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Artists and self destruction - poetic portraits by Hatto Fischer

                                     A. Camus: "to hope is to resign and to live is not to resign"

 

There was Pavese who killed himself after he realized he could no longer write. Something similar happened to Hemingway. And there is the fate of Ingeborg Bachman!

Sylvia Plath’s tragic has been followed by her son who committed suicide as well. Here is of interest whether or not the drive towards self-destruction is something inherited. A possible clue gives a letter by a daughter who until 40 wishes to commit as well suicide since her mother did it. Once destruction becomes an inherent power which drives the person to a fatal conclusion e.g. life is no longer worth living, then aside from possible transmissions from parents to their children other social factors play a role as well. After all that was the key question of Robert Musil as to who is a murder, and to what extent society has a responsibility for letting that happen?

Another kind of self destruction is described by Goethe in Faust. Since then many more have gone to sell something which cannot be sold: their souls.

Naturally in all of this we could widen the scanning of our pages for clues where poets and artists, and not only they go astray.

 

Can a poem be used for diagnosis?

Artists and poets have been declared by society as being insane, primarily if they fail to make a living. Such a crude measure and judgement has done a lot of harm. Michael Foucault attempting to undo this polarity between reason and insanity in his book "L'histoire de la folie" - Society and Insanity.

Most often society does not seem to want to recognize clear reasons for failures. They are not only social determinants i.e. family background or a negative experience during childhood, but as shown by Robert Musil in "Zoegling Toerless" a pupil can go cracy alone if he cannot resolve the question of infinite number in mathematics.

There are different deliriums and outbreaks of 'irrationalities' which can inflict a huge damage upon society and the world as has proven the case of Hitler who out of an inferiority complex sought to silence that by developing an overdrive towards power. In today's world the former doctor and dictator Assad in Syria shows how most dangerous is a 'rational irrationality' linked to a need to survive within a confined space and time, but without knowing how to stop the killing machine. A former fellow medical student of his made the crucial observation that Assad would use medical terms when planning military actions e.g. cutting out the malignant tissues i.e. resisters to his way of governance and use of power.

This sickness can be extended to an examination of Putin who supports Assad, just as did Chavez as if power and Socialistic principles are still compatible despite frightening people into submission rather than grant them the "freedom of expression". Leaders do not become over night that vile. They are also supported by others, in the case of Assad also by his wife although one wonders why she does close her eyes and ears to all the atrocities being committed left and right around her?

The unexplainable is that this emotional affinity to a power (Carlos Fuentes says love can be equated with treason) more than being merely frightening, seems to leave no other choice but to submit completely. Rather than express a critical self-conscience, the desire to live in freedom with others is massively suppressed. As long as there is war and brutal suppression, peaceful co-existence is impossible. More so the wounds which have been inflicted in the meantime in Syria, that is since 2011, they are immense. They are horrific to say the least.

Most likely it will take more than another Truth Commission as was the case in South Africa to make possible a peaceful transition from a violent struggle to a new form of living together in peace. The latter would be already a sign of sanity in the double sense: to allow the freedom to the other to be just crazy as is oneself, but not to harm others by breaking all social, ethical and personal codes. After all, the vindictive spirit seems to override everything when there is no more regard to humanity, and for each individual human being.

 

Vincent Van Gogh

Much has been written about Vincent Van Gogh, but do we really know the different qualities of despair. Vincent Van Gogh painted it. Heart rendering. In music such tunes which go astray are in reality a beauty sensed but not captured by the composition. Something evades, cannot be grasped. Despair is the outcome. The question remains, if it is that simple when attempting to explain what drives artists towards self-destruction.

Vincent Van Gogh had many inner and outer enemies. For instance, when he was priest, the church did not like him being kind to the poor. He gave everything away, and therefore set an example for not enriching oneself through people's dependency upon religion, church and faith! His father did not understand him, while his brother Theo stood by him throughout all those difficult years when without money, Vincent Van Gogh was in near despair due to having not the money to pay someone to sit for him. He knew that he needed to draw and draw again the human body. As a matter of fact, Van Gogh was convinced once an artist starts to use paints, then it is more difficult to know if he or she is still honest in the search of expressions for form or composition! Lack of money was not the only problem. He was convinced in his art but only recognized as art only after his death. Does this imply society adds value to something when there is a prize behind it, a prize which has been paid by taking one's own life? 

