A curious line in the Christian prayer, The Apostles Creed says of Jesus that after he "was crucified, died and was buried.
He descended into hell."
As everyone knows, life is infinitely more mysterious than imagined by all but the very few, entwined as that life inextricably is with consciousness. And without wishing to pursue the possible eschatological subtleties of that heretical sounding thought of a divine consciousness entering infernal regions, that line came to mind while looking at Van Gogh's great painting, The Night Cafe, of which Vincent wrote: I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself or commit a crime... The picture is one of the ugliest I have done."
The scene is saturated with hallucinatory menace; a place where Dostoevsky's Raskolnikovs and Stavrogins could inhabit with suitable unease. And of course this is far more than about mere 'place'. Just as elsewhere in Van Gogh's oeuvre, heaven is an extension of the individual consciousness united with the 'external' world, so is hell here a seamless extension of the individual mind.
*Though the resolution of the picture here does make it more unfocused and garish than in reality. Click to enlarge & it improves.
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I was going to write something. But gazing at the painting has left me with no thoughts and no words.
Though the resolution of the picture here does make it a bit more unfocused and garish than in reality. Click to enlarge & it improves.
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