A Whisper on a Public Square

Mark Rothko walked, during dusk, through Market Square, Nottingham on February 22nd 1970. 

February is a difficult month. The unease of a new year in the dead weight of mid winter. Silent night makes way for a silent ice. Sounds are dulled, muffled. There is unease, post Christmas sales offer no mercy as merchants needs to be fed. It is the time when the city shows its wounds. Nature seems lost to me. 

My thoughts dwell on a landscape remembered.

Of a public square that holds the bereft and beguiled in its borders cupping a community of sorts. The chat and rattle of their walk and talk layering a skin forever over stone ground. Each slab holding the trodden truths of thoughts expressed and muttered. 

A ground engraved by the muttering and uttering of mothers, fathers, children, teenage, middle age, old age, girl, boy, woman and man. Stories of villainy, of lovers and lusts, of deaths, of bargains, of the weather, of pets, of histories, of race, of relatives, of costs, of desperate needs and endless plans. All whirl, fly and scatter across this city centred clearing, this square. Such a storm.

An invisible autumn building a dust from us; made palpable in the gyrations of the gyres seen here by me, on this square, on this day. Our dust blown and blown, generation upon generation. Unbearable in its weighted weightlessness. A material, born of centuries, that whirls in seamless gyres to the borders of this clearing. Thickening its edges and filling the space. Built by an unknown Nature. Whirling as a conversation that we can all remember.

A conversation that layers a now and forever and ever archaeology. A star dust, human dust machine or maybe a mind spinning its conical gathering of the crushed, the immediate, the historical and the uplifted uttering of us. And in this dizzying spin I breathe all these conversations, unrequited and requited, uttered through millennia. The hesitant, the desperate, the reasoned, the uncertain, the passionate, the fearful petitions to be less lonely in the cosmos. And in this square, for this moment, I am filled by these spinning truths. You, I, can never truly know. In this square, on this day I saw, was in, was of, the clearing that redeems our thoughts, cutting all thresholds to the most difficult and fragile of our melodies. The songs of trust. Trust, absolute, as in love. 

This was ever so.

From another time, the beginning clearing; fallen trees, sweet skies, raised heads. Sun light, star light, an open iris between them and us. An unfettered air confecting through the space.  A fearful trust engages our thoughts, falling as actions and landing as expressions. A wanderlust that sparks our questions; that ignites the song. 

So begins our only essential conversation. A whimper that accumulates its echoes over generations becoming a thundering and endless wave until the whimper returns and our species is no more. An space open to sun and moon. Iris to human iris. Beginning humanity’s shout, ‘Teach me to be less lonely’. Less lonely in the forest, in the cosmos, in the street, in work, in relationships, in the square, in everywhere. A conversation requited in trust drenching our instinct to know, to prove, to survive. A booming silence of a conversation. All questions formed to befriend a minded mechanism not of our dependence. A non descendant. A possibility never to be proven. Questions that have no answer, always spinning, always unsettling. 

In this clearing Batman’s Riddler forgoes his questions of tease and incident, choosing instead to construct questions without end. No puzzles these. They are questions made as desires, stretched as counterintuitive reasons to say, we cannot know but we need to know. They are the ‘always beyond’ texts, syntaxes to conjure a conversation. Miracles of sorts. This is the clearing where the words of a song began.

I will not know. I cannot know. Will never know.

And no one knows. And no one knows. And no one knows. 

And I hear the song, maybe genetic in its nature, certainly human in its insistence. How badly we need to know and how badly we know that need cannot be quenched. This is the thirst from the clearing. A drinking of regrets from weary warriors of times gone. A conversation with day night skies. Bringing on the liminal traces of our and everyone’s knowledge. A sound ever hesitant. Beautiful and fettered in its melody. 

I will not know. I cannot know, will never know.

And no one knows. And no one knows. And no one knows. 

A low hum of ritual upon ritual, of act upon act, of a whirling and grinding our experience into many expressions of hope for a sign as proof. An empiricism of the cruellest kind. Please show you care.

John Newling, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 2002

This is the space where we see our place.

This is the space where I see my place.

And now, in this square, in the clearing of the beginning, I see, hear, feel, taste and smell an eclipse. A terrible change. Us over Nature. A permanent dimming. We have affected the effects of the clearing. The Anthropocene era. A geology of us in it. An accidental merging. A Darwinian prediction of a species surviving and thriving but at such a cost. A geology sparked from the very moment we entered this space, this place. Guests we were and what guests we have become. Such an improbable quest marched on by a conquering certainty. Warriors, foot trodden to certainty’s only anthem; proof is truth. A hymn so compelling that we forgot our song. The clearing knows only the uncertain. It is the uncertain; can only be the uncertain. And now, in this square the gyres are waning. A tiring storm. Its trust cut through and dimmed. Its rotations slowed. And us, the guests, hollowed like Eliot’s men begin to leave. The kingmakers. The rat a tat tat, rat a tat tat, rat a tat tat, of these warriors cuts a low disquieting moan as this procession departs. The sound of a surrogate Nature, ours only, all of mirror, no heads raised, a pitiful loneliness is brought upon the world. It is the sound of love lost as trust is unwound. 

