What actually happened the night Van Gogh cut off his own ear, Amiri Baraka's lyrical manifesto for openhearted living, an anatomy of sleeplessness

What actually happened the night Van Gogh cut off his own ear, Amiri Baraka's lyrical manifesto for openhearted living, Nathaniel Hawthorne on how the transcendent space between sleep and wakefulness illuminates time and eternity. NOTE: This message might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](. If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( – it's free. donating = loving I pour tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider supporting my labor of love with a recurring monthly [donation]( of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner: [Subscribe]( You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: [Donate]( And if you've already donated, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. If you wish to cancel your recurring donation, you can do so [here](. 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[Gauguin’s Stirring First-Hand Account of What Actually Happened the Night Van Gogh Cut off His Own Ear]( Certain relationships are charged with an intensity of feeling that incinerates the walls we habitually erect between platonic friendship, romantic attraction, and intellectual-creative infatuation. One of the most dramatic of those superfriendships unfolded between the artists Paul Gauguin (June 7, 1848–May 8, 1903) and Vincent van Gogh (March 30, 1853–July 29, 1890), whose relationship was animated by an acuity of emotion so lacerating that it led to the famous and infamously mythologized incident in which Van Gogh [cut off his own ear]( — an incident that marks the extreme end of what Sir Thomas Browne contemplated, two centuries earlier, as [the divine heartbreak of romantic friendship](. Vincent van Gogh, “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear,” 1889 In February of 1888, a decade after Van Gogh [found his purpose]( he moved to the town of Arles in the South of France. There, he exploded into a period of immense creative fertility, completing more than two hundred paintings, one hundred watercolors and sketches, and his famous Sunflowers series. But he also lived in extreme poverty and endured incessant inner turmoil, much of which related to his preoccupation with enticing Gauguin — whom he admired with unparalleled ardor (“I find my artistic ideas extremely commonplace in comparison with yours,” Van Gogh wrote) and who at the time was living and working in Brittany — to come live and paint with him. This coveted cohabitation, Van Gogh hoped, would be the beginning of a larger art colony that would serve as “a shelter and a refuge” for Post-Impressionist painters as they pioneered an entirely novel, and therefore subject to spirited criticism, aesthetic of art. Van Gogh wrote to Gauguin in early October of 1888: I’d like to see you taking a very large share in this belief that we’ll be relatively successful in founding something lasting. Despite his destitution, Van Gogh spent whatever money he had on two beds, which he set up in the same small bedroom. Seeking to make his modest sleeping quarters “as nice as possible, like a woman’s boudoir, really artistic,” he resolved to paint a set of giant yellow sunflowers onto its white walls. He wrote beseeching letters to Gauguin, and when the French artist sent him a self-portrait as part of their exchange of canvases, Van Gogh excitedly showed it around town as the likeness of a beloved friend who was about to come visit. Gauguin finally agreed and arrived in Arles in mid-October, where he was to spend about two months, culminating with the dramatic ear incident. In [Paul Gauguin’s Intimate Journals]( ([public library]( the French painter provides the only first-hand account of the strange, almost surreal circumstances that led to Van Gogh’s legendary self-mutilation — circumstances chronically mis-reported by most biographers and the many lay myth-weavers of popular culture, all removed from the facts of the incident by space, time, and many degrees of intimacy. “Paul Gauguin (Man in a Red Beret)” by Vincent van Gogh, 1888 (Van Gogh Museum) Gauguin recalls that he resisted Van Gogh’s insistent invitations for quite some time. “A vague instinct forewarned me of something abnormal,” he writes. But he was “finally overborne by Vincent’s sincere, friendly enthusiasm.” He arrived late into the night and, not wanting to wake Van Gogh, awaited dawn in a town café. The owner instantly recognized him as the friend whose likeness Van Gogh had been proudly introducing as the anticipated friend. After Gauguin settled in, Van Gogh set out to show him the beauty and beauties of Arles, though Gauguin found that he “could not get up much enthusiasm” for the local women. By the following day, they had begun work. Gauguin marveled at Van Gogh’s clarity of