sorrowful, yet always rejoicing

Letter for June 2024. On Writing, depression, Van Gogh, and the whole value of artmaking.

June 30th, 2024

I've been trying all my life to label the thing that’s slowly killing me. Depression is such a dull, clinical word. For Abraham Lincoln it was ‘melancholia’, or ‘defective nerves’. Hemingway called his condition the 'black ass'. Virginia Woolf labeled it as her ‘madness’.  But I've maybe found my favorite word. Weemoed. In Dutch, it roughly translates to 'deep sadness'. But it’s a compound word: 'wee' is its own word, meaning ‘woe’, and 'moed' is another, meaning 'courage'.

I first read this word in a letter sent in 1880, between two brothers. One of them, a young clergyman, was writing to the other, who was an art dealer in Paris. The clergyman found comfort in the word weemoed. He thought there was something empowering about the notion that his lifelong sadness could exist alongside joy. On the last day of October in 1879, he sent his brother a copy of a sermon that he had delivered at the Methodist church in Isleworth in England. He told a story of a pilgrim walking through an evening landscape. The pilgrim approaches a road that leads over a mountain. It's only when the traveler gets closer that he sees an angel posted by the road. He asks the angel, “Does the road go up hill then all the way?’ And the angel says ‘Yes, until the very end’,

“And he asks again: 'And will the journey take all day long?' And the answer is: 'From morn till night my friend. And the pilgrim goes on sorrowful yet always rejoicing, sorrowful because it is so far off and the road so long. Hopeful as he looks up to the eternal city far away, resplendent in the evening glow..."

For months the brother had been committed to the work of the clergy, convinced that it was his calling. But he quietly felt some other purpose tugging at him. He wrote to his brother Theo; "When I see a painting by Ruysdael, Van Goyen, Bosboom, or so many others, I am reminded again and again of the words, 'As sorrowful, yet alway(s) rejoicing' - of wee-moed."

The brother gathered charcoal, paper, and began to draw; landscapes, churches, people digging potatoes in the fields. He sent some of the sketches to Theo. The first drawings are rough. Done in charcoal, they look flat and somber, no trace of color or movement in them. But he kept drawing, even though the sketches weren’t reaching his vision. “I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God's help I shall succeed. I want... to be sorrowful yet always rejoicing.”

He was still gripped by depression through his years of intensive self-taught study, but he envisioned a way to live alongside it. "Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside of me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum."

The deep sadness would never leave him. But he was invigorated by the challenge of making his art poignant and beautiful, despite his suffering. And I will always love Vincent Van Gogh for that.

"So instead of giving in to despair I chose active melancholy, in so far as I was capable of activity, in other words I chose the kind of melancholy that hopes, that strives and that seeks, in preference to the melancholy that despairs numbly and in distress." - Vincent Van Gogh, July 1880

For the last month I've been watching the same family of geese in my neighborhood. They meet on a rocky shoreline, along the banks of the East River in New York. I mentioned this beach a few months ago. The beach is mostly boulders, dark seaweed, and small pebbles of smooth green glass that sound like thousands of chimes when the tide comes in. In the afternoons the geese glide in from under the Hell’s Gate bridge and settle on the shore. At first it was only a group of mature Canadian geese. But then a quintuplet of yellow-haired, fuzzy gooselings followed the parents one evening. They all huddled together as the breeze picked up. The elder geese craned their necks downward and picked bugs and worms out of the ground for the toddlers. And once the orange sun fell behind the skyline, the geese all waddled to the water. They floated away, like furry little buoys.

Every time I watch the geese, I feel a little bit more like Tony Soprano when he becomes obsessed with the ducks in his backyard pool. The geese on the river look so calm and peaceful, I can’t blame Tony for wading into the water while wearing his bathrobe. I’d love nothing more than to bob along the water with them.

I feel somewhat like a failure when I spend my free evenings watching geese. I feel momentary bliss, before being suddenly thrown into a third person view of myself. It's like I can see myself from a distance, like my consciousness is a drone buzzing above me. A voice asks 'Isn’t this sad, what you're doing?’ The voice tells me that I’m still young, and that I should not be wasting my life. ‘Go drink! Hit the town! Grab a meal with someone! Be messy!’ It’s an annoying voice, but a loud and persuasive one.

