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.