Monologue-ing Chris

I  went to see Rothko, but I also see life. There were a couple, an old man in a wheelchair pushed by a youngster, a little girl accompanied by her very tall father. I was shaking when I took this photo. I was shaking when I saw a glimmer of life, so I made it 'Seurated'.

Rothko was just a happy coincidence when I wandered around. He was a tragedy for his suicide because of his heart defect illness. The saying in Mandarin is somehow correct - long lasting suffering in illnesses breeds the hatred toward life.

Oh I remember reading something about Rothko and psychology, and later on, about his refusal of relating his paintings to his life. Interpretations are left to eye of the beholders. I remember he insisted on nothing going between his paintings and the audience. Sontag said, 'interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world  - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings'.

Meanwhile, while reading her thinking 'art as a seduction rather than rape', this quote of hers, 'a large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter', just made me laugh outloud to tears in fears.

 

The glimmer of life showed itself again while I passed by a familiar scene. Well, there are these many familiar déjà vu scenes. There are these many nightmares. Nightmares, can they be metaphors, too? Oh, yeah, life, and, Illlness as Metaphor. Sontag wrote that 'everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.'

I've been struggling in this Kingdom of the Sick awaiting some hope of recovery, but in vain. I don't prefer using the 'good passport' since it's not recognised in the world when most of them teasing its entity and most of them doubting its legitimacy, if you know what I mean; and I was seduced to eternally use the 'sick passport' as an identity of the forever-ill, and I was then again a citizen of nothing. 'Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens - and real diseases are useful material,' Sontag said.

 

Today, is the Sontag's Quotes Day.

'It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe - though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived'. Reckoning that a friend once commented some truth he discovered that almost all people are very self-indulgent in the past because of the feelings of safet-iness. Almost no one lives in the present and plans for the future. Now I realise how this was originated.

But, 'the truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is'. And, 'the truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie'.

Lies, sometimes, are so true, so true to be told.

Oh, ok. This is the very last but not least quote from Sontag then. 'The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste'. It is why Rothko fits so well in this blog on the Sontag's Quotes Day, if he agreed that he's now categorised in the Surreal part of modern arts.

Note: This blog article was written by Christine Lee, 'the writer [who] is either a practising recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both'.