Holy Week Meditation

1 Prologue

When the cassocked pastor told the boy to gaze
into the hole gouged below Jesus’ ribcage, he did.
What he saw was something local:
the Atlantic heaved in a storm, waves
seethed on rocks, beached whales rotted
on sand the color of mommy’s belly.
Later, when the rain stopped and the sun blazed,
large blooddrops fell from Jesus’ wound, sizzling
like omelets on the ground.
“Eli, Eli, Lama, Sabachthani!” a rooster crowed
early that afternoon. Soon afterwards
Mr. Irrgang, the tailor who lived next door, chopped
off its head.
The boy, confused, didn't know what it all meant
but nonetheless felt happy, knowing
he had years to figure it out.

2
Like a woman fanning her ailing mother
Sarah swayed her palm branch in the air
as did Jeremiah and the others.
Although she couldn’t see the new chieftain,
she grunted as, close to her, the donkey on which he rode
shat on the narrow road into Jerusalem, then bared its teeth
crazily at someone in the crowd.
It was hot. Her thighs itched. Smelling jasmine
she wanted to get laid.

3
A different day. The mob, tired of heckling magicians and whores,
heaved stones and rotted food scraps at a convict
who lugged a mammoth piece of wood through the streets.
Bramble leaves, held in place by thorns hammered into the criminal’s skull,
hung like miniature paintings nailed to a tavern wall, each one depicting
a blood-spattered chaos only drunken louts could understand.
One night years earlier, having decided to end it all, Jesus ran
into a stormy sea and begged the waves
to whirl him under, but instead they held him up.
From that point on, followed by the rabble, he journeyed into villages,
cornering people and sniveling, “I’m God!”

4
A fool who spoke a philosophical creole no one understood,
the eccentric looked down. Far below
tiny figures jumped around, waved their arms
and told jokes. A few soldiers
played craps and argued, unaware of how the hill they played on
sloped downward toward a laundromat in West Columbus, behind which
a skinhead shot heroin under his tongue after pissing on April daffodils
in a corner of the parking lot.
“Did you nail those goddamn spikes into him real good?”
an official asked two laborers, as the wind whistled
over stones and thunderclouds rolled in.
Not hearing anything, Jesus hung groggily on the cross, his twisted lips
a ragged ditch with piles of debris in it.
No one looked at him.
Even his father didn’t catch his moment in the limelight.

5
The hill, Golgotha, ascends toward devotion’s object.
Lusty triumph, whimpering on the cross, stares at us.
The Garden of Gethsemane, with its fig tree in the shadows, remains
one of hope’s subdivisions in the distance, a spot
of dirty green in the midst of high-rises;
there, on a balcony without a railing, a paralytic sits
on an upside down paint can and smokes a cigarette.
And where is the tomb, the one from which Jesus walks away?
There it is, with the boulder rolled to the side of the cave’s entrance.
A million maggots carry out the corpse on their collective back
while singing the praises of a giant larva no human wants to marvel at.

6
Dusk, the only holy moment: the flower
and its absence about to merge, the wind
blowing in the olive grove, a woman taking off her clothes.
The taverns, loud now. Publicans bang tankards
on wooden tables, and the barracks,
where Roman soldiers remove their military girdles
so they can stretch at will, are like
the mind’s guard posts, protecting us
from dangers beyond thought’s borders.
Magdalene, the region’s best-known whore, cares nothing
about these goings-on, craving only
what the others don’t: a “more” so big they can’t imagine it.
On the path where she walks now, the air itself is the fragrance,
not grass or weed or myrtle, that she detects
as she swoons forward toward things as they are,
including Jesus’s corpse there in the dirt, its little
maggot friends still happy with their salvation, singing
as they work.
Yes, this is where I’ll sleep tonight, she thinks,
lying down in adulterous silence with her Lord.

(a revision)

Can the Visual/Verbal Arts Accomplish Anything These Days in the U.S.?

Blaze / graffitti decal / 10" x 8"

Yesterday (4/2/2009) at Facebook someone sent me a compliment about the graffitti decal above. Although I appreciated the comment, it started me thinking about the obstacles that stand in the way of effectively reaching out to people through the visual and verbal arts. I don't want to exaggerate, reaching a mass audience has always been a difficult goal for an artist to achieve, and the continuing existence of that challenge is no surprise. However, technological differences between the contemporary scene and the past have redefined the nature of the issue.

The issue of reaching people at a mass level is no longer about using "the people's language" in poetry or about employing popular graphics styles in one's paintings or murals. Instead, the issue is now, Can ANY art have a long-term public impact? The reason for this question is simple. Because technology drowns us these days in images and words, images and words in general have been demoted from unique signifiers of certain meanings to fleeting parts of an ongoing deluge. Reality is no longer experienced as a sequence of invididual "this's" or "that's" or individual "rights" or "wrongs," but rather as a river of infinite this's, etc. Although this may help us see objects/events from multiple viewpoints, which can be good, the technology behind this culture river is nonetheless dangerous in that it imposes on society its notion of the real, which is that the electronic/virtual river is what's real, not the specifics it carries. Consequently, the river overwhelms us with things (images, words, etc.) flying by so rapidly that we don't have time to analyze the specifics. This undermines efforts to produce verbal/visual artworks that effectively counter the status quo, since the only reality now is the image/word flood, not any particular image/word in itself. Images that are for war and ones that are against war are equal parts of the flood as are the views of the coservative and liberal commentators on a CNN panel. Visual art, poetry, panel discussions - their importance is no longer what they say, but merely that they are. The social function of their presence is that it proves the real exists - "real" as in "the river which deadens."

Still, people, including myself, try, as we should. Today's unsolvable problem becomes tomorrow's solved one. But the effort requires getting outside of the box and, at some point, defying authority. This is one of the reasons I started experimenting with graffitti years ago. I don't consider this experiment "the answer" o the difficulties mentioned above. Still, like all artistic experiments with public communication at this time,it is part of a necessary process.