Co-creators
“Starry,
starry night
Paint your
palette blue and gray
Look out
on a summer day
With eyes
that know the darkness in my soul.
Shadows on
the hills
Sketch the
trees and the daffodils
Catch the
breeze and the winter chills
In colors
on the snowy winter land...”
Don McLean
“Vincent” (Starry, Starry Night)
Now and then, a song
enters the ether and never leaves. “Vincent” is one of those.
Once in a lifetime, a singer/song-writer writes a genius lyric, and
never matches that again. That's true for many artists—for
instance, there most likely will never be another book like The
Secret Life of Bees from Sue Monk Kid, and J. K. Rowling may
never top Harry Potter. But the song, “Vincent,” about the
life of Van Gogh, and the madness that drove him both to create
absolutely unique masterpieces, and to take his own life, stands out
in the same way that Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah” does. They're
now incorporated into the human DNA.
There is an edge, some
say, between genius and madness, that is easy to fall off. Artists
who are driven to create, who cannot tear themselves away from their
work in order to have normalizing relationships and keep their feet
planted on the earth, are more likely to find themselves falling into
that abyss. And not just artists, but others who stare into the
theoretical void for long enough, for whom the world that is unseen,
and misunderstood by the vast majority of people, becomes more real
than this flesh and blood one. The refrain in McLean's “Vincent”
goes:
“Now I
understand what you tried to say to me
How you
suffered for your sanity
How you
tried to set them free.
They would
not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps
they'll listen now.”
Artists of all stripes,
theoretical mathematicians, and mystics are essential to our forward
movement, but they must stay planted in this reality. The balance
point is still here, on terra firma. With feet firmly grounded, they can look
into the starry, starry night and see beyond what our mortal eyes
discern, then draw the rest of humanity toward it. Thank God for
folks like Vincent Van Gogh, Georgia O'Keeffe, Leonard Cohen, and all
the deep seers of this world. We would be so much poorer without
them.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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