The Materiality of Paint

"Inside the Museums
Infinity goes up on Trial"

- Bob Dylan

In the heart of the otherwise apallingly laid out, thematic, impersonal pick-n-mix that is Tate Modern, there is a cavernous room with no windows, dim underlighting and a single long bench. In this gunmetal-grey crypt Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals hang from the walls, like the stations of the cross. The lights are way down, and as you pass from mural to mural, the highlights of each colour field seem to follow you around the room, like the eyes of the Gioconda. And in the room the women come and go, talking, but not of Michelangelo. As they enter, they tend to fall silent. Most leave. Frequently you can sit alone on the long, gently convex central bench, undisturbed.

It is a far cry from their intended destination, the fashionable restaurant on the ground floor of the Seagram Building in Manhattan. This was a huge commission for Rothko, and he set about fulfilling it. And it was only once Rothko had seen his paintings, so to speak face-to-face, only once he had completed his journey towards the incarnation of them, that he realised he could never hang them in a fancy restaurant "Where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off."

It was seeing the murals in the flesh, so to speak, that changed Rothko's mind. Coming to know them, as one would another person. Of having a relationship with them. And it is the physical presence of the canvases, the materiality of the paint, the relation in which they stand to your own body, that makes the murals. The comparison with flesh is apposite, for these are not, nor are ever with Rothko, mere blocks of colour. Each has a texture, a play of light and a weight of the paint itself, to match any forehead by Rembrandt or cloth-of-gold by Fra Angelico. No reproduction of the murals, no conception of them, is comparable to being in the room and seeing them float above you, like windows into the back of your own head.

You can compare this one to the womb, this one to a forest, that one to a pair of ghostly skyscapers, but ultimately what they depict is what they are. Luminous, many-layered oil-based paint on a large expanse of blank canvas. In a sense like Pollocks, they tell the story of their own making. You can glimpse the underlayers of paint, the trickles and splashes from where they were hoisted up and turned around in the converted boxing gym where Rothko had his studio. And what better setting for an artist to go ten rounds against Infinity? Each canvas is a bout against an invisible opponent, what T.S. Eliot called "another raid on the inarticulate". These canvases do have subjects. Just no objects. They are not depictions, they are things in themselves.

Sure, the dark columns float above an eerie, light-and-dark redd, apparently mottled but, on closer examination, full of shapes, shadows, half-figures in the half-light. The giant pause-sign of the two pale skyscrapers, edges blurred as if by wind and rain, here an empty square bulges and sags like a sweeping theatre curtain or a doric arcade, tapered at the top to suggest compression, great weight.

It is all a bit heavy. But the colours pull you in unanswerably. Reds burn around the edges of blacks, blacks glow in their dark hearts with barely-suppressed crimson, crying out like the fire hidden inside the coal, waiting to burst forth. Verticals loom out of the swirl of brushstrokes like the trunks of trees, seen by a blind man, lost in the forests of the night.

If you meditate for long enough on any object (which I have found a useful way of freeing the mind from its ttachment to flitting thoughts, a precursor to beginning to empty it - pick an arbitrary object, place it in front of you, and focus on one angle, one facet or reflection of it) you find the world around it beginning to become strange, and luminous. Blacks become white, whites turn black, as the patterns of your sight becomes a kind of screen burn on your retina. The room around you grows darker, and the object before you begins to glow with its own inner light. I associate this with the inching open of Blake's doors of perception, or with a breaking down of the unconscious filters which protect the conscious mind from being overwhelmed by the detail, the beauty and the strangeness of every moment of life. If we were to see all of it, whole, at once, we would be paralysed, like Funes the Memorious.

But inside each of Rothko's bleak rectangles, just at the edges of perception, hidden or revealed in the veil-like layers of paint, they crowd - every conceivable (and inconceivable) figure, scene, expression, structure and symbol. All latent, half- or un-formed, like the form of Michelangelo's Torso of a Slave waited, poised, enclosed in its square block of marble, for the artist to excavate it. But all that is latent in a Rothko, all the minute particulars, will never be excavated - and this is their beauty. They remain forever potential, poised, waiting. But sometimes, when you don't look directly at them, you can suddenly catch a glimpse. Then you look harder, and you are back with the physicality of the paint, the rich oil-based pigments, the spatters and strokes of a long-dead brush.