purpose. “I don’t admire the painting but I admire the man,” he wrote. “He so confident, so calm. I so uncertain, so uneasy.” Gauguin foreshadows the tumult to come: Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling too, inwardly, a sort of struggle was preparing. In the first place, everywhere and in everything I found a disorder that shocked me. His colour-box could hardly contain all those tubes, crowded together and never closed. In spite of all this disorder, this mess, something shone out of his canvases and out of his talk, too…. He possessed the greatest tenderness, or rather the altruism of the Gospel. Soon, the two men merged their finances, which succumbed to the same sort of disorder. They began sharing household duties — Van Gogh secured their provisions and Gauguin cooked — and lived together for what Gauguin would later recall as an eternity. (In reality, it was nine weeks.) From the distance of years, he reflects on the experience in his journal: In spite of the swiftness with which the catastrophe approached, in spite of the fever of work that had seized me, the time seemed to me a century. Though the public had no suspicion of it, two men were performing there a colossal work that was useful to them both. Perhaps to others? There are some things that bear fruit. “The Painter of Sunflowers (Portrait of Vincent van Gogh)” by Paul Gauguin, 1888 (Van Gogh Museum) Despite the frenzied enthusiasm and work ethic with which Van Gogh approached his paintings, Gauguin saw them as “nothing but the mildest of incomplete and monotonous harmonies.” So he set out to do what Van Gogh had invited him there to do — serve as mentor and master. (Gauguin was the only person whom Van Gogh ever addressed as “Master.”) He found the younger artist hearteningly receptive to criticism: Like all original natures that are marked with the stamp of personality, Vincent had no fear of the other man and was not stubborn. From that day on, Gauguin recounts, Van Gogh — “my Van Gogh” — began making “astonishing progress,” found his voice as an artist and came into his own style, cultivating the singular sense of color and light for which he is now remembered. But then something shifted — having found his angels, Van Gogh had also uncovered his demons. Gauguin recounts the tempestuous emotional climates that seemed to sweep over Van Gogh unpredictably — the beginning of his descent into the metal illness that would be termed bipolar disorder a century later: During the latter days of my stay, Vincent would become excessively rough and noisy, and then silent. On several nights I surprised him in the act of getting up and coming over to my bed. To what can I attribute my awakening just at that moment? At all events, it was enough for me to say to him, quite sternly, “What’s the matter with you, Vincent?” for him to go back to bed without a word and fall into a heavy sleep. Van Gogh soon completed a self-portrait he considered to be a painting of himself “gone mad.” That evening, the two men headed to the local café. Gauguin recounts the astounding scene that followed, equal parts theatrical and full of sincere human tragedy: [Vincent] took a light absinthe. Suddenly he flung the glass and its contents at my head. I avoided the blow and, taking him boldly in my arms, went out of the café, across the Place Victor Hugo. Not many minutes later, Vincent found himself in his bed where, in a few seconds, he was asleep, not to awaken again till morning. When he awoke, he said to me very calmly, “My dear Gauguin, I have a vague memory that I offended you last evening.” Answer: “I forgive you gladly and with all my heart, but yesterday’s scene might occur again and if I were struck I might lose control of myself and give you a choking. So permit me to write to your brother and tell him that I am coming back. But the previous day’s drama was only a tremor of the earthquake to come that fateful evening, two days before Christmas 1888. “My God, what a day!” Gauguin exclaims as he chronicles what happened when he decided to take a solitary walk after dinner to clear his head: I had almost crossed the Place Victor Hugo when I heard behind me a well-known step, short, quick, irregular. I turned about on the instant as Vincent rushed toward me, an open razor in his hand. My look at the moment must have had great power in it, for he stopped and, lowering his head, set off running towards home. Gauguin laments that in the years since, he has been frequently bedeviled by the regret that he didn’t chase Van Gogh down and disarm him. Instead, he checked into a local hotel and went to bed, but he found himself so agitated that he couldn’t fall asleep until the small hours of the morning. Upon rising at half past seven, he headed into town, where he was met with an improbable scene: Reaching the square, I saw a great crowd collected. Near our house there were some