When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuściński located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?

There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq.

Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.

Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests.

The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.

There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country).

Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups. Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the Khomeini revolution.

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

Iran is currently in the grip of a new and strong political movement. While this movement proves that Ahmadinejad’s populist techniques of deception no longer work inside Iran, it seems they are still effective outside the country. This is mainly due to thirty years of isolation and mutual mistrust between Iran and the West which has turned my country into a mysterious phenomenon for outsiders. In this piece I will try to confront some of the mystifications and misunderstandings produced by the international media in the last week.

In the first scenario the international media, claiming impartiality, insisted that the reformists provide hard objective evidence in support of their claim that the June 12 election has been rigged. But despite their empiricist attitude, the media missed obvious facts due to their lack of familiarity with the socio-historical context. Although the reformists could not possibly offer any figures or documents, because the whole show was single-handedly run by Ahmadinejad’s ministry of interior, anyone familiar with Iran’s recent history could easily see what was wrong with this picture.

It was the government who reversed the conventional and logical procedure by announcing a fictitious total figure first – in four stages – and then fabricating figures for each polling station, something that is still going on. This led to many absurdities: Musavi got less votes in his hometown (Tabriz) than Ahmadinejad; Karroubi’s total vote was less than the number of people active in his campaign; Rezaee’s votes were reduced by a hundred thousand between the third and fourth stages of announcement; blank votes were totally forgotten and only hastily added to the count when reformists pointed this out; and finally the ratio between all candidates’ votes remained almost constant in all these four stages of announcement (63, 33, 2 and 1 percent respectively).

Moreover, as in any other country, the increase in turnout in Iran’s elections has always benefited the opposition and not the incumbent, because it is rational to assume that those who usually don’t vote, i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want to change the status quo. Yet in this election Ahmadinejad, the representative of the status quo, allegedly received 10 million votes more than what he got in the previous election.

Finally, Ahmadinejad’s nervous reaction after his so-called victory is the best proof for rigging: closing down SMS network and the whole of country’s mobile phone network, arresting more than 100 leading political activists, blocking access to Musavi’s and many other reformists’ websites and unleashing violence in the streets… But if all this is not enough, the bodies of more than 17 people who were shot dead and immediately buried in unknown graves should persuade all those “objective-minded” observers.

In the second scenario, gradually unfolding in the last few days, the international media implicitly shifted its attention to the role of internet and its social networking (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc). This implied that millions of illiterate conservative villagers have voted for Ahmadinejad and the political movement is mostly limited to educated middle classes in North Tehran. While this simplified image is more compatible with media’s comfortable position towards Iran in the last 30 years, it is far from reality. The recent political history of Iran does not confirm this image. For example, Khatami’s victory in 1997, despite his absolute lack of any economic promises and his focus instead on liberal civic demands, was made possible by the polarization of society into people and state. Khatami could win only by embracing people from all different classes and groups, villagers and urban people alike.

There is no doubt that new media and technologies have been playing an important role in the movement, but it seems that the cause and the effect are being reversed in the picture painted by the media. First of all, it is the existence of a strong political determination, combined with people becoming deprived of basic means of communication, which has led the movement to creatively test every other channel and method. Musavi’s paper was shut down on the night of election, his frequent request to talk to people on the state TV has been rejected, his official website is often blocked and his physical contact with his supporters has been kept minimum by keeping him in house arrest (with the exception of his appearance on the over a million march on June 15).

Second, due to the heavy pressure on foreign journalists inside Iran, these technological tools have come to play a significant role in sending the messages and images of the movement to the outside world. However, the creative self-organization of the movement is using a manifold of methods and channels, many of them simple and traditional, depending on their availability: shouting ‘death to dictator’ from rooftops, calling landlines, at the end of one rally chanting the time and place of the next one, and by jeopardizing oneself by physically standing on streets and distributing news to every passing car. The appearance of the movement which is being sold by the media to the western gaze – the cyber-fantasy of the western societies which has already labelled our movement a twitter revolution, seems to have completely missed the reality of those bodies which are shot dead, injured or ready to be endangered by non-virtual bullets.

What is more surprising in the midst of this media frenzy is the blindness of the western left to the political dynamism and energy of our movement. The causes of this blindness oscillate between the misgivings about Islam (or the Islamophobia of hyper-secular left) and the confusion made by Ahmadinjead’s fake anti-imperialist rhetoric (his alliance with Chavez perhaps, who after all was the first to congratulate him). It needs to be emphasized that Ahmadinejad’s economic policies are to the right of the IMF: cutting subsidies in a radical way, more privatization than any other post-79 government (by selling the country to the Revolutionary Guards) and an inflation and unemployment rate which have brought the low-income sections of the society to their knees. It is in this regard that Musavi’s politics needs to be understood in contradistinction from both Ahmadinejad and also the other reformist candidate, i.e. Karroubi.

While Karroubi went for the liberal option of differentiating people into identity groups with different demands (women, students, intellectuals, ethnicities, religious minorities, etc), Musavi emphasized the universal demands of ‘people’ who wanted to be heard and counted as political subjects. This subjectivity, emphasized by Musavi during his campaign and fully incarnated in the rallies of the past few days, is constituted by political intuition, creativity and recollection of the 79 revolution (no wonder that people so quickly reached an unexpected maturity, best manifested in the abstention from violence in their silent demonstrations). Musavi’s ‘people’ is also easily, but strongly, distinguished from Ahmadinejad’s anonymous masses dependent on state charity. Musavi’s people, as the collective appearing in the rallies, is made of religious women covered in chador walking hand in hand with westernized young women who are usually prosecuted for their appearance; veterans of war in wheelchairs next to young boys for whom the Iran-Iraq war is only an anecdote; and working class who have sacrificed their daily salary to participate in the rally next to the middle classes. This story is not limited to Tehran. Shiraz (two confirmed dead), Isfahan (one confirmed dead), Tabriz, Oroomiye are also part of this movement and other cities are joining with a predictable delay (as it was the case in 79 revolution).