And you decide that your mind - or Rothko - is playing tricks on you.

The Fish, the Sea, the Kid and the Dick

Another platonic dialogue with my compadre in gloom, the ironically named AOK.

What, we asked, causes a romantic relationship to dissolve so suddenly into nothing, or less than nothing? It begins so beautifully, suddenly or gradually, but growing and deepening and overflowing until it seems that it will overwhelm all else in your life, all the mundane, practical regular stuff you go through life trying to get hold of for yourself. Like it will reach the sky and nothing will ever lay you low again. It seems strong, stronger than death, stronger than life itself. Love, love is of a different order of experience than anything else that befalls us in our lives, and yet it is also fragile, transient, full of illusions, animal spirits, hidden depths... and hidden shallows also.

When it begins, you think almost literally the world of each other. Everything you've been seeking, everything you secretly or avowedly want from life - when you fall in love, truly in love, you see it allin the other person, or rather convince yourself that you do. For this is of necessity a projection. Sure you fall in love with this person and not another because there are things in them, about them, in their movements and the way they think and the way you move as one, that you love. But you also fall in love with them because you collide with them, like atoms in a vacuum, those proverbial gnats in the cathedral. If you had never collided, you would never have become one. And there are almost seven billion other people with whom you never collide. It's not a pretty thought but it is out there.

But once you have this person, you set busily about projecting onto them all of your needs, your ideals, you make plans for the future, start spending less time with your friends, who, often, are happy for you anyway. Because you are happy. Not contented, but possessed, intoxicated with this person and what they (to you) are and represent. But... you do not love them, nor they you, as you truly are (if there is such a thing) with all your fuckups and hangups and your flaws and all the ways in which you fall short of the ideals you have projected onto each other.

Then one day - it can be after two months, two years, or twenty years - you each begin to realise that this person is not the person you thought they were, or wanted them to be. Or one of you realises this while the other wanders on in a dream world, scarce imagining that the cliff-path is beginning to weaken beneath their feet. And that curious sensation, when things begin to fall apart and its like the person who thought the world of you and only wanted to be with you, suddenly becomes cold and turns the other cheek to your protestations of love, is not what it looks like, which is them falling out of love with you. Rather, it is them beginning to see you as you truly are, rather than wearing the mask of all they believed you to be. The projection, like some phantom, moves on, leaving just you, unmasked, suddenly no longer appealing, with all your flaws and none of the phantom's grace.

For most connections between people, this is the end. But in another sense, it ought rather to be the beginning. For here is where the real work, the slow, unglamorous, compromise-ridden work of trying to know another person, and accept them for who they are, and challenge your own cherished illusions, must begin. And it is this that must be undergone if a relationship is to last. No one can fill the boots of their lover's projections forever. You are pitted against a phantasm, a superman, a myth, a deity. And you cannot prevail. And so your lover will move on, and keep searching, until she catches a glimpse of her ideal in the eyes of some other man, and some other, and some other.

We are always looking for the best fish in the best of all possible seas. And it is this idea, that there is always more, this perennial dissatisfaction with what is in favour of what could be - that drives us apart, drives us, perhaps, forward, but in such great pain, a little less ready to trust and to sacrifice. We humans are not built to attain satisfaction (what an irony that Mick Jagger of all people should have stumbled upon this foundational truth) for he who makes peace with his life ceases to strive for better and, in a Darwinian sense, begins to fall behind.

And so we all will be forever striving, forever fighting, forever competing and coming together and falling apart and faring forward. But as individuals, we will never know peace. The closest we come is when in love, when we are love we are most vulnerable, or through a Buddhist negation of the self, offering ourselves up to the current of events, learning to accept what is. This is not the happiness of intoxication referred to above. Indeed, it can often come, like Job's renunciation of self, only through great suffering or persecution, and through the letting-go of the beautiful illusions which seemed to fill us with such joy.

