A Curious Cologne

How bad my handwriting is. I copied down the Museum Director’s name, and when I went back to read it I thought it said Bullrecks, clearly the wrong name, but quite a comic name for a Museum Director, bringing to mind, as it does, a bull in a china shop, though the exhibit in question, the one the Director was commenting upon, was not of Chinese Glass, or Minoan Pottery, but of pictures of Jesus. “Antique pictures,” to be exact, though the announcement in the paper said only “pictures of Jesus.” How different those two things are, “pictures” and “antique pictures.” The antique Jesus is grave, and lily white, or lead yellow, draped like a dead swan backwards over his mother’s knee, or lost in shrouded thought, or bleeding like a rose among the rocks, while the new Jesus, on the pamphlets brought to your door, or on the billboards, the same Jesus reproduced with slight variation a million times over on cards and books and shirts, is a Jesus so pastel he would melt in a minor rain. People, it seems have given up on making solemn pictures of Jesus—except, of course, for the band of brave artists devoted to disfiguring Jesus. They dip Jesus in urine, or smear pig’s blood in Jesus’s curly hair, or bind Jesus in hundreds of colored chains and whips, and sometimes we go to look at these Jesuses, and we think about lunch, or the peculiar unstable weather, or the sad man on the museum steps waving a warning placard back and forth slowly like a sail without a ship. . . . The Director of the Museum, Director Bluehm, as it turns out, a very sober name, a proper name, a proper man, not like his friend Mr. Bullrecks at all, the Director was commenting on the latest addition to the “exhibit of antique Jesuses,” a “guest exhibit,” as the graceful man who took off his clothes and climbed onto a table and stood perfectly still beside a picture of “The Crucified Lord” described himself, a “guest exhibit,” a ghostly display, which was lowered quickly and taken away by men in blue suits. And “regrettable” was the way the Museum Director described the “uninvited exhibit,” regrettable but not fatal, since none of the “real artworks were destroyed.” Indeed not. Indeed not. For how electrified those somber pictures seemed to be in the hush following the great stir, how radiant the light shining on the vast blue distances, and the carved and gilded frames, and all the brooding Jesuses, everything humming together like a neon installation celebrating the whole absurd affair.

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