In a big city like this there's a cornucopia of distractions, waiting to be plucked at. And the summertime only makes it worse. One of my friends told me that she heard people calling this 'feral summer', and my first response was ‘Nah, I’m good’. A quiet and neutered summer for me! But still, the pull to fill one's life with things and events is only too alluring, especially in this loud and very expensive city that I live in.

I have this weird sort of ‘sunk cost fallacy’ with living here: I spend so much on rent, and drinks, and general cost of living, that the only way to justify living here is if I do everything. This is a common sentiment, but I don’t think a very healthy one. And on top of that, I suffer from a very American affliction of thinking that 'doing well' means 'doing much'. So it goes.

So at the beginning of June I changed course from my blissfully quiet life. ,I said goodbye to the geese, and filled every evening with plans across the city. It was like I entered a dream-state. I drank each night. I smoked cigarettes, which I never do and vowed that I would never start. I had to drink five or six cups of coffee each day just to muddle through. I talked energetically about all the projects and pieces that I was working on while, crucially, not making the time to work on any of them. I essentially stopped reading and writing. I started a book on May 31st and by the second week of June I had only read five pages.

Every part of my smiley exterior screamed happiness, togetherness, joy. But I could feel this part of myself withering and rotting. It was like I was an overwatered houseplant. The flurry of activity felt invigorating and exciting when it was happening, but whenever the busyness ended I couldn't bare sitting alone with my thoughts. It was like I was on a mental boom and bust cycle; flurries of manic activity, and then a horrific backslide where everything felt suddenly pale and colorless. I would be sitting in a subway car at 3am and thinking, blankly, 'This is it? This is the beautiful world that we were all promised?’

There's this sense that doing everything, and filling one's life, is the antidote to restlessness and depression. So I routinely try it, because that's what so many people in and on the periphery of my life do. They must be onto something, I think. But each time I try it I only feel further strung out, like a soggy towel being repeatedly twisted and rung out. There’s this idea that living in this manic, carefree way is somehow ‘liberated’ and exciting and worldly. But each time I indulge in the moveable feast, I don’t feel like I’m in touch with the world, or in communion with others. Instead everything feels small, and pale, and colorless, and all I can ever see is myself. A distorted, grey sepia shadow of myself.

"How much sadness there is in life. Still, it won't do to become depressed, one should turn to other things, and the right thing is work, but there are times when one can only find peace of mind in the realization: I, too, shall not be spared by unhappiness." -Vincent Van Gogh, October 1883

There's a way that many people think of dealing with depression: You overwhelm yourself with good distractions, 'treat yourself', indulge in retail therapy, talk with a shrink for one hour and then forget the emptiness for the rest of the week. Or you take drugs and hope that it will sufficiently lift or numb you. I have tried all these things, but they're never enough. The only productive thing that reliably works is sitting my ass in a chair and writing and reading. You either think that's a ridiculous sentiment, or you understand it entirely.

Writing, when done well, requires awareness and focus. It also requires discipline, which is something I haven't cultivated for years. Somewhere in the last decade I began to focus less on the joy of the process itself, and exclusively on the end result. I think it's been disastrous for my work, not to mention my well-being. I've been in an uphill battle to preserve the last shred of deep attention that I have, the kind of attention that I need to focus on larger projects. It hasn't been going well.

I have a lot of bugbears that I like to blame for my inability to write as much as I’d like to. Social media, the pandemic, Capitalism, global catastrophes. At other times I shovel all my woes under the D word: depression. Systemic issues don’t make it easier to make art, clearly. After all, it's not like scrolling social media makes me a better writer or a more engaged being! Neither does having to work a day job, nor thinking relentlessly about the very excellent and normal political state of the world¹. And it’s challenging to do any meaningful work when life feels devoid of meaning. But still, I feel uncomfortable with the idea that I have no individual agency to overcome those obstacles in some way. Especially if you believe, like I do, that good art and craftmanship can be some sort of antidote to a harsh and sterile world.

One of the things Van Gogh makes clear throughout his letters is that art, for him, is not just about the created product. He cares about the process and how it changes the artist themselves. I think this is an easy thing to forget. The world is quick to celebrate the values of work and prestige in the traditional workplace, or the consumable products of artists. But I suspect it's a tad wary of how artmaking can change the way that artists engage with the world. Maybe because being disciplined in art requires attention, and awareness, and being attuned to the world as it really is. That’s a potentially explosive mix.