Is this beginning to gnaw at you like it is me? How do we live with this mutability and cruel fate, without ceasing to connect with others, and retreating into our shells, reminding ourselves that All Things Must Pass, including this our love? How do we grow through the first stage, of projection, when we are children in love, seeing the universe reflected in the eyes of the other, and then survive the destruction of this ideal, without throwing our toys out of the pram and flitting on to someone else, sadder but not ultimately wiser? How do we learn to forgive someone for not being the Archetype we had projected upon them? And does that first heat, the honeymoon, and all the epiphanic filth and adventure, all that musk and pheromones, count for nothing?

It seems to us, as men, that within us, our whole lives through, there is the Kid. And the kid wants what he wants, and now. His demands are unceasing, and he will not listen to the ego's reasons why-not. He has been nourished since becoming aware on a diet of Disney movies and myths, that out there somewhere is the One. A female protector (no doubt also a mother imago) who is beautiful, and understands, someone who will get it. The Kid is the one who built the projection, And the Kid wants to be united with her, and believes that once she is found, she will be his (yours? ours?) for good.

And then there is the Dick, who lives between your legs, and in your deep subconscious, way way below the belt, and demands his own dark satisfaction, with his libido and his pride. And when you fall hard for a girl, the Kid and the Dick, who are on first-name terms with one another, gang up on your conscious mind, your pseudo-rational faculty. And they tell you This Is Her. And your ego tries vainly to point to all the times they were wrong, and remind them of how much love burns, when it goes wrong. But the Kid and the Dick won't listen.

They will not learn, do not want to learn. They just want satisfaction. But human beings are not built for satisfaction. And when the poor partner onto whom they have projected their fantasy departs, the two of them recoil back on you in horror and pain, and you collapse into a heap. they demand you get her back, and sometimes you try, with disastrous consequences. Or you retreat into your shell, and do notcome out again. Your conscious mind tries to pick up the pieces and tells itself it's learned a lesson, and that life isn't that easy. But the other two, of course, have not learned. And if you ever get another chance, another shot at happiness, they will be waiting.

The Truth and Other Convenient Fictions

"The Truth? You can't handle the Truth"
- Deep Throat

Truth is, it is impossible to even discuss truth without falling down the philosophical equivalent of a K-hole, ending up staring at the back of your own head saying "Well it depends what you mean by mean." There are reasons why there are campuses and colleges full of awkward white men of a certain age (sorry to stereotype analytical philosophy like that, but if there's one thing I've learned it's that a prescient generalisation has more 'truth' to it than an ethnicity graph) arguing each other into a hole in the ground over language and meaning while the world goes on around them barely even noticing their absence. It's because the question "Is there such a thing as Truth, and can we understand it?" is at once a meaningless intellectual curio, and one of the foundational questions of all human experience.

All of the things we say, do and think are done 'as if there was' such a thing as truth, and as if we could know things. Yet any examination of the idea of what is true, what is false and how we tell one from the other soon throws up so many problems that we are forced to admit truth is only provisional. There are the usual tired examples of Newtonian physics being undermined by relativity, in turn undermined by quantum mechanics etc, etc.

I absorbed all of this more or less in my stride, all this conceptual stuff about absolute knowledge being impossible. Emerging from the reassuringly simple period of Atheist Materialism into the swamp of Postmodernism is Appallingly Expressed But It Has a Point was hardly a philosophical Road to Damascus. As soon as you look at the predicates of the scientific method it is apparent that all sincere science operates from a position of "We cannot know for sure, but it looks like..." Sure, researchers in the trenches are forced to use the shorthand of "we have proved that" because well, otherwise they too would end up staring at the hair-netted backs of their own heads. Again, in order to proceed with life, work or thought it seems we have to pretend or imagine that truth and knowledge are possible, all the while aware that they are fundamentally not.

