“I see,” says Sly.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate all your work, Sly, but this just isn’t right. It must be torn down and rebuilt.”
“Well, you’re the one paying the bill for the construction. Whatever you say, Fizzy.”
With a facile wave of his hand, Sly makes an entire street disappear, buildings and all. Another gesture erases the Mediterranean foliage. Suddenly and decisively, the terrain is restored to its original status.
I decide that a bit of research might be in order, so I conduct a quick search on the Internet for photos and artist’s renderings of nineteenth century Holland, especially Groot-Zundert in the Netherlands and Borinage, Belgium. I also download pictures of Arles and Saint Remy and send them to Sly for reference. I watch his emulation as he studies the pictures. “See what I mean?” I ask.
Sly nods as he stashes the pictures in his cache. “I think I get it,” he tells me. “Let’s see what a second try produces.”
“I have the utmost confidence in your abilities,” I tell him. “I’ll check back in a day or two.”
“I should have something by then,” he speculates.
“Meanwhile, Crystal and I are headed back to VLU, then to the ‘garden’. This scripting language is driving me crazy, and I have to study more, and then experiment. So, if you need me, just IM. You’ll find me in either of those two places.”
“You’re the boss, Fizzy,” says Sly as he tips his hardhat.
Back at VLU, I spend no less than six hours studying code. The numbers and symbols mock my ignorance, but I will not give up. I barely notice the passing hours. Crystal comes and goes, checking in with me, measuring my progress, helping whenever she can. Feeling like I’ve mastered one application or another, I move to the ‘garden’ to test my newfound knowledge and abilities.
The VL ‘garden’ is actually like Vincent’s wheat field, a vast expanse of topography with an ambiguous vista. A Murder of Crows circles overhead, blackening the sky. A sign? An omen? A warning? I type out numbers and symbols to the fury of flapping wings. Colors emerge at my fingertips, modern-day RBG representations of the pigments employed by the artist more than a hundred years ago: the mysterious indigo and Prussian blue of a swirling sky; the brown earthen pathway lined with a border of verdant green leading into uncertain prospect; the disarming yellow of the living wheat; and the black, black crows swooping in and out of the painter’s consciousness.
Aside from the building of the REP and the recreation of the paintings remains the question of who shall portray the artist himself. As I delicately code each color into each virtual canvas, I find myself wondering if a surrogate Vincent will present himself once the REP is finished and accessible. I wonder if perhaps I should advertise in the VL newspapers for a proxy. Or should I assume the role myself through a second emulation? No doubt, the artist himself was a man of extreme complexity, and I find myself wondering whether anyone can actually do justice to the roll. Of course, that is always the problem with resurrection, isn’t it?
I search as deeply within myself as I have ever searched, tapping distant and previously unexplored emotions, their source, the myriad possibilities for expression, and the artifacts they produce and leave behind as legacy. I’m searching here for confluence—(Is such unification even possible?). Who am I to think that I, Fizzy Oceans (or Amy Birkenstock), can somehow tap the artistic sensibilities of one such as Vincent Van Gogh? Yet I know I must try, for it is not only my legacy here in VL that hangs in the balance, but a testament to ultimate artistic expression in our PL culture, which by some accounts is disintegrating faster than peeling paint. So I keep crunching numbers and writing code, even as I search for Vincent’s pure yellow note.
Back at the REP, Sly escorts me to a replica he has created of Vincent’s bedroom in Arles. This time he has it perfect. He explains to me that he created the curiously convex room from a digital representation of Van Gogh’s painting. Standing at the threshold to the artist’s interior, I experience firsthand the texture of the rustic floorboards, the blue, blue walls, the wooden chairs with thatched seats, the rough wooden table upon which a pitcher and washbasin are arranged ever so neatly, a hanging smock, a mirror, the self-portraits, and Vincent’s humble single bed with a red blanket and yellow sheets. Dare I enter this room? Tread lightly, I tell myself; this is hallowed ground. Holding my breath, I step tenderly inside the artist’s vision—inside his painting. I can’t help but wonder: Am I trespassing here, or did the artist create this painting as an invitation into his private world?
