A Picasso-ian Family Portrait

My family is attempting to re-assemble. It feels like a Picasso.

There's a leg over here; a cracked face hanging over there; broken composition lines, un-tethered figures floating around with no clear spatial relation to one another. All the familiar pieces are there (though looking strangely unfamiliar) within the composition. But fitting them together in a familiar way has been obliterated like a mega-bomb.

Some Picasso canvases are soaked in color, bleeding passion like the slap of a furious lover. But this one, Guernica, is black and white, creating a different kind of slap. It's like a shock of cold water that startles you into sobriety. Guernica is a portrait of horror - the horror of violence, chaos, war. Some wars are political; some are within ourselves, flailed out on family ground. We see the wounded, the maimed laying strewn; grasping, arching for rescue and placement. We see bullish monsters and groaning steeds; but more than anything we see madness.

Next week my children, grandchildren, myself, and (here I go again, attempting an appropriate label I'm comfortable with) my former spouse (the father and grandfather of these mutual offspring) are getting together in our first post-divorce vacation-like thing. Now, to say that we're ALL getting together at the same time and place is a stretch. Various arrangements of us will be together at various times, but there will be a few over-lapping instances when most of us will be together. The planning of this vacation-like thing has already gone through several drafts, been sabotaged in a grenade-like implosion, reconstructed with smudgy lines that could dribble off the page any moment, yet is still attempting to wobble forward. We are desperately trying to reconnect, to reconstitute some kind of family beyond semblance. We want to be together; we just don't know what together is. And, there is still a lot of bleeding on the field. We are all, still, very raw.

We are struggling to gather onto this post-bombed canvas - to hang onto a portrait. All families have those studio-portrait moments of assemblage - the arrangement of tall to short, girl to boy, which baby is upon whose lap, whose hand is on which shoulder....now smile. There is a placement; a kind of artistic structure, no matter how arranged, which says - we are family. Walk in any office or cubicle and from across the room in a glance, you know exactly what that framed, matted, people-grouping is hanging on the wall - it's a family portrait. It says this is the collective from which I come; which places me; of which I am. This is us; this is me.

When I look at Guernica I feel it more than see it. Frankly, I don't know what the heck I'm looking at. But I can feel it. I feel the bombastic lack of structure - like jagged glass it tears at my sense of order and sanity. I don't feel safe in it's shadow. I feel the vapid loss of color and life, a canvas screaming for a gigantic crayon swatch, while declaring at the same time how this sallow pallor is perfectly appropriate. It feels drained of warmth. There are no soft lines, and I feel that too; the angular, weirdly juxtaposed planes shoving me off footing. I feel my arms flailing, flapping at something, anything. I feel the pain, the angst, the horror, not only as my own, but as ours; us - sprawled disjointed across the canvas. I feel us groping, clawing at pieces, trying to create some kind of composition that says something about us other than we are a flayed out mess. Some kind of assemblage that says, we ARE still family; we are more than the horror.

And perhaps,
this is the redemptive point of a Picasso.