1.
To stand in the Tate Gallery’s Rothko Room, surrounded by nine massive canvases, all painted in the corpuscular hues of blood and wine, is to find oneself suspended, outside narrative time, outside spatial imagery: in utero, or in a cave.
In each painting, a nebulous portal—black, maroon, or scarlet—hovers against a muted red backdrop. These passageways hang like momentary architecture, thresholds of smoke. Of all Rothko’s abstract work, these are the only paintings that we might legitimately say have perspective, depth of field. They hang as a door between two realms: the sayable and the unsayable. Each canvas pulls us toward its opening, pointing beyond. But where? To what?
The murals were originally commissioned as “decorations” (so read the contract) for the Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building on Park Avenue. Rothko was to deliver “500 to 600 square feet of paintings” for $35,000. Rothko signed on. At first he seemed to take it as a challenge. “I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room,” he told Harper’s editor John Fischer. Toward that end he employed a darker palette, “more somber than anything I’ve tried before.” Rothko once admitted to his assistant, Dan Jensen, that perhaps “comedy, ecstasy and loftiness of spirit are what I actually stand for and that I only exploit talk about tragedy and despair.” Such an argument could certainly have been made before 1957. Where, after all, is the tragedy in an orange square floating about a purple rectangle against a yellow background? But in the following years, as Rothko’s life grew bleaker—emphysema, alcoholism, an irreparable marriage—he sank into real darkness. However inadvertently, the Seagram commission gave him a final language to speak that despair.
After a disastrous dinner visit to the Four Seasons, Rothko told Mies’s assistant, a young Philip Johnson, that the uptown bourgeoisie didn’t deserve his art. He voided his contract with the Four Seasons and instead sold the nine paintings he had completed to the Tate Gallery in London. These nine paintings arrived at the Tate on February 25, 1970, the day Mark Rothko took his life. This, no doubt, is one reason I have come to think of them as drafts of the suicide note Rothko never actually wrote. Another reason is that suicide—specifically, my father’s—is something I was struggling to understand one year in my twenties when I took a hiatus from formal education and moved for a semester to Oxford, England. I paid rent for a tiny room above the garage of a working-class family, and every weekend I took a bus to the Tate Gallery, where I spent hours lost in the massive paintings that Mark Rothko bequeathed to the Tate. Sitting on those benches, staring at those fields of red, I began to realize that Rothko’s late paintings might reveal some vital information about my own father’s final act.
2.
My father, like his father, was a Baptist minister. He shot himself with a hunting rifle when I was three. My grandfather was a forceful fundamentalist preacher in the Tidewater area of Virginia. My father, apparently with some trepidation, followed him into the ministry. But he was not as successful a preacher as my grandfather, who could overwhelm a congregation with the power of his conviction, and at some point my father began to doubt whether he felt truly called to the ministry at all. Moreover, he began to doubt the strict literalism of my grandfather’s version of Christianity. In his own mind, he had not lived up to his father’s standard as a minister, and to make matters worse, he felt that he had secretly betrayed his father’s faith. My father punished himself with guilt and anxiety. That, compounded by a bipolar disorder, caused him to turn a gun on himself on September 1, 1970.
After my father’s death, I labored unconsciously to fill the void he had left, to be so “good” in my grandparents’ eyes that I would in some way make them forget their great loss. As a child, I told everyone that I too was going to be a minister and carry on the family legacy. As a teenager I led youth retreats at our church and abstained from all of the usual adolescent seductions. Then gradually, I became infected with the same doubt that had plagued my father. I had done some reading in a textbook on abnormal psychology and discovered that bipolar disease is passed on only to children of the opposite sex. It seemed I had been spared that, but the doubt—followed by guilt—remained and increased. My family’s fundamentalism began to feel like a penal system meant, as the poet William Blake put it, “to bind with briars/my joys and desires.” It became insufferable, and by the time I reached Oxford, feeling close to some breakdown of my own, I decided that the best way to avoid my father’s fate was to abandon my family’s religion. To that end, I immersed myself in the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche, convinced that Nietzsche’s post-Christian philosophy might help disentangle me from the “mind-forg’d manacles” (Blake again) that I was convinced had doomed my father.
