How They Roar Their Light
I believe I’ve mentioned that distraction is my vacation.
Distraction is simple when you are searching for it the way I am, did, have been, will be. It lights up in the dark parts, or it tries to, and when your eye is as practiced as mine at spotting those flashes then you’ll never want for diversions. They will spill out in front of you like light through a half-open door. But, if I might be frank, it’s very unlikely that you will avoid me long enough to master the skill.
* * * A NOTE ON FRANKNESS * * *
You will forgive me for mine.
I have found it is best to embrace eventualities.
Someday you might even appreciate it.
So I keep my eye out for the interesting, the bright spots amongst dull palettes, and sometimes I’m lucky. Sometimes there is a story, an exchange of eyes or a mouth sewing itself shut that brims at the edges with things unsaid, and those things are worth following. Largely I’m disappointed; I’ll gather the subject finally into my arms and the sky will be brittle and grey and there will be no cards on the bedstand. I’ll have followed their narrative and be left without payoff. But there are times, rare times, when that soul is warm with peace at having fulfilled their potential in a good story, and I’ll be happy with the time I spent thinking about the things they have done and could do.
This is not one of those stories.
This is something more complicated, and inappropriately more pure.
I met the painter twice.
The first time was the day his father’s heart stopped trying.
It isn’t my place to blame the human body for giving in to the temptation of rest. Indeed, that temptation is what supplies my livelihood. But surely there can be more effort involved in keeping one’s self alive. I’ve seen those struggles countless times, hovered over the faces of men and women swallowing the rattles in their throats and clawing their way back to the surface of the world, and I honestly can’t help but cheer for them in my own way. They know when their time is, even if I’m uncertain. I can respect a body that knows it isn’t finished.
The Reverend Theodorus van Gogh knew he was finished when the pain flashed red down his left arm. I lifted his soul into my arms, and it was that queer place between heavy and light, between a gift and a burden, that so many of these men who had never been sure of themselves possessed, preaching but unable to shake the idea that perhaps there is nothing waiting for them.
Hello.
I turned for a look at his colors through a shuttered window, but was caught on the flat of a nail hanging a crooked canvas.
It was The Old Church Tower At Nuenen; I’ve only learned the title recently. Back then, it was the sky. I had seen reproductions through the eyes of their creators, landscapes and portraits considered earth-shattering for their boldness or their newness, but none had ever moved me. No human could see the world the way I saw it, could witness color in its purest sense without tempering it. Certainly no mortal could capture my skies, my colors, my palette collections stacked against each other with each new soul. But this painting seemed to find the world through my eyes. It found the sky that way. I was so distracted that I never made it to the window, and stuck to the wet paint instead.
It was a wonderful distraction.
I took the painted Nuenen sky as Vincent van Gogh’s father’s color, and I filed the man himself as someone to wait for.
* * * THREE FACTS BEFORE WE CONTINUE * * *
1. I don’t make a habit of looking forward to collecting
a particular soul.
2. I respect the idea that most humans are not
eager to make my acquaintance.
3. Vincent van Gogh was not most humans.
I’ve never been fond of the words humans use to describe the act of taking one’s own life. “Suicide” is a word with far too many connotations, ranging from the absurdly clinical to the obscenely personal. “Self-slaughter”, to borrow a phrase from a castle in Denmark, is too violent. It brings to mind gore, when gore isn’t necessarily an inherent part of the act. Though it often is.
It was for Vincent.
I thought that the bullet in the field would do the job - much the way, I suspect, Vincent thought it would. I watched him hold the muzzle in an awkward grip against his heart. I hovered. I admit it. I was tense. He looked so purposeful, the way that you often do, those of you who meet me this way. His nerves leaked into mine. The sky was faultless blue, and I was vaguely disappointed in it. Just because I try to enjoy every color doesn’t mean I’m always successful. It seemed too simple a color for a man so complicated. The shot dropped him mewling to the parched ground, and he inhaled warm earth.
I was just as surprised as he was when he dragged himself up to his feet and started the bloody walk back to the Ravoux Inn.
