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historytaker · 4 years ago

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He knew he was dying. He gave us a farewell as only he could – manic, sardonic, tip-toeing on the periphery of the numinous. Yet, David Bowie bowed out with Lazarus. It was, as only these 4 short years later, a powerfully humbling take on a life taking account of itself.

I resented that he died. “The gall,” I’d half mutter with exhaustion to myself. “To go off and die when the world needed his thoughts the most.” The starman took off, nonetheless and the world did continue—a little less. But for my money, anybody who had a bit of Bush-era angst and a penchant for subversive scream matches with music knew they still had Chris Cornell to turn to. And that was very much me.

In fact, the love affair I cultivated with the Audioslave front-man began in earnest when I was a moody teenager on the back of beyond Missouri. What did I even begin to know of the deep, deep text Cornell was singing about? Not much. But everything struck a chord. I loved his voice. He carried the whine of a trained vocalist recovering from too many cigarettes and nights prolonging themselves from the pull of hard liquor. He managed to be at the top of his craft despite the negligent behavior. I loved the wind tossed black locks of hair and how they fell so defiantly to either side of his temples. Men in those days still very much catered to a tighter look. Not Chris. He defied and made it look sexy. I enjoyed seeing his pouty lips crested by the careless growth of chin strap beard. His eyes bore through any picture of him I ever saw. I suppose buried beneath the incredible vocals, fallen-angel looks and guitar riffs were years of layered pain. But artist carry pain for a living. He simply did something with it. The very first moment I heard Chris Cornell, he was singing that mystical song constructed with the discarded boards of symbolism, “Like A Stone.”

As so often is the case with love at first octave—I had to hear more. Fortunately for me, at 14, I had boon companions that were persuaded in the aesthetic of Audioslave like me. My best friend certainly appreciated the first Audioslave album. In fact, our high school years could be characterized by a joint disdain in George W. Bush being president, rural life cultural indifference, and Cornell’s work to anthem us between milestones. Among our group, I was the first to get a job. And who was there to give the newest take on managing school life, puberty, and work? Chris of course. “Be Yourself,” or “Yesterday to Tomorrow,” “Doesn’t Remind Me,” were all standout songs in the band’s newest album Out of Exile. Many of the songs on that album could just as easily have described our murky take on this time. And no good high school experience could be complete without long drives at night—preferably a Friday—jamming to the plethora of songs in the cd holder. True to form, there was Chris Cornell telling us what he knew about grief. Naturally we would slide back and forth between the newest album and the older original. In fact, by the close of sophomore year, I recall distinctly the stuffy humid Missouri early summer working as a veil. Outside, filled with the determination of conquering our minor life major goals, “I Am the Highway” playing low in the background while our group discussed the lovelorn musings of feminine mysteries. None of which mattered to me, I was with the guys I liked. But it mattered to them, so I suppose it mattered to me on second thought.

2005 produced a lot to be upset and genuinely angry about though. The war on terror was only reported as an aimless mission between ill-defined moving targets. As far as my young self was concerned, Bush – who should not have won—did win and proceeded with the war effort. More Americans were dying and being sent to overwhelm the region. I was inching closer to 18 and not at all ready to be a part of that mess. I saw what cultural conservatism did when it married itself to neo-conservatism—nothing worth being an advocate for. As a closeted gay youth, it was nationwide rejection and state constitutional amendments confirming the position. Worse still, hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans. For the first time in my life, I saw what racism and failure looked like in one catastrophic moment. Once again – as so many times before in high school, Chris Cornell was there to put that anger, anxiety, disappointment, righteous indignation to words. “Wide Awake,” called out the failings of the Bush administration. He called out in no uncertain terms just what was going on, and nobody was blind to the motivations of our president. The album featuring this song, Revelations, was that last time the band would produce anything together. The timing was almost fortuitous because within because our time in high school was nearly finished. But first….

