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Untitled | Kristen O'Neill
By Maryam Majid
“Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.” – Vincent van Gogh, 1888
***
The walls of the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum are void of colour. They are sick and lumpy — mere blank reflectors of their inhabitants’ misery. This morning, the fragrant, sunlit France of my fancies is nowhere. Instead, a haze seems to obscure all Saint- Rémy-de-Provence, where the illusory comfort of my squalid, itchy sheets shatters; my dreams escape to the night held hostage by my nightmares; and I awake to be greeted by a grey day and those pale walls.
The paper is unevenly textured with swelling bulges spread throughout, as though slugs are crawling underneath the plaster and causing the ever-present stench in the room of madness and tears. It is the worst sort of monotony, tedious and nauseating. I feel an arcane desire within me to escape this. It propels me, before thought, to sit up and throw away my covers to vacate the place I languished all night, upon which sorry attempt, I find the thicket of tragedy only denser all around me. For my view of the dreaded wall sharpens, and my eye catches a break in the pattern – right at the edge. The wallpaper has peeled to reveal a yellow underneath. Not the golden of sunrays or flowers, but the putrid, unripe lemon of decay and illness. These walls are falling apart; the very world is deteriorating.
My drab clothes wait for me to dress, but all the wonder and feeling I have laboured so hard to convey my whole life are gone. Everything. What was colourful and bright, those white walls have consumed, leaving me with their mocking smug uniformity.
My eyes and ears seem to bleed from the way I have strained them to observe every detail of the world’s beauty. Now, their object having perished with the suddenness of the time, they are bereft and reeling. The hours my hands have spent in devotion – nay worship – of the picturesque, the divine, are countless as the stardust in the sky. They seem to stretch out before me, now, as an empty and wasted infinity. Distantly, I hear the forever interrupted by knock on old wood, then the squeak of rusty hinges being strained.
I pull the shirt over my head, so I am in darkness as a man of the order enters and places my breakfast upon the shabby stand near the entrance. Fully dressed, I approach the stand – the sludgy food that is plated on the tray, and beside it a chipped cup of water – and all I see are the little, white cylinders that are powdery at their edges and have left their chalky dust on the tray under them where they lay. The monk has places to be. Perhaps he asks me to drink, to swallow the pills. But I am already gone – the pain that was born from the moment I awoke, crescendos now, and I can see nothing beyond it.
It is unbearable – or, at least, I cannot bear it.
My head is tormented with sharp, pounding aches; my senses, in a deep stupor, are depressed. At times it is like a dull butter knife is being forcefully dragged through my mind, in a migraine that ails me for hours. At others it seizes the whole of me, like a sword, sharpened to be paper-fine, is cutting my soul, in a singular moment of agony. 2 And, always, there is the fog that remains over my senses, another way of pain. It makes the merest exertion exhausting and gives everything the appearance of black grief – like no happiness will be known to man again.
I feel it is for forever.
There is a window, whence – when the Sun finds my part France, cloaked in despair and madness, and deigns to shine upon it – the misery of the room is, slightly, lightened. But my gloom – a mad, dolorous thing that wreaks havoc with its wilful and wicked ways – has veiled the splendour of this light with slashes of blackness across the blue aperture. They have the banal way of evil about them – as the walls, the furniture, the fabrics do; as does everything in this den of insanity. They rip apart any last respite I have from the agony, any lost vision for the beautiful I still possess. They are tears – pin-straight, metallic, the black of wells and holes and voids. Just as bars. The day, the next, and perhaps many others, pass away – like a forlorn life – to bring me here. To this night, before this window. I am exhausted from waking for long hours, and the pain – my pain that is for forever – accompanies me here as anywhere else.
But I can see it.
In this moment, the misery is just dust behind the lush curtain of outer space whispering sad dictums, unheard, and I am before the wonder and artistry that sings of abundance and livens the world.
The pinpricks of silver in the sky overtake its darkness with their multitude, like someone crushed those foul tablets wholly and sprinkled the powder across the onyx blanket to bring it alive. Where they touch the heavens, the space brightens and turns blue to become a place of dreams and whimsy.
