I often imagine the Void

The meaningless horror of it.

How we’re all pigeonholed in the Void.

I’m talking the bleakest form of void. The existential kind. You don’t use this one for blowing out birthday candles. I don’t like it. I get depressed and nervous.

Today was a bit different. I imagined another person rather than myself. Today, imagining The Void, my thinking turned to Mark Rothko.

I don’t know why. My mind is like a crab. Clawing stuff. Today I clawed up Mark Rothko.

Orange And Yellow by Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko may be the greatest painter that ever lived. Because he gave us images of the void. Displayed it. The essence of it. The Tao. The eternal force that gives life to the universe. He showed us everything. Which is nothing. Or Nothingness. If Rothko’s value is in dollars, he’s definitely one of the greatest painters, if not the greatest. Orange and Yellow sold for 86.8 million dollars in 2012.

His work is esteemed by smart people.

On the other hand, Rothko may be the greatest con man to ever pass himself off as a painter. Other smart people have showed him to be a supreme bamboozler. Check out this article.

[According to the writer Kurt Vonnegut…as he writes in his novel Bluebeard: “Modern art is a conspiracy between shysters and the rich to make poor people feel stupid!”]

Rothko himself may have doubted his own legitimacy. I suspect he wondered if what he was doing meant anything at all. Could be he fretted over the idea that he was not a real artist but a poser. That he wasn’t what lots of smart people thought he was cracked up to be. That his whole life was a sham.

Toward the end he went dark. Here’s one from among his last series of paintings:

Could be he saw himself standing alone on the moon.

Then, abruptly, he changed again. He fell back from the immense loneliness he was viewing. Tried to find his way in another direction.

Here’s his final painting.

Rothko overdosed on barbiturates and cut an artery in his right arm with a razor blade. He was found lying in a pool of blood. He left no written suicide note. This, his last painting, unfinished, was left behind. Like a suicide note.

He was sixty six years old. He’d suffered a heart attack recently. His marriage had ended. He was depressed with the direction his art was taking. Yet, at the time of his death, in 1970, he was worth 43 million dollars. (That’s more than three hundred million dollars in today’s money.) Most of his worth was in canvases. His reputation in the art world was rock solid. He value would only increase as his reputation expanded…as it has.

I imagine he thought too damned much about his paintings…if that’s possible.

“A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer,” Rothko wrote. “It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky act to send it out into the world. How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend their affliction universally.”

The cruelty of the impotent.

People return pain with more pain; joy with more joy. The Void offers nothing. Don’t expect answers. You can kill yourself or you can live. The Void couldn’t care less. Rothko chose death.

Rothko’s pictures live.

Here’s the deal. Like it or not, we’re all stuck in the same stupid position as Rothko…of not knowing if what we think we know actually amounts to anything at all. We all carry a stone, like Sisyphus. People who think too much…most people think too much…they need a career, a hobby, a distraction. A survival tactic against the madness of the Void. Rothko had Art. Most people have religion and family. Others drink. Race cars. Compose Music. Write Poetry. Build houses. Play Golf. Climb mountains…etcetera, etcetera, etcetera..

We all gotta have some kind of Survival Tactic.

Mine is Spite. I live on nothing to get even. I live under the radar. I’ll cannibalize the energy grid to live on nothing. Like I do here at the Marina. I want to pay nothing in order to live. I want to contribute nothing. Honor nothing. Worship nothing. I’m a cockroach. Cut off my head and I go on living. Living on nothing. Nothing, that is, but my Spite.

I’m like the Underground Man!

