The Lost Ear of Vincent Van Gogh

I was watching a commercial for reverse-reverse mortgages. It’s a program where they take your home’s equity and don’t let you live there anymore. Check to see if a reverse-reverse mortgage is right for you…

But, I started thinking about a documentary I’d watched about an hour before. It was about Van Gogh’s ear; or, more specifically, how much was left of Van Gogh’s ear after he mutilated it. Did he lose just the lobe, forever dooming him to a life without dangly earrings? Or, did he lose the entire ear, dooming him to a life of ill-fitting eyeglasses? Well, in a superlative act of specialization, Bernadette Murphy spent seven years researching just that. That would be like researching the death of Julius Caesar but only along the lines of did one of the assassins also kick Caesar a couple of times. Or, was the designer of the Eiffel Tower prone to canker sores? Or, when the Declaration of Independence was signed did they all use their own pens or did some of them share? I figure Hamilton and Madison probably shared. I just get that vibe from looking at them…

Ms. Murphy’s research goals were two-fold in that she also wanted to find the prostitute that Van Gogh gave the bloody ear to. She wanted to know more about the woman… see her as a person, or, barring that, see her as an end table. This was secondary, though, to the ear thing. But, before any of that, PBS had to tell us who Van Gogh was and why he might’ve cut off his ear. The artist was not particularly forthcoming in that regard. Seems any visiting friends and family avoided the subject like the plague, which wasn’t a big problem in Europe at the time.

Seems he’d had an argument with his roommate, Paul Gauguin, that very day. What is notable about Paul Gauguin is not that he lived in Fiji and had lived amongst and painted beautiful nude native girls using bright vibrant colors; the most notable thing is that he ever LEFT the island willingly. Frankly, I wouldn’t have the will power to leave and I once ate an entire Altoid. Anyway, Gauguin was having second thoughts about living with a violent schizophrenic and decided to find lodging elsewhere. Sadly, he didn’t have the intelligence to leave when Van Gogh was out. Van Gogh chased him for a bit, then went back to his room where he could be alone with his mental illness and his straight razor; nature took its course.

Then, bleeding like a stuck impressionist, he walked several blocks to a brothel and awarded the ear to a specific woman that he called “Rachel”… one he’d asked to come to the door. She screamed when she saw the ear, so apparently, she has some kind of phobia concerning ears. The name “Rachel” was not found in public records; but, prostitutes often went under assumed names like “Rhonda World” and “Ewell Githa Clap” (those puns have been bugging me for years so I’m glad to get to finally use them). Beatrice finally found the family of the woman and, according to their accounts, she was NOT a hooker but a domestic who worked at multiple brothels. Ms. Murphy theorizes that the two had met in Paris while the woman was being treated for rabies. I wish I was joking.

Anyhoo… Because even a blind historian finds an acorn from time to time, Beatrice Murphy finally found a document that was sent to Irving Stone, author of The Agony and the Ecstasy from the actual physician who treated Van Gogh. Turned out, he’d cut off all of the ear except the lobe. This has several implications:

First, it explains the ridiculous hats the man wore in his self-portraits; but, it leaves open the question of “why did he leave the lobe?”. Frankly, when I shave off my beard, I’m on a roll and just keep shaving until I get to my navel. Secondly, if he was crazy enough to cut off one of his ears, why wasn’t he crazy enough to cut both of them off for symmetry’s sake? And, finally why did he give away a perfectly good ear to a rabid lady janitor?

When Ms. Murphy saw the drawing that showed how the ear had been severed, she literally wept… and I don’t blame her. Seven years working towards one goal and suddenly, that goal was achieved. She was like the dog who caught the car except, in this case, the dog was Beatrice Murphy and the car was a piece of paper. There was bound to be a flood of emotion and I regret writing PBS and demanding that they only feature male historians or female historians only if their humours have balanced. I’ve been told the letter could be misinterpreted to be misogyny…

The only issue I have is the occupation of the ear-recipient. Sure, her family said that she wasn’t a prostitute; but, they’d have every reason to lie. I think that someday there will be an historian that actually studies the woman’s family with the sole purpose of finding out if they’d lied about other things. Maybe even get a few historians to research that historian. Because the ultimate task of historians is to create work for future historians.

Much like lawyers…