I feel the deep soreness of my eyes – from constantly begging cruel, crumbling time to return to them the sight of beauty – slowly healing as the salve of long-held tears washes over them. I want to reach out, clutch this silk blanket of the heavens, so that it pools between my fingers, and drape it over these pained eyes.
It appears the bars, the previous barricades to my vision, are gone – that I am beyond them.
And in this place beyond the sadness, my fatigue overtakes me – gently, from my window to my bed, into sleep. It is not the sleep of restlessness and bitter cries, but the sweet respite of calm breathing, relaxed limbs, and bountiful, beautiful dreams.
I picture it: where the sky is soft and velvet, full of swirls of clouds that melt into stars that flow, radiant and pulsing. It is so vivid I could brush it with my fingertips. Here, the beauty is endless and endlessly growing. I see a cypress growing from the ground, like the fervent flames borne of a burning passion. It stands strong and towering over a hamlet which sits beneath rolling hills that change in the light of the sea of stars in the heavens like waves from oceans home to grand and glorious things. The homes in the hamlet are small, with thatched roofs and askew build, each of them a little universe of domesticity and peace. With the somnolent glow of oil lamps illuminating the dark cobblestones in irregular patterns, it all comes together as a field of scattered stars on the Earth.
One moment at the edge of this splendour, I find myself awoken the next.
Sitting up in the same bed as before – squalid sheets over me, lumpy walls opposing, and all – I face an entirely different world; it seems to pulse with the ghost of my dream, the ugliness everywhere banished from my vision. Instead, I feel that familiar call. The tendons in my fingers tingle with the feeling of brushes and canvas – a live 3 memory calling them to action. The world I left behind I can sense here, in the warmth of the sunrise and the aroma of rich oil from my paints. I must bring it to life.
The day does not pass like those before it.
I crouch before the chest and stare at the bottom drawer where my palette and easel are stored. It is a simple drawer, faded and chipped from years of use with lack of care; perhaps it was rich chestnut, once, and the home of a greater artist’s tools. I pull it open to find where mine were abandoned before. They lay there – still and hauntingly elegant, the skeletons of forests, exactly as I left them – and I feel that to leave them, from now until forever, would be unthinkable.
As my heart pumps the blood my lungs breathe life into, the motions come to me. It is an art once learned and never after forgotten.
My fingers place themselves upon the aged wood as if fondling an old friend, with exactness, finding the old grooves of forgone time well spent there. I hold the brushes, heavy with paint of wild hues mixed from messes on my palette, and watch as the streaked white of canvas changes to full, vibrant strokes of colour at my hand. Warm yellow tones of vast sunflowers of the sky, dying stars, and melting candlesticks; the indigo of a sky with nebulous shapes of darker and lighter blue shading the Earth beneath it; the dense, verdant green of a tree with rings in its trunk that run the length of the universe – the dream brought to life.
*
The painting, as all the things of life and beauty that inspired it, takes its time in becoming.
Forever behind it – if one pulled away the curtain of swirling stars and sky, the peaceful night air, the quiet music of the cosmos to come upon what is at times dust and at times stronger – there remains the soreness, the suffering, the torturous pain. There are odious walls, and wilted flowers, and desolate days; there is foul food, and disturbed sleep, and madness in my mind.
But there is also a window that lets in sunlit days, brushes not abandoned, pain that is bearable after all. And a painting that is slowly born – one that brings repose and composure, that wars nightmares and catches dreams.
The pain is as it was, always – it is nothing different. It is only that, where the starry night has bars across it, now, I can see beyond them to gaze at its beauty, and bring it back to keep close, as the pulsing, throbbing life inside me.
***
“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, and racing crowds and time leaving you behind – but there in all its eloquence for those who look.
Maryam Majid is an emerging teen author from Great Britain who loves writing prose purple like the lavender haze in her veins. You can find her work in Teen Ink Magazine, the Expressionist Literary Magazine, the Malu Zine, the Blue Things Zine, WRITERS Magazine (forthcoming), and the Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine. She is also the Prose Editor at the Malu Zine, and active on Medium @maryammajid. She hopes to continue honing her craft and that, one day, her writing will be the comfort and inspiration to others, that so many authors' works were to her growing up. "The Starry Night Has Bars Across It" was first published in Issue II of the Expressionist Literary Magazine.