. #festive

Got this new brush from my sorceress hair dresser today and it’s incredible. I’ve had it for approximately three hours and I already love it more than my children.

It would be a grave disservice to not buy this for Clyde’s bedroom.

I have been trying to detox our home as much as I can (RIP, candles) and have tried to switch over to less toxic cleaning agents, too. I grew up on the peppermint soap for bathing, but I’m just as obsessed with this for cleaning everything else!

Edith Wharton stans: I’m reading this right now and loving it. We love a hateable protagonist! I’ve heard that Sofia Coppola was going to make an adaptation but it got quashed…Nicolas Cage please remedy this immediately.

xo.