Chris Cornell returned to a solo career for a while. His celebrity has risen dramatically in the years since being part of Audioslave. In many ways, he was taken more seriously as an artist since his early days in the grunge scene with Soundgarden in the early 90’s. For me, 2007 might as well ought to have been the apogee of his prominence in my heart and life. I was staring at a senior year that was about to begin in the quick few months that separated it from May. Cornell released Carry On that month. His songs were less invective and were touching on something more ephemeral – fleeting love. In love with my best friend, closeted, yet joined by a shared enthusiasm for life and this incredible artist; it had a poetic way of playing itself out.

Throughout that senior year, with Chris Cornell’s newest album and everyone of his Audioslave cd’s, we enjoyed his music in abundance. From lung-filled burst of matching pitches, attempting to mirror Cornell, to inventive recreations of his songs in our mundane daily observations, my friend and I enjoyed his music obsessively. With that year came the definitive conclusion—a farewell—to the structured preparedness of oblivious youthful musings; and in that sense, enjoying music superficially. Over that summer, my friend burned a cd that was of Chris Cornell’s first attempt at a solo career—Euphoria Morning. The power, pain, and pros he employed in that cd was much of the same that I would later associate Chris Cornell with. This genre of fusions between genres pulling from rock and blues was astounding. He laments that at 24 that he knows he has everything to live for but this love was not meant to be. It just as well may have been a song aimed at me in my comeuppance. My freshman year in college was an important one. I came out. Additionally, by the end of it, I had finally fallen in love in a way I could accept. But I also drifted from my high school friends. Cornell’s music just could not hit the same—not then, without my best friend to explore its meaning with.

As it were, I grew beyond his music or my fervor for it anyhow. I never tuned him out. In fact, I did enjoy anything he lent his talents to. But the music just could not hit the same with the estrangement from friends, and the budding introduction to successful attempts at failed love. In many ways then, my observation and enjoyment of Chris Cornell’s work was largely passive—never fully immersing myself so completely as I did as a zealous teenager. Nevertheless, I recall distinctly the feeling in my gut—being bereft of words and filled with despair in hearing of Chris Cornell’s death. In many ways, all those high school days and summer nights, all those drunken nights in college sleeping with headphones on and drifting in and out of sleep with Chris playing in my ear, comparing my heart’s desires with his wise songs all collided in this ebullition before bursting in what amounted to a inhaled sob.

I was stunned. Stunned because his death was more than a celebrity death, but also a reconciliation with life having moved on for me so much. After that introspection I then looked into what happened, and the general consensus is that Chris Cornell had been depressed for a long time. He ended his own life. And immediately all of those songs, defying himself, or his lover, were also proclamations against this pain that he carried so completely for so long. He clearly felt things deeply in a way that so many of us could never understand. Surely his joys were a high that could not be comprehended, but I imagine if Hell exists, he dwelt there many times; always climbing out from it, and often with a new message to give us.

I could not listen to his music for months after he died. It hurt too much. I could not enjoy his gifts to the world or particular contribution to my life while knowing he was gone. Slowly, incredibly slowly, his music crept back in to my occasional listening. This would generally be my new relationship to his music; Always reminded with each passing song as it randomly played on my phone that Chris Cornell was gone. Then, suddenly, like a grasp at the heart from somewhere beyond—I stumbled on his song “Misery Chain.” Then, years after the passing of the poor man, then I felt the gravitational pull of his heart. The pain, the truth, the baring of his soul is plainly displayed in his song. Nothing unique to him, but the missing piece was the tragedy in knowing how it all ends. Each whine, each extra effort in carrying the note—pushing himself ever forward despite the futility of the exercise, is underscored in knowing in a few short years he would commit suicide. He snubs that misery he knows so well, but we know it was never far away.

I could not say goodbye. I was not ready. He teaches still, even now from beyond. What he gifted the world in music and honesty, I can only assess through my own life. I lament that his brilliance is bookended by infinity. But I am glad that someone who knew how to share their heart ever existed at all. Indeed he felt, and I felt with him. I know that now.

