The kid was holding the dog in his hands and the man held tight on the kid’s neck. The girl laughed. With his other hand, the man opened the kid’s Jansport backpack and took out a notebook, balled-up socks, and then the Buddha. The girl stared at the Buddha. The Buddha stared back with eyes of fire. The Buddha had been there meditating, through their sex and their bath. The Buddha was always having a bath.
She could see right through the Buddha because he was crystal. She could see through the kid too, but not the man, the dog, or the woman. She could see through herself because she was inside and outside. The man aimed his gun and shot the Buddha. The woman snickered. The bottom of the Buddha sat there, legs folded on top of legs, still meditating. The top of the Buddha had shattered across the room. A bit of the Buddha was sticking out of the girl’s arm. The girl saw it, but didn’t move. The Buddha had touched her. It stung.
The man put the gun against the dog’s ear. The woman released her trigger guard. The girl could hear the gun against her hair. The kid was hyperventilating. The man told the kid to pick. The girl’s clothes weren’t on well. The dog licked at the kid’s hands and didn’t know about the gun. The dog licked the gun. The girl could feel the gun against her hair and her hair against her scalp and how her scalp was covering the rock of her skull. The kid was trembling on the floor. The dog had been a puppy when the kid was a kid and the dog had smooth ears. The girl was the only person the kid had ever had sex with. The girl would laugh after good orgasms. The dog liked to be inside sweatshirts.
The two guns hovered and pushed. The kid wouldn’t look at the girl. He kissed and kissed his dog’s head. The man whispered something disgusting about the kid’s choice. The kid could not choose. The dog always yelped and wagged when he saw the kid. The girl had a nice way of singing along to songs. The dog knew more words than most dogs. The girl couldn’t think if there was a more humiliating way to die. She couldn’t see through the kid anymore. Only her and the Buddha were clear of anything.
The summer was forced into fall. The kid was back home, but didn’t want to start 12th grade. He didn’t want to start his sandwich, which lay in tinfoil in front of him. The tattoo gun’s needle went in and out with a hum. The shape of a beagle head was being stabbed into his arm. Carefully, fur was added on, and whiskers, a little glimmer in the eyes that made the head come alive. It had been the girl’s idea. The kid was crying and couldn’t stop. The girl was bored of the crying. The tattoo man pretended not to see.
ICONOGRAPHIC CONVENTIONS OF PRE- AND EARLY RENAISSANCE: ITALIAN REPRESENTATIONS OF THE FLAGELLATION OF CHRIST
The New Testament offers no specific description of the flagellation of Jesus Christ and very little of the rest of the Passion: Jesus’ criminal indictment, subsequent suffering, and execution. Yet this series of events received massive artistic attention in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, depicted thousands of times with a certain consistency of imagery. Biblical flagellation scenes in painting and sculpture from 1300 A.D. to 1525 A.D. exhibit unmistakable iconographic repetition. Given the lack of source material from which to draw, artists of these centuries heavily borrowed from their peers and predecessors.
Historical coverage of the Passion is slim. In this significant historical void, great artistic liberties could initially be taken as interest in the subject expanded. Someone once decided, for example, that Jesus had been bound to a column and this achieved a thematic resonance with the audiences of the time, encouraging artists to repeat it. Someone decided Christ was slender, his hair gingerly framing his long face. Long like a horse and long like unhappy. Thereafter, artists followed formats that conveyed the message successfully, deviating rarely and then only slightly. No monumental compositional alterations occurred for hundreds of years.
This common practice of formal imitation and borrowing is unremarkable, but as the accumulation of passion-related imagery accelerates through this time period, visual history achieves legitimacy. Passion (from the Latin patior, meaning to suffer or to endure) is an emotion of intense, compelling enthusiasm for a person, object, activity or idea. The Passion quotient is used in Thomas Friedman’s formula of CQ + PQ > IQ. Curiosity plus passion is greater than intelligence.
No description exists. Christ was slender, his hair casually framing his long face. Like a horse’s and unhappy. Like a bluesman playing his blues. A mostly empty ketchup, a basset hound looking low with eyelids lower. His chest had some or none hairs. A beard over his cheeks because that was the style back then; only warriors shaved their beards, and that was to show how sharp their swords were. That was for fun. Also, it was custom for a cuckold to have a warrior shave his beard, publicly showing his marriage as flawed, an invitation to flaw it further.
Curiosity plus passion is almost equal to being smart. E = a Mazda car driving twice as fast. E = Michael Jordan dunking two balls while coughing. God is the closest thing to an all-knowing entity. She indexes over 9.5 billion web pages, which is more than any search engine on the web. She sorts through this vast amount of knowledge using her patented PageRank technology. God is virtually everywhere on earth at the same time. With the proliferation of Wi-Fi networks, one will eventually be able to access God.
Through repetition, validity is assumed. The flagellation thus becomes one part of a larger visual narrative, instantly recognizable. Flagellation scenes turn iconic in their thematic compatibility with each other. To see one is to be reminded of others already seen. This repetition strengthens their representation in religious culture. As with the crucifixion, a familiarity close to comfort arises when gazing at a crucifixion painting, knowing absolutely the being being killed will be a white male with a long face and relatively long nose. Nails and blood are optional. Clouds, optional. Weeping women, optional.
Children tend to add a curlicue of smoke upon the addition of a chimney in a drawing of a house. What if all beach scenes had a symmetry of beach umbrellas and a ratio of birds to sky? A formation that urged copying. In China, there are no curlicues of smoke in children’s drawings. Smoke is usually represented by several soft, wavering lines. The sometimes discounted studies of children’s drawings have informed larger studies of lifestyle differences. “California coast drawings varied greatly according to the quality of the children’s mark-making tools. Wealthy children had the opportunity to mosaic with minerals and a wide variety of artistic plastics, whereas children in poorer neighborhoods stuck to construction paper and in extreme cases, broken glass.”
Stick people are not necessarily the child-drawing norm. Studies found young Russian children making “bubble-men,” as researchers referred to them. These rounded sketches were thought to originate from the abundance of snowmen during the lengthy, snow-prone winters of the region.
When American college students take their year abroad, there is no one familiar to greet them except a loneliness they outgrew years ago. Friends will be forged like signatures. From this great distance, they will finally be able to see America, from looking around and not finding it. Buildings like cakes instead of Legos. If they go to art museums, they feel anxious. How can one stand the exquisitely stunning, divinely magnificent paintings in European cities? Making one nostalgic for the Middle Ages, the early ages, painted so painfully there are nowhere strokes, nowhere splatters. It’s unnerving to see a scene so deeply actualized in two dimensions, the David in three, appealingly human, the most appealing human, a new ideal to bring home along with the souvenirs.