essjay
once upon a time an oddity from downstate decided to explain to me that all the rothkos are really landscapes she said just look a third ground at the bottom and the top two thirds is sky it’s the same on all of them they don’t mean anything really just that it’s a landscape
the best part of that was i had never i mean not once not for one hot minute not for a nan-o -second not one single instant ever considered any of the paintings to be landscapes
when i questioned myself as to the why the only answer i could muster was that i had simply accepted them as they are a trick that many cannot stomach
natural and otherworldly at the same time
they’re music for airports
brave stations of color in a world where every little thing is corruptible
peaceful powerful
i only say ‘otherworldly’ because i can’t imagine imagining them if they didn’t already exist i mean how could you create them
now once it is seen once it is known and the idea breathes the open air
then
i understand
so there must be other words than ‘otherworldly’ but i cannot come up with one so i use the cheap word to get by
you can pay as much or as little attention as you like and you will be rewarded if you walk by quickly a warm glow that you feel in your skin it sinks in just enough for you to get wherever you’re going with something you’d describe as a feeling and maybe you think it came from within you or from god but really it comes from some russian immigrant painter
now i don’t know if he knew and i like to think that he did but he may not have and maybe he was even full of shit the way some painters are but maybe just maybe
he wasn’t
maybe he did know and he gave it to you because someone gave it to him
chopin
matisse maximilien luce max diz or bird high heeled shoes gene fucking krupa mina loy stein or nietzsche duke ellington clyff still
maybe his mother or father or someone that he met once on a street in a park on the way home in oregon underneath incomplete
and if you walk by slowly you just might see yourself in that mirror color not the self you see in the bathroom mirror but your possible self your arbitrary self your deep-feeling fascinated self the you that you didn’t know you had good bad beautiful flawed
but
if you linger if you stare if you dare
it just may swallow you whole as it did to me and as it did to you it may leave you without words until many years later and i mean big years not the two or three that follow your undergraduate career but the ten or twelve that follow your inexplicable move to buffalo a dying town from atlanta a town busy being born again and again but to such an ugly extent that you had to get away nothing much to say and that even now is so full of people chasing things you can’t understand you don’t know who they are why they work where they live what purpose they serve
i didn’t see any of the colors until ninety nine later maybe and when i did it was in a store the same kind of store i had run from but there it was
in the store in a bin
staring at me
staring
at it
inviting me in
so i bought it and didn’t try to find words
i didn’t have words when the odd downstater said her piece
i didn’t even need words to defend such an attack
because the defense was built in
the paintings just groaned rolled eyes sympathized with all those that stood before it and had to fix a meaning or more to it then
a lie of a story someone told someone who told some one that rothko said it first but nobody really truthfully heard and nobody believed it because
it didn’t hurt
it didn’t hurt no blood was drawn the only thing that ‘number five’ did
was
y a w n
wasn’t boredom setting in just thick giving way to thin
when the words did come they were tumbled and jumbled full of emotion they wanted to see you in the ocean they wanted to make more of the effort the music on canvas its painted colored soundwaves its new language
synesthesia synesthesia synesthesia synesthesia
synesthesia
synesthesia
No comments:
Post a Comment