Michael Jinkins

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” 

                — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The words remain among the most often quoted in the history of philosophy: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Wittgenstein’s famed pronouncement in his epoch-defining book, known among philosophers simply as “The Tractatus,” draws a line at the outer edge of human discourse more forbidding than any mere political or martial boundary on earth.  

Human beings can only speak meaningfully about a very limited range of things. However, arguably, the most compelling matters related to life and death that have puzzled mankind throughout time, those subjects beyond our reach — eternity, infinity, creation, love, meaning, purpose, God (or any other name you wish to grant to ultimate reality) — these matters and scores of others demand silence. 

Ultimately.  Words.  Fail. 

Can art, however, go where human language cannot? Can art become the handmaiden of silence? Can art bridge the unbridgeable? 

No artist has explored these questions with greater integrity and intensity than did Mark Rothko. The arc of his progress as an artist bent from abstract figurative and urban scenes toward something like (but equally unlike) surrealism, to the haunting planes of colors (which can only be dimly imitated by any other artist), finally to the deep palette of those epic panels that evoke silence in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. 

As Rothko’s son Christopher once wrote, Rothko’s “work communicates on a level that is explicitly preverbial. Indeed, it would be hard to find a less-narrative painting. Like music, my father’s artwork seeks to express the inexpressible — we are far removed from the realm of words.”

Here we find the echo of Kandinsky.* Music expresses reality that words cannot. But can visual art take us where even music falls silent? Rothko tries to do just this in his crowning achievement, his chapel. 

I remember as though it were yesterday sitting in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford University. It was during Michaelmas Term 1999. I was there on a post-doctoral fellowship. My days were given to research, my evenings left free. For one of those evenings I had a ticket to a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Requiem.” If you are familiar with his requiem, you know that it begins at death. Musically, Verdi attempts to evoke the silence of the grave. (If, by chance you are not familiar with it, please stop reading right now and listen to a recording of it.)

Closing my eyes that evening, I was transported for just a few moments in my imagination to that shadowland where human breath ceases, what Hebrew poets long ago called “Sheol,” where, as John Henry Newman prayed, “the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over,” and I felt wave upon wave of sweet darkness and peace. But, knowing Verdi’s “Requiem,” I knew that Verdi would not allow us to rest long in the grave. Soon the stillness and hush would be broken by the soul-rending entry of orchestral brass, and the dead would rise to the business of divine judgment. Such was Verdi’s vision!

Rothko, however, takes us deeper into that stillness, into the Place of Shadows, into unknowable Sheol. Deeper into that hush, he invites us. He allows the darkness to gather round us like a shroud, soft as our favorite blanket, warm as the womb that bore us into this world. 

Rothko has in mind a Renaissance chapel, and he saw himself as an heir to the great artists of the Renaissance. Rothko evoked a Renaissance vision of death and judgment, not unlike Verdi’s later operatic version. But Rothko refuses to allow us to give ourselves over to any narrative, any story, any myth or legend that makes sense of the darkness into which we cannot see from the auditorium of the living. His vast planes of deep dark colors, colors many casual viewers in their glancing pace through the chapel see only as black, draw us to contemplate what cannot be perceived, and to perceive that which is beyond human contemplation. 

Tread softly here for this is holy ground, ground made holy not by the priests of any religious tradition, but by the longings of all humanity. Silence is the only acceptable liturgy in this chapel, where we are likely to discover that the very thing we each and everyone must experience individually is that which makes us all alike. 

Terror has no place in these deep panels. Unless you bring it with you from your own private hell. 

Here, layer upon layer of enigmatic pigments float outward to the patient observer, welcoming us into a presence or The Presence, The Absence or an emptiness. And somehow (and how could we possibly know how?) we find ourselves blessed.

There are monumental Rothkos in great museums across the country and around the world. I cannot think of seeing them on the same terms I do other marvelous works of art. I think, rather, of “entering their presence.” In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, I step into that room where enormous Rothkos hang opposite that other master of abstract expressionism, Jackson Pollock, and I feel as I did stepping into Notre Dame de Paris for the first time decades ago. This is a place of reverence because of the spirit that is here evoked. I could say something similar of the Rothkos in the Tate in London, or in the Chicago Institute of Art or the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or midtown Manhattan’s MOMA. 

But nowhere is the spirit evoked with such force as within the walls of the Rothko Chapel. To enter there is to enter into that realm to which the mystical Medieval classic “The Cloud of Unknowing” tries to transport us. Is it possible for Agnosticism to be more than mere negation, to be, instead, a call to reverence? 

I hope so. I do not know. I dare not hope to know. There are boundaries beyond which I cannot know, can never speak. And I glory in this not knowing, not speaking, because this is at least partially what it means to be human. And this is enough. 

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*The previous blog, “What is it supposed to be?”, explored Kandinsky and the Spiritual in Art.