PISS CHRIST

That laughter which jeers at the grandeur, the holiness, the majesty, the poetry of all things.

-Gongourt

Dear Christ,

I have just perused a photograph of you. Your body, this time fabricated out of plastic, depicted in the usual clichéd manner, strung up on the cross of irrevocable failure. Image  dimensions: 60 inches by 40.

You are certainly crucified and, this time, submerged. In this instance the photograph’s blurred and the critical appraisers have threaded together numerous adjectives to describe this studied image of you:  indiscrete, vaguely golden, mystical, liquefied, suggestive, materially reticent, translucent, innocuous, subtly reverential, romantically opaque, mysterious, ethically intriguing.

I have just seen this image of you, Christ, deadly crucified.

And drowned in piss.

I don’t know if the efflorescent liquid belongs to the acclaimed artist, but there you are, Jesus Christ, submerged in ammonia, urea and creatine, and, perhaps, albumin and glucose, in melanin and porphyrin. Not only choked in your own blood but in Andres Serrano’s piss as well.

- B. 1950 in New York, holding American citizenship, of a multi-ethnic descent, a baptised Roman Catholic, an expert in bodily fluids, including milk, semen and blood. Sponsored by prestigious cultural entities, such as the National Endowment for the Arts. Further information can be accessed on Wikipedia and in the book The Sacred-Subversive Perversion in the Contemporary Transgressive Oeuvre of Western Christianity in Andres Serrano by Josefa Huerte Castenada (2010), Cruz Inc. Publications, San Diego, CA.

I have seen this new blasphemy in your name, Christ Jesus.

But the greatest violation lies not in the idea that someone has transformed you into a synthetic idiot, suspended and plunged in his own urine (it wasn’t important if the piss designated a nocturnal fast or inebriation after glugging wine). The greatest malediction is that once more you do not say anything. There you are, the self-same distant icon – passive, indifferent, absent, pathetically divine.

Mute. Once again you are silent, as you always are, in every circumstance that entails intervention. Mute in every transgressively sabotaged circumstance. Silent when confronted with the famished, the parched and the wretched of this world, the massacred, the women unpicked with bayonets.  There you are. Unspeaking when faced with tortured genitals and heads, with political and religious hippopotamuses; when confronted with the paedophiles that have hatched behind the colonnades and the thrones of your church, for centuries a whore, the seat for the popes’ age-old excrement and privileged, smug and convenient self-righteousness.

 And now there’s you, Christ Jesus, the Saviour: mute in piss, and exhibited for a postmodern aesthetic.

Expectations that you will save yourself are foiled. After all, the narrative has become familiar. The narrative of your impotence in front of any crucifixion.

Obscene is your silence, Oh King of Illusion.

Oh  Hero of the Defeated.

Oh Prophet of poems gestating in the eye-sockets of the oppressed and the dead.

Translated by Patricia Gatt, 2011