#chris cornell

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historytaker · 4 years ago

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Tears for Chris

#chris cornell

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historytaker · 4 years ago

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Once upon a time in a prairie school

We were the children of toilers, broken homes, established names, and passing vessels. The only commercial successes our tiny communities could point to were the handful of convenience stores or the adult video store that dotted highway . What passed for middle class standards might as well have been the steady assurance of heating in the winter, bathing gel, and new jeans at the beginning of the year for my classmates. The local economy was hardly existent. Boys were raised to stay home and work hard, drift off to a more urban area and explore their options in college or go to the military. Girls were never expressly told not to do any of those things, but if they did find themselves compelled to marry their high school sweetheart and aspire only within the sphere of domesticity, then that was fine too.

Despite the prospects being bleak for all of us, the teachers at my school in 2008 were some of the most caring, compassionate, knowledgeable and wise that I could have hoped for. Chief among this symposium of educators was my English literature teacher, or in the parlance of my junior-aged self, (lets call him) “Mr. Smith.

Mr. Smith was my English literature teacher. He introduced me to a passion that has never left me – love for British history. For it was in the telling of English literature as one part English language development and one part a snapshot into the historical context of the developing English tongue, that I was able to grasp the deeper meaning behind some of the tales that had been known but never dissected; such as the tales of King Arthur. Indeed, that semester our class was immersed in the terse and potent burst of verse from Beowulf and how we had to parse out the split personality of a deeply Euro-pagan story handed to posterity by a Christian pen. Or equally compelling was the sunburst of enlightenment energy handed down to us in the works of the English romantics or the introduction into the darker gothic musings that brought us Frankenstein. Yes, from Beowulf, the Wife of Bathe, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner to an introduction to Dickens proper, we took a tour of Britain in time and developed an understanding that these works were fictions, heroics, and sometimes even political statements of a revolutionary quality.

It would have been incredibly easy for Mr. Smith to simply meander through this content with the grace of a perfunctory middle-aged nihilist. But he did not. He knew that half of us would stay among the hay-fields and gas-stations, the other half would scatter the compass and survive or fail but regard our time there with little care. Yet he told all of us from day one that we were special and that we mattered. He knew that there was nothing we were about to read we could not understand or draw our own profound conclusions therein. He knew that this literature was an opening to thinking more deeply about ourselves and the times we inhabited. He remarked on the relatively young but dazzling speed of thought of Lord Byron and William Wordsworth. He knew that we too would be the inheritors of the world and would be voting very soon. He challenged us to see ourselves in active, concrete ways and as influential as those romantic poets.

Between the rich source material and the occasional class discussion, Mr. Smith also made a special point of speaking to all of us as people on the verge of adulthood. In many cases, he met us where we were at as individuals. He did not encourage arrested development. Instead he had a high standard for us and challenged us to match it because that was what adults did. So invested in our ability to excel, particularly in college writing, our big project was supposed to be a research topic—entirely of our own choosing—that was 12 pages long and had a bibliography. At the time, and even to this day, such a page count seemed incredibly daunting. Because Mr. Smith believed we could do it, offered clear directions, and ample edits and suggestions to add to the depth of the work, most of us succeeded in this task.

As a matter of style, he dedicated himself to learning our names and in conversation would slip our names in meaningfully. It felt less like discussing topics in class in a question and answer format and more like having a conversation over a subject we equally enjoyed talking about. In this way, he made us feel like partners in our learning.

Other teachers had their favorites or taught to the strengths that they best knew. In these cases, it became pretty clear early on how engaged the class might become. On the other hand, Mr. Smith had a way of enveloping the entire class. Popular kids and ne’er-do-wells both found their voice in his class. It was unique.

As an aspiring teacher, I can only hope to be as influential in learners’ lives. I hope to be a modicum of compassionate and caring over the fact that the students I will be teaching are near-future adults with great decisions to make in the society they inherit. I am sure the talents of Mr. Smith did not come easily or all at once. But I am also certain the attention to detail and the overwhelming faith in our ability to achieve regardless of our backgrounds or proclivities that may have suggested otherwise. And by having that faith, so many of us fought to confirm and affirm such dedication.