If a poem about Vincent Van Gogh is to be used like a tool for diagnosis, then best to understand it as an associate way of thinking, in order to let out what comes to mind when reading about Van Gogh, when going especially through his letters to Theo, and when looking at the countless sketches, paintings and ideas he left behind for an art world only learning slowly to appreciate what he had given.

 

Vincent Van Gogh   In his paintings one does walk out into corn fields, all alone. It does no matter if it snows, rains or shines the sun. Sadness descends like ravens do on fields ploughed by a heavy hand. He lets potatoe pickers eat The earth apples with the same hand. Time passes by in all his paintings. One stands on the fields after harvest while at a distance, on an embankment, the train races by and heads to the city. This abandonment of time underlines what happens year after year, as every autumn leaves behind the summer. Underneath the railway bridge another time zone reigns. Rain water still drips, drips, drips with only footsteps echoing off the walls, but then they are drowned out once the train thunders again overhead - again and again. Always around that time of the year yellow becomes the dominant color to show what life promises to be after the fields have been harvested. And again ravens appear on the horizon. He lets them fly on, for nothing is in vain. Only in the tavern the unemployed gaze into their glasses with the waiter a butcher of time. There Van Gogh sees no one striking a chord of agreement with his fellow men. Quickly the brush goes over the canvas. He sees and detects Japanese shades of time within a scene not merely marked by earth and horizon, but in between is felt past, present and future. He lets everything become a daze as if already drunk while gazing into the sun. Here insanity dances in front of the eyes till concentric like circles reinforce the blazing sun now burning deep inside his head from which there is no escape. Even if Dr. Gachet attests that he is worse off than his after-death-to-be-most-famous patient. Yet with his forever blue eyes Van Gogh did not answer him, but instead looked inside of himself. Deeper and deeper he looked courageously enough, as he stayed steadfast even when he began to see only nothingness. It is the most cruel aspect of all emptiness. Still Van Gogh could recall his father, a priest dressed in black robes, leave the mine shaft and while crossing over the snow fields, he thought Rembrandt could have painted that scene much better than he. Recognition of others was his art. It shows how he draws the hand. All alone, he reflected himself as a tree standing all by itself, outside the family circle, alone, without leaves, while the other trees would frolic around, love each other, their leaves still intact, dangling from every branch to recall longing of the heart is like having in front of the eyes a human body to be drawn. But nothing could have altered his fate. As a painter he searched for the atelier of the South since he knew not alone, but many together would have only the energy to take up then subjects worthy to be painted. There he lies, his brother Theo beside him, in a cemetery in Arles, near that church, around them an open field and that horizon with that special light of the South. Both are covered by a blanket of ivy! Forever are true his letters to his brother. In them he describes art as a lesson of proportions - the greatest of all arts! This he maintained when painting a chair standing beside the bed. It reminds of that gaze into the sun, for the room wobbles a bit, but not the blue door beside the yellow floor.

