0256 What Are Those Kids Up To?

It’s in a quiet corner to itself away from the grandiose creations of the Italian Renaissance gallery, so you can stand undisturbed to wonder just what’s going on? A small painting: in a peaceful green and hilly summer countryside, not a soul in sight except these three – children? - their faces under their hoodies seem known to each other but shadowed, small, not asking to be known to us; absorbed, maybe learning, and they’re enacting, in this remote spot, the Crucifixion Jesus hanging patiently up there, a bit like a kid trying it out for himself to see what it feels like (and there was a case, a kid a few years back, on Hampstead Heath, it was hushed up; no accomplices let on) : Mary’s quietly grieving, no big painterly gestures there; she’s huddled up, a girl who’s really learning about emotion as she acts it out; John, lost in thinking as he tries to meet in his boy's mind, the dimension, the immensity. It would be easier, if this were a short story by some masterly South American writer: three kids who have been totally unexposed to scriptures, find this Bible book, read it as, like, science fiction, decide to act it out. The master of short stories would have to work out the denouement: did the kids, unobserved, pack up and return to normal life, but secretly transformed in inner mind? Or did one die, as on Hampstead Heath, the others never let on, and yet never forget? And later, become…? Or would a well-scripted film, like 'Whistle down the Wind', make a memorable, reasonable reality of this, subtly balancing fiction and emotion, that children and their parents would go to see together, even buy the video? It’s such a private scene, this rehearsal of the event so hard to imagine, even if you try; as if you were on a fast Italian train; saw it flash past your window; not quite believe your eyes; then already two kilometres on, wonder if you should have pulled the communication cord with that elegant Italian instruction next to it? Or try to tell the guard in your halting Italian, that you’d seen the Crucifixion back there…he’s Catholic, you’re crazy English…yet, it happens.. ‘miraculo… miraculo…! ’ the train’s many kilometres down the line by now; the kids have maybe had enough to last them a lifetime.. packed up, gone home..so some kinda joke, Protestant English taking the mickey out of Catholic superstitious visions? Best say nothing, it’ll work itself out in God’s good time so to speak We’re sensible, down to earth people – A prosaic answer, perhaps? Like, this is a record of the moment in art when rumours of the delicate realism of that strange but skilful, detailed Flemish art hit the idealist Italian scene, by secondhand account? ‘Yes, they paint very carefully, real young people in a real landscape, acting out the greatest dramas – you should try it…’ Or perhaps some quietly, intensely devout patron might have said, I'd like a small Crucifixion scene to take around with me, or have upon the table in front of me to inspire my poetry; no need for dramatics, nor for labouring the point; just paint the scene; take my own children as the models; that will touch me more... In the still silent backwater of this public gallery the Crucifixion plays itself out in paint, privately; you’re reluctant to leave it, to seek the tearoom; since, no answers; only questions