Mark Rothko and the "Red-Bricked Road"

The PhillySound Blog has featured a few posts recently concerning Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko (who, btw, apparently hated the AE label). Thought I'd share an experience I had last autumn in response. It may illustrate something about Rothko & his violent/harmonious fierce/delicate aesthetic. I have a Rothko print ("Orange and Yellow") hanging opposite my bed. I had a dream one night that verged into "lucidity"; I felt a presence that I knew to be Rothko drag me, feet first, out of my bed, and pitch me, head first, against his print. I fell back, dazed, and saw that Orange and Yellow had become Black and Grey, and the colors were swirling, swimming, and pulsing. Very acid-y. Rothko spoke to me, told me that "each color chunk is a way of life", and I must choose. I answered him in a poem I wrote in the morning, called "Red Life":
Mark Rothko
came to me in
a dream and said,
each color chunk is
a way of life,
you must choose.

I'm wearing a red
sweater, that's my choice.
Anything not to be
bloodless.
The point is that Rothko was a master of passion, and that, as poets, it behooves us to follow his example and choose a "red" path. Those who don't, the School O'Quietude poets, really have no business taking on Rothko as some kind of representaional icon. For me, I have a difficult path-- how to be in academia w/out becoming academic. Perelman & Bernstein did it. Waldman & Ginsberg did it. I'm trying. And Rothko, on many levels, continues to lead the "red-bricked road".