No, what really got me was when this idea began to be applied to our inner lives, and to human relations. The human mind, spirit, brain (take your pick... or admit that they are all words for one entity we do not have true knowledge of) is where we do our knowing, our understanding and our self-deception. Where can the question of Truth be more pressing, applicable and urgent than to our minds and their relations with other minds. We've all been on acid and faced that breath-defying realisation that we can never know what another person is thinking, what it is like to be them, or rather what it is like for them to be them. and that we are embodied and embedded in our own selves for all of our time on earth. Some of us have even done it without the acid. But this realisation has something important in it. Not only can we never truly know another's thoughts, or being, but we cannot know our own. The unconscious is another of those invisible, undeniable concepts, like gravity (or relativity) that changed our view of everything. The idea that somewhere in my head there are other parts of me that I can't see, influencing me with a power of its own, like some kind of dark matter, puts the final conceptual nail in the philosophical coffin of Truth.

If you cannot even be aware of the totality of yourself, how can you even begin to probe and question the world without, or your lover, as they lie away from you in the dark, their own head full of such half-thoughts, dark matters and questioning as your own. When you ask someone what they feel, or why, they cannot tell you. They may not even be able to tell themselves. For they too have invisible elephants in the room of their soul, thought-skeletons in the closets of their frontal lobes, Reds under the conceptual bed. Even if they know what they feel, to be able to articulate why, or even know it, will be beyond the power of their tongue to tell, or your ear to receive. We are separate worlds, and the satellite beams of language rarely hit home, and when they do they cannot be decoded. We get by on a nod and a wink.

"Know Yourself" said the Delphic Oracle, and then sat back and chuckled as Humanity set about this most impossible, most Sisyphean of tasks. God gave Adam Eve as a help meet, and on the next day God Rested, arms behind his head, and waited for the fireworks. We cannot know ourselves, and we cannot speak the Truth to each other. Well, no. This is not true. We live in the fog of unknowing, beset on all sides by strange shapes, stalked by our own shadows, divided each from each by dark seas.

But we can help each other. We can speak the Truth as best we know it, accept that certainty is impossible, but learn to live with mutability. Indeed, if there is one thing that the debate on Truth should not be used to legitimate, it is Lies. Truth may not exist, but Falsehood most certainly does.

On Love and its Sudden Unexplained Absence

"If our two loves be so alike
that none doe slacken, none can die"
- John Donne

In my beginning is my end. A few days ago I ran into an old friend, with whom I had fallen out badly a few years before. A girl was involved in our falling out, but so was much else. We had competed, in a manner of speaking, for her. Like we apes, we animals are supposed to do. David Attenborough will tell you that for nothing. And so, like sounding wales or clattering antlered elks, or preening, inflated birds of paradise, we competed. And lo, our competition drove her away, to somewhere where the people were less assholeish. And it drove us apart from each other. We had been inseperable, we went way back. But there were mutterings of underhand goings on, of pressure behind the scenes, of jealousy and recrimination, of deceit and dishonesty, of drink and drugs. You know, the usual. So we all went our seperate ways. Well, sort of.

He and I met again last week. It was sunny still, not like the cold spring in which we made our final break from each other. By a hilarious and ironic twist of fate, we had both just been ejected from relationships we cared intensely for, for reasons which we could understand, but not comprehend (to understand something is to see its outline, its form, to stand under it and perceive it from without, whereas to comprehend something is to assimilate it, to absorb it into yourself wholesale). His had been two years, and mine five months, and his end had been absolute whereas mine had seen flickers since the end... But nonetheless we felt ourselves bound in a kind of shared bumout. Rightly, I think. And so, after drinking all evening and standing around an unexpected bonfire in the middle of a dark plain on the edge of the old city, the dreaming city, that never wakes, after walking home, via the all night garage with its security glass and cigarettes, we sat side by side on the sofa and talked about love.

Only really about heterosexual love, as this was what our experience, and to be honest our concerns, were limited to. Although now I remember we did kiss once, during the three way times. But that was a long time ago. And to be honest it was all part of the competition. What is the male equivalent of a lipstick lesbian?

So we talked, and drank wine left open too long. And the idea was suggested arose that men, when they fall in love, tend to do so over a period, gradually, but that eventually their succumbing is absolute and irrevocable. They are hopelessly lost. When it happens, it happens for real and for good. Women, on the other hand (it was suggested) tend to fall suddenly and violently in love, and this initial depth and pulling onward of the other party gradually loosens and the love begins to drain out of them, until one day it is as if they wake up and think "What on earth am I doing with this person?". I had just read a lot of DH Lawrence - call it a parting gift from the lady - and had read about the wild fluctuations of the inner life, and how ecstasy and boredom can coexist in an instant, and the man oblivious all the while. The woman hungering for some nameless, mysterious union with the whole of existence, and the man blindly, stubbornly trying to get her to say 'Yes' to his tedious proposal.

