In My End Is My Beginning

Clyfford Still (1904–80) belonged to a circle of pioneering American Abstract Expressionists in New York City, which he abandoned to pursue an often- isolating practice of visual creation on a farm in Maryland. In Still’s work each line, colour, shape, and position takes on a Zen-like quality that is more than the sum of its elements.

PH-235 (1944-N-No.1)—one of a series executed over several years that Still intended to be viewed together—shows a broken rust line running up across and then down the canvas. White and yellow pull downward intersecting the red, and, like the vermillion at bottom right, end in a knifepoint, as though slashing through the black and often cracked impasto that dominates the canvas. Still called these ‘lifelines’ after farm-boy experiences from his childhood. His father would lower him, suspended by rope, into wells—usually to survey them but sometimes also as punishment.

‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?’ Mark has the women continually ask one another on their early morning journey to Jesus’s grave to anoint his body (16:3). Mark says the sun had risen, but it is a dark and well-trodden path to the tomb. We all know what it is to come to the graveside in grief and broken hope, suffocated by the requirement to keep breathing. This is indeed a ‘very large stone’ (16:4).

Their question is, however, not the right one. The attentive reader of Mark’s Gospel will remember that Jesus has predicted three times, once plainly, that he will die and rise again (Mark 8:31–32; 9:31; 10:33–34). These predictions are lifelines. The better question is, ‘How are we going to live with resurrection?’ The women’s response is to flee in terror. Easter is like a gash that bleeds colour through the darkness in which they (as often we) are suspended. The initial path toward the finality of death is torn open like knife-edged rust, white, yellow, and vermillion to become a road whose end and whose beginning is resurrection.

George Dubuffet (1901–85) coined the phrase art brut (‘raw art’, often called ‘outsider art’) to describe the rejection of the artistic canons of professional training in favour of promoting an artistic style free of cultural convention. Chalk scribbling on a sidewalk, children’s drawings, and images produced by the mentally ill inspired the artist, challenging conventional perception and inviting the mind 'to adjust to a new fragmentary and discontinuous perspective, and for it to decide to radically change its old operating procedures' (Dubuffet 1989: 42).

The painted canvas of Men on Road pushes beyond two- towards three-dimensionality. And it is at once a bird’s eye and straight-on view of a landscape. Dubuffet mixes a thick paste of oil and materials such as sand to create a bitumen surface on which he scratches fields and other details of the landscape and draws a childlike picture of travellers on a curving road, walking toward a house that threatens to drop off the edge of the flat horizon at the top. A man on a bike is smiling, his legs simultaneously on either side of the pedals; a cow’s teats (lower left) hang between impossible legs. Dubuffet’s carefully crafted view invites us to look again at the world around us, capturing a celebration of existence through an art whose ‘chaotic swarming … enriches and enlarges the world’ (Dubuffet 1989: 73).

The young man at the empty tomb promises that if the disciples go to Galilee they will see the raised Jesus there. In Matthew’s Gospel this is exactly what happens (28:16–20), but Mark does not furnish us with this ending. The women flee in terror and tell no one. So ends the Gospel in its oldest (shortest) version.

Or does it? One suggestion has been that the ending is an instruction to return to the start of the Gospel and reread it as a call to see Easter by living the resurrection amidst the ‘Galilees’ of our daily lives. Mark’s Easter story is not once upon a time, but always present. Where we are is where we will see him. Easter as ‘art brut’ asks us to open our eyes for the outsider’s perspective, from an empty tomb onto our daily lives.

References

Dubuffet, Jean. 1986. Asphyxiating Culture and Other Writings, Trans. by Carol Volk (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows)

The fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus, named after its nineteenth-century discovery at St Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai desert, is the earliest, most complete version of the Gospel of Mark we possess. Sinaiticus’s original story ends anti-climactically with women fleeing the scene and in their silence disobeying the command to tell others. There are longer versions, but their endings were added later, and stylistic comparison with the rest of the Gospel suggests they were created by different writers.

The Codex’s ending concludes the Gospel with the adverb gar (‘for’), which would be like ending an English sentence with the word, ‘because’. So, is this earliest version of Mark a witness to a mutilated Gospel, a text whose first and original conclusion has been torn away? In the Codex’s closest sibling, the contemporaneous fourth-century Codex Vaticanus, the Gospel ends identically. Perhaps earlier versions of the same ending motivated scribes to produce their own final account. On the page reproduced here in the space under the second column a second hand has added in abbreviated form, ‘the Gospel of Mark’.

Whatever the author of Mark’s Gospel intended (whether this or another ending), the manuscript has taken on a life of its own. The scribe recorded here has added his own words, others more of them. The creators of the Codex have added to Mark’s Gospel in a different way, by incorporating the written words of its text into a collection of writings as costly to produce as it is magnificent. They have thereby transformed its poor Greek and its surprise ending into a material object incongruent with its probable historical origins. The words have been transformed into a beautiful material artefact of ink and leather.

Perhaps we might see that empty column as an invitation to complete the resurrection story, doing what the women failed to. For Mark has this to say: wherever the raised Jesus may be, he is not here on this page—not at this (lost?) ending, nor amidst the longer ones. Could it be that he is there waiting in the empty column for us to create an Easter ending in our own response to the young man’s command at the tomb? To go to Galilee to our own resurrection story?