It felt like I was on the right tack. Sitting on the banks of the Thames River, I read Ronald Hayman’s biography of Nietzsche. There I learned that Nietzsche’s father and grandfather had also been protestant ministers and that his father had died of some brain disease when Friedrich was a boy. The young Nietzsche’s response, like mine, had been to embrace piety in an effort to please his grandparents, so much so that his elementary schoolmates mocked him and called him “the little minister.” But twenty years later, in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, the little minister began what would be the most sustained attack on the organized church that Western philosophy had ever seen. Reading that book for the first time in my twenties, I felt as if Nietzsche were speaking my deepest doubts back to me in words I could never have found on my own.
In Nietzsche’s sweeping claim that art is a healthier metaphysic than religion, I recognized for the first time the trapdoor through which I might escape my own family drama. Rothko’s own debt to The Birth of Tragedy has been well documented by Dore Ashton and Brian O’Doherty. And according to his biographer, James E. B. Breslin, Rothko made extensive notes toward a commentary he hoped to write on Nietzsche’s first book. He must have immediately recognized how Nietzsche’s own analysis of the elemental power of music—abstract by definition—provided an analogue to his own intense and imageless art. Nietzsche believed that Socratic rationalism had robbed Greek tragedy, and life itself, of an elemental vitality. “Will it not some day rise once again out of its mystical depths as art?” he wondered. Certainly Rothko wanted his paintings to be an answer in the affirmative.
It’s clear from notes Nietzsche was making around 1870 that the twenty-six-year-old professor of philology had already decided on his life’s work: he would topple Platonism, pull the gods out of the sky, and reestablish beauty—appearance—as a better myth than truth. He began this project in The Birth of Tragedy by borrowing from Jules Michelet the distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian, a distinction he thought went to the very core of Western consciousness. From there he could trace ahead to where it had gone wrong, where it had become Socratic, Christian—moral. The book is a breathless, idiosyncratic series of moves, grounded in the rather obscure story of “wise Silenus,” whom King Midas hunted down one day because he wanted to know the “best and most desirable of all things for man.” Like all oracles, Silenus was reluctant to speak. But when the king refused to let him go, the wise man confessed: “What is best is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.” Here, Silenus stands as the true voice of Dionysus. His message: total annihilation—suicide. And, argued Nietzsche, it was precisely this terrifying answer that gave birth to the true Apollonian culture of the Greeks. Whereas Dionysus stood for chaos, Apollo sculpted that senseless matter into art; he gave it form. And of course it was the Greeks who created Apollo. For life to be bearable at all, the Greeks had to invent a pantheon of gods. Why? Because, wrote Nietzsche, “the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it—the only satisfactory theodicy! Existence under the bright sunshine of such gods is regarded as desirable in itself.” Given this, a Greek or Christian morality that was “hostile to life,” that invented a metaphysical realm superior to this life, amounted to a betrayal of our Western birthright. Art, not morality, is “the truly metaphysical activity of man,” Nietzsche concluded. That is to say, when we stare down the existential reality that the world contains great suffering, we have essentially two choices: We can hope for a better realm, and pray to be rescued into it, or we can find a way to make this world acceptable, inhabitable, meaningful. Philosophy and religion had always represented the first answer; art the second. And according to Nietzsche, those with the courage to accept their fate—to celebrate it, amor fati—gave birth to Greek tragedy.
The title of Nietzsche’s first book comes from his assertion that tragedy was born out of music. The Dionysian chorus came first. Only later did scenes and characters emerge. Nietzsche imagined tragedy evolving in the same way we tend to think of existence coming into being: From a formless force, some great breath, the world of things was called into existence. Music was the force that gave birth to imagery, language, the plastic arts, just as all those arts aspire, in the end, toward music. This, said Nietzsche, was as it should be. Form-giving Apollo showed us how to invent ourselves as individuals—principium individuationis—even as he recognized the tragic impermanence of a life Dionysus would eventually rend asunder. But Dionysus could never be denied. It was crucial for Nietzsche that we experience both at once: the Apollonian individual and the Dionysian force that he called “primordial being itself”—“the one living being” that erased all distinctions. He chose a metaphor from Schopenhauer to best illustrate this dialectic: Apollonian culture and its principium individuationis is but a small boat made from frail bark, tossed by the punishing storms of Dionysian nature. The boat is the “Apollonian world of beauty”; the sea is “the terrible wisdom of Silenus.” Together they consummate “the perpetually attained goal of the primal unity, its redemption through mere appearance.” In this version of redemption, life isn’t a trial to gain admission into an unworldly kingdom of God. This is the kingdom; but we must invent it, enact it, ourselves.