(interestingly compare the above two patterns to the patterns often found in male and female orgasms, done properly. The man's long slow rise, then hanging on - or holding off - as long as he can, then the climax and he is, for the time at least, done for. The woman's rising faster, and maybe running through several rises and falls before she has suddenly had enough. What does this mean? What does anything mean?)

My friend asserted that in this game called love, it is the woman, always, who does the choosing. And she goes through life trying out a succession of men, but each time she determines after a certain point that she can do better, and is only passing time with this man, and she moves on. Until one day she settles. No one knows why, and the man she may be with when she decides to settle may be by no means the fittest, strongest, smartest, tenderest or the fullest of mystery. He was simply sitting in the chair when the music stopped. I cautioned him that this was a very cynical, perhaps defeatist view, and he assented. I also said I thought many men did the same thing. He reminded me that generalising can lead to valuable insights provided one does not take ones generalisations for fact. I could not fault his point.

It has sometimes been concluded that our generation(s), caught in the dying days of the (let us generalise) judaeo-christian ideal of marriage and monogamy, once guaranteed by God, but now being downrated faster than a Greek bond. This has been done to death, but nonetheless we, as we have grown up, have been forced to learn to live in this brave new world of chopping and changing, hiring and firing your life partner every few months or years, always on the search for the best deal. Compare The Market Dot Com. And yet we have done so with the shibboleth of Marriage always at our backs, on our backs, conditioning our expectations of monogamy, faithfulness, unconditionality, mutual duty, all those things that have (perhaps) slowly ebbed away from us as we try to love one another, but grow slowly, silently apart. Why, we ask, isn't love the way we had been led to expect it would be?

Of course, in the old days it was the same story, or perhaps a worse one, with a different name. People still grew apart, or came to hate one another, or chose badly, but they were trapped in loveless, contrived or sham marriages while they pursued their way through the treetops in search of other lovers, pastures always greener, the juicier forbidden fruit. And for some even this was not possible. The monument of Marriage was also a Prison. And of course somewhere (literary archaeologists vary in their assertions of when and where this occurred, like the location of Troy which may not even have existed) some asshole invented (!) Romantic Love, and set us all after it as after a hare, believing that it would bring us fulfilment, meaning, maybe even happiness. Or that it was an end in itself.

This conception of Love as a literary/social superstructure built upon a foundation of animal Lust strikes me as simplistic, but nonetheless there is an element of truth to it. For the animal is always there. We are not 'in' our bodies. We 'are' our bodies. When we reason, we are emotional. We do both and neither well when we are in and out of love. Who has ever reasoned so coldly as when in the grip of some passion and trying in spite of all the world to work something through clearly? And what kinds of conclusions do we come to in such circumstances? Why, the conclusions of passion. Myself I come up with nonsense resolutions and decisions when I am in that kind of state. Any division of the emotional or personal or bodily from the intellectual or the rational or the businesslike is a nonsense. Any division of the Self into mind, body, spirit, social being or any other is a nonsense upon metaphysical stilts. Whatever we are, we are not an IKEA kit of attributes or parts which are slotted together. We begin as a single cell, union of two cells. Beyond that initial spark, blueprint, tiny roadmap, we basically are what we eat.

And there, in our beginning, in the moment of conception, is our end, or our ends, which is to conceive afresh, whether in love or lust, or this thing we experience which is at once both and neither. Anyone foolish enough to doubt Freud's assertion that sex underlies everything would do well to be mindful about where exactly they came from. And indeed, if future reproductive technologies wreak such changes on the parent-child bond as recent contraceptive technologies have on the relationships between men and women, then we shall have an interesting world indeed. Whether we defeat death may not be half so interesting, or significant, as whether we defeat Birth. In my beginning is my end.