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One may perhaps connect this yearning for stabilization with Van Gogh's fear of his own ailment, whatever it was (epilepsy complicated by syphilis is a likely guess). It is as though the calmer color, the growing penchant for structuring his work as a process of sequential research into a given motif -- a walled field near the asylum, the olive grove outside it, the pines in the asylum garden -- had an apotropaic use for him, keeping at bay the demons of the unconscious. He wrote incessantly; his letters from the asylum, unmarred by a single note of self-pity, are among the most lucid and heartbreakingly frank disclosures ever written by a painter. He categorized and cataloged his work, a habit for which art historians, wishing Cezanne had done the same, have long been grateful. And in October 1889 he summed up the relation between his paintings and his illness in one piercing metaphor: "I am feeling well just now . . . I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible -- and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does." Work and seriousness: this, not the vulgar image of the madman issuing orgasmic squirts of yellow and blue at the dictation of his lunacy, is the real Van Gogh of Saint-Remy and Auvers.
Quite often the works that seem most "expressionist," the clearest indexes of a mind approaching the end of its tether, are the most tenderly scrupulous in their treatment of fact. One has only to go to Saint-Remy and stand on the edge of the olive grove outside the asylum, looking south toward the chain of limestone hills called the Alpilles, to realize that Van Gogh changed nothing essential in the view when painting Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background in the spring of 1889. The heaving stratification of the limestone, its caverns and holes, and the turbulent profile of Mount Gaussier to the west do look exactly like that, just as the writhing strokes of his brush on the olive trunks are a direct pictorial equivalent to the real arabesques of ancient bark and wood. One might not often see a real cloud like Van Gogh's -- that strange fetal shape extruded into the blue sky -- but it powerfully conveys the strength of the wind over the plains beyond Les Baux.