When I was a college student for the first time, back in the early 1970s, I remember going to a print sale in the student union. This was an event where traveling art salesmen moved from college to college, selling cheap reproductions of bad (and sometimes good) art to students looking to spiff up their dorm room, or brighten up their dreary basement apartment. After wasting way too much time combing through table after table of pictures I didn’t much like, I found a sepia-colored drawing by van Gogh called Avenue of Poplars. In order to improve on the original, the art producers had printed it on authentic fake canvas textured paper – just like van Gogh would have used, had he been producing for the college market. Anyway, I bought it, and spent several times its cost to have it framed so that it looked nice, and I had it hanging on my various walls long past my college days. I have no idea what happened to it, but it no longer hangs on my walls.
The reason I bring up this trivial remembrance now is that the peasant figure in the drawing always struck me as being poorly drawn. Now van Gogh was no Ingres, and his figures are frequently crude and, as the art historians would say, ‘out of drawing.’ He was not interested in getting these sorts of sthings ‘right,’ so it is unfair to criticize him for something he did not want to do. But in this case, I think he got the drawing just right, because it looks to me like he captured one of the realities of rural life about as perfectly as any artist has.
I say this after Kathleen took a phone photo of me being followed by the goats, and I look scarily like the peasant in van Gogh’s drawing: sort of hunched over and lurching along. I remember the moment, and I did not feel particularly burdened, but it is clear that gravity is pulling me downwards. Since seeing the photo I have become much more conscious of how I walk around, and I am constantly finding that I revert to the image of that drawing. Son Zach got a copy of the best-seller book by Jordan Peterson called 12 Rules for Life, and I glanced at the table of contents. One of the chapters is titled ‘Head Up, Shoulders Back.’ I haven’t read the book, but that title keeps bouncing around in my head and I will say it out loud when I am working alone (which is often) to hoist myself up.
I remember reading, years ago, about something called the ‘scholar’s stoop’ that afflicted people in the academic business who spent too much time in the library, bent over tables reading books. I think I only knew one scholar in my 35 or so years in the academic trenches with that malady, and he had earned it. I have seen many more farmers bent over from years of toil who have a harder time standing up straight, or who have given up trying. When I was young our family had a neighbor, an old German farmer in southern Illinois named Rudy Basler, who had broken his back in some way or another, and was L-shaped and could not stand straight. But he was a cheerful fellow despite that.
So, if I can follow Jordan Peterson’s advice and keep my head up and shoulders back (until I can’t anymore), and be cheerful in my life like my old neighbor Rudy Basler, I can minimize the deleterious affects of old master gravity. It’s worth a try.
