Help. The Last Part.

Descent from the Cross. The painter thinks maybe it's finished.

Festival, Brian Kershisnik

*****
His people on the grass, around the cross, are lovely, so sad. Some are crying. Almost all of them are moving, stepping up to work, enclosing the dead son in a safe circle of their love, in their steady concern and bewildered, heart-broken care. They wear the neverwhen clothing the painter's people always wear, their hair is dark, as is almost always the case in his work, the men are mostly clean shaven. The air is filled with angels.

*****

Here is a tiny story about the painting of Descent from the Cross.
Nothing quite like this has ever happened in the painter's studio. Interestingly, this sequence of events was captured on film (or the digital equivalent thereof), which has also never before happened in the painter's studio.

He began the painting on a large canvas which, having been stretched, gessoed and prepared but never used, had waited on his wall, bored, for years (another first, or perhaps more correctly, an only). This one time his working would be captured in a sort of stop motion for use in a documentary (Painter: The Movie). The work went well, he was pleased. And pleased, too, with the animation, a baby movie of charcoal and paint flying onto canvas, figures growing up and fleshing out in mere moments. He liked showing people his work so far, liked the funny little tricks he played with the cameras; himself apparently shuttling about in front of the painting without moving his feet, a box that zipped about as if under its own steam.

Not that he approached this painting and its subject lightly. No. Far from it. He uses music to help him as he works, help him get his head and heart where they need to be, and I don't at all know how he could face day after day of the sad, sad music he has been using. I can hardly stand to be in his studio with it; I make him turn it off till I leave. He's, uh, expressive when he works. Laughs, cries, stalks about, sings, rants and whispers. I understand, I do it too. Talk to myself, mutter. Sketch things in the air, brush them away and draw them again, the same and different. I don't laugh, much, and I don't sing but I do listen to music, a song over and over, tears running down my face till I just get tired of it. We agree working alone is vital, otherwise you'd never envision, never build, you'd only ever perform and while that's important it's different. Also, people would seriously think you were crazy. Touched. Making up a true thing is really difficult work. It's been hard, hard, this painting, not like Nativity where the tears could be for the beginning of life and for the joy of a baby. This dead son hangs heavy, heavy. The painter's been weeping for months. In each week he stops work to read letters at his studio, e mails from our far-away missionary-boy. And he weeps. An anniversary comes and goes; our dear friends have been living a year since the death of their son. Other friends talk with them of respite, the easing of tearing, rending pain that only more years will bring, speak with knowledge as the death of their own boy moves slowly away and slowly away from them.

Curtain, Brain Kershisnik

All these sons are with him as the painter weeps in his bright, sunny studio, painting a family stirred and spilled in the first moments after the loss of their son. So he needs a break.
Sometimes he would have to be silly, laugh, this isn't a hopeless subject after all. The work went well, he was pleased.

One morning he called to tell me the world had ended.

*****

I've had a quote, or something I've made into a quote, lodged in a crack in my memory since I started mulling the images in this painting and these ideas of help. I haven't quite been able to shake it free; I've decided it must be a line of movie dialogue from years ago. Perhaps someone who reads this will remember too and tell me. Donnette? Julie? Tom?
This is the line, "who do you think you're helping?"
Or, no, "who do you think you're saving?"
Like in a movie with...knights and castles, perhaps? I have this vague picture of a sort of peasant person shaking himself away, pushing off a knightish person, a knight who's trying to do something helpful and noble. They struggle a bit, awkward. The peasant is looking up at his knight in disgust. "Who do you think you're saving?" The knight is taken aback and nonplussed. Doubting his nobleness, a bit, suddenly. Who do I think I'm saving, he wonders. I was pretty sure it was from The Holy Grail, but the painter, who will recite every shred and particle of all things Monty Python ("Ah," you breathe, "now I see!" and feel you finally comprehend his work) says, emphatically, that it is not. (He also says, "When you don't know what you're talking about, be emphatic." Now you truly comprehend his work.)

