Starry Night

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"For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left inside
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you."


Don McLean
"Vincent"

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Today, I want to ask for my readers' indulgence while I deal, as writers do, with some persistent thoughts in my head.

For some reason, lately I've been thinking about Vincent Van Gogh, although this isn't the anniversary of either his birth or his tragic suicide at the age of 37.

Maybe it's the bleakness of the times. I'm not immune to that, and I've had my share of troubles in recent years.

Perhaps it's the influence of my mother. She's been dead for more than 13 years now, but she is never far from my thoughts. And recently I built a memorial website for her. So, after spending a great deal of time scanning her pictures and working on the text for the site, many thoughts, some of them apparently long repressed, have been swirling in my mind.

One such thought has been of folk rock songwriter Don McLean's song, "Vincent," which was written in the early 1970s and appeared on the album "American Pie."

The title song from that album, with its familiar line, "Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry," was a huge hit, and many people have written about its meaning. It was inspired by the plane crash almost 50 years ago that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and "The Big Bopper" — an event that McLean dubbed "the day the music died."

That plane crash came during a formative time for McLean. He had just turned 13 a few months earlier, and Holly died when he was only 22 and his popularity was blossoming. I wasn't born until later that year, but to the people of that time, it was a brutal event from which no positive lessons could be taken — although perhaps the crash provided some valuable information about flying in poor weather conditions for people in the aviation industry. Investigators blamed the weather, along with possible pilot error, for the crash.

For his part, McLean has left analyses of the song to others. "[L]ong ago I realized that songwriters should make their statements and move on, maintaining a dignified silence," he once said.

But I've never associated the "American Pie" album with either the plane crash or the album's title song. Whenever I think of that album, I think of my mother, who bought it primarily because of "Vincent." At first, she didn't know the actual name of the song. She thought the name was its opening line, "Starry, starry night," which is taken from the name of one of Van Gogh's paintings (you can see it above).

One need only listen to that song once to realize the depth of McLean's admiration for the often deeply disturbed Van Gogh, who achieved recognition as an artist only after his suicide in 1890. Over and over, the lines in the song refer to Van Gogh's paintings, especially his self-portraits, whether they were acknowledged as such or not.

Frequently in the song, McLean talks about how Van Gogh was misunderstood during his life.

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"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."

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Yet, by the end of the song, McLean's expression of hope that Van Gogh would ultimately be accepted for the genius that he was yields to the tragic acceptance that must have gripped the anguished artist in the end.

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"Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
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."

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Van Gogh's wasn't the only creative mind that struggled with the demons that tormented it. I've written in another blog of the death of Edgar Allan Poe, which remains as mysterious as the classic tales he wrote. Some have suggested that, like Van Gogh, he took his own life.

Whether Poe, like Van Gogh, committed suicide probably never will be known. But if he did, then, clearly, both men found it impossible to persevere through the pain and hardship they faced.

And perhaps that's a cautionary tale for us in our times. In the current recession, which, more and more, is being seen as the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, millions who do not possess the creative talents of Poe and Van Gogh are struggling against conditions that are not of their making, that are beyond their comprehension, and there is no telling how many are losing hope with each passing day.

Many of these people feel that they are slipping through the cracks of society. The decent, humane thing for our government to do is to focus on ways to help, by extending unemployment benefits or making it easier to get financial assistance so families can stay in their homes or whatever it takes.

I know this may add to the national debt, and there are some lawmakers who will resist. But if the government can come up with the funds to bail out big industries and corporations that can still afford to fly their top lobbyists to Washington in private luxury jets, surely it can find the funds to help the least of these.