gendarmes and a little gentleman in a melon-shaped hat who was the superintendent of police. This is what had happened. Van Gogh had gone back to the house and had immediately cut off his ear close to the head. He must have taken some time to stop the flow of blood, for the day after there were a lot of wet towels lying about on the flag-stones in the two lower rooms. The blood had stained the two rooms and the little stairway that led up to our bedroom. When he was in a condition to go out, with his head enveloped in a Basque beret which he had pulled far down, he went straight to a certain house where for want of a fellow-countrywoman one can pick up an acquaintance, and gave the manager his ear, carefully washed and placed in an envelope. “Here is a souvenir of me,” he said. That “certain house” was, of course, the brothel Van Gogh frequented, where he had found some of his models. After handing the madam his ear, he ran back home and went straight to sleep, shutting the blinds and setting a lamp on the table by the window. A crowd of townspeople gathered below within minutes, discomfited and abuzz with speculation about what had happened. Gauguin writes: I had no faintest suspicion of all this when I presented myself at the door of our house and the gentleman in the melon-shaped hat said to me abruptly and in a tone that was more than severe, “What have you done to your comrade, Monsieur?” “I don’t know…” “Oh, yes… you know very well… he is dead.” I could never wish anyone such a moment, and it took me a long time to get my wits together and control the beating of my heart. Anger, indignation, grief, as well as shame at all these glances that were tearing my person to pieces, suffocated me, and I answered, stammeringly: “All right, Monsieur, let me go upstairs. We can explain ourselves there.” Then in a low voice I said to the police superintendent: “Be kind enough, Monsieur, to awaken this man with great care, and if he asks for me tell him I have left for Paris; the sight of me might prove fatal to him.” I must own that from this moment the police superintendent was as reasonable as possible and intelligently sent for a doctor and a cab. Once awake, Vincent asked for his comrade, his pipe and his tobacco; he even thought of asking for the box that was downstairs and contained our money, — a suspicion, I dare say! But I had already been through too much suffering to be troubled by that. Vincent was taken to a hospital where, as soon as he had arrived, his brain began to rave again. All the rest everyone knows who has any interest in knowing it, and it would be useless to talk about it were it not for that great suffering of a man who, confined in a madhouse, at monthly intervals recovered his reason enough to understand his condition and furiously paint the admirable pictures we know. Newspaper report from December 30, 1888: ‘Last Sunday night at half past eleven a painter named Vincent Van Gogh, appeared at the maison de tolérance No 1, asked for a girl called Rachel, and handed her … his ear with these words: ‘Keep this object like a treasure.’ Then he disappeared. The police, informed of these events, which could only be the work of an unfortunate madman, looked the next morning for this individual, whom they found in bed with scarcely a sign of life. The poor man was taken to hospital without delay.’ With pressure from alarmed neighbors and local police, Van Gogh was soon committed into an insane asylum. From there, he wrote to Gauguin about the sundering tension between his desire to return to painting and his sense that his mental illness was incurable, but then added: “Aren’t we all mad?” Seventeen months later, he took his own life — a tragedy Gauguin recounts with the tenderness of one who has loved the lost: He sent a revolved shot into his stomach, and it was only a few hours later that he died, lying in his bed and smoking his pipe, having complete possession of his mind, full of the love of his art and without hatred for others. Complement this particular portion of the forgotten treasure [Paul Gauguin’s Intimate Journals]( with astrophysicist Janna Levin on [madness and genius]( poet Robert Lowell on [what it’s like to be bipolar]( and neuropsychiatrist Nancy Andreasen on [the relationship between creativity and mental illness]( then revisit Gauguin’s [advice on overcoming rejection]( and Van Gogh on [love and art]( [how relationships refine us]( and his [never-before-revealed sketchbooks](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Answers in Progress: Amiri Baraka’s Lyrical Manifesto for Life]( The question of what it takes to have a good life is the animating inquiry of human existence, and although it is each of our life’s work to arrive at the answer for ourselves, we can be, and have been, greatly aided by those who have made the question their vocation — the philosophers, like Bertrand Russell and