Rothko wanted to paint basic human emotion. So he painted red over red over red. Behind the colour he was looking for light. In 1942 he painted The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, where Iphigenia is not a girl, but a black pine already resined in grief. Above her the amnesia of light, an umber sky, shadows spilling white, the only motion the white hands of the wind.
The story of Iphigenia was never about the girl, but the men who called for the blood of a girl knowing that the winds would one day change. The forest charred, the air stilled, deranged, and the truth beneath it all is fear, was always fear, the open grave, the charcoal line, the dead growing out of the living like lichen, the pine a blood-eyed child, the pyres loose stones
and living rooms. Dress it up in the white hands of the wind. Call it need. Call it necessity. Rothko wanted to paint basic human emotion so looked behind the light and found blood rushing to no end and no knowledge of end.
eat delicious things in every sense. savor novels that unravel slowly, like decadent meals for the mind. let sunlight kiss ur skin, bask in its warmth like an endless summer. hold close the people who make you feel alive, kiss them tenderly, love them fiercely. laugh at bad jokes, the kind that make you roll ur eyes but secretly smile. plant basil on your windowsill, water it with care, breathe in its fragrance as you stir it into your meals. be unafraid to indulge in beauty, to notice it everywhere and to consume it greedily. there is no virtue in starving yourself of joy, no wisdom in rationing delight.