Such experiences are unsettling. Never in Vincent’s imagination, vibrant and diverse as it surely was, could he have imagined it possible for someone to enter this two-dimensional representation of his private quarters; yet I stand at the center of his revelation, turning round and round in dizzying circles, touching his artifacts, perceiving his symmetry, breathing the very air he once breathed…
We move on to appraise Sly’s version of Vincent’s studio.
Like the interior of Van Gogh’s Groot-Zundert studio, my visceral workplace is filled with empty bird’s nests, old mud-stained shoes, broken chairs, fallen limbs, filthy peasant’s caps. From every picture, letter, receipt and scrap of hand-written paper, Vincent whispers:
“You cannot be at the pole and the equator at the same time. You must choose your own line...”
To Theo’s frustration, Vincent was forever giving away his small stipend to those even less fortunate than himself, if indeed such persons were to be found!
Left alone and misunderstood in Arles by the artist Paul Gaugin, he had preferred oblivion to obscurity and the constant fear of epilepsy, and shot himself point blank in the stomach. Waiting three days to die, he lay back on his bed, bleeding, and smoked his pipe. Fragrant wreaths of tobacco smoke gathered in swirling clouds about his head, and he died as he had wished to die, amidst his own yellow vision.
I leave the studio with flexuous Van Gogh visions freshly imprinted upon my mind: dour and oblique-looking peasants eating potatoes; terrace cafes; landscapes; skeletons; and the red and green and orange portrait of Vincent himself, his ear bandaged and looking quite mad.
Was Vincent really mad? Or was he simply disillusioned? I think the latter. To be sure, he was sick, probably with some form of epilepsy. In Vincent’s time they didn’t have drugs like Phenobarbital and Valproate to control seizures, so he suffered not only from the effects of the illness, but also the torments of those who did not understand the condition. What must he have thought of himself? He probably believed those who advanced the misconception. He suffered not once, but twice for the same affliction.
Yet Vincent nobly persisted in the quest to portray natural beauty through his artistic passion. Because that is the very nature of art. The painter amplifies and defines the literal world by representing it in symbolic terms. By fusing the capricious element of emotion into the work, he somehow renders his representation to express an even greater unanimity than exists within the inherent. The sum is greater than its parts. And nobody has done that better than Vincent Van Gogh.
Oh fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck! Amy’s lost her job. Just as Fizzy Oceans is hitting her stride, building her very own Van Gogh REP, Amy gets laid off. The doctor told me that because of healthcare reform he just couldn’t afford to pay three clerks. Stupid me! I never saw it coming, and I’ve changed all my spare dollars for greenshoots, and spent most of those on the REP. What am I going to do now? I guess I’ll start looking for another job, but finding one could take months. I know people who have been out of work for years now, and some have quit trying altogether. No food needed in VL, but it’s another matter in Physical Life. How am I going to pay rent? Without my job, I won’t last three months. Shit! Fuck! Goddamn it all!
Deb and Karen took me out for drinks one last time after I was furloughed, and of course they were full of encouragement: “Don’t worry, Amy, you’ll find another job” and “It’s a shitty place to work anyhow, you’re the lucky
one”. But I can tell that they’re both scared now, because they know it could just as easily have been one of them to be let go. What are they supposed to say to me? They know it’s tough out there; they know it’s not going to be easy finding another job. “If there’s anything we can do, Amy, you just let us know,” Deb said. Which I figure really meant, “Good luck kid; see you in the next life.” Of course neither has any idea what I’m up to in VL.
The only upside to losing my PL job is that I get to spend almost all my time in VL now. Both Crystal and Kiz notice that I’m suddenly at my REP during the hours I used to spend billing insurance companies for unneeded procedures. I’ve not told either of them about losing my PL job because it’s not really relevant here in VL, and besides, I neither need nor want sympathy. I’m a big girl, as they say, and I can take care of myself. At least I think I can… At least I’ve always been able to so far… Under normal circumstances… But what’s normal these days in PL? Nothing!
When I’m not in VL at the REP, I’m doing a lot of reading about Vincent. I devour book after book about his life. I read his correspondence with Theo, his brother. I trace his path on a map of Europe I’ve pinned to my wall. I study his paintings; I construct a timeline of his works. I want everything in the REP to be perfect. Why am I so drawn to this eccentric soul? I guess his paintings and his life move me in a way I cannot articulate. Isn’t that what art is supposed to do?