I don’t like that particular type of wait. I’d be hard pressed to find a wait I do enjoy, but I am especially discontent with the bedside vigil, filled with gasping silences and anxious panic-relief when the dying drifts off only to return again. It’s the hurry-up-and-Wait. That’s what I call it. But the walls and tables were covered with distractions, and I ran my fingers over them while Theo van Gogh’s shoulders shook at the bedside. Their twin red hair blinded passersby through the open window, and I made myself familiar with every stroke, every pattern, every movement of the wind in every painting.
It took two days. Vincent van Gogh’s last words were these: “La tristesse durera toujours.”
* * * A ROUGH TRANSLATION * * *
“The sadness will last forever.”
I set him down in a field of waving wheat. He didn’t protest; just put his feet down with soulish non-weight and tilted his head back. The light was growing long and dense, solid gold bending the stalks on all sides. It fell through his transparent chest and onto the ground behind him. I watched him watching it.
“I’m a fan of your work,” I told him. “I mean, I enjoy it.” I settled my weight awkwardly on one foot and then the other.
He tossed me a short, sardonic smile. “Pardon me if it’s rude,” he said, not sounding like he wanted pardoning at all, “but I don’t know that I like the idea of you enjoying my work.”
I said nothing. I couldn’t blame him, really. I’m aware that I don’t have the best reputation among humans. I live in the worst neighborhoods and associate with the worst sorts of people.
He was looking back up at the sky. “I thought once--” he said. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I thought that there was somewhere in years to come where my work would be loved. Now, I don’t know if it was just part of my madness. I hope it wasn’t. I hope they were real.” He looked over at me. “Can you tell me?”
I couldn’t. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I shook my head.
He sighed. “I suppose it was just madness, then. I don’t know how I could have believed so long.”
I wanted to say that it was better this way. I wanted to tell him that if he was insane, then there should be no such thing as sanity. I wanted to say that I had met sanity, and sanity never had a good story.
“They’re very good,” I said instead. “The paintings. They’re very good.”
He looked doubtful, as though I had any reason to butter him up. He was already dead. “Which is your favorite?”
“De Ruijterkade,” I said. “The Seine Bridge at Asnieres. The Coal Barges.” I slipped closer to him, vomiting words. “It’s the skies,” I insisted. “You have amazing skies. Colors. I’m an expert in skies. I collect them, it’s a hobby.” He was staring. I stopped. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spoken to a human like this. It’s normally so silent, withdrawn, all of them expectantly lifted up and carried away in my arms. They act as though they shouldn’t speak to me. I would listen. “When I take a soul, I also take their sky.”
I had never told anyone. No one else would have understood.
He took it in, rocking backwards on his heels, squinting in the thick daylight. He looked like he wanted his hat. A hand raked his hair. “This would be mine, then,” he said. The words hovered in the hazy summer air. Late July in the French countryside.
* * * VINCENT VAN GOGH’S LAST SKY * * *
The sun poured out of one gaping hole in the clouds.
Each had a dark shadow on its belly that spoke of maybe-rain which
we wouldn’t remain to see.
The hidden parts peered blue and startled through gaps
around which the wisps of clouds curled like the lines of
wood grain will twist around the knots in old pine.
It was all mountain ranges. It was all oceans.
“Is it enough?” I asked him.
He looked down at the dry earth beneath us. “I don’t know that I deserve it.” He drifted, staying in one spot. “What have I done?”
I didn’t want him to regret it. I didn’t want him to think about it. What’s past is past. I know that so well. I’ve seen it so much. “How can you see them?” I asked him. “The colors. It’s only you.”
He rolled a spike of wheat between his fingers. “I’ve always felt them as a challenge. To capture them - not to tame them, but to ride them out and leave them to it.” He turned his face to take me in, and I could feel myself silhouetted in the beams light. Like I was the ghost. “Anyone who says they tame color does nothing but dilute it. You must only hold it briefly and let it go.” He held my attention. “Is that what you do?”
