The Llama-Jesus Complex
How dinner at my in-laws’ is an exercise in self-awareness
At my in-laws’ house last night at dinner, my husband sat underneath an etching of a llama. It’s not really a llama. I think it’s actually a green man. Maybe? Even now, I’m not entirely sure about this. I usually sit under the llama, at the round table that dominates the dining room, with its one giant window looking out over the garden filled with flowers and bird feeders, and the other walls as bedecked with artwork as the Spring boughs outside the window are with buds and the winged emissaries of spring. Last night, on Wednesday of Holy Week, however, I found myself sitting on the wrong side of the table, my father-in-law to my left, my mother-in-law to the right, and my husband across from me, sitting under a llama, eating a meatless burger, because, well, it’s Holy Week.
Once I thought of the etching as a llama, there was no going back. It’s a llama. Like full Emperor’s New Groove llama.
I am, categorically and historically, bad at art. I’ve always been. I dreaded art class in elementary school the way the rest of the nerdy kids dreaded gym class. I’d take dodge ball and running laps over paper mâché and chalk portraits anyway.
In college, we went to a special exhibition of Kazimer Malevich’s “Red Square.” Everyone understood this except me. I just couldn’t get it. It was a red square. I mean, I got that. I just didn’t get it. I acted like I got it, for appearance’s sake, for sure. But, let’s be real; it’s a square.
Meanwhile, twenty years later, I found myself sitting across from my husband, staring, while trying not to laugh, at him, sitting beneath a llama on my mother-in-law’s birthday.
My father-in-law is a docent at the Walter’s Art Gallery. Their home is covered in art. None of it, I think is actually a llama.
Listening to the conversation and turning my head ever so slightly to the left, the llama started to look like Jesus. Yes, there was definitely a beard. And it did look just quite a bit holy.
I tilted my head back. Yay! I’m a llama again!
My family, these people who have become part of my life from the moment I fell in love with my husband, definitely don’t always get me either. They are wonderful people, deep in thought, who use cloth napkins and have fancy art in the house. It is part of the joy and terror of family, the ones we are born into, the ones we choose, and the ones we marry into, that they don’t always get us.
I spent dinner tilting my head from side to side. Jesus-llama-Jesus-llama-Jesus-llama.
I also write essays that my family, both in-law, outlaw, and in between, don’t want to talk about. When my mother died, I wrote an essay- my first to get published!- about my mother and the aftermath of her death. I’m not sure anyone in my family wants to talk about that one.
Jesus. Llama. Jesus. Llama.
I thought to myself, while staring at the Jesus-llama above my husband’s head, it’s entirely possible that my essays and poems are their Red Squares. They know it’s “a thing,” but who really knows why?
My great-grandfather was an artist. He made a living carving faces into statuary and carving names into tombstones across Maryland. My grandfather drew figures, painted landscapes, sculpted. My uncle is a musician. I just can’t seem to be artistic. In my defense, great-grandfather Rosenauer’s angel driving his sword into a serpent did not exactly reek of subtlety.
Me, though, I can’t even put icing on a cake without it looking just a little bit lopsided.
Jesus.
It’s definitely Jesus.
I thought of all these things while sitting at the dining room table at my in-laws’ house because I was steadily getting more and more nervous about this essay I had written, about the loss of my mother, that I am scheduled to read this coming week at my college. I was also eying the precarious position of the birthday cake I had baked for my mother-in-law, thinking of the first cake I baked and took to her house that baked up rather like a brick as I had used expired baking powder.
Llama.
A llama? He’s supposed to be dead!
I keep getting myself more and more worked up about this essay because I, of course, in the flush of just-got-published pride, sent copies of the book containing this essay to everyone who is related to me by blood or by marriage. I have been met with silence. This is the way of outpourings of emotions. We want to hide from them.
Jesus.
At dinner at my in-laws, all of these things were running through my head, while looking at my husband, the llama, who is definitely not our resurrected Savior, hovering innocently above his head. I wanted to ask them to come to this reading, but, my essay is a llama to them, or maybe Jesus, and who am I to say what is art and what’s a cartoon voiced by David Spade?
What if my colleagues, attending this reading next week, think my essay is a llama while I think it’s Jesus? Can I stand the shame?
Definitely llama.
Ten years after my ill-fated trip to stare in muted awe at “Red Square,” I finished a dissertation on Emily Dickinson, whose poems are, at times and simultaneously, a llama, Jesus, a green man, and an open door into a really lengthy essay that you never actually meant to write. No one can read a Dickinson poem and feel like the square is just the square or that the llama might not also be a Savior. Dickinson, also, has a reputation for a healthy amount of artistic space spent on death, which is where my dissertation went as well.
I have been here, it seems, for awhile, tilting my head from side to side, from the ridiculous to the divine. The llama-Jesus complex might, at this point, become as real as imposter syndrome.
This is, I thought to myself, sitting there at my in-laws’ table, enjoying a Holy Week Meatless Burger, really the way of art of all kinds, the Dickinson, the Malevich, the Rosenauer, the Kuzcotopia, that we’re constantly tilting our heads from side to side for a clearer view, for a better sight of what it is, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be all of the things at once.
This Meatless Burger, though, is definitely just the one thing and definitely not the other.