his [theorem of love and knowledge]( the psychologists, like the Harvard team who conducted a [revelatory 75-year study of human happiness]( and, perhaps most of all, the poets, those captain-spirits of humanity, who craft and steer vessels of language to hold what our hearts and minds struggle to contain. One uncommonly beautiful hint at an answer comes from the poet, playwright, short story writer, and essayist LeRoi Jones, better known as Amiri Baraka (October 7, 1934–January 9, 2014). Amiri Baraka, mid-1970s 1967 was a momentous year for Jones. Upon returning from Los Angeles, where he had become enchanted by Kawaida — an activist philosophy celebrating indigenous African names — he changed his name to Imamu (honorific Swahili for “spiritual leader,” from the Arabic imam) Amear (derived from the Arabic for “prince”) Baraka (“divine blessing” in the Islamic tradition), which he eventually condensed into Amiri Baraka. That summer, the police brutality surrounding his unlawful arrest incited sixteen of the country’s most prominent white poets to perform [a remarkable act of solidarity and moral courage]( rising in Baraka’s defense and in defense of artists’ broader right to speak truth to power. That year also marked the release of Baraka’s debut short story collection, Tales — a sandbox for experimenting with and refining his singular voice as a writer, in which he punctuates his prose with fragments of poetry infused with his formative Beat sensibility. One piece, titled “Answers in Progress” and later included in the indispensable [Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones]( ([public library]( contains a bewitching poem-song that pours in from the boulevard as the protagonists walk through town after an alien invasion. Reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s [advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life]( from the preface of Leaves of Grass, the piece stands as a lyrical manifesto for largehearted living. Baraka writes: Walk through life Beautiful more than anything Stand in the sunlight Walk through life Love all the things That make you strong, be lovers, be anything For all the people of Earth You have brothers You love each other, change up And look at the world Now, it’s Our’s, take it slow We’ve got a long time, a long way To go, We have Each other, and the World, Don’t be sorry Walk on out through sunlight life and know We’re on the go For love To open Our lives To walk Tasting the sunshine Of Life. In 1969, the poem was reprinted as a standalone poster, bearing the title of the story in which it originally appeared: “Answers in Progress,” 1969 poster Complement with the late Amy Krouse Rosenthal on [how to live with fantastic aliveness]( Mary Oliver on [the measure of a life well lived]( and Diane Ackerman’s [poetic invitation to living with absolute presence]( then revisit the striking story of [Baraka’s arrest and the conquest of justice](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [The Haunted Mind: Nathaniel Hawthorne on How the Transcendent Space Between Sleep and Wakefulness Illuminates Time and Eternity]( “Something nameless hums us into sleep,” wrote the poet Mark Strand in his [sublime ode to dreams]( “withdraws, and leaves us in a place that seems always vaguely familiar.” But where, exactly, is this part-real place of our nocturnal escape? Where do we go when we go to sleep, and what exactly happens there? Generations of scientists have labored to illuminate [our complex internal clocks]( how sleep [regulates our negative emotions]( and [affects our every waking moment]( but in the end it is the poets who seem to capture the slippery otherworldliness of sleep with the firmest grip. Nearly two centuries ago, and long before he rose to literary celebrity with his 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) shone a radiant beam of beauty and insight on the nocturnal consciousness. Nathaniel Hawthorne Hawthorne owes much of his fame to the trailblazing journalist, activist, and matron saint of Transcendentalism [Margaret Fuller]( credited with discovering Hawthorne and advocating his work into the limelight with her poetic praise. “No one of all our imaginative writers has indicated a genius at once so fine and so rich,” Fuller wrote of the practically unknown Hawthorne in 1840. She then was one of America’s most trusted tastemakers in culture — the first and at that time only woman writing for the prestigious New York Herald, where she composed some of the finest art and literary criticism of the New World. A few years earlier, had read and loved his short story collection [Twice-Told Tales]( ([public library]( | [free ebook]( recording in her diary the impression that the book was written by “somebody in Salem,” whom she assumed to be a woman. One of the pieces that had so enchanted Fuller was Hawthorne’s 1835 story “The Haunted Mind,” in