A painting: three regions of color: dirty-green, pink-yellow, purple-pink. Mark Rothko, Untitled. Finished in the early 1950s. It lives at the Tate Britain, in a room full of unfinished works by JMW Turner, the Romantic painter of shipwrecks and seascapes. Rothko’s piece is a tribute to Turner’s color palette. Rothko gave a group of his paintings to the Tate in 1969, with the hope that he might be displayed near Turner. He got his wish.
Summer was ending. It was my last week in London, and I made a trip to the Tate Britain to see this piece, this favorite of mine, one last time. I was on a bench, journaling before the Rothko, trying to make sense of my study abroad experience. Visitors came and went. Some looked at the piece; some didn’t bother. Children shuffled feet and tugged at sleeves. One guy in Mick Jagger cosplay made a show of studying the Rothko (leaning in, squinting) and then theatrically moving across the room to study the piece again, from a different angle.
You know that recent spy movie trope, where two spies meet in an art gallery to whisper some secret intelligence, and they face opposite directions while making vague metaphorical connections between the paintings and the high but personal stakes of their very dangerous mission? Picture this: I was sitting on the bench, writing, and after a while, a woman, very quietly, sat beside me. This middle-aged woman turned over her shoulder and whispered: “Do you like Mark Rothko?”
I thought saying I liked Rothko would sound pedantic, so I said, “Yeah, I like this piece,” which felt, somehow, like a softer admission.
“Why do you like it?” she asked.
Sometimes it seems that I don’t have thoughts until I’m asked to express them. “I guess I like it,” I said, “because I think of Rothko as so original, but it’s nice to know that even originals have their influences—their patron saints.”
Vigorous nodding from the woman. “The first time I was moved by a piece of art,” she said, “it was a Rothko at the Tate Modern.”
The woman’s name was Peon. She was working on a Master’s degree, and her thesis was on “slow looking.” I had been sitting by the Rothko for so long that I’d done some mental calculus as to how fast I’d have to scurry to the bathroom and scurry back if I wanted to keep my bench. This made me a “slow looker” and thus qualified me as a worthy source for Peon’s project. Would I mind offering a quote? I could repeat what I’d just told her.
It’s a unique anxiety, being asked for a quote. She posed her question again—Why do you like it?—and I repeated my thoughts about originals and patron saints. I tried to sound like someone worth quoting.
I think I lied to her. Not deliberately—everything I said was true, I suppose—but I don’t like the Rothko painting for the reasons I provided. Liking a painting doesn’t work that way.
So: for a woman named Peon, living and studying somewhere in London, asking gallery lurkers about their looking habits, here is what I should have told you; here is, after much thought, why I like the Rothko…
***
There’s a meeting place. It is in my head. It is shapeless—more absence than presence. Like all dreamed spaces, its geometry is inhuman and cannot be measured.
This place resembles a tunnel, and, seeing the Rothko for the first time, I find myself in this tunnel place, looking from one end to the other. Untitled is on the other side. We have not met before.
I look at it; it looks back at me; the world hums; I shake hands with the essence of the thing. This all happens before I’ve fully accepted the dirty-green, the pink-yellow, the purple-pink. This is the looking that occurs before the looking.
“I know something now,” I tell Untitled. It nods without nodding. “I know something,” I say, “but I also know that if I try to say what I know, it will crumble, and I’ll forget whatever it is that I know in this moment.”
But there is no language in the meeting place. Even whispered syllables would shatter the walls. I’m communicating without words, and in that place, Untitled and I both bear witness to something—some thing—too complex to recapture. What I feel is not the zoomed-out knowledge of time-lapses: no blurred stream of traffic, no opening chrysalis. Just pure color.
Of course, after this encounter, I try to capture what I newly know, and as soon as I write, the knowledge falls apart. The meeting place does not permit re-entry. But I sit with the hope that I can write my way back, that I can conjure it again by force. I sit and write. I look at Untitled and I sit and write until a woman sits next to me (she too has met the piece in her own meeting place) and asks what we both know to be an innocent but impossible question.