History will prove who the real participants of this movement are but once again we are faced with a new, non-classical and unfamiliar radical politics. Will the Western left get it right this time?

This piece was originally published here

* The title is a reference to Michel Foucault’s 1978 writing on Iran’s revolution: “What are the Iranians dreaming about?”

In Memoriam: Dr. George Tiller (1941 - 2009)

He was asked to conclude his talk with a vision of the future that he wished to see and was working towards.

‘I personally see a society that respects the integrity of its citizens to struggle with complex health issues and make decisions that are appropriate for them and their personal lives. I see a society that respects the religious differences of its citizens. I see a society that rejects hate, rejects judgmental condemnation, and rejects prejudice and racism. I see a government that honors the privacy of its citizens without unwarranted surveillance. I see a society where war is not an option.’

His striped shirt did not match his patterned tie.  His Utopia sounded saccharine, slightly naïve and simple.  Nearly cliché.  We have all appealed to these ideals, but what good does it do?  These are just words.  Still.  So much could be hung on that word ‘complex’.  He continued with a series of platitudes and a touch of irony that got a small laugh from his audience.

‘We have given war, pestilence, hate, greed, judgment, ego, self-sufficiency a good try. And it failed. We need a new paradigm that consists of kindness, courtesy, justice, love and respect in all our relationships.’ 

Then a pause.  A moment to collect himself.  A shift in tone.  He left his paper for a moment. Speaking from somewhere unscripted inside of himself, his right hand caught in his left.  There seems now, in retrospect, a slight urgency to his words.  A pleading to keep going, an insistence on perseverance:

‘Work hard. Be a leader. Your way of life depends on it. And just look at the rest of the world. That’s the way the anti-abortion segment of our population wants the USA to be. And how do we do that? We do it the way we have always done things. We feel our way forward. We consider defeat a temporary inconvenience. And we never, ever, ever take no for an answer. Never take no for an answer. Work hard. Be a leader. The rest of your life depends on it, and the life of your sisters and brothers throughout the world depend on it.’

These were the words of Dr. George Tiller from March 2008.  On May 31st, 2009, Tiller became the eighth abortion provider (the fourth doctor) to be murdered in the United States since 1977.  On March 10th, 1993, Dr. David Gunn of Pensacola, Florida, was fatally shot during a protest.  On June 29th, 1994, Dr. John Britton and his clinic escort, James Barrett, were both shot to death outside a Pensacola facility.  On December 30th, 1994, Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols, two receptionists, were killed in two clinic attacks in Brookline, Massachusetts.   In 1998, Robert Sanderson, an off-duty police officer, and Dr. Barnett Slepian were killed.  Tiller was sixty-seven years old and was shot outside of the Wichita Reformation Lutheran Church in Kansas where he was an usher. 

Tiller’s was one of 3 clinics in the United States performing late-term abortions after the 21st week of pregnancy.  His clinic was bombed in 1985.  In 1991, during the so-called ‘Summer of Mercy’, anti-abortion protestors tried to block access to his clinic.  Protestors also insisted the District Attorney investigate Tiller on a variety of criminal charges, of which he was acquitted.  Dr. Tiller survived a 1993 shooting sustaining gunshot wounds to both arms.  It was after this last attack that Tiller’s trauma started affecting him.  To compensate, he hired a Brink’s armored car to take him to and from the clinic.  He joked that those days were the only times he ever left the clinic on time.  In 1994, he was assigned federal marshals to protect him.   Anti-abortion activists stalked his wife and harassed his business vendors.  When speaking of these experiences and sharing slides of his bombed clinic he repeated his attitude plainly, but with gusto: ‘Hell, no, we won’t go!’  He believed in the American legal system and the rights the government gave his clinic to use the full implementation of the Roe v. Wade decision to conduct post-viability terminations of pregnancy.

Tiller first worked as a surgeon in the Navy.  With the death of his father in a plane crash, he returned to Wichita with the aim of closing down his father’s medical practice and pursuing his own aspirations of becoming a dermatologist.  Dr. Susan Robinson recounted that after returning he just couldn’t leave: the patients kept him in Wichita.  One day, she recalled, a woman asked him for an abortion and he said ‘Well, I don’t do abortions.’  The patient made it clear: ‘You have to do abortions.  Women need abortions, and you have to do them.  Your dad did them, and you have to do them.’ 

It was from these patients, Tiller would explain, that he became a woman-educated physician. (What he meant by being woman-centered could be summed up in a list of his rules, which themselves owe a debt to midwifery: The woman’s body is smarter than the doctor.  Time, Patience, and the baby will come.  Respect the woman’s rhythm.  And if you forget the second and third rule, remember the first: The woman’s body is smarter than the doctor.) He learned quickly about the abuse and devastation that occurs in families as a result of alcoholism and drug addiction.  

His pivotal moment came when a mother and her nine and half year-old daughter travelled from California to his clinic to terminate the girl’s pregnancy.   The girl was too far along and he explained that he could not help.  Stories leaked to the press that Dr. Tiller was ready to kill babies for a nine-year old.   In trying to explain the situation to his own nine and ten year-old daughters, he came to realize what he had to do.  Thirty seconds into him trying to explain the situation, Tiller’s daughter Jennifer said ‘Daddy, a nine year old girl shouldn’t be pregnant, and simply not by her father or her grandfather or her uncle.’  Tiller, who would joke that he was going to allow his daughters to car-date when they were 35, had to face the reality that at nine and ten, his daughters already knew a great deal about sex and babies and right and wrong.

‘What one of the things that my father taught me was that to be credible in medicine, you must require for your patients the same care that you would require for your family.  I made a decision that if my nine and ten year old daughter at that time were in that situation, I would do the procedure.  I did it for this girl.  It turned out marvelously.  There were no problems, no complications.  And I made that decision at that time that I was going to help as many people as I possibly could.  And age was—if a woman or a girl was able to get pregnant, we should be able to do a termination of pregnancy.’

