Clamavit

Guernica was a gift to me…

My first exposure to Picasso’s Guernica was a gift.  A suburban pious upbringing by parents who didn’t emphasize or particularly care about the visual arts had not prepared me to receive what was being offered. Then, when I was 17, a memorable art history professor led me to encounter that painting in a way that made it an epiphany. It disturbed me into awareness of terror, trauma, interdependence, brokenness in ways I had not registered before. It left me with a lasting, jarring, heightened sense of what we talk about when we talk about war.

What we hear about war is too often told in abstract terms: ground forces; strike; advance; invasion--disturbing, but not disturbing enough. "War" itself is an abstraction. Even "genocide" loses its power to awaken a cowering imagination. 

Picasso's relevance to the wars we wage now, in so many places, at so much cost, against so much citizen outcry, is his insistence on the way communities and beings, not just human ones, are damaged, broken, trampled, how their suffering is shared and their cries unheard in the artificial light of self-enclosed, tightly framed media narratives. Looking at it after seeing images on independent newsfeeds of ravaged fathers holding dead children in Gaza, or of mothers weeping as children play with sticks in rubble, its power to move me grows to meet this moment. It comes as close as a painting can to audibility. I hear the cries in the night. 

I don't want to, but I need to be reminded repeatedly of how impossible it is, and how wrong, to insulate myself from the suffering of those whose homes and lives are rattled by exploding bombs provided by profiteers funded by my tax dollars. Or to forget the cost to all the living beings put into our collective care, and to this fragile earth, our island home. I owe those last words to the Book of Common Prayer. I read this painting now as a prayer of the kind a Psalmist, in agony, cried out to the Almighty: "Oh Lord, how long?"