Re: a little sermon
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Thu, 12 Mar 1998 10:54:37 -0500
> at some point you'll need to come out of
> the warm nest of vaguely brotherly love & use words in clear,
> sequential, coherent statements.
Amen to that!
I will (sorry!) have to insist that as a melancholy child, I would look
into the eyes of Van Gogh's self-portraits, knowing nothing about the man,
and see something approximating the emptiness and loneliness I felt as a
child. I was a little bit precocious then, but still, at that time, I
didn't have words to express it (which is the same frustration we see in
young children when they want to tell you something but can't find the
word, or can't get us to understand the word).
All I knew is that I was a sad child, and I saw a sad man in front of me.
And seeing him on the wall, treated with such respect (a gilded frame, a
crowd nearly always in front of him), made me feel that I was looking at a
kindred spirit. It wasn't until many years later that I started to hear
the many stories that presume to explain Vincent to us.
I have a feeling that we're really talking about the same piece of lumber,
but I've got my hand on the raw bark, and Scotty's got his on the plank
that's coming out the other end of the sawmill.
At any rate, whether or not this is so, three cheers for clear, sequential,
coherent statements!
--tim