His clinic walls were lined with thank you letters from patients from all over the world.  There was a letter from the woman from New Zealand who found out thirty weeks into their pregnancy that her baby didn’t have a brain.  There was one from the woman from New York whose baby had a life threatening tumor on the fetus.  Post-viability abortions save women’s lives.  Dr. Tiller saved people’s lives.  But how might we explain such a simple fact to his murderer or to those such as Randal Terry from Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion activist group:

‘Dr. Tiller was a mass murderer.  I grieve for him that he did not have an opportunity to properly prepare his soul to face his Maker.  Unless some miracle happened, he left this life with his hands drenched with the innocent blood of tens of thousands of babies that he murdered.  Surely there will be a dreadful accounting for what he has done.’

Tiller always believed that these people were simply misguided by their religion, that they didn’t understand the lives or biological realities of different women’s lives.  But domestic baby killers spill ink, so to speak, and people who help women don’t.  Bill O’Reilly mentioned Dr. Tiller on twenty-nine episodes of his The O’Reilly Factor on Fox:

‘Let’s be more blunt: Tiller is executing fetuses in his Wichita clinic for $5,000.  And records show he’ll do it for vague medical reasons.  That is, he’ll kill the fetus, viable outside the womb, if the mother wants it dead.  No danger to the mother’s life, no catastrophic damage if the woman delivers… There are Americans who believe that babies that are about to be born are not human beings—how they form that conclusion is interesting—and only a handful of doctors in the USA who will perform late-term abortions for any reason, because doctors know a viable life when they see it.’

I find myself sometimes repeating platitudes like they are koans or prayers to help me keep a grip on what is happening around me.  We seek peace.  We would like housing and medicine and education to receive greater funding than bailing out banks or supporting the military industries.  People should not be terrorized or occupied by foreign powers.  When I am fumbling, I reach my way forward to hold onto such simple truths, like a baby at grip with its pacifier.  But simple wishes are not enough.  These are just words.  Sometimes, however, when the words turn a little differently, they take the shape of thought and help nourish and protect us.  Language in the guise of thought can sometimes hold open enough space to inhabit the worlds our imagination offer us and that we must take the responsibility to help create.  All of a sudden and in an instant such was the space offered to me when I overheard Dr. Tiller’s words, repeated by someone else, wherein he noted that ‘Women are spiritually, morally and intellectually capable of struggling with complex, ethical decisions and arriving at the correct decision for themselves and their family.’ As his voice fades beneath the din of denunciations or simply as he is forgotten under a thin layer of earth, may we speak with him again and imagine better worlds.

‘An active line on a walk moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk’s sake.’

Paul Klee, Allegorizing Drawing

The How to Live project will be leading a philosophical walking tour from Hay-on-Wye to Hay Bluff, on Tuesday 26th May 2009.   You are invited to join us, walking and talking at the same time, as we make our way along Offa’s Dyke to navigate philosophical landscapes. We will be thinking about philosophy and walking, and the philosophy of walking.

Setting off from The Globe at Hay (Newport Street, Hay-on-Wye, HR3 5BG) on TUESDAY at 11AM, the walking tour will chart a course towards Hay Bluff (4 ¼ miles or 6.8 km from Hay), resting at sites of interest and for spectacular views, as well as pausing for thought.  We’ll see how far we get. On returning to Hay, walkers may wish to swim with us at The Warren on the River Wye.

Walkers will be provided details of the route and a pack of reading material.  The packs will be made available beforehand to interested parties who may email nemonie.craven@htlblog.com to register. There will be no charge. Solitary walkers and groups welcome.   

‘Walking, then, is a perpetual falling with a perpetual self-recovery’

Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Physiology of Walking (1883)

Shahidha Bari will be speaking at How the Light Gets In on Monday 25th May (www.howthelightgetsin.org).

About the Walking & Talking Group

Nemonie Craven Roderick

In the early hours of a November morning in 2004, I set off with my friends Sam and Pinny, from our house in Stamford Hill, London, to Paddington, where we met up with a group of strangers and boarded a train to Gerrards Cross. From there, we walked - friends and strangers - through Buckinghamshire, to a beautiful village hall, where we ate lunch together, then watched performers read from Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice – an account of the German filmmaker’s journey, on foot, from Munich to Paris, in November 1974, to the bedside of his beloved Lotte Eisner:

‘My boots were so solid and new that I had confidence in them. I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot. Besides, I wanted to be alone with myself.’ Of Walking in Ice (New York: Free Association, 2007)

During this magical day (organised by experimental theatre company 1st Framework), the rhythm of our walking leant energy to our thoughts, and, through our talking, shared ideas formed as visibly as the clouds of our breath.

This event inspired the creation of Goethe’s Elective Affinities Walking Group (London, New York, Bridgend). Goethe is our mascot of Walking & Talking, and this summer Emma Townshend will lead a walking tour of Kew in his honour. The Walking & Talking group is an energetic variation on the reading group: we read before we walk; we walk and talk.

For more information please email nemonie.craven@htlblog.com

My first conversation with Louise Stern was scrawled on scrap paper offered up from her yawning leather purse. As most friendships with Louise do, our friendship began through writing, because she’s deaf. She’s the one friend I keep up with primarily via transatlantic missives, and I open fat envelopes from London every few months with singular pleasure. That’s the thing about memory – it thrives on images and senses, pulling from a barrage of multi-sensory information a version of truth. And once remembered, a moment is described with a particular slant of meaning, with an eye toward creating a picture that another person can see. That’s how we write letters, and Louise’s do just that. In her letters she describes the old men in Wellies who populate her neighborhood on a rainy Saturday or the strange pleasure of waking up with a hangover headache, which allows her to spend the day in bed — little scenes that I can picture vividly.