To Nietzsche, the unpardonable sin of Socrates and of late Hellenic culture as a whole was that it tried to push our Apollonian character to the point that we abandoned Dionysus. Socrates represented the victory of the rational, or the illusion of reason’s victory. At this point, tragedy itself committed suicide in the guise of Euripides. The chorus was pushed to the edge of the stage. Poets had no place in a culture where everything could be explained logically. Dionysus was driven underground. It was no accident, as Nietzsche saw it, that the death of tragedy happened simultaneously with the birth of morality, philosophy, Christianity. Nietzsche’s ambition, and to some extent his success, was to announce the death of Socrates and the rebirth of Dionysus—the death of Christianity and the resurrection of art. If philosophy from Socrates forward had been an arduous attempt to abandon Plato’s famous cave, Nietzsche was ready to lead everyone right back down into that dark theater of ritual and art.
And so was Mark Rothko.
3.
There are few photographs where Rothko appears at ease. At times he admits a smile in the company of his cat, or his children (never with his wife, Mell). But for the most part, Rothko looks deeply uncomfortable in his own skin. His body weighed him down. Only through painting did he ever seem to achieve levity, loftiness. There is, though, one often-reproduced photograph by Hans Namuth in which Rothko does appear content. He is sitting in a green, wooden deck chair before a six-by-eight canvas, contemplating a maroon square against a red, rectangular background. He is smoking a cigarette (a Lark!). Though the photo is taken from behind, the slouch of Rothko’s frame and the tilt of his head suggest satisfaction with his work, even with himself.
Many writers have made the connection between Rothko’s admiration for Matisse’s Red Studio and what seemed like a literal attempt to create that space with the red murals that would eventually become the Rothko Room at the Tate. Dore Ashton described a visit in 1959 to Rothko’s “cavernous studio with its deep-dyed red floor.” Versions of the Seagram murals surrounded her. The room was “dim as a cathedral” or an ancient library. Clearly this was not the bourgeois interior of Matisse’s painting. Now, when I look at the Namuth photograph of Rothko in his wooden chair, surrounded by these walls of intense dark color, I think of Schopenhauer’s fragile boat awash in a Dionysian storm. Rothko sits in an Apollonian calm, but it is only temporary. It is, as Nietzsche admitted, an illusion. For some, the illusion is enough to stave off the terror of what lies behind it. For others not. Rothko, I believe, had a profound understanding of both impulses, as well as the precarious balancing act he had to maintain between them. His art was at once the lifeboat and the storm.
4.
A jazz pianist named Sonny would have been a contemporary of Rothko’s and would have lived only twenty blocks away, in Harlem, were he real and not a character in a James Baldwin short story, “Sonny’s Blues.” Still I think of Rothko and Sonny together. Both suffered great torment, and both took their own art to the brink of the Dionysian void. Neither could rely on language to make sense of it, or any art form that had come before. I also bring up Sonny because he knows something vital: He knows that only his art can save him. And in that, I think he can tell us something about his contemporary Mark Rothko.
“Sonny’s Blues” is narrated by an unnamed high school math teacher who doesn’t understand music and doesn’t understand his younger brother, Sonny. The story begins with the older brother reading in the paper on his way to work that Sonny has been busted for possession of heroin. Oddly, the narrator can draw only one conclusion—that Sonny is trying to kill himself. Later that day, when he sees a friend of Sonny’s, he asks him why Sonny wants to die. The friend replies, “He don’t want to die. He wants to live. Don’t nobody want to die, ever.” And though the narrator had vowed years before to their mother that he would look after Sonny, he turns his back on his brother when Sonny is sent to prison. Not until his own daughter dies of polio does the narrator write Sonny. “My troubles made his real,” he tells us. Feeling guilt that he has not been a better keeper of his brother, or that he never tried to understand Sonny’s dark inwardness, the narrator picks Sonny up when he is released from prison and asks him to come live with him and his wife. Sonny begins to reconnect with musicians he knows in the Village, and his brother looks for signs that Sonny may be using again. One afternoon, the two of them watch a Harlem street singer wailing to a crowd a song called “’Tis the Old Ship Zion.”
