Break Loose Your Bonds

I was reading Hélèn Cixous’s essay “The Last Painting or The Portrait of God” (1983) and I came across a quotation from a van Gogh letter to his brother Theo from the autumn of 1883 (Letter 339, by permission of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Cixous's essay published exactly a century later.) The letter urges Theo to give up his hectic life in the art world and join Vincent where he is painting, deep in the Dutch countryside. A strange experience, as I looked at them the words arranged themselves as the lines of a song, and the song is, verbatim, the words of Cixous’s quotation. What is the quotation/song about? It is a call to what the existentialists call “authenticity”, to thinking for yourself. Not simply to float along with the conventional wisdom of the day or to seize on some already available worldview or identity, but to think -- amongst the many creatures that inhabit this life, a uniquely human capacity. 

However, CA have no current plans to rent a cottage somewhere suitably wild and lonely in order to "get it together in the country". (GG, 25/10/26)

Break loose your bonds

Do come and paint with me
on the heath, in the potato field
come and walk with me
behind the plough and the shepherd
Come and sit with me
looking into the fire
let the storm that blows across the heath
blow through you

Break loose your bonds

I do not know the future
in what way it might be different
if everything should go smoothly with us
but I cannot speak differently

Don't seek it in Paris
don't seek it in America
it is always the same
forever and exactly the same

Break loose your bonds

Change if you will
but it is in the heath you must look

Break loose your bonds

Don't seek it in Paris
don't seek it in America
it is always the same
forever and exactly the same

Break loose your bonds

Letters of Van Gogh
9 June 2012