I AM a sick man. . . . I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I
think that my liver hurts. But actually, I don’t know a damn thing
about my illness. I am not even sure what it is that hurts. I am not
in treatment and never have been, although I respect both medicine
and doctors. Besides, I am superstitious in the extreme; well, at
least to the extent of respecting medicine. (I am sufficiently
educated not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, sir, I refuse to see
a doctor simply out of spite. Now, that is something that you
probably will fail to understand. Well, I understand it. Naturally, I
will not be able to explain to you precisely whom I will injure in
this instance by my spite. I know perfectly well that I am certainly
not giving the doctors a “dirty deal” by not seeking treatment. I
know better than anyone that I will only harm myself by this, and no
one else. And yet, if I don’t seek a cure, it is out of spite. My
liver hurts? Good, let it hurt still more! Opening paragraph of the novel, Notes From Underground, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Wait a minute! Look at me…

Am I beginning to resemble THE UNDERGROUND MAN?

God help me!

I’m hiding out on Scruffy. See that green chord below the prow. That’s my bootleg wire. I attach it to the plug at the empty slip across from me. That way, I have free electricity. I get free electricity anyway from my own plug. I just like the idea of getting free electricity from somebody else’s plug. It’s been cold lately. The seagull perched above is not cold. I’m cold. I’m running three space heaters to stay warm. What do I care? It’s free.

Here’s the sunrise. A cold January sunrise in my corner of the Void.

A little orange and yellow on the horizon. Kind of reminds me of Rothko’s painting….

Ronnie came last weekend

Wait a minute. This is not Ronnie. This is the Devil.

This is Ronnie.

No, no, no. This is not Ronnie, either. This is Henry David Thoreau. He wrote a book called Walden. He also wrote a tract called On Civil Disobedience. Gandhi got his ideas from Thoreau. Same with Martin Luther King. Thoreau just popped up out of the Void one day and influenced historical events like few others have. Personally, I like Thoreau because he lived on nothing. He was a minimalist. I like to live on nothing. I’m a minimalist. Thoreau was one of the good white dudes. He’s a pretty sad looking mug, I’ll admit. But that’s beside the point.

Is this Ronnie?

No! This is Whitey Bulger. He’s dead. A fellow prisoner beat him to death. He was sitting in his wheelchair and the prisoner bludgeoned him to death with a pipe….Prison is brutal. Well, but so was Whitey. Still, you don’t bludgeon to death an 89 year old man. It’s obscene.

This is Ronnie

Ronnie bought my boat. He paid cash. He transferred the boat slip into his name. Now he owns my boat and he’s the registered slip renter. Raul, my harbormaster, likes Ronnie. I like Ronnie. But Ronnie is not here. I’m here. I mean I’m still here. I was gonna move off Ronnie’s new boat, my former boat, and go live in my Van like a true Underground Man.

Here’s my van.

Which is what I did. I spent weeks fixing up the van for van life. I coulda done it all in a few hours but that would make me handy. Instead I spent several weeks and finally had a van life van with a bed and window covers and a ice chest and a tumbler for wine and just about everything you need to live in your van. Then I spent my first night in the van. I crashed in the marina parking lot, in the van. Nobody bothered me. It was okay. It was no fun, but that’s not the point. The point is to live on NOTHING. I was resigned to occupying a new and lower level of UNDERGROUND LIFE!

I was all set.

I moved all my stuff off the boat. Plates. Cups. Spoons. Wire. Bags. Toothpics. More wire. Rags. Spare tools. Food. All the leftover stuff I had left on the boat. I cleaned everything out.

Ronnie arrived on Friday and I vanished…vanished into a darker corner of the Void.

But Ronnie got depressed. He stayed one night on Scruffy and drove back down south. Back to L.A.. Back to his wife. I didn’t even know he was gone. I had to call him to find out.

“I got depressed,” he said.

“You got depressed?”

“Yeah…it was hard.”

I offered to watch the boat for him until he returns.

“If you like,” he said.

“When are you coming back up?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’m really tired.”

“Well, let me know.”

“I will.”

So I’m hanging on Scruffy until who the hell knows.

Today is Thursday. I’m still here!

I’m hanging on C dock.

Aboard Scruffy.

My little corner of the Void.

I kind of like it here.

Maybe Ronnie will get used to it too…someday.