As the singing filled the air the watching, listening faces underwent a change, the eyes focusing on something within; the music seemed to soothe a poison out of them; and time seemed, nearly to fall away from the sullen, belligerent, battered faces, as though they were fleeing back to their first condition, while dreaming of their last.
Later, over a beer, Sonny tries to explain to his brother, “Her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes—when it’s in your veins. It make you feel sort of warm and cool at the same time. And distant. And—and sure. It makes you feel—in control. Sometimes you’ve got to have that feeling.” Frightened, Sonny’s brother grows contemptuous, scared, angry. He is a man who accepts with a stubborn fatalism the limitations of a black man’s life in Harlem in the fifties. The idea that one might try to “control” one’s destiny would simply not occur to him. But Sonny wants badly for his brother to understand the lure of heroin, because what he really wants his brother to understand is the lure—the power, the uses—of art. “Listening to that woman sing,” Sonny says, “it struck me all of a sudden how much suffering she must have had to go through—to sing like that. It’s repulsive to think you have to suffer that much.” His brother replies, “But there’s no way not to suffer—is there, Sonny?” Sonny smiles and says, “I believe not, but that’s never stopped anyone from trying. . . . No, there’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem—well, like you. Like you did something, all right, and now you’re suffering for it. You know? . . . why do people suffer? Maybe it’s better to do something to give it a reason, any reason.”
But if there’s no way not to suffer, Sonny’s pragmatic brother reasons: “Isn’t it better, then, just to—take it?” Sonny explodes, “But nobody just takes it. That’s what I’m telling you! Everybody tries not to. You’re just hung up on the way some people try—it’s not your way!”
Sonny has considered the Judeo-Christian logic that to suffer for no reason is unbearable: We must have done something wrong; we must deserve to suffer. That is one way—it was my grandfather’s way—to make it feel “like you.” But as an artist, Sonny will ultimately choose the more Nietzschean way to get control of his own suffering. Rather than trying to escape it, he will face up to the stink, the funk, the “storm inside,” because to face up to it means to get control of it, to give it form, to make it you. Sonny is Nietzsche’s tragic artist: He will stare down a life that is racially, economically, existentially unjust—a life that may not be worth living—and he will save himself with his art. Wrote Nietzsche:
Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible.
Later that night, Sonny takes his brother down to a club in the Village, where he will sit in with a four-piece band. The narrator realizes that for the first time, he is in Sonny’s “kingdom” and that here, Sonny is royalty. He’s nobody’s brother. He’s Sonny. On the bandstand, Sonny sits down at the piano. A large Mingus-like character named Creole dictates the tempo from his bass fiddle. “He was having a dialogue with Sonny,” his brother writes. “He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning are not the same thing.” And slowly, Sonny does venture out into the Dionysian storm. And his brother realizes that “the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason.” Sonny launches further, filling his instrument with “the breath of life, his own.” He is rewriting, in each moment, the song “Am I Blue?” Desperately, Sonny retrieves the painful facts of his own life and grafts them onto the ephemeral string of notes as they hit the air. His brother hears “with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, he could help us to be free if we would listen.” The narrator suddenly thinks of his dead parents, of his dead little girl, and he thinks of how Sonny is taking all this into himself and “was giving it back” in a way that, in his words, we can stand it, in a way that we can even find beauty in it.
The song ends. People applaud. The narrator sends a Scotch and milk up to the bandstand. Sonny sips it, looks back at his brother, then sets the drink on the piano. It glows there like the song itself, which has taken the storm and given it shape. It is “the very cup of trembling.”
I think of Sonny sitting at his piano after his solo, and Rothko sitting in his deck chair after a session of painting. For a moment, both have tamed Schopenhauer’s storm; they are safe, in control. They are each the Apollonian artist who refuses to yield to the storm and does not yearn to escape it. They haven’t succumbed—at least not yet—to heroin, poverty, chronic depression. Sonny’s brother had been unwilling to accept heroin as a way to “control” one’s suffering; to him, it was a way of giving in, of giving up: it was suicide. And in the end, without saying so, Sonny agrees. Religion can’t save him; nor smack. There’s only his art. In this moment, Sonny and Rothko have forced Proteus to take shape, and they have wrestled him to the beach. Through jazz and abstract painting, Sonny and Rothko adopt the most demanding of mediums—entirely new vocabularies—to tell the story of suffering in a way that we can hear it new. After all, says Sonny’s brother, “There isn’t any other tale to tell.”
