The quiet, quiet signs of Rothko Chapel

The Sign: Eighteen inches. That's the distance from which one should view a Rothko painting, according to Mark Rothko. One might have to get closer to read the signs outside the Rothko Chapel though. The placards placed around the tan brick structure are minimal, not much more than museum labels.

If the chapel were in a museum, say the Menil Collection next door, it would take little to adapt the muted signage:

Rothko Chapel. 1971. Mark Rothko, Philip Johnson, Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry. Commissioned by Dominique and John de Menil.

As they are today, the signs offer some fairly vague guidance for visitors who might be unsure how to proceed: stand-squint-sigh or count rosary beads. "All are welcome," one reads. Another, "Guests are invited to experience the silence."

Visitors sometimes stop to read the signs before entering through the two heavy doors at the center of the monolith-like structure. Some, perhaps the more seasoned in stillness, come out looking refreshed. Others, a touch bewildered.

Part of the ambiguity may stem from the placards themselves, which have all the visual makings of museum signs: a less-is-more, sans-serif somberness. And then there's the building, unyielding in its opaque monumentality. Part gallery, part worship space. It's an intellectual dance between decoding and contemplating. Guests are invited to experience the silence.

The Place: In a turn Rothko, with his proscriptions for proper viewing, could never have anticipated, the chapel has its own Yelp page.

"Whatever, some people don't like to think too much about life and what our place is and if you're one of those people, this isn't the place for you," writes Eric J. in his recent review, "You need to head on down to Moody Gardens for 'Pirates' or whatever."

Inside, there's a collection of Rothko paintings – dark and turbid – that surround the viewer. When the sun sifting through the clerestory shifts, the purple panels shine like scars. People meditate on cushions on the ground or lean against each other on the benches. The occasional crinkle of a plastic bag breaks the silence.

There's a smell, a specific Rothko Chapel smell. That's the first thing two dashing young men in khaki shorts comment on when they leave the chapel.

Mike and Connie Sherman came out laughing. Visiting from Memphis for parents' weekend at Rice University, the couple said they weren't sure what to expect.

"It was a very calming place," said Connie. "Everyone's so solemn."

In an essay describing the spiritual milieu of his fellow artists in America, Barnett Newman, whose sculpture "Broken Obelisk" sits in the pool outside the chapel, wrote, "We are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to absolute emotions." That ability to dwell in the exaltation, rather than man's material existence, was essential to accomplishing the sublime. "We are creating images whose reality is self-evident," wrote Newman. "We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting."

Though the sublime tries to mute signs and signifiers, humans have a tendency to memory, to association, to nostalgia. Some, like Irma Santiago, visiting from San Antonio with her husband Angel Santiago, see the Bahá'í temples she remembers from when they lived in Panama. And she feels God in the stillness.

But for each visit, there's a new constellation of memory, association and nostalgia mapped against the panels, try as they might to stand self-evident.

The solitude of the space didn't necessarily surprise Connie. "I think for a meditative environment, it makes sense," she says after spending time inside the chapel. Still, there was something about the focused silence of it all that translated into levity for her.

It happens. The light shifts, the shadows from leaves outside play against the paintings and suddenly a knot is undone. It feels like free fall. Only up. Like the photos at the end of Tom Junod's essay "Falling Man" that show a single man in the air, falling beside the North Tower as it collapses. But after searching for the identity of the man in the iconic photograph by Richard Drew, Junod's unidentified man finds his way to the pages of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," his descent reversed into a heavenly, effortless climb. Up, up, up. A knot undone.

So, she comes out laughing, dizzy on the dissonance of being. "I felt like I was being disrespectful in there," she says.

It's perfect weather outside. Cool in the shade. A child wades in the water by the Newman sculpture. His dad paces beside him. The kid, still new to walking, eats it and ends up face first in the water. Dad scoops him up. The kid's delighted. Dad's delighted.

Somewhere inside that knot, always tying and untying itself, life is lived.