ON FIRST SEEING VAN GOGH'S IRISES (10/21/04)

I stood before Van Gogh’s Irises for the first time, and I wept. I had never before wept at a work of art. Not the Mona Lisa. Not the Pieta. Not umpteen Rembrandts and Renoirs. I had been awestruck and inspired, but I had never wept.

My obsession with the Irises is not new. Our home is full of lots of original artwork and beloved family pictures, but the only art poster that I own is of the Irises. Then there are my Irises mug, screen saver, mouse pad and coffee canister. Would I ever abide by such kitsch were it for any other work of art?

What did his tortured soul convey to his canvas as he captured a patch of flowers in the asylum’s walled garden? Giddy elation? Darkest melancholy? Hanging there with no fanfare flanked by two Renoirs, my widening eyes fixed magnetically on it, alone for ten minutes in a world that was entirely of him and my Irises. Let there be no mistaking: The Irises were mine. Not the Getty Museum's. Not the public’s. Mine.

“Look at the brushstrokes.” “Look at how vivid the colors are.”

But I stood sufficiently back that I could see neither brushstrokes nor manufactured colors. I saw through his eyes only a world circumscribed by the walls of the asylum at Saint Remy, less than a year before he took his own life.

What made his Irises my Irises? Why this obsession? In the meditative moments as I wistfully moved on, I wondered whether it was that they did not capture beauty as absolute, but as fragile, volatile, a labyrinth beckoning equally to heaven and hell.

Was he capturing crystalline springtime in a moment of manic whimsy? Or had it been a memorial to fleeting beauty and the inevitable withering of things ephemeral? Was he clutching at a bouquet of hope as his tormented spirit slipped further from his grasp? Was it an epitaph that he wished to be spoken only according to his will? Or even perhaps an encrypted suicide note? I dared to fantasize that the single white iris standing so erect by the side of the drooping blue one somehow bespoke his resolve to cast off the despondency of this world and ascend in purity heavenward.

And one more wonderment about the Irises that he painted at the same time that he was cutting off his ear and planning his suicide: What if they had been able level him off with the good meds like the ones I take, so that neither mania nor depression would go “that far out of control”? Would his palette have stayed so magical and bright? Would his eyes yet behold and his canvases yet express so vividly the dizzying roller-coaster of flighty elation and dank depression? Would he have become just another life of the party or a painter of insipidly “pretty” pictures?

What would have been the price on his living another ten years? Would his genius have been incarcerated in another unrelenting asylum, in which wrinkle-free normalcy is the therapeutic goal?

I make no apologies for overanalyzing a frail man’s take on a bunch of flowers. When irises adorn my own table and garden, they venture to cheer me through my own fits of despondency. Do we not, each of us, have our own asylum window and patch of irises growing immediately outside? Have we not, each of us, seen them through the eyes of profound elation and deepest despair? As we attain the “years that bring the philosophic mind,” do we see beauty not as absolute but as a complex, volatile paradox? God knows, I do.

I will likely never see my Irises again. I will probably not have much more reason to go to LA. But, in larger part, I simply want to remember that in my 54th year I saw my Irises and I wept and that nothing ever will replicate that blessed jumble of darkest melancholy and sweetest joy.