Some time ago, though, I came across a stack of crumpled pages – it was a conversation Louise had four years ago with my then brand new boyfriend, at our favorite meeting place, a self-consciously cheesy bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Waitresses came and went in cowboy hats and holsters, carrying trays of nachos and green-chilli cheeseburgers. Louise and my boyfriend sat at a booth, supervised by a glittery photograph of a serene cowgirl, and chatted on paper. In hurriedly scrawled longhand, their conversation captures that brief moment in time just as it was — more accurately, if less vividly, than an authorial description recalled from memory could. A record of a conversation is an artifact of a relationship, a snapshot of what was actually experienced between two people, in the moment that it was experienced, and in that way, it’s accurate, though it’s far less sensory than my memories of late nights spent at that kitschy bar eating gooey quesadillas, or Louise’s of rainy Saturdays in London.

Louise’s recent art addresses, first and foremost, real snippets from her daily correspondences, such as the one described above. These conversations, scrawled on menus and expired calendars, are plucked from the bar booths and park benches of real life. They provide a glimpse of real experiences. An elemental narrative unfolds naturally over a prescribed period of time, and we even glean a rough sense of character, setting, and tone from the hurriedly jotted words, as if collecting clues. But as I fill in details, imagining settings and actors, I’m also reminded of how much of life isn’t really about words, it’s about people, about complex interactions in specific circumstances. I’m reminded about how much we don’t know about these people — how much we have to invent — when all we have to go on is language. And also, how much our brains take in to make inferences, to pull from a few scraps of conversation a sense of meaning.

What makes this kind of presentation different from typical narratives is that these dialogues aren’t seen through an author’s filter - rather, they’re presented as they actually existed, word for word and person to person. Unlike most literature, where we’re allowed certain kinds of intimacy and withheld others — where we’re guided through a narrative from behind a distinct set of eyes — here we’re able to draw our own conclusions about the characters and about Louise. We’re removed from the context of the interaction – an orientation that leaves us feeling both welcome and held at arm’s length, eavesdropping on the outskirts of other people’s lives. Being distant from the original author/reader dichotomy, we are able to move freely into our own perceptions because Louise gives us room to do so, presenting this information with refreshing neutrality. She becomes vulnerable to our judgment, too.

Last year Louise published a book of her written conversations called “A Strange Story”. Of course we can picture the man she converses with at a “job do” in a London Bar. We imagine him as tall and skinny, wearing a suit and a loosened neck-tie, and he’s already three sheets to the wind when we encounter him discussing Eva Longoria with Louise. He’s had a long week, full of cubicle work in his beige office building. He’s got more money than he has time to use it, but that’s only one reason he’s buying Louise beers in a spare, industrial-looking bar. The other is that he’s desperate, not just sexually desperate — desperate desperate. I sense this somehow in his happily drunk word-choice, in his insistence that Eva Longoria IS HOT.

More elusive, however, is the mysterious male figure who “suspects he’s quietly in love” with Louise in “A Strange Story about Love.” He’s hard to read, and not just because his handwriting is unfamiliar and messy. He’s hard to read because he says things like, “I suspect I’m quietly in love with you.” I cannot create a picture of him that isn’t dark and shadowy – and maybe that’s because everything he says is shadowy, not quite what it seems. The lack of detail in all of these conversations forces you to literally “take a person at their word,” and there’s a kind of emptiness to a person who is reduced to his or her conversations. They’re a bare outline, a brief sketch, as elliptical as their words. Even anger reads a bit tamely here, without a particular lens to view it with. In a way that I’ve come to see as characteristic of Louise, her comments are direct and biting, but being handwritten, they come across as sparse and isolated. Like emails or text messages, they read less violently than a verbal dialogue of conflict. Without contextual details — the expression on someone’s face, the way they speak, the emphasis they put on certain words — it’s hard to say with any certainty what the underlying truth of the situation is. It’s hard to know the characters, hard to relate to their dialogue.

The conversations Louise offers up are surprisingly intimate, yet anonymity divides us from the true story. Though a few pages of these written conversations often distill the essence of entire relationships, they’re also punctuated by an acute sense of what isn’t shared. And, it’s strange, but my sense of removal from the situations outlined here evokes a certain loneliness in me. Maybe it’s the loneliness of voyeurism. Or maybe it’s a sadness that’s more related to the failure of words, our inability to accurately communicate through language alone. What about the cowgirl waitresses and the gooey quesadillas at that Western bar? Aren’t the grease stains and the water rings on these pages somehow more indicative of an experience than the words that passed between two people? In a world full of language – a world literally saturated with literature, film, social interactions and depictions of them, theatre, internet, newspapers and magazines, and contemporary critical analysis full of criticism and analysis – experiences are often seen as a sum of their words, or at least essential to them. But words aren’t essential to experience, and this is a theme that obsesses Louise.

Last week I went ice-fishing with some friends. We sat on upturned buckets in the middle of a frozen lake. We drank dark beer. At dusk we caught an eighteen-inch brown trout. It was slimy and dappled with pink spots. We hardly spoke, and when we did, it was about the weather, or the bait, or the depth of the water. What Louise does is remind us how much of a particular experience isn’t about language. Were I to reduce those quiet hours out on the lake to the words we actually uttered, were I to transcribe them as a document of the experience, they’d be transparently vacant, capturing only the bare outlines of what we actually shared. “Nice fish.” “My toes are freezing.” “Any luck?”

How would the reader know that the giant clouds above the mountains turned blue as dusk set in? How would they know the moment as I now recall it? How would they appreciate how still it was, how despite the harshness of the landscape — the knee deep snow, the rocky outcroppings, the huge sad-looking pine trees — the evening seemed restful, fresh snow silently remaking everything, the descending dusk weirdly comforting, enfolding? After a while we packed everything up and headed home in the companionable warmth of the car. Our cheeks ached from the cold. We shared a thermos of tea. In those moments, giddy from shared experience, sitting in collective silence, we are wise, and we understand our relationships better than we ever could by talking, or writing, them through the wringer.

Carrie Braman grew up in New Mexico and Vermont. She is a graduate student in creative writing at the University of Montana. She’s working on a collection of essays about search for authenticity, including a travel narrative about the search for authentic pie. She’s interested in food writing and art criticism, and plays the accordion.

