Die Liebesfälscher.

Desire to gaze on stars and angels.

and the nature of the angels went unexplained, 

I’m happiest now when most away I can tear my soul from its mould of clay, on a windy night when the moon is bright, and my eye can wander through worlds of light. When I am not, and none beside, nor earth, nor sea, nor cloudless sky, but only spirit wandering wide through infinite immensity.

“Drink my dreams,”

Rothko wanted to paint basic human emotion. So he painted red over red over red. Behind the colour he was looking for light. In 1942 he painted The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, where Iphigenia is not a girl, but a black pine already resined in grief. Above her the amnesia of light, an umber sky, shadows spilling white, the only motion the white hands of the wind. The story of Iphigenia was never about the girl, but the men who called for the blood of a girl knowing that the winds would one day change. The forest charred, the air stilled, deranged, and the truth beneath it all is fear, was always fear, the open grave, the charcoal line, the dead growing out of the living like lichen, the pine a blood-eyed child, the pyres loose stones and living rooms. Dress it up in the white hands of the wind. Call it need. Call it necessity. Rothko wanted to paint basic human emotion so looked behind the light and found blood rushing to no end and no knowledge of end.

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”