This is what Vincent had to say about it:
There may be a great fire in our soul,
yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it,
and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke
coming through the chimney.
My ad in the VL newspaper drew many responses, yet I failed to find an applicant I thought worthy to portray Vincent. So the role has fallen upon me to embody the artist. I have created an alternate emulation—one that looks like Vincent’s self-portrait painted in 1887 and now on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Like all his self-portraits, it shows a dour man, a serious man, perhaps a troubled or tormented man. In this self-portrait, and in others, one senses the artist helplessly searching for himself within his creation. It is because I seem to be able to identify that perspective that I know I am the right player for this persona, and even before I open the REP to others in VL to visit and explore, I walk the various regions alone—in Vincent’s shoes, in his ragged clothes and peasant’s hat—to experience his world firsthand.
The year is 1879, and Vincent is twenty-six years old. Moving as nimbly as my fingers type commands, he enters the Borinage district. There he determines to enter the Marcasse, one of the deepest and most dangerous coalmines in all Europe, and I direct him into a basket to be lowered deep into the mine. Fifteen hundred feet underground he steps out of the basket and looks up at the shaft’s distant opening, no larger than a star in the night sky. Now, I am not only moving Vincent’s emulation from point to point, but I feel as though I am breathing the air he once breathed, and feeling the intense claustrophobia he must surely have felt. I feel the tension in his neck, back and torso; I taste the desperate dryness of coal dust. Everyday miners in the Marcasse face poison air, firedamp explosions, water seepage and cave-ins. Wet walls gleam under miners’ lights as children of both sexes, some little more than babes, load coal into horse-drawn carts to be shuttled to the main corridor of the mine then lifted to the surface. I feel Vincent’s sense of horror in this strange subterranean world.
Vincent, the young parson, has arrived in the Borinage to minister to the miners and their families. In his valise are two suits, gentleman’s clothes bought in Amsterdam with money received from his father. He rents a clean room from a baker in which to live. He watches the miners and their humble families with interest and sympathy. They live in huts scattered throughout the woods on the edge of the village—homes without running water or toilets. At night their windows glow from the light of candles. At the entrance of the mine loom tall chimneys and conical mountains of coal—testaments of redundant and dangerous lives led by the miners. He soon gives away his fine suits to one in need. He moves away from the baker’s house and takes up residence in a hovel not unlike those in which the miners live. He ceases to wash, and soon his face is as blackened as if he, too, spent his days digging underground. “Why have you given away your clothing?” he is asked by a young woman. “Because I am a friend of the poor,” he answers. “Like Jesus…”
Yet, the miners and their families are more than a little uncomfortable with Vincent’s devotion. “The parson is no longer normal,” they whisper amongst themselves. And it is true! Van Gogh lives more like an animal than like a man. He talks to himself. He prays on bended knees for hours at a time. He eats barely a morsel; his abstinence is notorious. What money he receives he gives away. He says he talks to God. Nobody believes God talks back to him.
This business of portraying another person—a real life individual now dead—is both eerie and exhilarating. I don’t know whether or not I like it, but my dedication to this project is documented in code, and there’s no turning back now. It is my long felt admiration for this man’s particular passion that has led me to create the REP, as well as a profoundly personal search to express something furtively felt within me, something long harbored, something anxious for expression yet fearful of exposure, something disorderly yet divine. I take the next tentative step in Vincent’s worn leather shoes.
Unable to relate to his parishioners, Vincent is finally dismissed from his post by the mission sponsors. Officially, they cite his lack of oratory skill, but in reality his behavior is simply too extreme. He moves to the next village where he lives on charity. He sketches the miners, honing his drawing skills. He sleeps outdoors, eats barely anything. Vincent’s father suggests having him committed to an insane asylum, but Theo intervenes on his brother’s behalf. He begged Theo, the art dealer, to send him prints by Jean-Francis Millet, an artist that drew scenes of peasant life; one he admired above all other artists. “Send me what you can and do not fear for me. If I can only continue to work, it will somehow set me right again,” he wrote his brother.