"You cannot always tell what keeps you confined, what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls... Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison... Without these one stays dead. But wherever affection is revived, there life revives." - Vincent Van Gogh, July 1880

I'm thinking back to when I started finally reading again, after I was able to pull myself away from the busyness. I was making good headway on Van Gogh's letters, and I brought my book to a brewery close to home. I was looking closely at the trees, the sunset, all of those pretty and colorful things, until a large bus lumbered into the parking lot across the street. It was a school bus, painted white, emblazoned with the logo of the police department. I live near one of this city's most notorious jails. It's on an island just offshore. The bridge that leads from the landmass to the jail is only a few blocks from my apartment. The sight of that bus unlocked a memory.

I had recently been walking around the neighborhood, not a care in the world. When I had turned the corner onto my street I saw another large white bus parked in front of the corner bodega. It was a bus from the prison. The driver was standing outside, milling with his drink and a bag of chips. When I got closer I saw the windows on the bus. They were covered with thick metal sheeting, except for a thin uncovering at the top. And through the glass I could see shadows and shapes; heads, bodies, people sitting in a metal cage at the height of the summer heat.

“But I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road… But you must love with a sublime, genuine, profound sympathy, with devotion, with intelligence, and you must try all the time…” - Vincent Van Gogh, July 1880

I am wary of attaching a 'value' to art and artmaking. People routinely defend reading by arguing that it will make the reader a better and more enlightened person. Even though I believe that reading is, yes, consciousness expanding, I’m wary of using facts-and-logic to defend something that is supposed to be pleasurable and joyful. We don’t have to debate the inherent worth of a sunflower! So why can’t we accept that art being invigorating, and beautiful, and fun is good enough?

And yet, that’s not a universally acknowledged truth, so I’ll take my crack at it. My sense is that what unites art in all its different stages is care. Any good story or painting or piece of music comes from the artist caring for the person receiving it. Care comes from something like love. James Baldwin said something to this effect. “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” To make a good piece of writing you really have to care for the reader. To be a sharp critic, you have to care for the possibility of the work. And to be a good reader, you have to be willing to take this thing that someone created and hold it, reexamine it, and make it your own. It’s love all around.

Caring and loving is not a mystical ‘state of being’, but an act, a muscle. Muscles atrophy when you don’t use them. This is not an especially radical thing to say, but I don’t think our culture prioritizes loving and caring. If it did, then we would not primarily treat people as modular entities that largely fit alongside our lives. Self-care would not be distorted into self-absorption. Love would not become synonymous with obsession. And our art wouldn’t be primarily framed as a consumable object that can be binged and then discarded.

My sense is that in a good and healthy society we would focus more on ‘trying to do good’ than ‘being a person who has done good’. Those are two different things. I hear lots of talk about how to ‘get a partner’, but not how to love a person. Endless discourse over how to prevent bad things in the world, but not how to build good things now. And an almost endless and nauseating chatter over ‘how to be successful’, ‘how to get a following’, or ‘how to be a published artist’. What is success? Why do we want a ‘following’ and not a collaboration? And are you publishing for the sake of being a ‘published writer’, or because you believe that the work is good and that it will add something beautiful to the world?

I stumble into the same traps myself. I’m sure my web-search history asks somewhere ‘How to be happy’ or ‘How to not be depressed’. But I will never be entirely happy and fulfilled, because unhappiness and restlessness are part of the human condition. I will always have a glimmer of depression, I’m afraid. I could live trying to avoid these facts and make myself miserable while doing it. Or I could accept my limitations and ask myself ‘so, what now?’ So. What now?

“I’m not at all satisfied with this year, but it may yet provide a solid basis for the next. I have feasted upon the air in the hills and the orchards. For the rest I shall have to wait and see. My ambition reaches no further than a few clods of earth, sprouting wheat, an olive grove, a cypress…” -Vincent Van Gogh, September 1889

I returned to the park yesterday. The geese were there, drying their feathers on the beach. The gooselings were nearly all grown up. On the lawn drag queens danced on a stage and belted out Charlie xcx and Freddie Mercury. On the water, boats strung up with pride flags chartered up and down the river. I feel this compulsion now to tidy this all up, to weave a proper conclusion, to tie up all the loose ends and drone on about why the geese matter or why it’s wonderful to see people blossom and flourish. But all I can say is that it was joyful. And I would have never seen it if I wasn't looking and paying attention. I was still sorrowful, but quietly rejoicing. Isn't that good enough?

Tschüss,

-Michael

1. ‘I will not talk about the debate, I will not talk about the debate…’