“La tristesse durera toujours”                                                                               
The sadness will last forever

– Vincent van Gogh, 1890

*

On a July day in 1890, where the equinox seemed yet expected, the fields of wheat in Auvers-sur-Oise were a golden sea, shimmering, such that Rumpelstiltskin would have found himself useless there. In this place, at this time, a forlorn artist could be found amid it all, trying to capture it with paint upon his easel.

But he was failing. He felt the heat to be oppressive, as the feeling of boredom. It was a less familiar feeling to him than the one of excruciating pain – the passion that overtook him with madness – and he found himself less equipped to fight it. He knew passion, he knew madness – he had emerged from such trials before with his heart and eyes – but this void, that had grown and engulfed his heart to leave it as stone, he was at a loss with.

The morning he had left Auberge Ravoux for this field, he had told himself things. He had packed his oils into his satchel; his easel and canvas he had carried with him, had done this slowly and carefully, placing everything with precision so it wouldn’t move or break. He had packed his brushes and his palette.

Then he had stood up and, in the early morning when the light was nowhere, had felt it was too late. Looking up, he had seen the darkness reflected in his revolver resting against a chest of drawers. The shiny, black metal had reminded him of something else that had pained him once. The gun was long, and cylindrical and solid. Like bars were.

Now he stood, in Auvers-sur-Oise, wiping the colour off his hands with an old cloth and saw the black again. The cloth still in his right hand, he picked up the gun with the same. The gun was already loaded, since the morning, a small cartridge in the chamber.

He looked up, at his painting, once more. It was more golden even than the wheat billowing in the wind all around him; even the sky seemed alive in the painting. But there in the centre was the darkness projected onto the scenery – ravens, pitch-black, every one of them, like death. So different to the rest of it. A whole murder all flying, or fleeing, from a point in the fields, escaping to the skies – he could almost hear their rowdy crows – as though some strange, sudden noise had deafened the peace and scared them. A gunshot, perhaps.

He pointed the long barrel onto his heart, and his blood seemed to run cold within him.

Words came back to him from the letter he sent to his brother this morning. There are many things I should like to write you about, but I feel it is pointless. He realised those last ones he had not sent to his brother; the ink of those words was on a piece of parchment in his chest pocket right now. It occurred to him: these would be known as his last words. The thought was hilarious, ridiculous to him – they weren’t the words he had last to say.

His last words weren’t the words he had last to say either.

He moved the gun so that it was on his stomach.

The trigger had not been used before. Ever the artist, he squeezed it gently and felt a slight resistance.

Suddenly, there was pain and stars shooting across his eyes.

And at that moment everything shattered into a million glittering, glass shards. They twinkled in the sunlight as they fell in twisted paths. Their edges were finer than knifes, stronger than metal. They clinked against each other and made music as they hurtled to the earth, to destruction. The sharp edges of this beautiful canvas he had been painting on moments before, now fell upon, into his eyes and blinded him completely. There were stinging, incarnadine tears in his waterline, following the little crystals to the ground; his eyes closed, his sight lost forever. The veil of the beautiful sky – what had been his poor, lovely starry night – was now granules of sand, once more under his feet, to be washed away by a blood-red ocean, reflecting a dying, bleeding star that would engulf all of this before itself becoming destroyed.

He had had this dream, seen this vision, before, when painting a night of stars. He had awoken from it then.

He found the pain in his abdomen ignorable after a short while.

He then thought that he should rally his strength and make his way back to Auberge Ravoux. But he found he could not leave. His brushes and paints strewn around it and a gun interrupting everything. He thought what affrontery it would be to leave this mess here. He picked everything up, even in his sorry state, to leave the scene as it had been before his arrival.

What, precisely, would he have been affronting in disturbing a field of golden wheat? That he had given up on such things, and yet the artist in him – the lifelong training of his hands to serve beauty and the devotion of his eyes to see it. Even as his sadness marred everything so that he failed to truly appreciate it and ultimately surrendered, his allegiance to it remained undying. But such ideas did not occur to him.

He merely walked out of the field, down the winding path, and away, with the billowing gold and endless sky behind him.

*

The field did not go anywhere.

It remained there, as always, for the days during which Vincent van Gogh remained alive, but slowly less and less.

Then on a July night in 1890, where the equinox seemed very long gone, the field was shaded by dark, heavy clouds. It was the opposite of the starry night that was enchanted and glowing; the scene was a simple sight. Sombre, in a grief that seemed perennial – as though to say, “this sadness will last forever”.

But the forever of this sadness was very short.

Because then clouds dissipated and the straggling stars emerged. A soft breeze accompanied the calls of the earliest birds and made trees in background dance. Everything came alive. The sun rose from the east, chasing the pinpricks of light beyond it. In this time, this place, the world was between two things – the golden of the day and the midnight of the sky, at once both and neither. The sky seemed littered with stars and awash with sunlight. It was calm and peaceful, but no less vibrant for it. It glowed with the abundance of brightness – like it wished to negate what came before and sing of beautiful things to come forever.

If one were walking along the path, on the earth, they would find themselves still in darkness. But to only shift one’s gaze heavenward would reveal the starry night – marred and barred by all manner of cold fear and shadows, racing crowds and time leaving you behind – but there in all its eloquence for those who look.