#teaching

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historytaker · 4 years ago

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King Versus King

Within the first quarter of the 14th century, it would be forgivable to let the king of England seem profoundly on top of the world. The setbacks of his father, Edward II, were crudely mended by his mother, Isabella. England was swelling with military, political, and thereby economic success; So much so that the population had inflated to 4 million. Equally important to the crown, Edward II had a legitimate claim to the French crown. The Capetian dynasty was a long standing rival in European politics with the Plantagenets. The Plantagenets out-bred and out-wed the Capetians, ultimately. What’s more, the long time enemy of the English, the Scottish, had little affinity for their king, David II. To add to the seemingly charmed hand of state, when David II was struck in the head with an arrow and duly kidnapped by the English, the Scottish refused to pay a king’s ransom and had all but formally announced fealty to Edward II. This Plantagenet wore the crown of three kingdoms and ushered in an era of chivalry, fantasy, success, opulence and unrequited love for the dynasty overseeing an economic power that had heretofore been unprecedented in Christendom, save only for the early successes of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II. The king was experiencing the apogee of an age in which the old order was in solid control of the comings and goings of the world. Bishops preached in Latin. Indulgences could be paid. Wealth buffered concerns on Earth and evidently in Heaven. For, one could compel a monastery to pray for your soul with such fervency and continuity that one’s stay in purgatory would be short, and Heaven’s bliss obtained in short order. Wealth could be and was hoarded. The lord of the manor had no reason to ever assume a change in the order.

So sustained was the monarchy in England, Edward II felt it not at all unreasonable to fashion himself a modern Arthur at Camelot. His was a kingdom of gentlemen, of knights, of righteous conviction and marshal prowess. He started the Order of the Garter and created a round table to emulate the notion that the king was first among equals. Indeed, the top of the mountain granted a glorious view. Surprisingly, the view did not grant observation of a great encroacher, indeed a devastator of many kingdoms. In fact, this was a king in a hurry; one that intended on conquering more than England, but the world. His march may have started in the steppes of central Asia, but by 1348, some 20 years after taking the throne, Edward II England was besieged by a rival king, King Death.

The army deployed by King Death was, of course, the plague. It is generally believed that it was transmitted by rodents carrying bubonic infested fleas. The Mongols took their dead infested and lunged them into the city walls of the Black Sea city Caffa. From Caffa and the Genoese merchants who ported there, the disease spread. The contagion was swift. At first, and with devastating swiftness, the cities were eviscerated. The fecal matter of the fleas could be inhaled or the bites from the bugs were death sentences. If the diseases spread to the lungs, the death would take 4 agonizing days of fitful coughs. The blood-laced sputum surely spread to those near, and in its turn spread to whomever inhaled it.

What could Edward III do in the face of such rumors of malady in his realm? At first, not much. There were murmurs of a pestilence in the world by sea-fairing traders. Their contacts in Italy described the condition, its velocity of transmission, and naturally assumptions on what devil-worshiping cult had summoned it. There were even numbers suggesting the dead of Venice reached 100,000. Even so, it would not be until the king’s daughter succumbed to the illness in her turn. The Infante Pedro of Castile was to marry Edward’s daughter, Joan. But by September 2, news had reached him that she was dead from the plague. And in keeping with the stoic nature of the king, he is reported to take the news by first saying, “It is as it is.” Naturally, in a rare moment of looking behind the curtain, we can prize from his correspondence with Alfonso XI a father in morning. He laments with a piety mixed with a familiar grief that Joan had “been sent ahead to heaven to reign among the choirs of virgins where she can intercede for our own offences before God himself.” He is quick to remark that Joan had been his dearest daughter and whom “we loved best of all for all her virtues demanded.” To underscore the pang sorrow the king was enduring and to put a point to how bereft he was of a solution he states “No fellow human being could be surprised if we were inwardly desolated by the sting of this bitter grief for are human too.” Among kings, it is incredibly rare to hear such claims to human emotions.

So what does a king do when wrecked from the inside over a new foe as this? He reaches out to the only people who can have answers for pestilence. Naturally this meant the Archbishop of Canterbury. He needed prayers especially in the southern regions of the kingdom where this seem to be emanating from. Alas, the plague caught him too. There was no Archbishop of Canterbury to pray for the people of Kent. And what a perturbation it must have been when men on horseback would come into the city or village speaking of apocalyptic devastations only to then find themselves one of the dozens, or hundreds, or thousands destined for the mass graves.

