Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals hang in London’s Tate gallery according to his very detailed instructions: no more than six inches off the floor, on “considerably off-white walls with umber and warmed by a little red,” and under low light, so the colors don’t wash out. They are massive things, painted in deep, shifting layers of red, maroon, and black, and they stretch across the walls like the mouths of caves. You sit on a bench and look at one of them, Black on Maroon (1959), and after a moment’s passed it feels like it has swallowed you whole, like you’re a finely penciled stickman in its landscape. 

No photograph could have ever communicated the power of these paintings to me. When I finally walked out of the Rothko room I felt vulnerable and small and my face prickled with the faintest tingle of shame, because I’d almost cried at a painting, for God’s sake. That, however, is the power of The Seagram Murals: to give the viewer a glimpse of how small and fragile they are; to drive home the fact of one’s placeness.

One of the privileges of being a writer is the freedom to invent words. Sometimes a gap appears in my own vocabulary (I won’t say in the English lexicon, as my knowledge of it isn’t comprehensive) and I invent a word to fill it. “Placeness,” defined as the awareness and feeling of the smallness of one’s significance within the grand scheme of things, is probably the word I am most proud of. I forget exactly how I came to create it. You look out over a valley one day and there it is. Or you’re flying home, over wide open fields and oceans and the invisible, arbitrary borders of countries, and there it is again. It is feeling your awareness suddenly opening up to take in something far greater than yourself, while, simultaneously, you feel all the limitations of your powers of comprehension, and you have to acknowledge that a person, this collage of experiences, characteristics, and actions, has only the smallest significance within the universe.

Art that can land that punch is a rare thing. To do so requires looking squarely at those basic dichotomies of humanness which are also our simplest but most baffling mysteries: light/dark, freedom/bondage, infinity/finiteness, fullness/emptiness. Their mysteries lie in a person’s inability to even perceive one without help from its polar opposite: there’s no light without dark; no full without empty. Standing in the Tate’s Rothko Room, moving from one canvas to another, seeing the borders of the squares fade into the coloured spaces around them, which are themselves made of shifting shades of crimson and red and oxblood, it’s made clear that The Seagram Murals draw their power from these mysteries. Their sheer size and lack of any fixed point to draw the eye gives the viewer a glimpse at an infinite, empty space; a space and emptiness that could only be conveyed by including the finiteness of the rectangles’ edges. The sense of freedom which that openness brings would be meaningless without bondage to escape from. The darkness of the reds and blacks could only be perceived if there is light for them to swallow. In these paintings all the mess has been cleared away, leaving only these raw, terrifying, all-consuming absolutes. Is it any wonder, then, that many a viewer has broken out in tears at Rothko’s work? When, as he said himself, he was only interested “in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on”?

Rothko, though he denied being a colorist, labored over his shades, taking great care to blend the colors of The Seagram Murals together, so the layers of paint do seem to move around and over each other very slowly, like tectonic plates shifting. This blending—this slow, slow movement—deepens the pictures, making them three-dimensional, almost as if they were rooms themselves. When you stop in front Red on Maroon (1959), with its wide red square borders almost invisible against the deeper maroon background, you find yourself surrounded by “basic human emotions.” They lay themselves out in front of you as plain and honest as a confession, and the frightening thing is that you know, on some level, that Rothko did not make these emotions, and that all this joy and terror and passion and peace walked in here with you.

Rothko: “The progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity, toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among others) memory, history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.” This “elimination of all obstacles” is really the stripping away of all a person’s layers of assumption, expectation, preconception, knowledge, and identity. All these things come into the Rothko room from outside, are seen by us and used to create personhood, and all of them dissolve into nothing before his paintings. His art, including The Seagram Murals, seems more a process of uncovering than an act of creation; the act of uncovering the vulnerable, naked, quivering core of humanness, which was there before a solid and functioning identity was built around it. Rothko’s paintings, John Berger wrote “are about colours or light awaiting the creation of the visible world.” These absolutes were here before we were fully-fleshed humans. They are the most fundamental elements of one’s subjective experience, and the fact that to get right down into their fundamental self one must relinquish everything that makes them themselves is the greatest paradox of The Seagram Murals, which makes it also their greatest power source.

Standing in front of Black on Maroon (1958), staring into the black space between the two maroon rectangles that float in the canvas’s center, there’s only the gap, with the maroon’s bloody faded fringes on either side, and the experience of it, which is what I’ve called placeness. By only giving his colors the vaguest forms, Rothko leaves us nothing to hang definitions on; by painting these colors across such vast canvases, he gives us a glimpse at something primordial and very nearly infinite: “basic human emotions” and the paradoxes of our human condition.

It’s a glimpse big enough to lose yourself in. These paradoxes are vastnesses that cannot be fully comprehended, and when confronted with them, our senses reach their limits and then stop. Art that wields that power is called Sublime, and it has been discussed since antiquity. This is art that confronts the viewer with power so great in size, strength, age, and scope that all that can really be felt when we look at it is placeness, and we come face-to-face with the smallness of our significance. 

Placeness is not the same thing as insignificance. With modernity came the realization that one human being cannot seriously affect the cosmos: Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat” (1897) talks about a man’s realization “that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him”; H.P. Lovecraft’s characters are always being driven to madness by their littleness when they encounter the Great Old Ones. As our worldview expanded to include the universe beyond the night sky, we were faced with the fact of our minuteness, and to face this fact squarely means undergoing massive ego-deflation, and, in the process, coming to terms with our very finite limitations, our cosmic anonymity, and our vulnerability. To stand in front of The Seagram Murals, to feel that torrent of awareness and emotion, and then despair, is understandable. We put much stock and worth in our identities and egos, and to feel them fall away from us, leaving us feeling raw and exposed before these great powers, hurts. But this is not a belittling. Belittling someone means making them feel less than they are, which is to tell them a lie. The experience of The Seagram Murals is a rightsizing—an acknowledgement of one’s true power, size, capabilities, and worth. As such, it is a deeply humbling experience, for it shows the viewer that their worth comes from nothing quantifiable, like achievement or money, but from their place as part of this grand back-and-forth between those paradoxes that drive the wheels of Creation. The question of a person’s worth becomes obviously more complicated when concepts like sin and crime are factored in. But now, in the middle of the Rothko Room, it’s enough to feel that terrific sense of placeness, knowing that it is not the same thing as insignificance, but is rather the fact of one’s worth within a universe that only looks indifferent.