Taking a break from Vincent’s life, and from VL too, I (Amy Birkenstock) leave my apartment and trudge through a rainy Seattle morning down to the Pike Place outdoor market to see if I can find some work—even an odd job for a day or two—because I’m really broke now. I can’t even afford food, or toiletries, or cigarettes; in fact, I can’t even afford to take my clothes to the launderette, so I’ve been wearing the same jeans and flannel shirt for ten straight days. Thank God my Doc’s are sturdy, because I can’t afford to take the bus either, so I have to walk the entire way, twenty blocks, more or less. At the market I convince a Chinese fishmonger, Mr. Wang, to let me clean up after he closes his stall. The fish guts and blood make me want to vomit even though my stomach is dead empty. When I finish cleaning his stall he pays me a few bucks so I can buy a burger and fries. Call it good.
Unemployment (and the poverty that results from it) is no fucking fun at all. But hey, real food is expensive these days. Broccoli might as well be made out of gold; cherries out of diamonds. I’m really craving milk; I must be calcium deficient. There are plenty of leftover grunge-hippies here in Seattle, and they’d probably be willing to help out, but they’re in the same hard-up circumstance as me, so I don’t even bother asking. I make my own way. If Vincent could do it, so can I!
VL is my solace, my oasis, my home away from (home?). After all, everything in VL—except my Van Gogh REP, thanks to Sly Sideways—looks like California, the Golden State. Except California ran out of money back in 2009, and the shine is off that nugget once and for all. Look, it does no good to be bitter. I’m usually not one to complain, either; I just want a good meal once a week, that’s all. In VL there is no hunger. That’s something—a different kind of nourishment…
Fizzy Oceans is tracking Vincent to the South of France now—all in a few short steps, thanks to my VL REP. I’ve lent her my trusty Do
c’s to make the pilgrimage (lol). She is standing in front of Vincent’s yellow house in Arles when Paul Gaugin storms out of the door cursing the Dutchman. “That potato-eater just cut off his fucking ear!” Gaugin swears. And he’s off to the South Pacific. Just like that!
Shortly, Vincent appears in the street, his severed ear bleeding like a butchered pig. His expression is dazed as he staggers off to present his ‘little gift’ to the prostitute of his fancy. Oh, what a night!
Look, I’ve never cut off my ear, so I can’t say I know how it feels. But I do know something about sacrifice. It’s what you do for love, or passion, or insanity. Or maybe it’s what you do when you want to find the pure yellow note and you just can’t find it. I don’t know, but I’m certainly not going to be the one to judge him. He did what he did, and I’m sure he had his reasons. I’m sure it made sense to him as he drew the razor over his skin.
Am I Amy Birkenstock now, or am I Fizzy Oceans? Is Fizzy Oceans that cute little emulation that works like a banshee at Open Books, or has she somehow transformed herself into the artist Vincent Van Gogh? Shit, VL can get to be confusing, can’t it? I’m sensing that Fizzy Oceans wants to speak for herself now…
As I work in the VL ‘garden’ writing code and recreating yet another Van Gogh painting—this time “Vase with Twelve Sunflowers”—it occurs to me that what we create, or more accurately recreate, with our computers is at best a binary representation of our literal world, minus its soul. What Vincent Van Gogh did with tools infinitely more fundamental—a brush, a knife, a board or a bit of canvas, pigments of the primary colors—is quite different indeed. Looking at his paintings, most would agree that the eccentric images—swirling skies (“Wheatfield with Cypresses, c.1889), wavy wheat fields (“Wheatfield Under a Cloudy Sky” c.1890), emaciated jade faces with amethyst lips (“Portrait of Dr. Gachet”, c.1890), a humble community of once-proud houses now sagging like melting candle wax (“Houses at Auvers”, c.1890), olive trees lined up like soldiers under a blazing Mediterranean sun that shines its light upon the earth in ever-concentric particles (“Olive Trees” c.1890), God’s glorious firmament exploding like a Chinese fireworks display at the New Year (“Starry Night” c.1889)—convey not a realistic recreation of the literal world, but a window into the soul of the artist himself. My effort in making this REP is one of re-creation; Vincent’s effort, borne of deep humility and lifelong sacrifice, tapped the quintessence of Creation. His unapprised contemporaries failed to recognize his vision, and they scorned him for his eccentricity. In his lifetime he sold but a single painting. Today, of course, his canvases sell for tens of millions of dollars (though you can have a facsimile created by yours truly for the very reasonable price of fifteen greenshoots). The song remains the same…
The Virtual Life of Fizzy Oceans Page 22