Perhaps most jarring to the people, rich and poor, man and woman, young and old, was the remarkable speed at which it worked. People pieced together the transmission method soon enough that heart wrenching moments of furtive relationships occurred. Parents abandoning children, husbands abandoning wives, all watching from a distance the quick death but slow agony of those they loved. A welsh poet Jeuan Gerthin explained what we would have noticed among those struck down with the disease, “ Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit; seething terrible wherever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried beneath the arms, a painful angry knob, a white lump. It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion; a small boil which spares no one. Great is its seething like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of ashy colour…an ugly eruption. They are similar to the seeds of the black peas, broken fragments of brittle sea coal…a grievous ornament…the peelings of the cockle-weed, a black plague like halfpence, like berries.”

All told, by the end of the plague, nearly half of England would be dead and buried hastily in graves. Recent excavations from the 1990’s shown just how fast and chaotic the scene must have been. Traditionally the buried were oriented toward Jerusalem to rise from their graves upon the return of Christ triumphant. The graves revealed a final statement among the buried, jaws slacked open, limbs pointed jaggedly, a frozen protestation of the inhumanity. As the plague meandered through the realm, it upended more than health of very much alive people from just 4 days prior, it upended the conventions and structures of society. A Franciscan monk in Ireland, John Clynn noted with a sobering view to his own reality: “ Seeing these many ills and that the whole world is encompassed by evil, waiting among the dead for death to come, I have committed to writing what I have truly heard …and so that the writing does not perish with the writer or the work fail with the workman I leave parchment for continuing it in case anyone should be alive in the future.” With the all too familiar tone of understatement in British writing, it followed with a new hand, “Here, it seems, the author died.”

Who do the people go to if the king cannot save them? Who do they direct their frustration and hate to if the benevolent God in heaven is not manifesting through the sermons of the priest? How do people receive Christ for that matter now that there are no more priest to speak on their behalf to God? There were no bakers to bake bread, no physics to make med, no priest to receive the dead. Out of the uncertainty of the moment, truly inspired homespun remedies made the rounds. Whether by trial and error or willing a remedy, one potion is passed down to us by a herbalist; giving us a glimpse at the heavy ask but thoughtful response to what was by then considered a disease due to miasma or noxious air. It logically implies then that good smelling things were a kind of remedy. “If it be a man take five cups of rue, and if it be a woman leave out the rue, five little blades of columbine, a great quantity of marigold flowers, an egg, fresh laid, and make a hole in one end and blow out all that is within, and lay it to the fire and roast it till ground to powder but do not burn it, and take a good quantity of treacle and brew all these herbs with good ale but do not strain them – and make the sick drink it for three evenings and mornings. If they hold it in their stomach, they shall have life.”

The booming 4 million population at the outset of the plague were still 90% agrarian. Among those who worked the land, few actually owned their parcel. And increasingly the population was fighting for a smaller and smaller share of land to fashion subsistence for themselves and their families. The plague, in some respects served as a pressure valve. But the correction was too sudden to accommodate the economic structure of England.

The homes of the people, largely field laborers, lived in modest lime-washed structures made of wood felled from the local forest, with dirt floors. To add to the ambiance of the abode, the owners would have strewn loose straw on the ground mostly to collect the refuse of the fields and manure on their feet. The toiling masses did not have much to begin with. The world around them was hard enough before the plague, but with the plague came a psychological and physical damage that could scarcely be comprehended. Whole villages died. Naturally, the economy collapsed. Out of this collapse came the evolution of manorial economics to cash economics. It would no longer due for the workers to simply work for a subsistence and get whatever graces the lord granted. Work needed to be done, the obligations of the lord still needed to be met, but he now had a shortage in labor. His laborers were demanding, with a level of self awareness scarcely granted to them, that the new economic reality was on the worker’s side now.

