Collected Prose

had fallen in love with: so passionately and hopelessly that the thought of it still smarts. To remember the train, and then the ferry to New York (that ferry, which has long since vanished: industrial iron, the warm fog, rust), and then going to a large exhibition of Van Gogh paintings. To remember how he had stood there, trembling with happiness, as if the shared seeing of these works had invested them with the girl’s presence, had mysteriously varnished them with the love he felt for her.
    Some days later, he began writing a sequence of poems (now lost) based on the canvases he had seen, each poem bearing the title of a different Van Gogh painting. These were the first real poems he ever wrote. More than a method for entering those paintings, the poems were an attempt to recapture the memory of that day. Many years went by, however, before he realized this. It was only in Amsterdam, studying the same paintings he had seen with the girl (seeing them for the first time since then—almost half his life ago), that he remembered having written those poems. At that moment the equation became clear to him: the act of writing as an act of memory. For the fact of the matter is, other than the poems themselves, he has not forgotten any of it.
    *

    Standing in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (December 1979) in front of the painting The Bedroom , completed in Arles, October 1888.
    Van Gogh to his brother: “This time it is just simply my bedroom … To look at the picture ought to rest the brain or rather the imagination …
    “The walls are pale violet. The floor is of red tiles.
    “The wood of the bed and chairs is the yellow of fresh butter, the sheet and pillows very light lemon-green.
    “The coverlet scarlet. The window green.
    “The toilet table orange, the basin blue.
    “The doors lilac.
    “And that is all—there is nothing in this room with closed shutters. …
    “This by way of revenge for the enforced rest I have been obliged to take….
    “I will make you sketches of the other rooms too some day.”
    As A. continued to study the painting, however, he could not help feeling that Van Gogh had done something quite different from what he thought he had set out to do. A.’s first impression was indeed a sense of calm, of “rest,” as the artist describes it. But gradually, as he tried to inhabit the room presented on the canvas, he began to experience it as a prison, an impossible space, an image, not so much of a place to live, but of the mind that has been forced to live there. Observe carefully. The bed blocks one door, a chair blocks the other door, the shutters are closed: you can’t get in, and once you are in, you can’t get out. Stifled among the furniture and everyday objects of the room, you begin to hear a cry of suffering in this painting, and once you hear it, it does not stop. “I cried by reason of mine affliction….” But there is no answer to this cry. The man in this painting (and this is a self-portrait, no different from a picture of a man’s face, with eyes, nose, lips, and jaw) has been alone too much, has struggled too much in the depths of solitude. The world ends at that barricaded door. For the room is not a representation of solitude, it is the substance of solitude itself. And it is a thing so heavy, so unbreathable, that it cannot be shown in any terms other than what it is. “And that is all—there is nothing in this room with closed shutters….”
    *

    Further commentary on the nature of chance.
    A. arrived in London and departed from London, spending a few days on either end of his trip visiting with English friends. The girl of the ferry and the Van Gogh paintings was English (she had grown up in London, had lived in America from the age of about twelve to eighteen, and had then returned to London to go to art school), and on the first leg of his trip, A. spent several hours with her. Over the years since their graduation from high school, they had kept in touch at best fitfully, had seen each other perhaps five or six times. A. was long cured of his passion, but he had not dismissed her altogether from his mind, clinging somehow to the feeling of that passion, although she herself had lost importance for him. It had been several years since their last meeting, and now he found it gloomy, almost oppressive to be with her. She was still beautiful, he thought, and yet solitude seemed to enclose her, in the same way an egg encloses an unborn bird. She lived alone,