5.
For my father’s funeral, my grandmother insisted on an open casket over my mother’s objection. Though the undertaker had done his best to repair the rifle’s damage, my father’s head looked bloated, unreal, freakish as he lay in state. My great-aunts and -uncles didn’t even know he had committed suicide until they arrived in Virginia for the funeral and read it in the local paper. My grandmother had simply told them he had “gone to be with the Lord,” as if he were a Buddhist monk leaving his family behind to wander the Wu Mountains. My grandmother, at least, understood the dire implications of Matthew 10:37: “He who loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.” Here was proof that her son was worthy.
And this is the thing that my mother, a forgiving woman, will not forgive—my grandmother smiled throughout the entire funeral. Even Job raged for thirty chapters at God’s seeming injustice, until the voice of the whirlwind finally grew tired of his harangue and ground Job’s face in the dirt. My grandmother did not need such convincing. If she ever mourned her son, she did it alone. In public, she wore the veil of stoic fortitude. If it was God’s will to take her oldest son, she would show everyone that she understood, that she would accept that burden of fate, that she too loved the Lord even more than her own family.
I don’t mean to suggest that my grandmother was a cruel woman. In the years following my father’s death, I was closer to her than anyone besides my mother. When I stayed with my grandparents during the summers, she would read to me for hours from Howard Garis’s Uncle Wiggily books, and I would make her tape record each session so that I could listen to them over and over when I returned home. But after my father’s death, she slowly began to shut down and close off. I know, because she told me, that she never cried after my father died. She became a model of virtue for my grandfather’s congregation, a distant model, rarely available to anyone who might need her help.
No tenet of the Christian theology seems so vacuous to me as the one always trotted out at times of tragedy: that things happen for a reason. God is rational; we simply, in our blindness, cannot understand his rationale. And because God has a plan, my grandmother could smile through her grief, assured that in the end it could, and would, all make sense. It seems too awful to consider the alternative—that things don’t happen for a reason, that they just happen. Yet this is precisely what Nietzsche admired about the early Greeks: that they faced up to a world without explanation and out of it made their own meaning.
Of suffering, Baldwin’s artist, Sonny, said, “No one just takes it. You try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.” Not my grandmother. She just took it. What seems so terrible, as I think back over the last forty years of her life, is that, unlike Sonny, she could not find a use for her suffering, she couldn’t turn it into something else, and it slowly buried her in a shell of unfeeling that gradually slid into dementia.
6.
According to the Hebrew creation story, written about six thousand years ago, the first man was sculpted from adammah—“red clay.” But to reach back at least twenty thousand more years to the caves at Lascaux and Altamira, one is struck by how the earliest painters we know conceived of their horses, bison, and aurochs with the same reds, maroons, and blacks that we see in the Rothko Room. Like the sand painters of the American Southwest, the Magdalenian artists of the Upper Paleolithic era derived their powdered colors from the iron oxides within or around the caves where they painted. The Navajo sand painter took his brown from juniper root, his black from sumac. The Magdalenian artists painted with the same ochers, deep reds, and blacks. Near the frescoes, archaeologists have found mortars and pestles the painters used to grind pigment. There is also evidence that the artists heated ocher colors to achieve the manganese tints that gave shape to the massive, reddish-black fauna that stampede along the walls. Rothko, who had spent the fifties experimenting with vast combinations of color, at the end decided to return to these powerful hues of the beginning, the hues of earth, blood, and fire. He returned to the palette of the most primitive ritual.
And whereas Rothko evoked breathing as a sacral metaphor for applying paint, scholars now think that the cave painters at Lascaux and Altamira actually did blow pigment onto the cave walls through the hollow bones of griffin vultures—the same bones out of which they made the first flutes and thus the first music—and did so as a spiritual act. Says French prehistorian Michel Lorblanchet, “Spitting is a way of projecting yourself onto the wall, becoming one with the horse you are painting. Thus the action melds you with the myth.” The breath becomes the invisible syntax that binds all living things. The early cave painters were enacting what Nietzsche called a “unity of being,” a ritual that psychology and anthropology have identified as characteristic of the primitive mind. In this early consciousness, the individual ego was weak; rather Neolithic man projected himself everywhere onto the world, and thus found kinship with the reindeer and ox. Yet the history of Western consciousness has been a withdrawal from this unity into ever-hardening distinctions. Socratism, Platonism, and Pauline Christianity were long exercises in division, splitting the good from evil, the living from the dead, the I from thou, the body from the soul, the human from the rest of the living world.