Out of the plague did spur an opportunity for toiling folk to rise out of poverties oblivion. It was not fast, nor necessarily in one life-time. Sometimes it took generations, but generations as opposed to never at all, the working poor did have a chance. And it was this seeming conspiracy of the cosmos to upend all the structures that held the people together, their faith in the government, their financial inability to resist the rules or rulers, the unquestioning certainty on matters of God, death, hell and heaven by the priesthood, all went out the window. From the necessity of laypeople having to fill roles that were utterly foreign to their station came a new sense of capability to people who never otherwise would have ventured to change. Unwritten rules governing the village went to the wayside as power was exercised often by those who were in a position to exploit it. Meanwhile, Edward III was aging and his son and heir apparent, Edward the Black Prince, died leaving the succession in untenable uncertainty.

Inevitably the old king died and that left government in the hands of a 10 year old, Richard II. Grant it, everyone that was anyone knew that power ultimately laid in the hands of John of Gaunt, Richard’s uncle and protector. In fact, you might compare John of Gaunt to any of our modern day monopolist or business giants like Jeff Bezos. His wealth and holdings and influence could rival a king’s and in many cases did. Even so, the Lancaster stayed behind the scenes and guided the young Plantagenet through his early years. Richard took to the role of king rather quickly, it seemed. His vows and all the mystique surrounding the trappings of monarchy went to his head. In the early years of his boyhood, perhaps with the structure of fixers behind the scenes, it proved useful and life saving. In time it would be his undoing. Nonetheless, the boy regent was pitted against one of the biggest moments in his career when, at last, a popular uprising threatened to upend government.

If, as John Wycliffe supposed, people could find Christ in their own way free from the needs of the priesthood, this supposition unfettered the people from strict forms of social control or engineering. For as it was, finding Christ and following him meant a steady hand towards an egalitarian model. What concessions were made in the in-between years of the start of the plague and Richard’s reign were in-part at risk by the policies enacted by John of Gaunt. The toiling folk had definitively climbed the social ladder into the ranks of yeomen. They were solidly middle class, to borrow a later colloquialism. By their estimation the government was keeping them suppressed and squeezing them for revenues they earned no thanks to the laxed reactions of government. So it was no surprise that what began first as tax dodging by the villagers by shrinking into the forest soon bloomed into open hostility at the tax collectors or strongmen the king or lord would send. The usual deferential English country yokels were becoming intransigent. Dodging taxes soon became the least of it. The village leaders started violent reactions in the form of collecting the heads of those attempting to collect dues. The so-called Peasants revolt began this way. Not with a written manifesto, but with the gumption of survivors, social climbers, and increasingly self-indoctrinated Christians who took for themselves what bits they could of the point of Christ.

The leaders, in part self ascribed and in others acclaimed to, were primarily Watt Tyler and John Ball. Who was Watt Tyler? Tyler was a charismatic man who was imprisoned for not having the money to buy his manumission. In the New Jerusalem being created in real-time, who could be a better general for this lot of revolters in the service of God and King Richard? The imprisoned Watt Tyler. John Ball for his part understood the egalitarian nature of Christ message. Our riches were not for this world but for our home in heaven. It followed then that the ostentatious life of the bishops was something to disdain and use as proof that these were not shepherds of men for Christ, but shepherds of evil and wickedness for earthly possessions. John Ball was the only bishop the people would need. He was one of them and would remain so. The movement was not to overthrow the king. Instead, with a fatal sense of deference for power and monarchy, the movement sought to save the king from his uncle and all bad advisors surrounding him. They, naturally, would save the king and advise him.

The conflagration congregation indeed set fire to Gaunt’s holdings. Richard beheld a terrible site. The skyline of London was ember red in the evening the group made it to the city gates. The leverage was on the side of the “peasants,” but they fully went the whole way. To his credit, Richard agrees at the age of 14 to ride out to meet them. Tyler asks and evidently receives in word the concessions of ostensibly a new kingdom with a Magna Carta written and affirmed for the common people. The overreaching by such low born and the ability to get a king to capitulate was evidently enough to drive one of the king’s retainers mad. Watt Tyler was sliced down and murdered on the spot.