Louise Stern is a native Californian. She now lives and works in London, and her art, which centres on ideas of language, communication, silence and isolation, has recently been shown in London, Cornwall, Geneva, New York City, Barcelona, Madrid and Albania. Her first book of short stories with Granta Books is coming
out in 2010. How to Live is proud to be publishing the Diario throughout April.

Shimon Attie is an American artist, creator of innovative series of works such as The Writing on the Wall. Attie spent 5 months living and working in Aberfan, the South Wales village marked by the coalslip which in 1966 killed 144 people, including 116 children. Here Chris Townsend, professor at the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, reflects on Attie’s resulting video work, The Attraction of Onlookers: Aberfan - an Anatomy of a Welsh Village. All images (stills) are by Shimon Attie, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

The Choir Men

In The Attraction of Onlookers Shimon Attie offers us restrained yet intimate portraits of individuals; he also offers us an intimate portrait of the community that is the South Wales village of Aberfan. Filmed rotating slowly on a platform in front of the camera, each individual now interacts with the others on the screens around them and with the others who succeed them. They seem to float in space, isolated and without any form of location or context, identifiable only by the tools of their trade, the accoutrements of study or play, their robes and uniforms of office. To become understandable, to be interpreted, both by us and - as we shall see - in order to understand each other and the history to which they belong, these individuals have to be related both between images, one to another, and in series - one after another. Where these individuals, these citizens, belong is not Aberfan as a place, though that is where they all live. Nor do they belong to Aberfan as a history, or rather not to a specific historical trauma, though that is a history that they all live - whether it has been lived through, in some cases survived, or for the newcomers and those born in the last forty years, inherited. Where they belong - these individuals, these citizens - is in the community of Aberfan that they make. That is in Aberfan not as place or history, but as a network of friendships and antipathies, as a network of trust and support, caution and scepticism, as lives lived, everyday. This community, distinctively, has found itself in a void, been made by and through a catastrophic event and what came after. But the ‘what came after’ here is not a continuation of the event, not a series of events and after-effects imposed on those who already suffer. Rather it is because of that void – a certain spacing of history, a certain space which, often by neglect, has been given to the people of the village – that the community which preceded the catastrophe has rediscovered itself, that a new community has been made. It is this community, whose members can look each other in the face, experience each other, that has made history, and the transformation of place, its work, even as that transformation has made them and the village of Aberfan into a spectacle, an attraction for onlookers.

The Boxer

Each of Attie’s portraits is a detailed study of an individual or small group of people; a degree of scrutiny that we rarely, if ever, receive. The portrait is not a democratic genre of art; before the twentieth century it is rarely concerned with the ordinary or the collective. It is only with the advent of the camera, and projects such as that of the German photographer August Sander, whose ‘Men of the Twentieth Century’ attempted to document systematically the representative figures of ordinary life in Germany between two world wars, that we witness a concern with the mundane. (When we look at a great group portrait from history, such as Rembrandt’s The Nightwatch, we are not usually aware that this is no ordinary group of men banded together to protect and police the city, but rather a social institution whose membership was keenly sought by those who wished to emphasise or enhance their already significant status and authority within the community. This is a painting of power and for power. It is this group that has commissioned Rembrandt, one of the leading, and therefore one of the costliest, painters of the day to make their portrait – a portrait that in itself further enhances collective and individual status.) In many ways, as the French art historian Louis Marin showed, whoever the portrait is of, always the portrait is the king: it exists as forms of representation that embody and disseminate power from the top down. All subsequent portraits, whether those of noblemen and women, clerics, soldiers, or scholars, seek resemblance with their ruler, the king’s image and therefore seek to convey whatever degree of power and influence the sitter may exercise in a hierarchical society. The subject of the portrait may be an isolated individual, but through portraiture he is also exposed as belonging to a network of relationships – he is, paradoxically, part of a community.

The Headmaster

Visually, Attie’s portraits have more in common with Sander’s than Rembrandt’s, but we might say of them that they keep a watch over each other, even as they are watched over by us. We might say that they are historically significant figures, perhaps more significant in the relation of the mundanity of their daily lives to the events of a wider history than the aspirant Dutch burghers or petty renaissance priests and princelings. This is not an essay about “Aberfan”, about a place as synecdoche of an awful historical event; rather it is about Shimon Attie’s artwork about the citizens of Aberfan. We cannot represent the deaths, we cannot represent the losses experienced by those who survived. However, even as Attie consciously places his subjects in a darkened void and a kind of spacing, within the video installation, we need to outline a relationship between the artwork and history. That void is only understandable as a void if it is framed. The disaster of 1966 defined Aberfan: even as it destroyed the history of the village as it had been to that point. It is that tragedy which makes the village, even today, the subject of media spectacle. One could say that, in the eyes of the media, in Aberfan every day since 21st October 1966 is always the day after the catastrophe. Yet that trauma emerged from Aberfan’s history. Aberfan’s identity before that day, its very existence, was predicated on the economy of mining at Merthyr Vale; the disaster was a consequence of neglect, of disdain even, towards the community by the management of the industry, by the hierarchies to which that management belonged, that manifested itself in other ways, ways that demeaned its members rather then destroying them. The disaster of the landslip did not change that situation; rather it exposed it and repeated it. One of the striking features of Aberfan’s history after 21st October 1966, along with the niggardly compensation, is that a solitary social worker was appointed for one year to help the bereaved and the traumatised inhabitants of the village cope what had happened. To all intents the citizens of Aberfan were left to get on with it; they were in a void, just as they had been before the event. The difference was that now their struggle with history, their struggle to understand and shape what had happened and what was happening to them, was now the subject of media interest, they had become part of the media spectacle.