I have to know. I have to know. I have to know.

Rat a tat tat.  Rat a tat tat.  Rat a tat tat.

Truth is proof. Truth is proof. Truth is proof.

Rat a tat tat.  Rat a tat tat.  Rat a tat tat.

And proof is power. And proof is power. And proof is power.

The clearing’s boundaries close in and its heart darkens. A shrivelling cone spins A darkening not of the night but of light itself leaving. A closing iris. An awful symmetry. The spinning slows and all is of slouching. A human geometry drawing the slow slide towards a predisposed causality; a Foucaultdian prediction, a prison laced through by the warnings of Nietzsche, Kant, Aristotle, Plato and so many others. Heidegger’s Being shrivelled in institutions and controlled through threat and fear. Protocols for each and every act, ticked, boxed and valued for only itself. Knowledge never to be redeemed. A quantitive data that cannot be drilled. A frozen ground, all map and no territory. Our sense lost as reason itself is governed. No place for trust or even regret. Fear is the virus, fear is the governing, fear is our predetermined cause. No will, free or otherwise.

This is our clearing, our place, our square, our set of thoughts.

This is my clearing, my place, my square, my set of thoughts.

Here in shadow of the council house guarded by lions. And in the dimming light of a slowing gyre. And, sensing the clearing closing, I hear the procession walk of tragedy, ecstasy, and destiny that is my care. A rumbling archaic echo of what we were and I am. A care upon generation upon generation. A very human care. A whisper for a future Nature not lost to us. No backwoods view to this utterance. No side long longing for a beaucratic glance. No fear of uncertainty. Only a whisper of risk and a remembering of the songs of trust. A shimmered thought expessed as a disorientating whisper that melds with the fountains of this public square. A fingers raised to lips whisper, sensed and remembered in silence. 

This is their whisper.

This is my whisper.

Remember, the uncertain have the accuracy of silence. Theirs is the grace of looking through the mirror. This is a truth.

And in this silence, this truth, I listen to the distant muttering and uttering of the departing procession. 

And I hear them.

They talk of blood.  Blood is spoken in sighs, dead friends remembered. Nietzche’s proclamations bring haemophilia on us all. A redemption wound. Marx talks of gold as the grail. A tourniquet of a kind. Anselm’s open symmetry of always beyond. An argument for that which is greater than can be conceived. A thought without a finishing line has shrunk. Dry cleaned in some laboratory. 

I hear them.

They talk of science. Science quests for the soul. The inconceivable, conceived. The book of life. A genome catalogue. Nature split from nurture. A nature of cause without responsibility. Predictive and lexical. A cartographer’s dream. Identity slips to kit form. Biographical details made to fit. Social agendas laminated to the tables of committees committed to power. Planned and strategic, a stealth of a bombing kind. Waste land warriors are tourists now. Cappuccino bound. Saloon bar creditors. Taste is good and good taste is proper. Community is of heritage. A forward glance to a rose tint past. Cap the chimneys and bring on the chimney sweeps. All the worlds a stage. Grease paint over silicosis. Cute made culpable through a Disney wish. A social empiricism. Carried across the land as an elixir in a doctor’s bag. 

I hear them.

They talk of our buildings. The skins of our buildings are listed. Index linked. Untouchable touch-stones of reinvented remembrance. Comforters of a sort. Sleeping draughts conjured in a storm’s eye. The museum hits the street running. Camberwick Green big time. Flux, that angel of humanities’ poetry, is a hostage to fortune tellers. A Mills & Boon loop. A past present tense. Stilled in confusion. Pensive and frightened as progress peels its own skin and settles for reflection. A ransomed contract, impossibly binding. You cannot move if you don’t know how. 

I hear them.

They talk of choice. Less is more. A wish for simplicity or maybe a plea for a more silent pace. Less is less. A testament to reformation hunger. A diet against excess or maybe pleasure. More is more. Our century’s lyric to choice. Choice is the legislator. Our freedom giver with a sideways glance to a bank balance. The surrogate gift that classes us without effort. Double edged like swords from another time. Co-opting our participation. Seeking to persuade us of its boundless bounty. Its only limit is that of cash credit. Choice is good for those that can choose.