Pastoral with Injured Fool, Brian Kershisnik

*****

He had gone in the morning to his studio, flipped on the special cameras before beginning work at the large canvas, covered now with figures clustered around the cross where the body of the dead son hung, partially supported by the strength of nails driven through hands and wrists and partially held up in the arms of encircling family and friends. The painter stepped back to look, to see, stepped forward to work and just flicked away a bristle stuck to the canvas, a little hair from one of his round hog-bristle brushes. They stick in the paint sometimes. A great chip of the painting came away with the bristle.
Another first in the painter's studio.
He was bewildered, in an agony, in a fury. Sections of the painting flaked, fell away as he scraped at them. If that could happen, was happening, what else could, might, happen? To how many paintings? Why, of them all, to this one?
[*Note. Do not, DO NOT do this to paintings. The paint's not going to come off and you might cause damage. Painters do all sorts of things to artwork which no one else is allowed to do. This was a rare, unheard-of, one-in-a-million sort of event. DON'T SCRAPE AT PAINTINGS. Thank you.*]

That was a desperately dark and difficult day, and there were a couple more of them in the wings awaiting their turn to...not shine...glower? Quash, dismay, oppress, ruin, devastate, shatter, quell? Probably a good thing about the filming right there at first, probably people were more civilized for the camera. Smile like you mean it.

He worked it out. He reviewed and ruminated and reflected, experimented and examined, stomped around, made phone calls and prayers (did a little more scraping) and worked it out. It was an accident, a freak, an anomaly (good, good news), an aberration which irrevocably carried away the painting (bad, bad news). End of the world.
(Right?)

*****

In the composition the angels weep. Angels reach to help the man lifting down the top crosspiece. Angels reach out to touch hair, faces. The people standing on the earth don't look up, don't see the angels, don't realize, probably, that they are being helped. Are too cocooned in their pain. Have no way of measuring how much worse, if they were truly alone, this could be.

*****

The writers of the accounts that would one day be called The Gospels had a lot on their minds, a number of goals, a number of challenges and issues pressing them. I am, as many other people are, fascinated as much by what they could choose not to say as by what they wrote down. Pick events and phrases from something like thirty three or four years of a life you believe to be the most pivotal, vivid and important life ever lived. What do you not say? It grabs my attention that Matthew, Mark and Luke all stop the narrative, the account at the cross itself, the place where it's all going on, to jump for a tiny moment across town to Herod's temple. They tell us that as Jesus' soul tore away from this earth, racing back to the Father of us all, the veil of the temple was rent in twain. Take that statement a moment at face value, whether you believe the story as recorded in the New Testament or not. You're in Jerusalem, doing your thing in the temple, and suddenly the veil is rent. Not by any force you can see. Torn. How strange would that be?
Matthew does step back further, up onto a crane for a long shot, as it were, a sweeping 360 to show us the chaos and general upheaval in nature as time undid itself and the dead prepared to come forth. Except for that little phrase though, Mark and Luke never let us take our eyes from the close up, the same intimate scene the painter has chosen. Just a few words, like a voice-over, with all the attention still trained on these people here at the cross, these faces. The veil of the temple was rent in twain, and, according to Luke, from top to bottom.
Why would they want everyone, forever, to know about that?
Why just then?
I wouldn't pretend even to guess in a scholarly way what that's all about, but I'm willing to say what it means to me, right now, in a human way. I once told myself God tore the veil because he was so very angry with everyone for their hideous treatment of the son he loved, but I've shed that thought the way I've shed my braces and my fear of dogs. I believe the veil tore because, on some plane, people, a lot of people, needed to get through. Quickly. Their help was needed, and they came. The Veil, even the symbolic representation of the Veil, ripped, gaped, tore right across. Riven by the speed and density of their coming. I think one of the vital truths those men, those writers, wanted us to see and understand is that this is what happens when the world ends. God smashes open the windows and pours out help. I would, if it were my kids. And it wouldn't matter if it were the ending of a big important world with everybody on it and torture and mayhem in the immediate future or the end of the world in the size and shape of a three year old lost in the local grocery store. The end is the end. Nothing hurts worse than the end of the world.

Flight Practice with Instruction, Brian Kershisnik

*****

The painter started over. He had to. What else on earth was he going to do? Cameras were rolling (or clicking. whatever). The second painting, the one I've been talking about, grows, blooms in stop motion as quickly as the first one did. He'll show it to you if you express the least amount of interest. Possibly even if you don't. Here's the thing. The second one is better. Immeasurably better. There would have been no second painting had it not been for the death of the first.
Help.
Was that help?
Was someone helping?
A peasant sort of person angrily pushing away a knightly sort of person. "Who do you think you're saving?"