The Family I

The darkness that surrounds Attie’s subjects, whether in the video installation or accompanying photographs, might be understood as symbolic as much as it is a literal, quietly spectacular framing device, but it is not a symbol of the moment. The blackness is not there to describe a caesura, the absolute break in history that we might take 21st October 1966 to have been. It is not to say that the only context for these people is a non-context, not to say that on this day the village of Aberfan ended in catastrophe, not to say that the only way in which its citizens can be envisaged is in emptiness. Nor is the darkness there to literalise the blackness of coal, nor of burial, the blackness of memory, nor a perpetual sense of mourning – though it might invoke all those things. Though the mass-media might want to depict the village thus, Aberfan does not go daily dressed in mourning wear. The catastrophe was not an event that defined and fixed the place forever, nor a trauma lived through, mourned and then “healthily” forgotten. (This would be the psychologist’s model of mourning: incorporation, memorial, and coming out the other side forgetting, mostly.) The catastrophe is an event that is lived through and lived with, that at once shapes Aberfan and is constantly reshaped by it. The event is not one of the past tense that determines perpetually the future; it is immediate, lived with, lives on, and is a property of the community. In sharp contrast to the media version of history as spectacle, this is history as lived experience.

Here I want to invoke a hypothesis by the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, which has an important resonance for Aberfan as place and people, and which Shimon Attie seems to me to be capturing in his video and photographs:

History…does not belong primarily to time, nor to succession, nor to causality, but to community, or to being-in-common. And this is so because community itself is historical. Which means that it is not a substance, nor a subject; it is not a common being, which could be the goal or culmination of a progressive process. It is rather a being-in-common which only happens, or which is happening, an event, more than a “being”.

This is not, conventionally, how we think of history: history is ‘events in time’; it is one-thing-after-another. A conventional view would have it that Aberfan only exists after the visible, representable event, that history begins in October 1966 at the same moment as it comes to a catastrophic end. This is the view of the world’s media, reiterating trauma as spectacle for passive audiences. In that presentation of catastrophe the mass media overlooks its own responsibility for a critical analysis of events and fails to demonstrate that even the day after the event, the event changes. History is always being resumed, even in the moment of the disastrous happening, even as the world around us ends.

How is history resumed? How does it come to belong to “us”, to a community in the real world rather than to individuals in portraits? I want to suggest that in the village of Aberfan, history was resumed by a group of people, the community, who were made by the event and who took that history to be theirs. To quote Nancy again: ‘The happening consists in bringing forth a certain spacing of time, where something takes place, in inaugurating time itself. Today it is the resumption of history that takes place as our historical event, as the way we eventually are in history.’ It is not, not exclusively, perhaps not at all, the happening of October 1966 that is the historical event that gives us a timescale by which to measure things, to say that this is the fortieth anniversary of the landslide and the loss of so many lives. This is what gives us ‘our time’, or as Nancy says ‘by its spacing, the possibility of being we’. It is the resumption of history, the next thing and the next, that the community does within ‘a certain common space of time’ that is the historical event.

What is this resumption then? I would say that it is what Shimon Attie shows us in all its ordinary dignity. It is work on behalf of each other through which the self comes to history. It is the daily business of running a sweetshop or a café - where one is maintained by newcomers to the village and its ways who are nonetheless accommodated to it, as an event, and accommodating of it, as an event and the other is run by a woman, a child of 1966, who explains her survival by the fortune of being in one classroom rather than another. It is the daily business of being a schoolchild, forty years on, in a village that once lost almost the entire generation of its children. How can such a child, whose parents were quite likely born after the event, have any consciousness of that legacy? And how can they not? Being a child in Aberfan means something special; it means being a symbol for other members of the community; those who remember, those of who lost children, those who looked at each other in the ordinariness and tormented grief of their faces and lived on. Attie gently but brilliantly illuminates the dichotomy of the present and the past that is lived with, seating the girl at an old desk, as if she somehow occupied two different times within the same space.

Aberfan has not become a community through death, which is how the mass-media spectacle would portray it, but it has become a community through the unspectacular work that human beings do in response to calamity and to death. Attie, through his attention to his subjects, through the way in which they turn towards and away from each other, I think lays plain what this is. It is the face-to-face encounter, the meeting of the other person. I do not mean here that ordinary meeting, important though that is. Community, history begins, or recommences, with the meeting of one to another, the face stripped bare of artifice, reduced to its most fundamental elements to a point where it is almost unbearable. This is what our experience of death does to us. As the Jewish and French thinker Emmanuel Levinas put it: ‘We encounter death in the face of the other.’ But we might also take from that statement that we encounter the other in the face of death – it is at that moment that we encounter others. Not as we would have them in our image, so that we might say ‘oh, they are just like us’, but to meet them in all their wild difference, their impossibility. Elsewhere Levinas talks about the presence of the face as such a violent intrusion on our experience of the world, turning our possessive gaze into generosity. This is where the mass-media fails, since it exists to enable us to recognise and ‘understand’ other people – that is to reduce them to versions of ourselves. It refuses to acknowledge an ethics without imperatives. This is where art may succeed, since freed by the realism of photography and television from the role of portraiture as symbolic communication of the image as power, it may belong to a different economy, that of the local and the personal. Art may, and I think Shimon Attie’s art here does, tell us about relation, about the juxtaposition of the impossible that makes up a real community in space and time. Where the portrait would once have told us about the singular power of the individual, and collectively of the dynasty (across time) or the hierarchy (across space), in the video installation we see a nobility of the ordinary, a relation of images that have no power over each other. Where once we had the power of the singular, here we see the power of the group directed towards the outside world.

Especially, I think Attie’s art tells us about that turning to generosity from our own self-interest. (The word Levinas uses in French is muant, which may mean transformation in the sense of a metamorphosis, or of a violent turning inside out.) This is not only what it means to be a survivor of someone else’s death; it is what it means to see the face of a survivor. It is the call to a generosity beyond calculation that is the source of community and the possibility of a stake in one’s own history. I’m thinking here of the faces of the older members of the community that Attie shows us: those who were young, bereaved, distraught mothers and fathers, forty years ago; those who raced from the colliery to dig their children out, and failed, and the faces of those too who lost no one, and yet had to look at the faces of their friends and neighbours and say that in recognising you, for the first time, I too have lost everything. These are now the faces, beatific, intense, resigned, or maybe simply tired, of those who have given a life of service in supporting one another, in learning how to survive on one’s own. They may be too the faces of those whose pension for a life of work in the pit is the daily wearing of a mask, just to be able to breathe. Perhaps this is a face we would rather not see, but a face that, precisely because it makes us uncomfortable, because it tells us where responsibility lies, that we must see. Levinas writes: ‘What we call, by a somewhat corrupted term, love, is par excellence the fact that the death of the other affects me more than my own.’ Is it too much to say that it is the traumas of history, experienced as real, not as mediation, that compel us to love one another? Is this what Aberfan learned to do? Is it too much to say that in the faces of that community, even when they are estranged from each other, Shimon Attie tells us something about love as continuing, historical process; as work, rather than sympathy or pathos as momentary event?

