I hope aliens look like a painting by Rothko
It seems unlikely that there aren’t any aliens. It’s possible of course, but I can’t think why our little planet should be in any way unique. I hope humanity gets to meet them some day, both because if they’re about then the inevitable consequence of our species sticking about will be that we run into each other at some point (and I’m quite fond of humans and hope we do get to stick around) and because I do think Liu Cixin was wrong and that actually if aliens do exist it should be possible to have mutually enriching interactions with them (in Liu’s defence I don’t think the Three Body Problem series is really about aliens: it’s an allegory for the American and Chinese empires, and I think he’s probably right that empires can’t coexist. But maybe we don’t always have to live in empires).
The general scientific consensus seems to be that if aliens do exist we don’t have the foggiest what they will look like. One idea I love is that maybe one of the reasons we’ve found alien life so hard to find is that it is so … well … alien to us that we repeatedly fail to spot it when we come across it. Maybe alien life takes a form that we’ve never even thought of and therefore do not know how to look for.
Unfortunately that seems not to be the majority view. Aliens will have been moulded by the same laws of physics and process of evolution as the rest of us, out of the same fundamental elements and under not dissimilar circumstances. Aliens might look very different to us but they will probably have physical form. They will probably eat, or at least consume in some form, and so their bodies will probably have some direction to them; even if they don’t have faces we will probably be able to hazard a guess as to which end we should talk at.
But the universe is very very big and contains very very many different possibilities. And so there still might be some deeply weird aliens out there. I hope so: the universe seems so much more hopeful the greater the diversity of things that lie within it. What I’m really hoping for are uncanny aliens: things, beings, that look nothing like intelligent life as humans here on earth understand it, but in which nevertheless we can immediately recognise the organising hand of intelligence. Aliens we might not be able to comprehend or communicate with but can acknowledge and admire as clearly having thoughts, whatever those thoughts may be.
I think meeting that sort of alien would be like looking at a Rothko.
Mark Rothko painted big blocks of colour on top of other big blocks of colour. He did this exclusively for 21 years. Towards the end he just painted black blocks on top of other black blocks, or sometimes grey blocks. He said these ones were about death. If this makes him sound like a parody of an Emperor’s New Clothes modern artist it is because pretty much everything about Rothko makes him sound like a parody of an Emperor’s New Clothes modern artist. He should be contemptible.
But there’s something going on in the big blocks, or around their edges. There’s an organising intelligence. Even though it doesn’t look anything like life it is somehow alive. Even though it’s inert there is somehow a sense of movement. Simon Sharma talked compellingly about stumbling into a Rothko exhibit by mistake, and as a sceptic, and finding the experience religious: not in the pious reverent way he had assumed was intended and pooh-poohed, but in the sense of connecting with a different form of meaning he never knew existed. Taken, in Rothko’s words, “on an unknown adventure into an unknown space”. I had a meta version of this experience: watching Sharma’s documentary, finding it to be pretentious nonsense, then seeking out the paintings to see what all the fuss was about … and then spending the next month obsessively staring at online images of them trying to work out precisely what made them so haunting. My last three laptops have had Rothkos as their wallpaper and I still haven’t worked it out. But I am haunted.
I think part of it is about scale, and what the scale says about economics. Josie Sparrow tweeted movingly about how what made seeing Rothko at Tate Liverpool numinous was the generosity of provision for working class cultural experiences the gallery represented: “like a cathedral”. I think the paintings themselves also have that quality. Rothkos feel like they are of the public realm, and indeed the vast majority of the later ones are. In the words of an anonymous Wikipedian: “The Seagram murals were to have decorated the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, but Rothko eventually grew disgusted with the idea that his paintings would be decorative objects for wealthy diners and refunded the lucrative commission, donating the paintings to museums”. His other major late life series were for chapels and universities.
The paintings have this sense of generosity to them; they are enormous, and mostly oil on canvass. As any child will know, if you get given a massive quantity of expensive paint and the good paper you feel an enormous amount of social pressure to not just to paint the whole thing one colour, whack a great big block of a second colour in the middle and leave it at that. People criticise abstract art by saying their four year old could have done it. There’s no way a four year old could paint a Rothko, their arms are too short, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to live in a world where they were allowed to give it a go?
Instead big paintings tend to be busy, filled with the various ideas the artist wants to convey and the various other ideas their patrons, audiences, and assorted stakeholders also need included. In contrast the size and simplicity of a Rothko, the amount of trust placed in the artist to create value without (or rejecting) pressure or relations of ownership over the art, the generosity of provision of “luxury” artistic resources to that end (and the understanding that comes with that that in the grand scheme of things it’s just a bit of paint and some fabric which society can easily spare) feels like a hint, a foreshadowing hopefully, of some of the more audacious things art could do in a post scarcity society; a suggestion therefore of possibilities beyond capitalism. Numinous in its vastness and its otherness. Uncanny, but clearly intelligent.
That’s another thing about aliens after all: they might not be capitalists. Even if neither Banks nor Posadas is right, aliens might think and organize differently. Aliens and gods have always walked closely alongside each other in our understanding. I’ve never been that sold on god but I do find something of the divine in the infinity of possibilities the universe presents; the humbling scale and the idea that things don’t have to be the way they are and maybe somewhere they aren’t. That’s exciting.