In a glorious sense of theatrics and prudent wherewithal, to allay the fears and ire of the crowd Richard rides out to them in a life-saving vague claim, “You shall have no captain but me.” It did the trick and bought the king and the other frightened aristocrats time to cut down the people one by one. The devastation was total. Upon retrieving the upperhand, when asked again by impertinent lowborn to be received as a king for them, Richard remarks with Plantagenet fury “You wretches, detestable on land and sea; you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues. Rustics you were and rustics you are still: you will remain in bondage not as before but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However we will spare your lives in you remain faithful. Choose now which course you want to follow.”

Evidently it worked. Richard was able to stymie the ferocity of a new social order ready to explode. Regardless if the upstarts were successful or unsuccessful, things had changed. While the plague took a century to run its course, and the slow death rattles of a dying dynasty took 100 years to finalize, and while it took 100 years for a modern sense of Englishness to take hold geographically as well as politically, the plague did bookend an epoch in the organization of labor, ideas, currency, and governance. And as with all moments of crisis and collapse, a germ of creativity can sprout into the first tree within a mighty forest of new possibilities. King Death then was the equalizer. Ultimately, it was that equality and need for it that had been festering for years before Edward’s reign even. It just took a different king to make the way and speed up the process, in this case, by necessity.

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historytaker · 4 years ago

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Fly Away Vincent

Sometimes art tells us something the artist is unsure they mean to say. But that had always been one of the tragedies of Vincent Van Gogh’s dramas. His paintings were earthy, mucky blends: sermons and pleas to find something. Yet, it was precisely at the penultimate moment in Vincent Van Gogh’s career did he finally give us a farewell that probably was not supposed to be a farewell. For it would be the Spring of 1890 that Vincent Van Gogh would produce Wheatfield With Crows, and shortly after kill himself. Ever the composer and the symphony, Van Gogh mashed opposites in his paintings in greedy jabs of oil, demanding us to take it in and meanwhile being the servant to his impulses that played out in the work. He struck the balance in Wheatfield with Crows. But in that balance he put a punctuation on his mastery, his gifts, his sermon. Could Heaven and Earth meet? Maybe. Wheatfield with Crows say exactly that.

Vincent Van Gogh was not well. He suffered bouts of manic activity often followed by deep spells of self-loathing and loneliness. He was also epileptic. He had a cunning self awareness though that often meant that his suffering was the expiation or price to be paid for being one of God’s children. Never far away from his religious zeal, burned a patriotic self-indulgence of love for the common man and the earthy struggle. Smothered in much of his works are these influences; his mental health, searching for God, and political thought.

Van Gogh thought it only right and proper to take his sermon to the people who deserved God the most, and equally needed God the most. The tramp, the whore, the beggar, the drunkard, the miscreant all God’s people… they just did not know it yet. Often this meant a life of even more privation than the would-be parishioners of the Church of Saint Vincent. He cobbled together a pittance in trading drawings for crumbs. His real lifeline was his beloved brother Theo, however.

In fact, it would be this relationship with his brother that would ultimately sustain Van Gogh’s life. Theo, always the true believer, would attempt to sell or promote the works Van Gogh produced. Sometimes, indeed, most times, the work was not appreciated. In his early years, Van Gogh was enraptured by the aplomb but simple landscapes and toiling work of the indescribable laborer, the everyman. Where Van Gogh’s contemporaries patronized the subject as rustic, Van Gogh blended his subjects mercilessly with the mud. They were the mud. No better picture did this radiate more totally than with Potato Eaters. The brown grey effluviates all over the canvas. The people surrounding the table, gaunt, strung-out, wide eyed, are communing over ashen potatoes and earthily mud brown coffee. They have the emaciated look of the overworked, underfed, neglected. But pulling in the room, keeping everything together, granting all of these diners the chance to partake in their concord is the singular illumination of a flame hung sturdily overhead by lamp.

In a rare moment for early Van Gogh, he knows he created something worth feeling accomplished by. How incredibly sad it must have been, when Theo maintained that the picture did none of the things the sort of people who bought art wanted it to do. It was ghastly after all. No matter.