What was it, Ernst Bloch wondered, that led those who had no need of revolution, those who had all the benefits of power and safety, to become revolutionaries. His answer was fundamentally humanistic: it was ‘the spectacle of misery, the frustration of the neighbour’. Levinas sees in this the power not just of economic and social injustice and alienation, but of death itself, to make and shape communities and to make and shape history. His answer is the same as Bloch’s: we work towards tomorrow, knowing that there will be no utopian ending, but nonetheless called to an ethical action by the suffering that is, or that one day will be, written in the other’s face. Nothing special, then: it is daily labour in vain that gives us our identity, that inscribes our portrait in the world. Aberfan was an ordinary Welsh mining village; today it is an ordinary Welsh village: nothing special. It is at the same time extraordinary. This is not in its legacy of trauma, it is not as an ‘attraction to onlookers’, a spectacle of grief. Rather it is extraordinary in the way in which its citizens have, through the simple dignified act of going on living and never forgetting, refashioned themselves in history and in their own image.

The Gardeners

The Ex-Coalminer

The Attraction of Onlookers is published by Parthian Books.

Art and Death by Chris Townsend is published by I. B. Tauris.

Gardens are full of death. Things wilt, things rot, things in the compost heap start to smell dubious. Sometimes they are animal: dead rats, dead pigeons, once even a cat’s head, dug up, bodyless, from some other garden grave by an over-zealous spaniel. Mostly, though, the deaths are vegetable, spilling yellow fluid from sores, dropping dried-up leaves in scores, or just slowly fading away, browning.

When you start to garden, you go through a first phase where you are very afraid of being responsible for death. Having been told pretty much from the word go in life that killing things is wrong, you feel the exhilaration of having living things under your charge, and at the same time the profound injunction not to kill them. Killing living things that you have been given seems particularly bad. Gifts of herbs from a friendly neighbour, a housewarming present from a well-meaning mother: these deaths sit in your soul starkly, failing to properly decompose. Each death seems a personal vote of no confidence in you as a human being whose ancestry bears no apparent traces of a presumably agricultural past. Maybe your genes are pure hunter-gatherer?

Yet even a brief investigation of the world of professional horticulture reveals that amongst the paid experts, killing some stuff now and again, or even often, is apparently nothing to worry about. Posh gardeners like Vita Sackville-West and Christopher Lloyd were especially unworried about killing things. It’s hard to resist speculating that it was their sense of aristocratic entitlement that stopped them worrying about the annual massacre of innocents, but actually your local parks department, populated by non-landed gentry, takes exactly the same view. They’re just plants, goes the received version. Plant tulips for spring bedding, let them flower, dig them up and throw them away. No matter that these are perennial bulbs, which could in theory come back year after year if planted in the right spot and looked after properly. It’s not worth the effort. And the cost. Just buy them again next year.

Professional gardeners also have a strong sense of permission when it comes to taking out plants that have got too big. Chopping out unwieldy magnolias or unrewarding witch hazels is par for the course as far as they are concerned; these plants aren’t achieving what they were supposed to, so get them out. The fact that the plant is only growing there to begin with on human orders doesn’t factor into the equation. Death is normal. The wood chippings will make a lovely mulch.

Yet the gardener’s dance with death is an elaborate one. Listening to a recording of Niall Fergusson’s The Ascent of Money (a right-wing meditation on the history of capitalism) while gardening, prompts a set of thoughts about the nature of speculation and risk. Twenty-first century gardeners in the UK have been fed an enormous quantity of persuasive prose over the last eight years about climate change. So there we all were, changing our strategy, investing in Mediterranean beauties like Nerium oleander, fragrant and heat-seeking. Oleander would die in a hard frost, of course; but then hard frosts were a thing of the past, weren’t they, like boom and bust economics?

But it turns out that neither hard frosts nor bank runs have quite been left behind in the good old 1900s. In Niall Fergusson’s tough-love scenario, boom and bust results from human nature being far too prone to exhilarated excitement, alternating with drastic panic. So stock market movements can’t be predicted using normal bell curves of human behaviour – when it comes to money, we are too extreme in our actions. We can’t help it: we are just a stampeding bunch of frightened cows when it comes to thinking we are about to lose our life savings. 

Looking out the window now I’m wondering if we are too extreme in other ways too. We live in a honeyed moment of summer, imagining the rest of our lives will be like this, not even able to remember what winter feels like, looks like. Reading about a Cornish aeonium specialist in the Guardian who had lost every one of their hundreds of specimen plants to frost and snow in the last month, I found myself thinking: “How could you possibly not have considered this possibility? Don’t you have greenhouses? And where, for that matter, was your bubble wrap?”

Death should be a fear. Winter should be a fear. The stock market crashing should be a fear. But they should be fears that are present all the time, not just in the two hours after we hear on the radio that trouble is imminent (financial or meteorological). Diversify your investments, says Niall Fergusson, which I translate as “don’t just grow succulents originating from frost-free South Africa.” More than this, I’d argue, taking the lesson from the thwarted bankers of the City, you can’t do something really well unless you are taking responsibility for the death of it, as well as the life. The only institutions to come out of the current financial crisis well were those who understood their grave responsibility for the money they held. Those who lost the most were those who felt no responsibility at all, who failed to take seriously the possibility of complete meltdown, who behaved like there was no death.