I thought of the gray, poxed skies over the Great Plague in London, hanging above the beaked plague doctors and their clipped, dark forms. I thought of the smoky ink-and-red above the Great Chicago Fire. I thought of the bruise and the stars over the R.M.S. Titanic, still to come. Every disaster has three things: 1) a name attached to greatness, 2) a sky filled with color, 3) me. The name always stays. The color always stays. I walk away.
“Yes,” I told him. “That’s what I do.”
“So you’ll remember this,” he said. He was smiling a little. It made me feel better for him. There was no hole in his chest anymore, so he shouldn’t worry about it. The thing back at the Ravoux clutched in Theo’s grip was only a frame. I had the canvas. “You will, won’t you? You’ll remember the color of the sky when you took Vincent van Gogh.”
“I’ll remember,” I said. “I always remember. You won’t be forgotten.”
He sighed. I always loved to see a spirit act as though it were a body, touching and breathing and speaking out loud. I loved that they were all still human. “I think I will be. But I hope I am wrong.”
I wanted to tell him that a woman in 1967 dies with a framed poster of ‘Skull of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette’ leaning against her bed because it’s the only thing that makes her smile anymore. I want to tell him that ‘Starry Night’ is a seventeen year old boy’s mouse pad image in 2011. I wanted him to know that I am everywhere and everywhen, and I can see him there.
But you aren’t meant to know that. None of you are. When you die, your connection to the human world ends. I can’t be your link. I can’t tether you. I can’t stitch you back in place. You are meant to move on. Like the colors.
You go. I stay.
“It’s time to leave,” I told him. “Are you ready?”
He held out a hand to me. “Is anyone?”
I took it. “Some more than others.”
He only laughed. “I think I am,” he said. “We have what we need.”
We did, the both of us. We’d gathered up the colors for ourselves, the golds and blues and whites and grays. I gathered him up, too, lighter than when I lifted him from his body. Warm and soft in my arms. A story ended. Not a good story, but a well-crafted one.
A story full of colors. And I can appreciate that. I can always appreciate that.
* * * THE SKY WHEN WE WERE GONE * * *
The sun set and left deep blue and black over the wheat field.
The stars burned hot and loud and far away.
Can’t you see
how they roar their light?
Distraction is simple when you are searching for it the way I am, did, have been, will be. It lights up in the dark parts, or it tries to, and when your eye is as practiced as mine at spotting those flashes then you’ll never want for diversions. They will spill out in front of you like light through a half-open door. But, if I might be frank, it’s very unlikely that you will avoid me long enough to master the skill.
* * * A NOTE ON FRANKNESS * * *
You will forgive me for mine.
I have found it is best to embrace eventualities.
Someday you might even appreciate it.
So I keep my eye out for the interesting, the bright spots amongst dull palettes, and sometimes I’m lucky. Sometimes there is a story, an exchange of eyes or a mouth sewing itself shut that brims at the edges with things unsaid, and those things are worth following. Largely I’m disappointed; I’ll gather the subject finally into my arms and the sky will be brittle and grey and there will be no cards on the bedstand. I’ll have followed their narrative and be left without payoff. But there are times, rare times, when that soul is warm with peace at having fulfilled their potential in a good story, and I’ll be happy with the time I spent thinking about the things they have done and could do.
This is not one of those stories.
This is something more complicated, and inappropriately more pure.
I met the painter twice.
The first time was the day his father’s heart stopped trying.
It isn’t my place to blame the human body for giving in to the temptation of rest. Indeed, that temptation is what supplies my livelihood. But surely there can be more effort involved in keeping one’s self alive. I’ve seen those struggles countless times, hovered over the faces of men and women swallowing the rattles in their throats and clawing their way back to the surface of the world, and I honestly can’t help but cheer for them in my own way. They know when their time is, even if I’m uncertain. I can respect a body that knows it isn’t finished.
The Reverend Theodorus van Gogh knew he was finished when the pain flashed red down his left arm. I lifted his soul into my arms, and it was that queer place between heavy and light, between a gift and a burden, that so many of these men who had never been sure of themselves possessed, preaching but unable to shake the idea that perhaps there is nothing waiting for them.
Hello.
I turned for a look at his colors through a shuttered window, but was caught on the flat of a nail hanging a crooked canvas.
