63. On the Fifth Day: Murals
It is 3.00 p.m. in the backside of Anesidora, and the sky is dark and brooding, and twisted with constipation, which finally releases after a grimacing disposition, a rain of thorns upon my inebriated brow. My head is shipwrecked and surviving on stormy seas on a hallucinatory raft even as I stagger upon the symmetry of a preposterous panorama.
Safe to say, I was on a plateau, or rather, crucified on a plateau, named the Place of Skulls. Old Romans staged this slow-death technique as a form of cynical joke and amusement. Documentation of soldiers crucifying criminals in comical positions survived through time; and bloody bastard, JC is inspired by it for tomorrow’s opening. Nail-gun in hand, he is hoisting, in the downpour, with the assistance of Deity High trainee teachers, subjects into laughable poses; each one triggering a cacophony of delirious snorts, from JC himself, and all the assistants following suit.
Take for example that dude in a ballerina’s pose, nailed as if on tiptoes; or the goalkeeper strung midair trying to save a ball; or the puppet, with wires tied to limbs, doing an acrobatic routine over and over in adherence to the commands programmed by a props-technician on a remote control. And of course there are the impossible sexual positions, no need to mention.
Just like Jesus Christ, uncensored - the real thing - and thousands others offered up in violence, we were robed in our emperor’s new clothes; or how else could one view the murals on show? However, unlike olden day practices, we were not hung on wooden beams; but rather, this high-tech sacrifices are tagged by digital markers, pinning the joints for a multitude of rotatable angles, rendering the ‘actors’ for motion-capture sequences to be superimposed as nonhuman characters later on in post-production studios.
So, there’re two projections going on in JC’s exhibition. One, the tapestries telling the long tale on the history of a heaven and an earth, (whereby thirteen lives intertwined make up part of the saga, comprising billions others); and another, with 3D glasses, the fantasy extended to countless dimensional shores, interlocking with the imaginations of the audiences.
JC, in a hooded raincoat, walks up to where I am propped upside down and splayed open like a racoon prior to becoming a coonskin cap; like Saint Peter having permission granted to be executed facing the earth, for he wished not to be the equal of his Saviour. He details, for no apparent reason, that he enjoys books, and that the tapestries only paint half the picture. The tapestries are a guide for the mind’s eye. They are just words after all; binary and other encrypting languages, circuit configurations on male asses to be precise. JC’s picking titbits inside. He’s curious what each spectator conjures for the other half. Boring, mainstream and predictable mostly; but occasionally, a gem emerges.
The man smiles at my inverted retina and gestures to an interior decorator, who in turn speaks to a contractor, and eventually workers lay the tiles to conceal the muddy ground. The torrents had stopped; the sky is clear and azure; and the mass of crucified flesh in rows and rows of funny postures, they’re primed for tomorrow’s inaugural exposition.