So if you must invest, in property or plants, understand the nature of the bargain. Don’t blame the soil, the climate, or worst of all, the plant. Not because of some abstract ethical stance, but simply because failing to accept the reality of the world will eventually lead to the making of bad decisions. And because being responsible for the life of other living things is something to be relished, not tossed away. Death has dominion here in the garden; yet fending it away is within your power. Take no notice of the posh dead white gardeners or the parks department. If your plants die, you are always responsible.

Rothko: The Late Series, recently ending its run at the Tate Modern, was, despite the crowds it drew, a rather empty encounter. This emptiness is, perhaps, not unexpected given what we have come to know of Rothko: serial blocks, grids and strips of colour, resistant to narrative, obdurate and unyielding. The Tate’s limited selection of a narrow palette, closely arranged, made for a puzzling and disenchanted kind of viewing. The familiar Seagram murals of the ‘Rothko Room’ put together with a selection from the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art and Washington National Gallery of Art, formed the centre of this new exhibition, which branched into a set of smaller arrangements (the Black-Form series, the Brown and Gray works) and what seemed little more than a corridor display of preparatory sketches and cursorily-pencilled plans. Here, hastily hatched grids sketched on paper were displayed as though they might make a claim to be regarded as works in themselves, and though such studies might allow for an intriguing access into artistic process and preparatory meditations, here the prizing of Rothko’s preliminary sketches incurred a certain embarrassment. The display of these plans seemed an attempt to attest to the careful consideration given by the artist to the arrangement of his work; but for those who would willing enter this exhibition, it served as a clumsy and unnecessary assurance of his integrity that had almost the opposite effect. If you choose to engage with Rothko’s taciturn forms, those patiently repeated blocks of colour, then you must already believe in their integrity and attend willingly and trustingly with the belief that they will yield something. And this, ironically, is what the Tate Modern exhibition disclosed most efficiently, if unsatisfactorily: Rothko requires belief. You must believe in Rothko if only so that Rothko’s work might disclose to you an idea of belief that is perhaps the emptiest thing of all.

Rothko famously claimed that the people who wept before his paintings were undergoing the same religious experience he had undergone in their production, and this notion of a sacred kind of aesthetic encounter is one he repeatedly affirms in the late interviews and conversations that accompany the late work. The late works are profoundly religious works. Rothko acknowledged Kierkegaard’s Abraham as an important influence; the Brown, Black and Sienna on Dark Wine canvases of 1963 he explained as an evocation of Christ’s suffering; and the last triptychs for the Houston chapel (an installation he did not live to see), confirm that commitment. Religious expression, though, cannot take any demonstrable or explicit form in the late series – instead, the canvases are scrupulously resistant to that kind of articulation. Indeed, they assiduously abstain from any sure statement. Rather, Rothko seems to work instead at the sacrality of surfaces, the faith of a non-representational formlessness. Form fastens onto feeling, but formlessness too is its own means. Rothko’s late work seeks a feeling that is untethered to any form or thing; the broad, blank washes of surface colour sacrifice the suggestion of any object materiality for a more immediate expressive affectivity. If at times, those patiently worked surfaces intimate density, such intimations are illusory - the canvases stubbornly offer up surface as surface. When Rothko’s surfaces seem to conjure depth, conjure things, conjure a world even - the Brown and Gray series in particular sometimes resembles the austere diurnal motion of a northern hemisphere horizon, sometimes seems like the edge of the world or a moon - these passing impressions easily sink away as the painterly surfaces surface once more as surface. If Rothko’s late series achieves depth, then it is a depth born of reflection, but which insistently returns to its blanket surface. Rothko’s canvases determinedly conjure surfaces that belong to no object and under which there are no things. And yet it is precisely this resistance to objects, to things, to worlds, that renders these works profoundly religious.

 In his own late work, Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud recounts a letter from an atheistic friend who describes being, nonetheless, subject to a particular feeling of religiosity ‘of which he himself was never free, which he had found confirmed by many others and which he assumed was shared by millions, a feeling that he was inclined to call a sense of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded – as it were ‘oceanic’.  This feeling was a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; no assurance of personal immortality attached to it …  On the basis of this oceanic feeling alone one was entitled to call oneself religious, even if one rejected every belief and every illusion’.  Freud, though, remained unconvinced by this feeling, and diagnosed it as an error:  ‘…if I have understood my friend correctly, what he has in mind is the same as the consolation that an original and rather eccentric writer offers his hero before his freely chosen death: ‘We cannot fall out of this world’.  It is a feeling then, of being indissolubly bound up with and belonging to the whole of the world outside oneself.  I would say that for me this is more in the nature of an intellectual insight, not of course without an emotional overtone, though this will not be wanting in other acts of thought that are similar in scope’.

Freud informs his friend that the ‘oceanic’ feeling of cosmic unity, a feeling of something limitless and unbounded was only the manifestation of a narcissistic ego - an ego that sees itself in all things and whose ‘feeling of religiosity’ is only an expression of that absolute narcissism.  For Freud, the oceanic feeling of religion reminds us of an ego that is bound up with the world, an ego that cannot fall out of the world, but which also understands itself in relation to all things.  This is an ego that is not just incapable of falling out of the world, but one who is originally in the world, who identifies with all things.  Rothko’s aesthetic religion though is the inversion of this.  The late series articulates an idea of religious belief that is resistant to things, which is not identifiable as any material thing in the world, but is, at its most sacred, only expressive surface.

 The Black-Form series is perhaps the emptiest and most effective of all Rothko’s arrangements insofar as this series articulates the determined resistance to things most profoundly.  Rothko’s religion is necessarily without things - the late series intimates this idea of a belief which cannot depend on things.  Rothko’s black grids resolutely reserve the presence of no thing.  Rothko’s abstention challenges his audience not to believe in things, in order that they may believe in more than things, or the feeling beyond things.  The ideality of belief requires this emptiness - a feeling not of absence or vacancy or loss, but precisely of something more than what might be seen in any given object, thing or world.  The late series, at the last, assert a belief in belief itself, a belief in something more.   

‘I was always looking for something more’    Rothko, 1970