Van Gogh kept at it and would build on this work. And like lightening, we begin to see sunburst almost literally in his landscapes. The thing about Van Gogh was, he became a deeply ardent lover of Japanese landscape art; Where if people are involved at all in the scenes, they exist in the most miniscule of parts. Tiny homes, tiny boats. Infinitesimally minute, casually present human touches in the landscape hammered home the humbling truth that we are not separate from nature, but nature. In that, Van Gogh attempted to bring down Heaven into Earth. “Don’t you see,” we can hear him say, “God is here.”

That was the hope anyhow. Van Gogh was notoriously nomadic. The lightening rod of Christ was somehow present and elusive for the artist. He was always searching for this emotionally true feeling. In moments he bathed in it, and in others he was absolutely bereft of the spiritual elixir. So it was that when he painted, he searched. Along the way, the full gamut of the human experience, he tells to us in his work. Everything, we learn quickly, Van Gogh experiences is intense. We all know the type. He was noted for shaking peoples hands heartily. He verbally reprimanded himself for aging himself 10 years early because of the intensity of his smiles and frowns. His face wore the marks of raw emotions. He had deltas in his face for tears, mountains of peaked flesh across gaunt cheeks when he donned a smile. Buried beneath was a brilliant sun burnt red beard.

It would be no surprise to our sensibilities then, that when Van Gogh took off and painted, and really got into it, the experience was flooded with emotions and personal euphoria. Perhaps no painting wraps more completely the need Van Gogh had for pairing opposites, companionship, God on earth…a taradise if you will, and somehow innocently enough, sexual explosion all at once than Sower At Sunset. The hallmark of Van Gogh that the background is the picture more than the subject is takes place. The Sun, the singular entity wholly prominent shoots strings of brilliant light at us. Gobs of purple, golden browns, stream everywhere. Our farmer vanishes in the fully loaded paint thrust Vincent elects to give. We are positively covered in the essence of the seeds being planted. Don’t take my words for it, Van Gogh refers to his paintings as a sort-of orgasm, jouissance. His ecstasy is permeating in the picture.

By this point, Van Gogh was finding himself. He was no aesthete, but he was finding his expression. And for all the tears, bouts of madness, brilliance, personal victories he is remembered for two things even the most minimal observer can tell you, Starry Night and he cut off his ear.

Starry Night is the return of the darker blues. While he was ward of the hospital he stayed at, he paints Starry Night. Giving us the timeless scene. It is perhaps the most prolific of his works and deserves all the credit it receives. We are moved as it moves. We feel the solitude and purity of the moment the painting gives. But for my money Starry Night does none of the things Van Gogh needed for himself quite like Wheatfield with Crows Does.

For in Wheatfield with Crows, we have climax. Vincent had always been nomadic, looking for a path that had a clear direction, he gives us a path but stopped trying to say where it went and from where it came. There is no redeeming work to be done by a casual artisan working the field. Those nightscape blues tell us a storm is coming or just went. Our crows are minimal strokes – afterthoughts—flying away or landing. Those brilliant bursts of yellow weren’t sources of vitality emanating from a giving Sun, but there is life in there yet. Grassy paths yawn with earthy mud. He is at peace. It is a troubled mind realizing itself. “The zenith of the Sun is in you,” we get the feeling he is saying, “no need for looking for it in the painting, get the picture?”

Not long after this is done, Van Gogh shoots himself. He was finally being seen by his contemporaries as the visionary. His sermons were reaching eyes and not ears, finally. What the parishioners of Saint Vincent needed, Van Gogh at last found for himself. And then, when for a change, he was ready to be the lifeline of the family’s needs, he withdrew himself from the picture. And for my sensibilities, I would say it was the greatest of all his works. It mirrors the best that Turner made us do with his watercolors; he gives us the final stroke of the brush and tells us to decide what we are seeing. What do we need from this? Is it salvation? Is it acceptance? Is the point of life the living of it, or does the path actually go somewhere? Its existential without meaning to be. It’s a gospel without fantastical happenings. It is our comings and our goings. It is everything and it is nothing. Heaven meets earth, finally.

#@history

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