Hamburger Jesus
When you’re just a young chap and it’s the nuns teaching you, what often happens during art class is you decide to paint Jesus. As if it’s your own idea and not Sister Perpetua nudging you in a certain direction. In my case, the picture of Jesus morphed into a picture of a hamburger. But before it all went the way of buns and lettuce, I spent an awful lot of time thinking about his gentle oval face, his tremendous flowing hair. Contemplated the colours of his flaming heart, all of that. I remember choosing the red and orange paints, mixing up a muddy green, so the sacred heart could be wrapped in barbed-wire thorns. He would offer it forward, his own heart that is, in one pale hand. I think I intended the other hand to gesture at the pierced organ in the orthodox way—limply—but probably even then I found the depiction of human movement to be pointless in a painting.
I was very influenced at that age by the nuns, of course. Hadn’t yet found another outlet for the passions they uncovered in us boys, probing for our notions of sin so they could pluck them out, force our thoughts and hands above the sheets, redirect all the varied confusions of our flesh towards their God and his regulations. All of which is to say that painting Jesus was a quite ordinary activity to focus the febrile young mind, while the more unusual thing was to end up with a food item on the easel.
*
‘You’re in your eighties now, Mr Diggory,’ say the interviewers who come around whenever I’m given an honorary something, or included on an important list. ‘How do you explain your longevity?’
I tend to say things like, ‘Well, Jerome, one thing I’d tell readers of your magazine is that any artist mustn’t pursue longevity as a goal. Never imagine that you must produce certain work by a certain age, or in response to the criticism of the moment. None of that.’
‘And instead?’ Jerome would prompt, a heat-seeking missile for the positive pull quote. But by then I’d have drifted off a bit, wondering when the cup of tea might arrive and if someone might have spread butter on the scone rather than putting it in a triangle on the side.
‘Instead?’ I might say if he’s still waiting, mouth open like a dead eel. ‘Well, I’d say think of the future pooling behind you. Go ahead into what’s come before. Don’t buy into the linear path of progress. All of that is important if art is to take us out of our limits, which of course it must.’
I realise as I say these things that they sound too abstract. Perhaps I should say, to paint over a lifetime you must live on a hill, take long walks with no purpose, read the back of the potting mix bag:
A). So that you don’t die of Legionnaire’s Disease, and
B). Because everything you take into the human brain re-emerges at some point. It settles and disappears, then the long walks loosen it all up, so the potting mix label information will rise again, and there is your concept of decay harbouring the potent instruments of both more life and more death, an idea of time not only moving towards decline, but spiralling to both nourish and destroy, and so there is your next painting, an extreme close-up of that intricate universe of incipient sustenance and hostility.
Jerome is game and he types down what I say about progress and limits. He pushes the recording device closer to demonstrate how he is listening.
‘Longevity,’ he clarifies, ‘as in, what’s your diet and exercise regime, Mr Diggory?’
So I say, ‘Well, I do like a bit of porridge for breakfast.’
At the beginning of my career it helped to have a name like Mungo Diggory. Scottish, the Mungo, and the Diggory too for that matter, although that boggy lowland side of our history was generations past by then. The etymology of Diggory is to be dispossessed (hardly the case once immigrated to the colonies), but as for the Mungo, I’m not sure. A pet, I’ve been told, also not applicable in my case, the third child of five, firmly in the forgotten middle, and all of us with less than run-of-the-mill names: Morag, Leod, me, Agnes, Dorcas.
It’s a bit of conversational filigree, the names diversion, buying me time to concentrate on transporting a bite of scone to my mouth. If this Jerome intends me to encourage the young ones, the next generation, that sort of thing, then the point I’d like to make is that when starting out, you must put aside all cynicism and winking in the work and have a go at the moon. Land on it with your moonboots, walk around, and put your flag into it. Then notice how you’ve left boot marks and flagholes everywhere, so leave the moon alone, try the footpath. Have a go at that unyielding surface of science and utility, and do that over and over until one day you’re good enough to paint the wet piece of concrete that reflects the moon, and then, there, you have something to put away and keep. That’s how it went for me anyway, once I was no longer a child paying too much attention to marvellous Sister Perpetua, with her throwing arm that could beat us all, even us farm boys, strong as we were from the hay bales and cream cans.
Thwarted moons, that generally gets the Jeromes nodding off. What would wake them up would be to point at the hamburger framed on my wall. It would be so easy to create a trinket from that and sell it for cheap.
