May 15, 2024
recently i went to rothko chapel with my girlfriend on a museum day – this meaning visits to art museums i haven’t yet been to in houston. i’m habitually guilty of not checking the weather before going about my day and after the first museum we stopped at the grocery store for caffeine where we were then trapped by a torrential downpour, lightning striking close enough to turn my vision red and strip us of our hearing. through this we still made it to the chapel.
im not sure if visitors are allowed to take photos of the building though the atmosphere of it demands respect that we wouldn’t regardless; light filtering through the roof such that the paintings themselves barely distinguish themselves from the walls, picture frames blending into the beige, obelisks situated in the cardinal directions as the inheritors of the space rather than the visitor, carrying the awesome scale of dimly-lit european catholic basilicas without reaching to their heights. as the distance to each monument diminished individual movements and patterns appeared looking into water.
two and ten people drifted through the space; a group of six in their teens sitting perpendicular without eye contact; a lone older man at the static edge of the west wall; a lanky younger man pacing from painting to painting finding similar flows in the surface; two security guards alternating slow tapping switching from east to west protecting the sanctity of the space.
the world comes resplendent with noise. we tune out the ambient hums of hvac systems cooling an office to jacket-requiring temperatures; low thrums of electricity via high voltage lines ensuring the amenities of modernity; traffic screaming by to ferry all as fast as maximally possible (at the cost of all else); tinnitus tearing through the space in between the ears, remnants from concerts gone by. in the absence of voice and music these sounds grow louder and louder to swallow one of the senses entirely, a reminder that the absence of sensation is but an illusion. had one not left they found find themselves carries away on the overhead alternating current leaving but a pair of blood-stained shoes.
when i woke up this morning with a beer in my stomach and six hours in my bed it took great force to roll myself onto the floor toward the clothes which had not yet dried from monday’s humidity and sweat (in houston, indistinguishable), rolling the cold damp shirt down my chest, twisting my hair into a knot and clipping it at the base, then lifting lead-heavy legs out the door into a pace just faster than shuffling. air rising off the bayou thick-scented with guano and all the trash which the storm washed down trinity river out to galveston bay filling my lungs with water vapor. the city a darkened sauna, downtown hazy on the horizon, only its lights visible despite being within a mile. rabbits hop away as i run closer to them, noses twitching in the thick air carrying scent farther than in the dry hear, moths flying at the overhead halogen-sodium lamps underneath the highway bridge keeping the area from being bathed in full darkness, though the up-and-down path through the wooded area closest to the six-lane boulevard just outside of it with branches stretching to the bat colony returning to their home underneath waugh defies this command.
almost no one runs this early in the morning, the swamp still as if it were photographed for me alone. alien cars pass the south side of the bayou, anonymous coming home from graveyard shifts or beating the traffic which will eventually pour from its tributary streets flowing onto stroads then onto katy and i-10 and the 8 and 69, the friction between cars slowing them to a near-crawl as roads fill to bursting capacity, on-ramps sucking in runoff from side streets. when someone does appear, he leaves an image behind, passing me in an instant and disappearing back into the morning over the bayou bridge, reminding me of my slowness.
the sun has crawled out of the earth over downtown burning off the meteorological and chemical fog (the latter drifting in from salty winds down south over galveston blasting over flares and distillation columns and furnaces on the edge of the gulf of mexico) as i turn right over the bat colony and continue the final leg of the run, gasping for air through the still-viscous air. the first rays torch the building above me as the dawn temperature climbs to eighty. construction workers file out of their cars to the new apartment buildings blanketed in plastic.
i stop on the corner of the last intersection and my world explodes, shimmering colors and lights enveloping the crosswalk in front of my shoes, parallel lines shifting and turning against each other as the trees turn to the static-patterned channels of the cathode-ray tube television from when i was a kid, screaming traffic falling to the wayside as the atomization of each individual inside the cars spreads to me. electronic keening makes its way through my nose and tear ducts into my sinus cavity where it bounces back and forth, losing tension in my neck as it slumps forward toward the earth’s core where the vomit-green soles of my shoes are glued to, the burning of the mantle working through marrow and into my stomach as my hands and knees go numb and nervous transmission grinds to a halt. a thought that i may be having a stroke outpaces this system-wide brownout as i force my knees lower to recirculate my blood and keep myself from hitting the concrete.