VINCENT VAN GOGH   En sus pinturas caminamos en los maizales muy solos. No importa que nieve, llueva o brille el sol. La tristeza desciende como los cuervos en los campos arados por una mano fuerte. Y deja que los recogedores de papas coman con las mismas manos. En todas sus pinturas pasa el tiempo. Nos paramos en los campos después de la cosecha Mientras en lo alto, en un terraplén, Un tren avanza hacia la ciudad. Este abandono recalca la forma como año tras años el otoño deja atrás el verano. Bajo el puente del tren el agua de lluvia aún gotea, gotea, gotea, mientras unos pasos hacen eco en los tabiques, pero luego se apagan al pasar el tren con estruendo —una y otra vez. Siempre en ese momento del año el amarillo es el color dominante para mostrar que la vida promete ser como los campos cosechados. Y de nuevo los cuervos aparecen en el horizonte. Deja que vuelen pues nada es solo en vano. Aunque en la taberna los desempleados miran absortos sus vasos y el mesero es el carnicero del tiempo. Allí Van Gogh no ve a nadie haciendo un acuerdo con sus semejantes. Rápido pasa el pincel sobre el lienzo. Ve y detecta sombras japonesas de colores dejando todo convertirse en un ofuscamiento como si ya estuvieran ebrios de mirar fijo el sol. Aquí la locura baila frente a los ojos hasta que concéntricos como círculos refuerzan el deslumbrante sol ahora ardiendo profundo en su cabeza de la cual no hay escape, aunque el doctor Gachet afirme que está peor que su paciente más famoso después de su muerte. Sin embargo, con sus ojos siempre azules Van Gogh no le responde, pero en cambio mira dentro de si mismo. Más y más profundo miró con bastante valor permaneciendo firme incluso cuando empezó a ver únicamente la nada. Es el aspecto más cruel de todo vacío. pero Van Gogh puedo recordar a su padre, un sacerdote vestido con ropas negras, salir del pozo de la mina y mientras cruza los campos cubiertos de nieve, pensó que Rembrandt habría pintado esa escena mucho mejor que él. Su arte era el reconocimiento de los demás. Muestra cómo dibuja las manos. Muy solo, se reflejó a sí mismo como un solitario árbol, fuera del círculo de la familia, solo, sin hojas, mientras los demás árboles retozan y se aman, sus hojas intactas aún, colgando de todas las ramas como recordando que el ansia del corazón es como tener frente a los ojos un cuerpo humano para ser dibujado. Pero nada podría alterar su destino. Como pintor buscó un taller en el sur pues sabía que no solo, sino muchos todos juntos tendrían la energía de abordar temas que valiera la pena pintar. Allí yace, su hermano Theo a su lado en el cementerio de Arles, cerca de esa iglesia, en torno a ellos un campo llano y el horizonte con esa luz muy especial del sur. ¡A ambos los cubre un manto de hiedra! Siempre serán verdad las cartas a su hermano. En ellas describe una lección del arte de la proporción —¡la mayor de todas las artes!. Mantuvo esto cuando pintó una silla al lado de la cama. Recuerda esa mirada suya al sol, pues el cuarto se bambolea un poco, aunque no la puerta azul al lado del suelo amarillo. Hatto Fischer (Alemania, 1945), Traducción de Nicolás Suescún Translated for the 26th World Poetry Festival in Medellin, Colombia, June 18 - 25, 2016

 

Another matter is addressed by Katerina Anghelaki Rooke: we use language without knowing it: language is something that we cannot touch, smell, see or taste, but we do hear it whether we laugh or cry, but fore mostly we do listen once engulfed by our own silence.

Above all, self portraits tell more than a whisper coming out of a dark corner. Van Gogh painted numerous variations of himself, one even with a bandage covering the ear he had injured himself.

So to end with a slightly different tone, self irony is as much needed as knowing when the muse is not with one and therefore most diffcult to write a poem.

SELF PORTRAIT

If I could ever draw a funny picture

of myself, and even though the lines

would be in black and white,

then it would be like taking a pot shot

at myself as snow man with a carrot as nose

and eyes those of a coal miner, and even

with some resemblance to a clown

or to a simple fool trapped in the circus

with men crowding around the lion's cage

to see wildness behind iron bars

just like society perceives me as a wild beast,

although in reality a dove hovers in my jest

to reflect what Surrealists dreamt about

when they saw a wanderer could not fly away.

With such notion of freedom I have no pain

when having to beg the muse to return to me.

 

 

 

To come back to those writers who could suddenly no longer write, and then committed suicide, something curious prevails here. If language is needed to exist in society, what does a person do when he or she discovers no one seems to listen or to understand what one is saying? To be without a socially acceptable language spells a huge existential crisis in the mind of that person. It may be overcome for a while by other, strictly non verbal means, but still a person has to be able to explain what he or she needs, and in what form such an existence remains viable.

Many artists did not really survive in the long run because they were literally without any means. For what goes beyond mere food and other things the body needs, is something like the knowledge of being needed and able to contribute in a positive i.e. productive way to society.

It does not have to be a strict a definition as Hegel applied when he said someone without property has to work, and if not he would be guilty for not contributing to the wealth of the nation. Wealth cannot be defined by merely material categories for peace within society depends as well on social cohesion and balance between needs and what the situation allows for at the moment. Engagement here can be an ongoing negotiation with the self as to what is acceptable, what not i.e. under which conditions to continue to exist.

 

Hatto Fischer

27.2.2010

 

 

Hatto Fischer June 2009 (updated: 3.6.2016)

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