23 March 2011

scarlet/crimson/vermillion/olive/forest/ 綠/ochre/




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





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