i've really been thinking about this thread. marcel said something to the affect that parents need to be able to show their children not only the beautiful work of art, but also point out the bottle of absinthe sitting on the table in the picture. my 11 year old son went to atlanta last year to see the starry night. i've still not seen it in person but i have prints of it everywhere. so when he came home he was really excited and he said, ..dad, it doesn't look like those prints you have. he said the trees on the left side are really more green, not brown. and there are all these colors mixed inside out, so what looks green may have orange streaked through it and it's really neat. then he said, but dad, i don't get the suicide. what was that all about. and i started to explain slowly...like a little last year, and little this year and more next year and so on, about how hard solitude can be. and how we can get lost in a funnel of depression. and about mental illness that can deceive us. and then there's the absinthe. last year i read some articles in the nyt about absinthe and how now many scholors believe that vincent's depression was at least exaggerated, if not even induced by the drinking of poisonous absinthe. so there you go son,...maybe the grain alchohol was bad. like some bad drugs. it may have fried his brain. the absinthe on the table is important in helping our children to understand life's complexities. we see posts, one even recently, about how hard it is for us to like some artist after we find out something really ugly about them (sammy davis jr.) i think it's even harder for children to understand that. so we have to help them. and to do that, they need to see the details. even if they're not pretty. or if they seem insignificant. or even if some might think we are giving them too much "detail" so as to limit their own individuality. they need to know the depth of what they are seeing. otherwise, they are living in a compromised reality. and that compromised reality can go two ways. one could say...oh i love vincent van gogh and he's so beautiful....but never talk about the shot gun and the wheat field. or one could go the opposite way like i heard someone say recently ...why do you like him,,,nasty depressed creepy guy who blew himself away. i don't think either of those two statements show the complete reality of vincent. i want my son to see vincent's beauty, which he does. and i want him to see his suffering and his loss. becuase they are surely as interwoven and laced and 'streaked' together as his blue and grey and green and orange paints were. like joni said, turbulent indigos. that's probably one of the reasons i like joni so much. i think she's very honest about reality. more than honest, i think she passionately pursues an honest reality. and when i hear her talk now, as a mature woman, i really think that more and more. like on ttt...she said..kiss my ass. but she also said...this is his town and i'm going down. she understands her choices and their consequences. she'd make a hell of a grandmother. patrick np. emmylou and dave matthews- my antonia