It was The Old Church Tower At Nuenen; I’ve only learned the title recently. Back then, it was the sky. I had seen reproductions through the eyes of their creators, landscapes and portraits considered earth-shattering for their boldness or their newness, but none had ever moved me. No human could see the world the way I saw it, could witness color in its purest sense without tempering it. Certainly no mortal could capture my skies, my colors, my palette collections stacked against each other with each new soul. But this painting seemed to find the world through my eyes. It found the sky that way. I was so distracted that I never made it to the window, and stuck to the wet paint instead.
It was a wonderful distraction.
I took the painted Nuenen sky as Vincent van Gogh’s father’s color, and I filed the man himself as someone to wait for.
* * * THREE FACTS BEFORE WE CONTINUE * * *
1. I don’t make a habit of looking forward to collecting
a particular soul.
2. I respect the idea that most humans are not
eager to make my acquaintance.
3. Vincent van Gogh was not most humans.
I’ve never been fond of the words humans use to describe the act of taking one’s own life. “Suicide” is a word with far too many connotations, ranging from the absurdly clinical to the obscenely personal. “Self-slaughter”, to borrow a phrase from a castle in Denmark, is too violent. It brings to mind gore, when gore isn’t necessarily an inherent part of the act. Though it often is.
It was for Vincent.
I thought that the bullet in the field would do the job - much the way, I suspect, Vincent thought it would. I watched him hold the muzzle in an awkward grip against his heart. I hovered. I admit it. I was tense. He looked so purposeful, the way that you often do, those of you who meet me this way. His nerves leaked into mine. The sky was faultless blue, and I was vaguely disappointed in it. Just because I try to enjoy every color doesn’t mean I’m always successful. It seemed too simple a color for a man so complicated. The shot dropped him mewling to the parched ground, and he inhaled warm earth.
I was just as surprised as he was when he dragged himself up to his feet and started the bloody walk back to the Ravoux Inn.
I don’t like that particular type of wait. I’d be hard pressed to find a wait I do enjoy, but I am especially discontent with the bedside vigil, filled with gasping silences and anxious panic-relief when the dying drifts off only to return again. It’s the hurry-up-and-Wait. That’s what I call it. But the walls and tables were covered with distractions, and I ran my fingers over them while Theo van Gogh’s shoulders shook at the bedside. Their twin red hair blinded passersby through the open window, and I made myself familiar with every stroke, every pattern, every movement of the wind in every painting.
It took two days. Vincent van Gogh’s last words were these: “La tristesse durera toujours.”
* * * A ROUGH TRANSLATION * * *
“The sadness will last forever.”
I set him down in a field of waving wheat. He didn’t protest; just put his feet down with soulish non-weight and tilted his head back. The light was growing long and dense, solid gold bending the stalks on all sides. It fell through his transparent chest and onto the ground behind him. I watched him watching it.
“I’m a fan of your work,” I told him. “I mean, I enjoy it.” I settled my weight awkwardly on one foot and then the other.
He tossed me a short, sardonic smile. “Pardon me if it’s rude,” he said, not sounding like he wanted pardoning at all, “but I don’t know that I like the idea of you enjoying my work.”
I said nothing. I couldn’t blame him, really. I’m aware that I don’t have the best reputation among humans. I live in the worst neighborhoods and associate with the worst sorts of people.
He was looking back up at the sky. “I thought once--” he said. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I thought that there was somewhere in years to come where my work would be loved. Now, I don’t know if it was just part of my madness. I hope it wasn’t. I hope they were real.” He looked over at me. “Can you tell me?”
I couldn’t. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I shook my head.
He sighed. “I suppose it was just madness, then. I don’t know how I could have believed so long.”
I wanted to say that it was better this way. I wanted to tell him that if he was insane, then there should be no such thing as sanity. I wanted to say that I had met sanity, and sanity never had a good story.
“They’re very good,” I said instead. “The paintings. They’re very good.”
He looked doubtful, as though I had any reason to butter him up. He was already dead. “Which is your favorite?”
