When I pick up my 90-year-old father-in-law to drive him
to the early service
at Galilee Church, where he has gone for the last quarter
century, he hobbles
out through the two automatic doors of the retirement home
on his flimsy wood
cane. He has lost weight so his blue suit hangs loosely around
his stooped frame.
He has smeared on his cracked lips the white cream that Dana, my wife
and his daughter, has given him
so he looks like James Ensor’s grinning white-faced death’s-head
with lipless mouth
and a black top hat partially wrapped in green crepe paper
in the lower left corner
of the oil painting Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889.
The 14-by-6-foot
canvas shows a carnivalesque parade of partygoers—
caricatures of Ensor’s
acquaintances, relatives, and enemies—all marching down a boulevard
to celebrate
Christ’s second coming. The small haloed figure of Christ,
who rides a donkey
and is a self-portrait of Ensor, is lost in the crowd of masked,
mugging, guffawing,
or unmasked, leering, squinting faces. They carry banners and placards
that announce
VIVE LA SOCIETE (Long Live Welfare), FANFARES DOCTRINAIRES
TOUJOURS REUSSI
(Doctrinaire Fanfares Always Succeed), LES CHARCUTIERS
DE JERUSALEM
(The Butchers of Jerusalem), and COLMAN’S MUSTART
(Colman’s Mustard).
None too subtly, Ensor implies that if Christ came back, we
would co-opt
the miracle to promote our own agendas—political reforms,
businesses,
product advertisements. Christ would be ignored. When Erwin
and I enter
his church, the well-dressed parishioners who presumably know him
turn away.
They don’t want to associate with an old, dying man whose suit
is unpressed and stained,
as I now notice, with brown spots that might be splattered tomato sauce.
I want to rise up
from my pew and shout, “Fuck you, frozen chosen!” So what
if only yesterday
Erwin, after a long phone conversation about his Volvo which had failed
its annual inspection
and has to have new tires and brakes, asked me, “Don’t I know you
from somewhere?
What’s the name of your organization?” Momentarily shocked,
I opted
for the flip rejoinder–“My organization is codenamed DANA.”
I want to explain to everyone
that he’s only an old man with Parkinson’s and mild dementia
who is trying to brave out
his last days and go to church as if nothing untoward
is happening
to him. We listen to the gospel in which a disciple
tells Christ, mobbed
by his followers, “Your mother and your brothers and your sisters
are outside, asking
for you.” He replies, “Who are my mother and my brothers?”
and gestures to the crowd,
“Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will
of God is my brother
and sister and mother.” Everyone around us nods sagely, but keeps
everyone else
at arm’s distance, pretends Erwin and I and death itself
are invisible. In his sermon
the priest says that Christ was liar, lunatic, or Lord—
the only three
logical, mutually exclusive, alternatives. “But why can’t he
be all three,”
I want to ask him, “just as Erwin is your father and brother
and a doddering
old man unrelated to you?” In Ensor’s canvas, the mayor perches
on a reviewing stand
next to a clown in orange and blue pants, who bends over
to show us
his large ass. Ensor’s people have bulbous noses, crossed eyes,
and bloated cheeks.
They gossip, fart, curse. Their faces are Halloween masks of lust,
greed, gluttony,
hypocrisy. A man and woman suck each other’s tongues
like pink popsicles.
Emile Littré, atheist social reformer with a red-brown bird’s nest
of a beard and a drunkard’s
red nose, wears a bishop’s miter, waves a drum major’s baton,
leads the rabble
forward. Why should I expect anything different outside
Ensor’s great
painting? One placard says of Les XX, the group of artists
who refused to exhibit
this picture: LES VIVISECTEURS BELGES INSENSIBLES
(Hardhearted Belgian
Vivisectors). Ensor knew firsthand that to be ignored is to be
cut open while still
alive and then eviscerated. Next to the top-hatted death’s-head
a big-mouthed clown
frowns. The man with wiry black hair laughs. A military brass band
marches ahead of Christ,
drowns out whatever he has to say. The band leader’s khaki shirt
is studded with war medals.
Erwin and I are part of this parade. We too are entering
Brussels, City of the Second
Coming. Only one gray-haired man stops to wish Erwin well
when he leaves
the church, shuffling through the dark double doors into sun.
I hold his hand
like that of a child too young to cross the street by himself.
His fingers are rough,
warm, clumsy. It’s like holding a lump of dried clay. I tell him when
he has to step down.
DONALD PLATT’s fourth book of poems, Dirt Angels, was published by New Issues Press in 2009, and his fifth, Tornadoesque, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. He has been awarded two individual artist’s fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three Pushcart Prizes. He teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University.
- One Page Torn From The Book of the Names of the Dead - December 13, 2013
- Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 - October 2, 2013