Like the Neolithic painters, Rothko’s work can be read as an attempt to overcome the false boundaries of the self. He dismissed the label “abstract expressionist” on the grounds that he had nothing personal he wanted to convey. “I don’t express myself in my painting,” he once said, “I express my not-self.” If mimetic art captured the world’s ephemera, including the self, then Rothko’s abstract painting expressed the sublime spirit that we associate with the transcendental. Rothko once dismissed the social realist painter Ben Shahn as a “journalist,” which is to say, Shahn painted the characters, the scene, whereas Rothko painted the primordial chorus—he painted tragedy itself. He had taken his cue from Nietzsche that this was the more heroic, elemental task. Rothko had gone so far down into what Yeats called “the deep-heart’s core” that there are no images to contain what the painter finds there. It cannot be given form; the language of images cannot accommodate it. It is the imageless image: the face we had before we were born. It is the place to which the suicide returns.
7.
In her poem “The Rothko Room,” Gillian Clarke refers to the smoke-like threshold in each painting as a “scaffolding of pain.” That is about as exact an image as one can find for these imageless, interior landscapes. To pass through those ciphers is to disappear into something final and inescapable. The exact opposite could be said about the thin black rectangles that stand about a sky-blue background in Robert Motherwell’s Open series of paintings. As the titles suggest, those thresholds call us back into a kind of ontological clearing where religion and philosophy fall away and, in Martin Heidegger’s phrase, we “let Being: be.” Those paintings feel almost utopian in both their aim and execution. They are exhilarating. Motherwell’s portal is pulling us into the open of Rilke’s Eighth Duino Elegy,
that pure space into which flowers
endlessly open. . . .
that pure
unseparated element which one breathes
without desire and endlessly knows..
[trans. Stephen Mitchell]
Beyond Motherwell’s thresholds await the pastoral, the prelapsarian, the unfallen world. These openings exist in time. But Rothko could see only a violent journey into the abyss. Motherwell shows us a way back into the world. For Rothko, there is no way back. Only a way out.
8.
At the end of “Sonny’s Blues,” the bassist, Creole, pushes Sonny “to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water.” Which he does. His piano is his Schopenhauerian lifeboat, and he embarks on a brilliant solo that takes in all his psychic chaos, all Harlem’s pain, and give it shape, makes it bearable. Then, in the end, Sonny’s piano also leads him back to shore. Safe. For now. Sonny’s blues, his brother finally realizes, was an act of enormous risk and courage.
Unlike Sonny, my father never returned to shore, never came back to his family, never made sense of his own chaos. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche said that only the gods or art can save us from the urge for nothingness. Art saved Sonny, but it couldn’t save my father. Nor could religion, because unlike the Greek gods, who justified life by living it, my family’s religion viewed this life as something separate from God, unjustifiable, fallen. But if I were to remain alive, that was a theology I had to reject. Living alone in Oxford that semester gave me the distance I needed to begin to find a path away from my family’s own tragic encumbrance with religion. That path began with art: the art of the Tate Gallery and the literature I read there on the banks of the Thames. Nietzsche had convinced me that art, like the gods, could justify living. Art could give life the texture and the intensity that was its own justification.
But that wasn’t enough for my father, because the work of art is, finally, an act of sublimation, a return to the shoreline. When viewers speak, as we inevitably do, of Rothko’s painting as sublime, we mean that, standing before them, we are in the presence of something that transcends the human, that transcends our understanding. And yet on some almost unspeakable level, it speaks to us. About things that have not yet risen to the level of language, about images that have no image, about the self that exists before and beyond the self. But we can never remain on the plain of the sublime. We leave the museum. We have to return it to the level of language, as I have done here. Unless . . .
Unless one takes one’s own life. Suicide is the one sublime act that can never be sublimated. The suicide will never return to find accommodation within the father’s house. To raise the sword against oneself is to find release into a moment—an endless moment—of freedom. Standing before the dark thresholds of the Rothko Room, I began to understand that. I began to understand something vital about the father I had never known.