‘Why did you paint such ordinary objects? What gave you that initial idea?’ Jerome will inevitably ask. You see, the reason I’m well-known, or used to be well-known, in this neck of the woods is I’m a bit like that chap, Richard Pearse, with his flying machine before the Wright brothers. Warhol didn’t start with the soup cans ’til the sixties, but I was on packets of chewing gum, bottles of Coca-Cola, Baby Ruth candy bars, that sort of thing, well over a decade before, and doing all that way down at the very arse-end of the world, artistically-speaking. Accidental prescience in global isolation explains much of my recognition, should you choose to be brutally honest about it.
I’ve painted on many subjects and themes, but it’s the food on white space they want to know about. From there they can chart my course—celebrated, criticised, irrelevant, revised, re-appreciated. So many retrospectives in the last little while that soon someone will declare me problematic.
The easiest answer to why I paint such ordinary objects is the hamburger. It’s a marvellous metaphor, obviously, for how one starts off wanting to capture the divine and ends up with a consumable article. But I don’t tell the story to this Jerome, nor any of the others, for fear they would seize on it, make it the main thing, emblematic of all that followed.
*
I was only twelve years old, but even I could see how she wanted to say his name.
Herb must be due soon. What time did Herb say he would come? Is that Herb I can hear at the gate? Mungo, run and see if that’s Herb?
Oh, she simply lit up. She wouldn’t have yet been thirty years old, Mum, in 1942. Yes, just twenty-nine. Still young by anyone’s standards, never mind having five children and Dorcas already weaned and walking. She was lean and fit right into old age, broad-shouldered and very straight through the spine, but her real beauty lay in her voice, a clear and chiming treasure she kept in reserve, hardly ever deployed at length.
I don’t remember the moment Herb first stepped through our door, but I have no doubt his eyes would have widened in surprise to hear her speak, a woman once trained in singing and still bearing the vocal traces of some finer, loftier life, right there in an ordinary farm kitchen. Why, a lady! Herb surely thought. That Jean Diggory has notions, was the unkinder way others put it, considers herself a cut above.
It was Dad who’d signed us up for the home visits from US marines. It was a formal arrangement between the military camp and local families, to gee the Americans along a bit, the ones who’d already gone through the mangle of battle and still had to go back. We were to build up Herb’s strength, provide a family atmosphere, help him recuperate and get ready to return.
My guess is Dad opened our home out of guilt. He hadn’t yet been conscripted himself, and I suspect he was relieved to hide his natural reluctance to fight behind a squinting eye and willingness to bust a gut on the home front.
‘Thank you, Ma’am,’ said Herb, after eating Mum’s roast mutton and then her plum jam roly-poly. She offered him seconds, thirds, a covered dish to take back to the camp, as if all of us kids weren’t eying up the remaining hunks on that mutton bone, wanting every last bit chopped in with our fried potatoes for breakfast. But Herb entranced us too, enough for us not to mind. The square American head, the slanting sliding speech, the bottomless supply of sweets sent over by a mother and three sisters hysterical for his safe return, then topped up from plentiful camp stores. Herb was an astonishing alien who landed at our table, and his every action and word scorched our imaginations.
While Herb ate, we watched his hands give away secrets that his grinning, cheerful manner did not; the fingers trembled and fluttered with remnants of what he called jungle rot, telegraphing his intense anxiety about being shipped out again to atolls bristling with disease, skinny palm trees, and suicidal Japanese. He laughed as said he was furious at being flung out to the Pacific fringes of war, never having seen its European heart. He longed to forget it all and just go home. He smiled and said a man had to wonder, too, at the effect of all the malaria medication on his prospects for family life, and his eyes rested on little Dorcas while Mum watched him watch the baby.
He held his fork in the wrong hand. Sheep meat, he told us as he speared it up in great brown lumps, was something he’d never tried. We added it to our list of things he didn’t know about—morning tea, afternoon tea, how our mother had never before taken her apron off long enough to sit down at the table to eat at the same time as us.
The day after Herb’s visit he sent flowers, chewing gum, Baby Ruths, and a thank-you note praising Mum’s cooking. Perhaps she read into all of that, even though she knew perfectly well that ma’ams and flowers and notes were being scattered all around the neighbourhood like horse droppings. In the note, Herb wrote out instructions for the meal he missed most from home, an obedient response to her specific, giddy request.
