What Do You See?

I’ve been feeling it lately. That is to say, I am carrying a lot of weight. My world around me is heavy. When it gets heavy, I lose time. I get numb.

So I guess I am kinda not feeling it, but you get the idea.

I can feel a deep sadness. In my chest. Like a rock. But it is remote and distant. I am numb to it.

When I stop feeling, I stop making. I stop reading and watching. I stop doing the things that release the pressure. I go on autopilot to keep carrying the weight another day.

Things need to be done. People need to be helped. Bills need to be paid.

But the pressure keeps building...

So, I am learning to go looking for that sadness. To find it and sit with it. To hold it for a minute or more. Release some of that pressure. Let some tears go. Let out a deep breath.

I did that yesterday. I needed help to get there. It took a minute. I got there though. It made it easier to take another step and release some more pressure.

I watched a recording of the play Red by John Logan staring Alfred Molina and Alfred Enoch. I urge you to go rent it. It’s ten bucks. It’s brilliantly staged and performed.

It also hit a note of something I have been wrestling with. I didn’t realize I had been until I heard the words, of course. That’s what good art does though.

At the start of the play, Molina as Rothko says:

Of course you like it– how can you not like it?! Everyone likes everything nowadays. They like the television and the phonograph and the soda pop and the shampoo and the Cracker Jack. Everything becomes everything else and it’s all nice and pretty and likable. Everything is fun in the sun! Where’s the discernment? Where’s the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect, what I deem worthy, what has… listen to me now… significance.

Maybe this is a dinosaur talking. Maybe I’m a dinosaur sucking up the oxygen from you cunning little mammals hiding in the bushes waiting to take over. Maybe I’m speaking a lost language unknown to your generation. But a generation that does not aspire to seriousness, to meaning, is unworthy to walk in the shadow of those who have gone before, I mean those who have struggled and surmounted, I mean those who aspired, I mean Rembrandt, I mean Turner, I mean Michelangelo and Matisse… I mean obviously Rothko.

Do you aspire?

After watching the play, I went back to read this monologue. To sit with it and let it breathe. To let it wash over me. To let it soak into my bones.

I often find myself struggling with this very thing. There is so often a vast gulf between what I like and what I respect. Gulf, it is an ocean more often than not.

And what I think is worthy? What has significance? They are like the stars. There seems like a lot, but there is way more darkness than there is light out there.

And yet, our dialogue precludes us from the nuance of talking like this. There is no space for anything but likes. There is only agreement. There is only support.

To be liked is to be worthy. To be respected. Significance is a commodity. It is a value measured in units, not in meaning.

Our social media, discord, and slack saturated communication stream carries a social cost for declaring any distinction. Subtlety is unwelcome. At best, you can be silent. Draw no attention to draw no ire.

Maybe text a friend or two you can trust to be silent with you...

My assumption about the vapidness I see in so much art was because of the capitalist urge. That never quite sat right with me. It was too clean. Too neat an answer. Too tidy for something as messy as art.

No, I think our dialogue is one of many factors. Why aspire to challenge when it is easier to be liked? Why push past your peers when your peers are loved? Why risk large failures when small ones are easier to shrug off?

Why do the hard thing when no one wants it? Just do the thing people want. Just make the pretty pictures that look good on Instagram.

“Pretty.” “Beautiful.” “Nice.” “Fine.” That’s our life now! Everything’s “fine.” We put on the funny nose and glasses and slip on the banana peel and the TV makes everything happy and everyone’s laughing all the time, it’s all so god damn funny, it’s our constitutional right to be amused all the time, isn’t it? We’re a smirking nation, living under the tyranny of “fine.”

How are you? Fine. How was your day? Fine. How are you feeling? Fine. How did you like the painting? Fine. Want some dinner? Fine… Well let me tell you, everything is not fine!

HOW ARE YOU?! … HOW WAS YOUR DAY?! … HOW ARE YOU FEELING? Conflicted. Nuanced. Troubled. Diseased. Doomed. I am not fine. We are not fine. We are anything but fine...

Look at these pictures. Look at them! You see the dark rectangle, like a doorway, an aperture, yes, but it’s also a gaping mouth letting out a silent howl of something feral and foul and primal and REAL. Not nice. Not fine. Real. A moan of rapture. Something divine or damned. Something immortal, not comic books or soup cans, something beyond me and beyond now. And whatever it is, it’s not pretty and it’s not fine...

I AM HERE TO STOP YOUR HEART, YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?! I AM HERE TO MAKE YOU THINK! I AM NOT HERE TO MAKE PRETTY PICTURES!

Is Rothko pretentious as hell in this play?

Yes.

Do I care?

Not. One. Bit.

I realized something fundamental as I watched the work unfold. As they hugged while the unseen crowd clapped. As I sobbed in my chair not knowing entirely why.

I am tired of the nice and fine. I am tired of things that are liked and the consensus culture we have crafted around the arts. I am tired of art that doesn’t challenge and of people uninterested in looking to be challenged.

I’m fucking tired...

I’ve spent so much of my time dwelling on the magic of the creation of art, I haven’t spent enough time on the breathing. The sitting and letting the feeling of a work wash over me and through me. The quiet. Then the storm of emotion.

And the disquiet that lingers forever afterwards...