This painting is an older one (48” X 30”).  The medium I used is mostly crushed rock, soils, flowers and plants that I collected at Pine Ridge Indian reservation when me and my wife used to visit and work with the elderly there every year.  We’d do simple things, like driving grandma to bingo at the Catholic church on wednesday nights and maybe fix up the trailer a bit, nothing much really as these things are reckoned.  It was there that I first saw what the Sioux and other plains tribes called a “Winter Count.”  It was a history of the years events painted on animal skins (see Colin G. Calloway, “One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark.”).  About 100 of these old winter counts still survive, but many native artists are reviving the tradition and the work they do is incredible, and they inspired me to do the painting above.  It is interesting to place events recorded in these surviving winter counts, ‘the battle of Little Big Horn,’ for example, in contrast to newspaper reports and the ‘official’ history of the same events.

Then an article by John Crossan got me to thinking about my family’s visit in 1996 to the ‘Altar of Augustan Peace‘ in Rome, another kind of winter count.  Tapestries, paintings, bas reliefs, depicting the victories of Caesar Augustus over the enemies of the empire (the Hollywood of it’s time really).  It’s how a guy could work himself up to becoming a god back in the day, ‘war, victory, peace; war, victory, peace; repeat as often as needed, a proven recipe for success.  Still, among the vanquished, the victims, there are always counter-histories, subversive songs, poems, parables, subtle aposiopesis for those with an ear to hear, spread about by folks labeled rebels or even terrorists.  What actually happened, the official story, the Truth, gets all mixed in with the blood and muck and money so sometimes even now we have a hard time getting our stories straight.  

Blessed holy days y’all and here’s a little ditty I wrote for Christmas:

Xmas Year Zero

If were just figuring statues and portraits

Jesus is the victor

If it’s the body count that matters

Then It all depends....

Two kinds of coins

Two kinds of kings

Two kinds of gods

It’s a toss up really

We have yet to decide

Between the hand and the heart

There is waiting

And there’s just killing time

Our sympathies are with the straw child of course

The mystic, the martyr, the Jew

The humble one with the unconsolable eyes

But Caesar was a kid once too

‘Novus homo,’ destined for greatness by all accounts

His devout mother was favored by the gods

Guiding his first baby-steps towards divinity

Tested by a serpent in the temple of Apollo

She was marked with a rainbow that never faded

Her womb was assumed into heaven

Signs in the stars confirmed the miracle

Great victories on the battlefields of Thurium 

Slaves, peasants, and the enemies of the law crushed

All the testimony is there in the records

The word conceived on parchment and calf-skins
Scripture in the making

But If we’re just adding up kapital

Shopping days and time off from work

The seasonal consumer index

Then the ‘son of god‘ has triumphed

I mean the one from Palestine

If we're just voting with our lips

Not accounting for feet or dollars

Believers and not actual followers

Then the Nazarene wins by a mile

But if it comes down to swords into ploughshares

What is actually rendered unto

Then it all depends...

There’s what we hail as peace, pax, pacem,

And then there’s order, obedience, pacification

Our hearts lie with the lamb

But we bank among the lions

Blessed Holy days all, much obliged.

( the link to the article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-dominic-crossan/the-challenge-of-christma_b_1129931.html ).