“De Ruijterkade,” I said. “The Seine Bridge at Asnieres. The Coal Barges.” I slipped closer to him, vomiting words. “It’s the skies,” I insisted. “You have amazing skies. Colors. I’m an expert in skies. I collect them, it’s a hobby.” He was staring. I stopped. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spoken to a human like this. It’s normally so silent, withdrawn, all of them expectantly lifted up and carried away in my arms. They act as though they shouldn’t speak to me. I would listen. “When I take a soul, I also take their sky.”
I had never told anyone. No one else would have understood.
He took it in, rocking backwards on his heels, squinting in the thick daylight. He looked like he wanted his hat. A hand raked his hair. “This would be mine, then,” he said. The words hovered in the hazy summer air. Late July in the French countryside.
* * * VINCENT VAN GOGH’S LAST SKY * * *
The sun poured out of one gaping hole in the clouds.
Each had a dark shadow on its belly that spoke of maybe-rain which
we wouldn’t remain to see.
The hidden parts peered blue and startled through gaps
around which the wisps of clouds curled like the lines of
wood grain will twist around the knots in old pine.
It was all mountain ranges. It was all oceans.
“Is it enough?” I asked him.
He looked down at the dry earth beneath us. “I don’t know that I deserve it.” He drifted, staying in one spot. “What have I done?”
I didn’t want him to regret it. I didn’t want him to think about it. What’s past is past. I know that so well. I’ve seen it so much. “How can you see them?” I asked him. “The colors. It’s only you.”
He rolled a spike of wheat between his fingers. “I’ve always felt them as a challenge. To capture them - not to tame them, but to ride them out and leave them to it.” He turned his face to take me in, and I could feel myself silhouetted in the beams light. Like I was the ghost. “Anyone who says they tame color does nothing but dilute it. You must only hold it briefly and let it go.” He held my attention. “Is that what you do?”
I thought of the gray, poxed skies over the Great Plague in London, hanging above the beaked plague doctors and their clipped, dark forms. I thought of the smoky ink-and-red above the Great Chicago Fire. I thought of the bruise and the stars over the R.M.S. Titanic, still to come. Every disaster has three things: 1) a name attached to greatness, 2) a sky filled with color, 3) me. The name always stays. The color always stays. I walk away.
“Yes,” I told him. “That’s what I do.”
“So you’ll remember this,” he said. He was smiling a little. It made me feel better for him. There was no hole in his chest anymore, so he shouldn’t worry about it. The thing back at the Ravoux clutched in Theo’s grip was only a frame. I had the canvas. “You will, won’t you? You’ll remember the color of the sky when you took Vincent van Gogh.”
“I’ll remember,” I said. “I always remember. You won’t be forgotten.”
He sighed. I always loved to see a spirit act as though it were a body, touching and breathing and speaking out loud. I loved that they were all still human. “I think I will be. But I hope I am wrong.”
I wanted to tell him that a woman in 1967 dies with a framed poster of ‘Skull of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette’ leaning against her bed because it’s the only thing that makes her smile anymore. I want to tell him that ‘Starry Night’ is a seventeen year old boy’s mouse pad image in 2011. I wanted him to know that I am everywhere and everywhen, and I can see him there.
But you aren’t meant to know that. None of you are. When you die, your connection to the human world ends. I can’t be your link. I can’t tether you. I can’t stitch you back in place. You are meant to move on. Like the colors.
You go. I stay.
“It’s time to leave,” I told him. “Are you ready?”
He held out a hand to me. “Is anyone?”
I took it. “Some more than others.”
He only laughed. “I think I am,” he said. “We have what we need.”
We did, the both of us. We’d gathered up the colors for ourselves, the golds and blues and whites and grays. I gathered him up, too, lighter than when I lifted him from his body. Warm and soft in my arms. A story ended. Not a good story, but a well-crafted one.
A story full of colors. And I can appreciate that. I can always appreciate that.
* * * THE SKY WHEN WE WERE GONE * * *
The sun set and left deep blue and black over the wheat field.
The stars burned hot and loud and far away.
Can’t you see
how they roar their light?