Every Painting Is a Rothko

some shit I have learned working weekends at a museum

I work as a museum security guard on the weekend and just noting that there has been a seriously alarming uptick in people who come into the museum with their families and leave sobbing and babbling incoherently that "every painting is a rothko." obviously, not every painting in the museum I work at is a rothko (I don't think there's even one) but I have had to eject several of these people and they've all been middle-aged men. Now some of them I have had to get rough with but even as I was twisting their arms behind their backs until they winced before forcing them out through the front doors and standing there sternly wagging my finger back and forth to let them know they would absolutely not be coming back in here, that whole time my heart was breaking for them because they have clearly lost their minds and no one seems to understand why. now every so often I find myself actually looking at the paintings in the museum I work at—something I haven't done in years, I usually look at the people—and squinting my eyes and trying to ask myself, IS every painting a rothko? even the obviously representational ones beloved of the new right that seems to constantly be in a twist about the downfall of the west? I almost can't believe I'm asking myself that question either, and I hope simply wondering the question, a question that is absurd on its face, isn't the first stages of whatever collective psychosis afflicts these blubbering men I have no wish to become anything like. and yet another thought I can't help but wonder as I stand here all saturday and sunday with nothing but my own thoughts to keep me company as I watch the art and watch the people and watch the people watch the art and, on some level, watch the art watch the people, is that would it really be that bad if every painting WAS a rothko? why is that so horrifying? and are these men saying that when they look at a painting that clearly isn't a rothko that instead of what the painting actually is, they see something else—the single color red or black or blue shellacked on with unforgivingly thick paint? or do these men see the actual painting as it is, but they suddenly conceive of it—whether it's a landscape or a portrait or an abstract assemblage of shapes and colors—as something so similar to what a rothko represents to them that it might as well be a rothko? what I mean is, are they actually having a visual hallucination, or living in a layer of reality where all they see is a quintessential rothko-type painting when they look at any other painting, or are they seeing these artworks as they are but are mentally associating them with rothkos so much that they can't not perceive some kind of horrific similarity between that which is opaque and aggressive and monochromatic and that which formerly felt more narrative or multicolored or representational? finally, the last thing that confounds me about this bizarre phenomenon, is why these men seem simultaneously distraught at what they're either physically seeing or simply mentally perceiving yet only seem to become more distraught when I evict them from the museum. if entering a museum turned me into a raving, blubbering, sobbing, psychotically broken middle-aged man, perhaps the first thing I would want to do would to be leave the museum. yet these men will consistently pound on the locked doors while I stare at them and wag my finger "no" as if they can't help themselves. they are drawn to their own mental torture, perhaps, is all I can figure, perhaps because they actually hate themselves on some fundamental level. I wish more people who think something is horrifically wrong with something, yet continually expose themselves to that apparent horror, would consider the possibility that the font of the horror they experience is within, and if they could only forgive themselves—not change, I'm not even asking for these men to change anything about themselves—but simply forgive themselves for who they are, they might not hate themselves so much that they continually hurl themselves at that which seems to so obviously destroy them. of course, the other perspective on all of this that I sometimes think about while standing here staring at people and wondering if they are getting too close to the art or are doing anything that might inadvertently cause damage to the art, is that maybe men like this need to experience self-destruction in order to completely their life's purpose. one time a long time ago someone told me that earthworms, after it rains, climb out of the earth not because they are drowning and seeking escape from the waterlogged earth, but because they simply want to die and want to suffer because it feels like it gives their life a meaning it lacks underground, which is paradise for them, a paradise they eventually long to escape. maybe every earthworm carries in itself the dream of seeing a world of multiple colors and different textures, full of all different kinds of larger animals, trees, sounds, and textures, as alien as it is to them, more than the endless opacity of night they move through and feast upon underground. maybe earthworm culture says you're not supposed to seek various forms by ascending upward, but then when the rain comes, every earthworm who wants to has a ready excuse—avoiding drowning—by which to rationalize their death-wish in the kaleidoscope of forms that is the inheritance of all who seek immersion in the light.