It is not quite dark yet and I look out through the high windows, where the elm tree stands out against the sky as a dark mass, with loose leaves that seem to float just like that against the deep clear evening blue. In my mind I say it all to myself – one of those many boring, descriptive passages of everyday life that one’s own head treats you to. As if someone should always be kept informed of their own experiences, often in the third person: ‘She cycled back from Pilates on the quiet country road along the still green corn’ etc.
Anyway, that elm, that twilight, nature outside the windows. At least let’s call it nature, even if it’s elm in the garden. I sit inside with a book on my lap, the catalog of the wonderful work of Etel Adnan (1925-2022), a painter who depicted nature in colorful areas with a palette knife.
Color as language the catalog is called and in the article ‘The liberation of color’ Van Gogh is quoted as saying that colors have meaning in themselves. You believe it immediately when you look at his and her work. I would like to sit opposite Adnan’s color fields for a whole day, they must come and live with me, I must be able to see them every day, they are life itself!
/s3/static.nrc.nl/images/gn4/stripped/data88037256-25d1c2.jpg)
Such tumults of desires arise in you when you see something that concerns you strongly for reasons not easily understood. Just as you sometimes want to be a landscape, eat flowers, I want to experience an untitled work from 1970 by simultaneously looking at those colors and sitting in a narrow Cretan street that slopes down to the sea. I feel the still fresh warmth of the morning and the coolness of the shadows, see the multicolored white of houses and streets, the blue sea below – warmth and coolness, that is what this painting seems to express, but in the highest form , as they really to be†
Why I looked up from the book and was outside because of this quote from Vincent van Gogh: “In all of nature, for instance in trees, I see expression and, as it were, a soul.”
Such a quote awakens another feeling. Jealousy. I think that Van Gogh and Adnan experience something about the world that I do not experience. I don’t feel a soul in nature. However eagerly the eyes swallow up the landscape, however you can sit thoughtlessly and yet fulfilled looking at the edge, yes always at the edge of a landscape, a wheatfield, a water – a soul is not there, for me. And I wish it were. Just as I wish I could also sense colors as ‘truth’ – if only I could believe in that great metaphysical truth behind everything!
And what would I want with that ‘truth’? I don’t know. Perhaps truth is just another word for the desire to be fulfilled, so not to desire anymore.
The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert wrote: “I thank you, Lord, that you have created the world beautiful and diverse” and Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote ravishingly: “Glory be to God for gaiety”. They seem to have found a non-desirous experience of nature, which shows them a creative God. Which is probably another word for that soul that Van Gogh felt in everything.
You can’t approach the tree, you can’t appropriate the truth by color, you can’t praise God in whom you don’t believe. But it is all possible at the same time. Thanks to the colors that, indeed, express themselves. Something. Everything.