I hear them.

They talk of love. Lovers become partners in their gold standard romance. A stroll, arm in arm, through settlements and agreements. An enterprise of sorts. Arthurian jurisprudence. Retailed relationships receipted in a language correct to its politic. Ecstasy is spun, a centrifuge of chemicals. A parching pill. Eliot’s thunder does not bring rain. Playground trading teaches coined value as its final equity. Orgasms are numbered and graded. Lancelot and Elaine have not made love. Galahad will not be born. The Templar’s scales are all of gold to coin. Sweeney erect still plods these pavements. A gap toothed space in Cromwell Street carries his shadow and many more. What we could not think, we have witnessed. Broken swords will never mend. Lust’s halleluiah of passion pasted to a digital screen. A memorandum of a fashion passion, not trust, just wants. Wishes upon wishes upon wishes.

I heard them. These dusts of us.

The thudding gyre slows to a droning whimper. Songs of trust and regret unredeemed. Yeats’ blood dimmed tide becomes a trickle. Innocence drowned. A landscape barren and untroubled by sun and moon.

And here in this open hearted open square the clearing closes. A terrible dimness folds the chill of mid winter into all that is left. 

My heart has closed

And I, Mark Rothko, a most celebrated artist, know that dimness, have felt the visceral clinging of that fading light. Have painted its darkening over and over again. Have described the threshold of its opening. Have wondered at our voiced conversations. Have edited its light. Have sung the songs of trust.

In this space, this place I have seen love. I have felt the uttered and muttered songs of others passing through. I have sensed the low hum of ritual upon ritual, of act upon act, of a long forgotten conversation still within us. 

I know now, at this time, that I have stood at the threshold of this clearing all my life. I have been spun and spun within it, thrown to its edges. I have long spoken with those that cannot answer me. I know the whispered care. I know the song of regret inside the songs of trust. I have felt the barren landscape. 

Here in my kitchen; another place, another continent. I remember again that clearing in the square where I heard the rattle and chat of us. Where I knew that I had understood our neurosis as our reality. Where I saw our fears dull a magnificent light. Where I sensed a future Nature befriended and not lost to us. Where I fell into the dust flecked gyre of the clearing. Where I heard it stop and my heart closed in that stopping. Where I, too, raised my finger to my lips and whispered, again and again and again.

Remember, the uncertain have the accuracy of silence. I have looked through the mirror.

This is a truth. This is my grace.

I will not know. I cannot know, will never know.

And no one knows. And no one knows. And no one knows.

_____________________________________________________________________

References

The Fourth Lateran Council (1215): The formal definition of transubstantiation based on Aristotle's distinction between ‘substance’ which was seen as an essential nature and ‘accident’ which was defined as the outward appearance.

Ontological Argument, Anselm of Canterbury 1033 - 1109:  'Therefore, O Lord, thou art not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but thou art a being greater than can be conceived. For, since it can be conceived that there is such a being, if thou art not this very being, a greater than thou can be conceived. But this is impossible.'

Karl Marx. Das Kapital: 'Soon after its birth modern society pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth and greeted gold as its Holy Grail.'

Nietzsche. The Gay Science: 'God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves - we who are the greatest murderers of all?'

Anthropocene: First coined by Nobel prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen; ‘Anthropocene’ refers to a geological era that corresponds to the Earth’s recent history. This is the term coined to represent the era when humans began to have a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems and climate.

Fisher Kings: Occurring in many of the Grail texts, The Fisher Kings are the guardians of the Grail and live at the Grail Castle 

Being and Time (German: Sein und Zeit, 1927) Martin Heidegger.

Book of Life: The name given to the outcome of American research into the human genome.

John Newling: Grail Text, 1997; From my Garden, 2008

T.S.Eliot: The Waste Land, 1922; The Hollow Men, 1925; Sweeney Erect, 1920

W.B. Yeats: The Second Coming, 1920

Quotations fom Mark Rothko:

'I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship between form and color. The only thing I care about is the expression of man's basic emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny.'

'Certain people always say we should go back to nature. I notice they never say we should go forward to nature.'

'Pictures must be miraculous.'

'Silence is so accurate.'

In the June 13, 1943 edition of the New York Times, Rothko, together with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, published the following brief manifesto:

Extract

'We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.'

Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, Saturday, December 7, 2002: 'Mark Rothko was found on the morning of February 25 1970, lying dead in a wine-dark sea of his own blood. He had cut very deep into his arms at the elbow, and the pool emanating from him on the floor of his studio measured 8ft x 6ft. That is, it was on the scale of his paintings. It was, to borrow the art critical language of the time, a colour field…'

© John Newling & Nottingham Visual Arts