*****

He has a painting of Christ struggling with a man, holding him by one arm, holding him close and still as the man pushes against his Lord in surprise and maybe pain? shock? Jesus is, after all, rubbing mud into the man's eyes. Push, pull. Almost an embrace, almost a dance. This is healing. After he clears his eyes, the blind man will see.

*****

What am I trying to talk about? All the stories, these memories of help. Quick, unthinking. Practiced and measured. Unrecognized and vital. Back and forth, give and take. Help that hurts us in the giving and the getting. Hurts that make us whole. Healing we shove away, bewail and bemoan. Who do you think you're saving? People in Descent from the Cross stand in the grass without shoes. They could not draw nigh, the closest friends can go to death falls far short, but they could put off the shoes from their feet, stand on holy ground. There were only a few of them together there, but enough for a circle, all facing in to a present need, a common goal, and he was in their midst, still, as he had promised he would be. The air all full of angels. The terror had torn the veil. Angels could get through. They'd been waiting.

*****

Years ago the painter made a song based in part on a dream. In the dream we are all dancing barefoot in long grass on level ground, learning a dance sort of like a square dance and sort of like a line dance but in a circle. A complicated circle. It's fun but it's really hard and has to be done right. Slowly we realize the man coaching us through the dance, patient but exacting, is Jesus. We're not doing a perfect job, we aren't up to steps as complex as these. We lose our breath, we start to laugh and our steps are ragged. The dance master doesn't laugh but he doesn't get mad. And he doesn't let us stop. He's going to keep us there till we get it right or till we leave, I guess, but no one wants to leave. It's fun, really fun, and he's nice and funny but making us work so hard. It's just too hard. We keep laughing because we dance into each other and on people's feet and some of us are getting hurt and he just keeps making us do it again and again. It's got to be right.
The last line from the song the painter made is this.

Standing with Jesus on the grass.
Everyone has taken off their shoes.

There was a Kershisnik painting of Jesus on the grass discussed at a seminar a few years ago and I asked him about the song. He shook his head. Too long ago, couldn't really remember. I remember. It was my dream.

There's a painting of a friend holding his dying son to his chest, carrying his son who is a big boy and hard to manage. It has to be a close embrace. Push and pull. It looks like dancing. The air filled with banners. It's not a hopeless subject.

Father and Son Dancing, Brian Kershisnik

*****

I haven't the slightest idea how to tie it down. This is fundamental to my walk in this world and I can no more explain it than I can explain the earth that holds up each and every one of my footfalls. I believe in help and in helping. I do. This I believe. I want to help. And I want Help.

We are called to the work. Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance? Push and pull. Give and take. Where we struggle, where we step, this is holy ground. Angels reach down. People reach out. He gives and he takes. I can't come back if I never leave. If I never die how will I live again?

Con'se-crate [...to dedicate; from com-, together, and sacrare, to...devote to a divinity, from sacer, sacred.]
Webster

Dance with naked feet.

What is it I need?
Light in the dark.
Health if I'm sick.
Water.
Bread.
Life when I'm dead. Whenever I'm dead. Every time I'm dead.
Help to a better place, whether I like it, understand it, recognize it or not.
Who do you think you're saving?
If the people in Descent from the Cross reached out, they could hold hands and make a circle.
A dance, great and terrible. Me and you. Give and take.
Dancing with Jesus on the grass.
Everyone has taken off their shoes.

Behold, I say unto you, as I said unto my disciples, where two or three are gathered together in my name, as touching one thing, behold, there will I be in the midst of them--even so am I in the midst of you.
Fear not to do good, my sons, for whatsoever ye sow, that also shall ye reap; therefore, if ye sow good ye shall also reap good for your reward.
Therefore, fear not, little flock; do good; let earth and hell combine against you, for if ye are built upon my rock, they cannot prevail...
Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not.
Behold the wounds which pierced my side, and also the prints of the nails in my hands and feet.

D&C 6:32-37

They Dance, Brian Kershisnik