a portion of which he contemplates the relationship between our nocturnal conscience and our waking self with uncommon poetry of understanding. Describing the surreality of being suddenly awakened from a deep dream at two in the morning, Hawthorne writes: What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to recollect yourself, after starting from midnight slumber! By unclosing your eyes so suddenly … you find yourself, for a single instant, wide awake in that realm of illusions, whither sleep has been the passport, and behold its ghostly inhabitants and wondrous scenery, with a perception of their strangeness, such as you never attain while the dream is undisturbed. […] If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night, it would be this. Illustration by Judith Clay from [Thea’s Tree]( In that hour, he argues, we come to inhabit a world that exists partway between sleep and wakefulness, a neverland outside time itself — we are snatched from the [Borgesian river of time]( and cast onto its strange banks. Hawthorne writes: Since your sober bedtime, at eleven, you have had rest enough to take off the pressure of yesterday’s fatigue; while before you, till the sun comes from “far Cathay” to brighten your window, there is almost the space of a summer night; one hour to be spent in thought, with the mind’s eye half shut, and two in pleasant dreams, and two in that strangest of enjoyments, the forgetfulness alike of joy and woe. The moment of rising belongs to another period of time, and appears so distant, that the plunge out of a warm bed into the frosty air cannot yet be anticipated with dismay. Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space, where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present; a spot where Father Time, when he thinks nobody is watching him, sits down by the way side to take breath. Illustration by Tom Seidmann-Freud from a philosophical [1922 children’s book about dreaming]( But the pleasant trance that seems to lift us out of time drags behind it a lurking awareness of time as the pulse-beat of existence — timelessness, sweet at first, bitters into nonexistence. Hawthorne writes: You sink down and muffle your head in the clothes… You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth, such as you now feel again. Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in its train. You think how the dead are lying in their cold shrouds and narrow coffins, through the drear winter of the grave, and cannot persuade your fancy that they neither shrink nor shiver, when the snow is drifting over their little hillocks, and the bitter blast howls against the door of the tomb. That gloomy thought will collect a gloomy multitude, and throw its complexion over your wakeful hour. In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your griefs may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain. Illustration by Tom Seidmann-Freud from a philosophical [1922 children’s book about dreaming]( In this hour of unconscious contemplation, Hawthorne argues, we confront our regrets, our shames, our disappointments, our lost loves, which return in our dreams in various guises. In that other world of the nocturne, we also taste the sweetness of our hopes attained and slake our deepest hunger for transcendence — we stand in landscapes of “a pervading gladsomeness and beauty,” we find ourselves standing “beneath the glimmering shadow of old trees” or “in the sunny rain of a summer shower” or underneath “the brightest of all rainbows.” And yet the clock that measures this haunted hour is one that brings “the knell of a temporary death” — in sleep, Hawthorne suggests, we foretaste our inevitable slip into eternal nonexistence: With an involuntary start, you seize hold on consciousness, and prove yourself but half awake, by running a doubtful parallel between human life and the hour which has now elapsed. In both you emerge from mystery, pass through a vicissitude that you can but imperfectly control, and are borne onward to another mystery… Your spirit has departed, and strays like a free citizen, among the people of a shadowy world, beholding strange sights, yet without wonder or dismay. So calm, perhaps, will be the final change; so undisturbed, as if among familiar things, the entrance of the soul to its Eternal home! Complement this particular fragment of Hawthorne’s [Twice-Told Tales]( with a contemporary counterpart at least as lyrical and insightful — Bill Hayes’s [poetic inquiry into sleep and its maddening absence]( — then revisit the science of [what actually happens while we sleep]( and [why we dream nightmares](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [BP] If you enjoy my newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a modest [donation](. [Donate]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. 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