‘I’ll be Herb,’ Leod said in the hay barn. ‘Mungo, you be the Japs. Agnes, you’re a hula girl. Get afternoon tea ready for me under that palm tree,’ he said, pointing to a rake against the wall. We trembled our fingers on a hay grenade so it flew off in random directions, taking out multiple Japs at once. We smuggled a fork out of the kitchen and wielded it in our right hands, stabbing enemies at close range, defying the orders of our crummy jerk officers and saving the unit. In our games, Herb always lived. We kept our empty candy bar wrappers, smoothed them out, stuffed them with twists of hay, then tucked them away somewhere private. Anyone who studies my candy series will see the wrappers are too irregular and misshapen, the effect too airy to be filled with factory logs of nougat.
The next time Herb came for tea, I rushed helter-skelter to the table and, shocked, said to Mum, ‘What’s on your lips? You’re bleeding!’
I can remember how Dad replied, light and easy, ‘Your mother has always liked to look nice at teatime, Mungo, now eat your… remind me what we’re calling this meal of yours, Herbert—a hand burger?’
‘Ham!’ us kids yelled in unison. ‘Hamburger, Dad!’
And Dad said, ‘Well, where’s the ham then, kiddos?’ And in that way he steered us all out of the danger zone I’d created.
Sometimes, Herb stayed on late into the evening, and we’d hear three voices plaited together through the wall. Mum who never talked much, talking. Dad who never stayed up, staying up. A stranger turning them into strangers too. I pressed my ear to the wall but couldn’t make out what they were saying, detecting only the sliding notes of worry and fear. What I really wanted to catch was the free cack-cack-cack of Dad’s laugh, vanishingly rare by then as his right eye squinted ever tighter, no longer making him appear roguish and dashing, but twisting his whole face into a permanent, more compulsive contortion. He put in enormous hours on the farm, and disappeared to the canning factory or down to the wharves for days at a time, leaving Mum to rise to the national occasion of coping and making do.
‘My goodness, Mungo, isn’t Mum looking well at the moment?’ Mrs Dunn said, arch as anything, eyebrows nearly flying off her face, when she handed me the Friday fish wrapped in paper. She’d spotted Mum, she said, riding her bicycle down the road toward the military camp, taking some fresh air at a guess. ‘What a treat for her to get out and away,’ she said. The part she didn’t say was that everyone knew a mother of five on a farm had no time for bicycle rides, especially not on routes that sent her sailing past the tents full of marines, then further down into the sand dunes, where Mr Dunn bringing his fishing boat to shore might wonder aloud later to his wife why Mrs Diggory’s bicycle lay glinting in the sun with no Mrs Diggory in sight.
The American camps were huge and fully kitted-out, complete with a darkroom and photographic equipment to document local proceedings. One weekend, they sent the photographer around to our place with his box camera. The idea was to catch Herb in a relaxed atmosphere, have him post the picture home, show the folks in Milwaukee just how swell things were. We got a copy of the picture too. It showed all of us in a line, right down to baby Dorcas scowling on Agnes’ hip. About ten years ago, someone made lots of rather good reprints from that one tattered original, enhancing it so our faces appeared bright and clear. Herb stood on the far left, the tallest. When I slid the image into a frame, my thumb briefly covered his grin, and the deletion revealed, with startling clarity, how his eyes radiated despair.
All we did in the end was fatten him up. Just a year after that photograph was taken, Herb was one of 6,000 men—Korean, American, Japanese—butchered on a two-mile-long island shaped like a triangle in the Pacific. Such savagery at such scale, and it took just seventy-six hours.
The slick and reek of all that death couldn’t be concealed, and the news reached even us. It was my job to bring Mum the paper so she could run her nail down the list of names and gnaw at her bottom lip. We knew that one of the dead Herberts would soon be our Herb, and when it was, she winced and bit down hard, and then there really was blood on her lip. When I went to put the paper in the kindling basket, she gripped my upper arm so hard her fingernails left four purple moons in the skin.
We received a letter from Herb’s family, excruciatingly unguarded as they begged for proof of his happiness in our home, pleading for even the tiniest crumb. Did he laugh a lot? Did he tell you about us? What did he say? Did he miss home? Mum told a stricken Morag to write back and offer our condolences, but kept her own face as closed as the front door.
Herb’s family were fortunate, in one sense, that they lost him to the intended purpose. Not long after his name appeared in the paper, ten of his countrymen drowned during some banal night exercise on a beach further south. The training boat capsized in pitch-black, a kilometre from the main ship. By morning the dead men were bloated white fish washed up to shore. One of the survivors, in shock, said that he didn’t know grown men screamed like girls when they died. When the news about the accident came through, Mum finally collapsed, hitting her own face over and over again with a bunch of carrots that she’d just pulled up from the garden. Morag sent Leod off on the bicycle to find Dad.
