Once again, let’s try to seize our fate in whatever form it comes.
Tag: mental health
Filtering: Tagged with mental-health
ResetWhen I came out of the hospital with good Roulin I fancied that I hadn’t had anything, only afterwards did I have the feeling that I’d been ill. What can you say, I have moments when I’m twisted by enthusiasm or madness or prophecy like a Greek oracle on her tripod.
Everyone here is good towards me, the neighbors & c., good and attentive as in one’s native country.
As it’s still winter, listen. Let me quietly continue my work, if it’s that of a madman, well, too bad. Then I can’t do anything about it. However, the unbearable hallucinations have stopped for now, reducing themselves to a simple nightmare on account of taking potassium bromide, I think.
Rey told me that being very impressionable was enough to have had what I had as regards the crisis, and that currently I was only anaemic, but that really I ought to feed myself up. But myself, I took the liberty of telling Mr Rey that if currently the first thing for me was to recover my strength, if by pure chance or misunderstanding it had just happened again that I’d had to keep to a rigorous one-week fast, if in similar circumstances he had seen many madmen quite calm and capable of working – and if not then would he deign to remember occasionally that for the moment I myself am not yet mad.
We’re sparing nothing of what we have, in order to obtain some rich effect of color. And I believe that the idea of earning something as much for the pals as for ourselves will give us confidence. And in our business dealings, although we have no fixed plan, everything we do will nevertheless be based on that deep sense that we have of the present injustice suffered by the artists whom we know, and of the desire to change it as far as we can. With that idea, we can work with calmness and determination, and in short, we have nothing to fear from anyone. I’m working on a portrait of our mother because the black photograph was making me too impatient.
I’ve tried to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green.
Since I’m feeling better now I really don’t consider myself defeated, and besides, if I’d had my health, which I hope to get back here, that and many other things wouldn’t happen to me.
But here is what I’m saying once and for all to you and to Mr Rey. If sooner or later it were desirable that I should go to Aix, as has already been suggested – I consent in advance and will submit to it.
But in my capacity as painter and workman it isn’t permissible for anyone, not even you or the doctor, to take such a course of action without warning me and consulting me myself about it too, because as up to now I’ve always kept my relative presence of mind for my work, it’s my right to say then (or at least to have an opinion on) what would be best, to keep my studio here or to move completely to Aix.
From what people tell me I’m very obviously looking better; on the inside my heart is a little too full of so many diverse emotions and hopes, for it astonishes me that I’m getting better.
Here are the expenses
| Given to Roulin to pay the charwoman for the month of December 20 Francs. same for 1st fortnight of January 10 ,, | Fr | 30 | ,- | |
| Paid | to hospital | 21 | ||
| ,, | to the nurses who dressed the wound | 10 | ||
| On returning here paid for a table, a gas heater &c., which had been lent to me and which I then took on account | 20 | |||
| Paid for having all the bedding, bloodstained linen &c. laundered | 12 | ,50 | ||
| Various purchases like a dozen brushes, a hat &c. &c. let’s say | 10 | |||
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______ |
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103.50 |
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Thus we’ve already arrived, on the day I left hospital or the day after, at an involuntary expenditure on my part of 103.50, to which it must be added that then on the first day I cheerfully went to have dinner with Roulin at the restaurant, completely reassured and with no fear of renewed anguish. In short, the result of all that was that I was broke around the 8th.
Gauguin said to me this morning, when I asked him how he felt: ‘that he could feel his old self coming back’, which gave me great pleasure. As for me, coming here last winter, tired and almost fainting mentally, I too suffered a little inside before I was able to begin to remake myself.
I myself think that Gauguin had become a little disheartened by the good town of Arles, by the little yellow house where we work, and above all by me. Indeed, there are bound to be grave difficulties still to overcome here, for him as well as for me. But these difficulties are rather within ourselves than elsewhere. All in all, I think personally that he’ll either definitely go or he’ll definitely stay. I told him to think and do his sums again before acting. Gauguin is very strong, very creative, but precisely because of that he must have peace. Will he find it elsewhere if he doesn’t find it here?
I have many expenses, and it sometimes distresses me greatly when I increasingly come to realize that painting is a craft that is probably practiced by extremely poor people, since it costs a lot of money.
Considering, if you will, the times in which we live as a true and great revival of art, the moth-eaten and official tradition, which is still on its feet, but which is at bottom powerless and bone-idle, the new painters, alone, poor, treated like madmen and as a result of this treatment becoming so in fact, at least as far as their social life is concerned.
If I find annoyance or cause it, my word I remain stunned by it. Certainly I would gladly respect, I would admire martyrs &c., but you must know that in Bouvard et Pécuchet, for example, quite simply there is some other thing that adapts itself more to our little existences.
It’s not in black that I see the future, but I see it bristling with many difficulties, and at times I wonder if these won’t be stronger than I am. This is especially so at times of physical weakness, and last week I suffered from a toothache that was so agonizing that it made me waste time quite in spite of myself
At the end of the month I’d still wish to go to the mental hospital at St-Rémy or another institution of that kind, which Mr Salles has told me about. Forgive me for not going into details to weigh up the pros and the cons of such a course of action. It would strain my mind a great deal to talk about it.
I’m well these days, apart from a certain vague background sadness that’s hard to define — but anyway — I’ve gained physical powers rather than lose them, and I’m working. Just now I have on the easel an orchard of peach trees beside a road with the Alpilles in the background.
These repeated and unexpected emotions, if they should continue, could change a fleeting, momentary mental disturbance into a chronic illness.