Someday We Will All Be Ruins and It Makes me Claustrophobic

March 31, 2010

I have a lot of dreams about light. Not light from the source, but paintings of light, artificial light, shadow and contrast and sharp edges. Light contained. Flat canvasses filled with color, blooming and spinning with brightness. Light as the origin, as the beginning of everything. As the only thing.

These abstract dreams are clearly ripped off from Mark Rothko. I feel slightly embarrassed when I wake after dreaming them, recognizing the paintings for what they are: a cheap imitation, a riff, at the most. It’s never enough for me to say I interpret, I understand. No, I have to go and dream someone else’s paintings to understand myself. To understand what it means to wish for a time when light was a window open wide.

When I was thirteen, my family moved from Nebraska to Wisconsin. It was then that I first lived among hills and woods and shadows, in a house surrounded by huge soft evergreens that blotted out the afternoon sun. It was then that I began to have dreams about light. I dreamed of running against the sky and watching the land forming before me, of early dawn and cruel white glaciers sweeping back rocks, pushing forward through buckling, bulging soil. I dreamed of heaps of earth, lit by a fuzzy, incandescent sort of sun.

Understand, I didn’t grow up in a wheat field. I grew up in big city suburbia, among seamless mint-colored lawns and beige and brick ranch split-levels. There was nothing wild about that landscape, nothing untamed in the four lane highway to the west or the vast mall complex to the east.

But it was the last of childhood, and so there was a yellow halo, a diffuse glow over the last uncomplicated spaces I would ever occupy. And so too, there is a thing long unresolved in me since we moved away from the plains, a kind of freedom that seems to have gone. Its shadow sits unsettled and burning just under my collarbone.

In my writing, Nebraska loses its finite place in space and time. It ceases to become a state, full of cities and people and things. It becomes flat land and bright open spaces everywhere. Strangely enough, it is this Nebraska that has moved into my memory. I live in the city now, and I love being surrounded by clamor, laughter, bodies, lamps, litter, rooftops, iron grates, things. The city is my world and I am very much at home here. But once in very great while, I dream of the light filtering through the bluer Nebraska sky, and suddenly I want to knock the city down, buildings and cars, everything, and find the land underneath. To make sure it’s still there. Not out of respect for nature—but out of fear that, like Babel, the world of people and things will suddenly slide into ruin. It’s a sort of claustrophobia, brought on by the weight of too much history. It’s the paradox of suffocating in the dark, hungry middle of life while obsessing over the ends of it. So soon born, so soon to be snuffed out.

Rothko thought we had lowered our standards, that we had become too complacent. In his work he tried to capture what he saw as the tragic essence of man: that we are forever caught between birth and death. He finally chose the latter. He chose to stop dangling in the middle. Of course, most people get used to the middle; in order to live most people get used to anything. Even the way space feels when you are driving away from it. Even the sideways pull of nostalgia’s gravity.

I rarely dream the light anymore; only in the most cramped of moments when I’m full of the awful anxiety of existence. When space becomes too small at the same time living becomes too big and my brain seems to go vast and dark and heavy as boulders. That’s when I dream those primordial paintings now.

Rothko once said that he had “visions of space expanding to infinity, the spaces of the beginning, when the world was clear.” I wonder if that’s not what my dreams of light are: a wish for beginnings. For the time before birth, before middles, before the muddle, before anything at all. The glaciers bulldozing the new world clean and blank as a canvas.