Dad looked at her soiled face, bewildered. After that he started saying, ‘Thank you, Jean, that was quite delicious,’ no matter if it was just suet pudding on the plate. His words were hoarse and stilted. Even his good eye couldn’t quite look at her, but he forced the words out every night, humbled by an artless boy from Milwaukee into noticing the efforts of his own wife. Once he even touched Mum’s waist as he said those words, and she reared back, dropping the big casserole dish so it broke into jagged chunks. Dad picked up the thick pieces, wiped grease from the floor, then said no more about it.
To reflect on your own culpability in another’s sin. To notice the log in your own eye before plucking out the speck in another’s. Forgiveness. Compassion. Redemption. Gratitude. What could be more Christ-like?
*
At school, I’d been working away on the gorgeous hair, but the flow of it eluded me. I shifted focus to the beard, compiling small brown blotches so the paint became rough and clumpy in the way I’d seen real beards. The splotches accumulated, then suddenly were no longer the hairy face of Christ, but finely chopped beef. The rest transformed in the same way. Glowing white skin breaded over, heart-meat fruited to tomato, and the robe folded quite naturally into a slice of cheese. I could no more stop Christ from turning to burger than I could ask Dad why Mum didn’t want him touching her. I simply followed the paintbrush with an astonished gaze, my arm a meat puppet with a secret master.
I was almost too old at twelve to get away with it. Sister Perpetua suspected intention, some order of prank, dare, or joke. She took me aside, asked a series of quite pointed questions, sensed in my mumbles and diversions something outside her own scope of reference, and rose above the usually relished opportunity for discipline. She suggested I take what she admitted was a rather accomplished artwork home, put it somewhere safe, and begin again on something more suitable.
*
Perhaps now you see the problem. If I point out the hamburger on the wall to the Jeromes, and reveal its origin, they’d make me an atheist, ahead of my time; the man who minced up the lamb of God and stuck him in a bun, Catholic schoolboy turned iconoclast, and so on. When really, to me, the image became more Christ-like in its transformation. But to explain thus would be to dishonour my mother and father.
The other part of the problem is that of course it’s necessary to dismantle Christ, in whichever guise we now find him: teacher, lover, celebrity, activist, friend. Without him, might we have sought our holiness more properly in the world around us, in the mysteries of water and wind? Looked earthward, not to heaven, for our ideas of reciprocity and reward? Might we have let go our desire for dominion, sought solace in understanding how we are all of the same stuff? Through Christ our physical realm was disenchanted.
I give it one last nudge with Jerome. ‘Why still paint at this age? Well, because we are left with the problem of how to live in a world that is quite different to the one the scientific mind tells us we live in. Our experience is not discrete and countable, divisible in this way and that. Mystery abounds, Jerome, mystery abounds.’ I notice Jerome has stopped abusing his keyboard with bitten fingers, and is hurrying me along with a socked foot that taps the air.
‘After all, Jesus was a Black woman,’ I test, and he starts up again, furiously typing. It’s a total non sequitur, apropos of nothing I’ve said out loud. ‘Or he should be, if he wants to represent suffering and patience. He was also a comic savant.’ I’ve lost him. Good. Bugger off, Jerome.
This boy came to me for canned hope. I have nothing of hope to offer, just a preference for noticing the things around me, for wondering at their constituency and connection, and considering my place among them.
‘Goodbye Jerome, good luck with the write-up,’ I say at the door. I wave him off and then see those hot air balloons in the sky again. Serene and silent at this distance, but up close you know it must be all roaring gas, and ghastly balloon talk about thrusting technologies, basket constructions, GPS systems, and what have you.
Yet, there, beneath the balloons, is a translucent day moon. It floats between electricity wires. The moon! A young man’s vanity rises. Perhaps now, it’s time to try again for the lunar surface. Something in the power poles and the swoop of wire will anchor it. But before I begin, I’ll do as I always do, and stand before the framed picture on my wall. I will wait. Then, yes. There, in the lettuce leaves, faint but true, will appear two long and tender hands.
Connie Buchanan is a writer living in Kirikiriroa. She works as the Deputy Editor of E-Tangata magazine. Her essays and fiction have appeared in E-Tangata, Landfall, Newsroom, New Zealand Geographic, Headland, The Spinoff and others.