What you tried to say to me

I was a teen when I heard the Don McLean song Vincent about Vincent Van Gogh and his painting Starry Night. I had seen the Van Gogh work in an art book we had at home and found it hauntingly beautiful. Any teenager could certainly relate to the pain of feeling like an outsider, of wanting to be loved and feeling unlovable and McLean’s song captured the tragedy of it quite well

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul

Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now

Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue

Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now

For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night

You took your life, as lovers often do
But I could've told you Vincent
This world was never meant for
One as beautiful as you

Starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frame-less heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget

Like the strangers that you've met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow

Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they're not listening still
Perhaps they never will.

But, somehow, we grow past the loneliness and turmoil of the teen years. We hear new songs that add context to our lives. Still, I never lost my love for Van Gogh’s work and have taken every opportunity to see originals when I could.

So, I found myself one day at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I knew Starry Night was there among a million other treasures. It became the object of my intentionally slow quest, proceeding from one floor to the next taking in works, one after another, until I turned a corner and there it was.

I was stopped dead in my tracks.

Standing before it I felt overcome, I felt a timeless sense of longing, that burning sensation around the eyes just before they tear up, and at the same time, wonder, wonder at the color, wonder at the texture and reverence, reverence knowing that Vincent had touched, created, handled this work a few feet before me not so long ago. I felt moved.

The power of art is the power to touch us in a deeply moving way. It is as if to say ‘I understand now.’ Even though we may not, as we look at an incredible work, be able to verbalize what that understanding is. We find truth in it.

Starry Path (shown here) is my homage to Vincent Van Gogh.