“…and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
Recently I went to an excellent exhibition at the Tate Britain; Van Gogh in Britain, where the above quote is from. I learnt a great deal about a man I had always admired, a man struggling with demons most of us couldn’t even comprehend and yet one of the finest creatives the world has ever seen. For example, Van Gogh wasn’t a painter for the vast majority of his life; in fact he only began painting in the last 10 years of his life, the bulk of his 2,100 works being made in just the final 2 years.
The thing that most impressed on me though was the development of his mental illness. He was always a stoic, lonely man however that loneliness compounded itself upon his move to London and eventually resulted in his dropping out of work and his resulting fall-back to religion. City life chewed him up and spat him out and left him worse off than when he first arrived. Now of course the exhibition was quick to extoll the virtues of his time in London, to celebrate the influence it had on his art, yet if you look at the charcoal sketches he made, on the paintings he bought and sold in his time as an art dealer in London, not a one of them is cheerful, not one has the tell-tale colour and brightness that Van Gogh is now so famous for, seeing the colour in the everyday, the colours of nature.
Last weekend I escaped London, albeit only briefly, and indeed the 20th century as a whole. It’s interesting to see how few places in the country are truly disconnected, however I am fortunate enough to have access to just such a spot, a small fishing hut on the banks of the river Tees, no electricity, no phones, no running water (apart from the fuck off massive torrent of it by our front door). It truly was an act of escape. It’s fascinating what happens to us when we truly disconnect, it may seem like a no brainer and people may scoff that actually they disconnect regularly it’s a strange thing to fetishize it. But really we don’t, in 21st century cities you always have some form of input, some screen or voice is telling you to buy this, go there, do this job, pay this bill. Mindless scrolling and aimless consumption has become the neutral state for any city dweller.
You can probably already see the link here. And now of course I am not suggesting that Van Gogh’s troubles stemmed from London, or being in a city at all but you can imagine that the pressure, the unending compression of life being thrust upon life, of absent space and constant noise piling on top of one another compounded these issues and brought them to the fore. Is it any wonder that as global populations become more nucleated then incidents of mental health problems are increasing at an unfathomable rate? Yes reporting is getting better, yes people are becoming more comfortable with coming forward but the inevitable, inexorable spike upwards cannot be justified with those alone. What it felt to me, sitting on that bank by the river, a book in hand and no noise but the movement of water was that we often need to just leave.
Leaving things behind, letting everything drop away until life is stripped back to its bare bones is such exhilaration; it’s a way to expose the things that are making you uncomfortable in life whilst really not giving two shits about them because so much of it you realise doesn’t matter. What matters is how to cook, how to get to bed, and how to ensure you don’t get sick.
Now of course this a grossly privileged thing to say, the ability to get away is impossible for many and for a vast proportion of the global population this is in fact how they live anyway. I’m always happy to admit my faults and I feel that this is one of them, but honestly I don’t really care, this is my life, the life of my friends and probably the life of my readership. The addiction of phones, blogs, input, consumption is one that I imagine most here can connect to and so the appeal of leaving, of abandoning those things is probably likely to strike home with most this reaches.
Van Gogh saw the networks of patterns in the sky, in nature. He saw the true colour of the world away from the noise, he showed us his interpretation of the colours that dance in the wind, of how light permeates the dark, how flowers glow with a vibrancy that can shake canvas. This tormented pained man saw beauty where others would pass it by, he took his demons and defied them to the end, used the hurt in his mind to create on a level arguably unobtainable to anyone else, and to do it over and over, constructing his view of the world without noise, where the only permeating input was the beauty of colour. He did this until the fight became too hard. There’s only so much that an escape can do in the end.
I’m not saying however that we must all abandon technology, flee the cities, and go become hermits. That’s mad, cities are great! Life with connectivity is a phenomenal thing and we are all blessed to be a part of it. What I’m saying though is that the appeal of disconnecting for a while, of letting yourself go, not thinking about anything but your next action, no big picture is something that often gets drowned out. Weeks and months are spent in the hubbub, the howling sounds and flashing lights, scrolling and snapping and everything else and it winds a coil inside us. Maybe the way to release that coil is to get away, go somewhere quiet, somewhere green. To cook a cup of tea on a small fire and swear at some fish that won’t get on your line. Maybe it’s to pour yourself a glass of wine by a river and look at the wind making ripples in the grass because that’s the only thing there is to look at, and realise that it’s all you need to look at. Then you can go back, spring uncoiled, a deep breath in your lungs, reality real once more and not a collection of brief moments piled onto one another at a pace too fast to grasp. Ultimately, it’s important that we leave so that we can come back again, come back able to see the colour in the quiet.
