Rothko's Sound Thought

We see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face...

That we are not very securely at home
in the interpreted world.
---Rilke.

God is not God. God is not God. God is not God. He is. He is before the sign that signals him. Before designation. He is the void before the void, thought before thought; thus also the unthought before the unthought-as if there were a nothing before the nothing.

He is the cry before the cry, the trembling before the trembling. He is the night without night , the day without day. The look before the look, the listening before the listening. He is the air before breathing..Not yet wind, but light air, indifferent in its primitive infinity.

------Jabes, in Desert, Ethos, Abandonement.

Natur hat weder Kern
Noch Schale
Alles ist sie mit einem Male.

Half our story is a search for a wider world, untrodden paths to the open..but half is to find our place in it, for the cosmos and order and wholeness. It sometimes seems that all we have are other people's thoughts, the fragments of others' words..idols of the mind. But we look for those gateways, those portals that will take us away from the world or the inner world of ideas and second-hand emotions, learned responses, the soul's cliches. A passageway that is also a labyrinth where we are lost and found. A transitional place, neither outside or inside, that leads outwards but that is also connected to the familiar world of memory and human warmth: 'home'..the dihliz...

But if access to that transcendence has been blocked then we withdraw into ourselves, seeking out hidden paths, an 'Orphic descent' into our deepest past: a sub-way. But there is an air of desperation and anxiety in such a move. The air is still, heavy with resignation, and space itself is cramped and we willingly accept our slipping away out of sight...By doing so we may avoid the nausea of every-day reality, its horror and absurdity, its shallowness and theatricality. To bear witness to our suffering in an age of crass materialism and easily-worn emotions, an age in which reason sleeps and brings forth nightmares, primordial monsters from the depths...To escape the predicament of theoretical man-'Am I in pain?' is answered by 'What is pain?'.

The artists, whenever the truth is uncovered, will always cling with rapt gaze to what still means covering even after such uncovering. The philosopher wants to dispel all wonder , or hold it like an idol. He is oblivious of the mystery that inheres in every breath of life, every brain cell.

There is a sorcery in art, a magnetic pull to the unknown; by focusing on the particular totality is avoided. This human being-not the human being-is the gateway to infinity.We must learn to stop at appearance and its folded, concentrated reality. The moderns are obsessed with uncovering, revealing and purifying. The Secret is his greatest enemy.

Rothko's art is an attack on the sedative, commercial world , the world of entertainment and forgetfulness, of synthetic brightness and superficial cheerfulness . (Schama). Modern man's idol is a false infinity.

There is, perhaps, a Jewish sensibility to his work..and the interior glimmer all make looking at them an inexhaustible process. Feeling himself unable to go forward , he must destroy the accumulations in which he has recognized himself and come to put his trust in the possibilities of the unknown. What else is this but an aniconism that preserves the secret of God's creation from the Medusa-like gaze of the world? Art, like love and thought, can never exist solely in the realm of necessity. They are bound and free. But his is a hard-won freedom and only the adventurer, the sea-gypsy embarks on the journey for the unknown space, the terra incognita, that 'second space' that lies behind space.

The picture 'expands and quickens' in the eye. It remains unfinished, a symbol of perpetual becoming.Is Rothko really attempting to make a painting or is he trying to compose music...a sound thought? A Russian Jew: two pre-occupations: to communicate, the ethical commandment to take on responsibility, to have comapssion for other human beings ("the highest form of understanding"); but also to shatter images, to trace that invisible axis, and listen to that silence behind the music...