...Eliade once wrote of man's ontological thirst -his quest for being. This now seems, to me, to be only half the story. For what he wants most is to step beyond the frontier, to un-do himself, unfasten his createdness, to catch a glimpse of what is beyond-being. Such a person does not search for 'existence' but has a 'fanatic thirst for essence'...to break not the sound barrier, but that of light...

And since man is made in the image of God, a God who in virtue of his indeterminacy of unlimited actuality , is supremely undetermined (Duns Scotus) would it not be fair to say that his search is, ultimately, an irreducible desire for freedom? Does not thought transcend matter all the time? In love, do we not leap out of our own narrow horizons? The mystery of life is in life itself. Is it only the mind that gives the impression of 'outer' and 'inner'?

Natur hat weder Kern...

Man only becomes aware of himself when he perceives all others, and then as a condition of his existence.

The Descrtesian cogito is shattered into tiny grey pieces by :
We are, therefore I can think.

(Wisdom is grey but religion and life are full of colour).

Two things: something is given and it is given to us.

Is Rothko after a silence that refuses to become a name..an absence, the spark before the world, the speech before the word, the light before the light, the space before the space (Jabes?)? A space that is neither the beginning nor the end; neither outside or inside..a space that is a point..death is the point of all points.

Rothko on large pictures: precisely because I want to be very intimate and human [insaan: ins: intimacy] To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a steroptic view or with a reducing glass. However you paint a large picture , you are in it. A lived experience, a sound thought: we need to think the stars and feel them...

But again, we must ask ourselves if such a thing is possible in these times, in an age devoid of religion and metaphysical understanding.How is this autonomous individual related to Nature and to the universal, to the cosmos, except in terms of radical discontinuity (Descartes , again. Also, "reducing glasses"..see Rorty). Man, who is closed in on himself, sees only himself or the reflections of his own mind in everything. He who sees Ratio sees only himself...

Robert Hughes poses this question in another way: Do the paintings carry the weight of meaning that he intends, is there a final epiphany ..the sceptic answers : No! [having seen them again in the Tate yesterday, I tend to agree with him].

But Rothko's is at least a high order of doubt. Can we ever possess and experience..should we? What can be revealed to us in these days but the absence of God? We, who search for ever new destinations, might we not be draw to what is actually always the same?

But the desire for that open space is in the blood, the pressing need to elicit meanings unmediated by discursive language , to find, be lost in, a space divested of rigid boundaries [Does his work not make them fluid?] What use words here, what thought? A knowledge of human feelings is to understand, not to 'know' ; still less is it a knowledge of how that knowledge was acquired. Knowledge through suffering...

Men, with their minds, produced a vision of the world,a concept. Perhaps there is too much thinking,a hypertrophy of the mind. When what we desire is a light from outside to reveal the light within. [Fides et Ratio: faith illuminates the paths of reason]

Was Rothko searching for a black square, a Ka'ba? A sign that would be and not be (Zeus wants to and does not want to be named)...a housing of the spirit, an enclosing of the presence moving through it. Movement in stillness. Does something end with the inexplicable or only begin...a sacred enclosure.

Blanchot: Light illuminates, that is to say that light hides itself, that is its sly characteristic. Light illuminates; that which is illuminated presents itself in an immediate presence which reveals itself without revealing that which manifests it. Light effaces its traces; invisible it renders visible.

Art, then, that is like a house that has breathing spaces (Terminus) , a broken circle that is both presence and absence.

Rothko is influenced by Fra Angelico and the search for that purest essence...no space of perspectival perceptions ..the single features are consumed by the cool flowing light...conjures up a space that knows no limits and yet flows tangibly before our eyes. Insight over sight, or maybe both. Or is he influenced by Monet: to be immersed in a vision, an 'oceanic feeling'; to dissolve oneself and feel oneself slipping away to unknown lands. And who can then say where one ends and one begins, whether I am one or two?

But for the moderns is this anything but a show-a spectacular show, no doubt- in the theatre of the mind? Is the world of things and humans left behind, made more opaque by the glowing radiance of the interior realm? Or is beauty a ladder where one cannot look back or down? Rothko admires the impenetrable, blank walls of Byzantine chapels: outwardly sober, inwardly drunk. They are the keepers of the treasures. To re-create 'the place' : ho topos. A place where necessity and chaos flees. Everything here is about the right proportions-but that of music, not architecture. People praying are distracted by images.

All is rhythm: the entire destiny of man is a single celestial rhythm, just as the work of art is a unique rhythm.
(Holderin)

The problem for the artist, then, is how to give shape to the absent, how to speak about silence. Is it only in silence that one surpasses oneself? Perhaps we should be cautious of thinking of Rothko's art as a stark alternative between a return to an interior space and a journey to outer space. But for someone who was so aware of his mortality is it so surprising that he should be fascinated by wells and caves, the subterranean, portals and gateways. Death is a kind of birth....

The indeterminate bars of colour, the flow of the river, the eternal flux that lies at the heart of all that appears so solid. It is a certain light : the absolute, but also a particular light. Are his pictures about the attempt to get a feeling (not an idea) of what is boundless, unlimited and the paradox that we are but creatures who are subject to birth and death: finite beings with immortal longings...is he saying that we, we who move from womb to tomb, move from one unknown to the other?

Main concerns are the mysteries of the emanation of the divine powers of the hidden God. On the one hand God is so remote from human understanding that nothing can be said about Him. On the other hand, the whole raison d'etre of any mysticism is the need to grasp, by thought and imagination, , the living dynamic presence of God in the world. [Black Sun?]
---M.Megged, The Darkened Light.

Rothko's experiences were shaped from the land of opposites: Russia. Or was it a Zorastrain sense of light and darkness and their moral relation to good and evil?

*Most of the words and ideas in the last three blogs are from Ashton's 'About Rothko', Schama's 'Power of Art' , and Robert Hughes' 'Shock of the New'. *

Jonah's response to Rothko is, intriguingly:

Between the idea and the reality
Between the motion and the act
Falls the Shadow

Between the conception and the creation
Between the emotion and the response
Falls the Shadow

Between the desire and the spasm
Between the potency and the existence
Between the essence and the descent
Falls the Shadow
---T.S.Eliot