Three-headed phoenix yapping at a spoonbill. There’s a hybrid evolutionary nuance at the edge. Downward-gazing Eve.Ĭenoté-like pond spontaneously generating creatures. On hind legs a lizard cavorting before a surly boar accompaniedĬreator. Two vertical millstones linked by a curving leafless branchĪrcing over white fruit-clustered bushy treesįour organless hosts. Genesisģrd day jagged “male” pinnacle with sprout drooping Squat, cleft “female” husk, dark blue with
Back in Ypsilanti, she went through my one hundred pages of notes with me, and helped me to understand that the process of studying and attempting to assimilate the painting, while significant, was less crucial to display than a poem in which all my research was reorganized into an imaginative structure.Īn apricot, mosque-like, spindle-shaped tower.Ī disk turns into a dark brown Jehovah (or Moses?) At the Study Center, she went on line for information about the mysterious red fruitballs and put me in contact with Dale Pendell, whose letter in response to my query I decided to include in one of the appendices. Given the similarity of nearly all the nudes, I conceived them as a multitude of doubles of a single, roving persona.Īs always in the past, Caryl helped me a lot with my project. For a section of the poem on the frieze of nudes, I borrowed some phrases from Frank O’Hara’s poem, “In Memory of my Feelings,” a fantasia on his various selves.
I ended up with a brief poem identifying the “Eden” Transformers which suggests what their role in the unfolding of the triptych might be, along with an appendix which reflects on their weird, unique forms in both panels. When I began to work on the poem itself, back in Ypsilanti, I realized that pages of detailed description were going to stop my work in its tracks. While at the Study Center I spent a week carefully describing what I saw in these areas.
Three areas in the “Eden” and “Paradise” panels offered very substantial challenges: the constructions along the top of these panels which I ended up calling The Terrestrial Transformers, and, in the lower part of the “Paradise” panel, the static melée of nudes and fruit. As someone attempting to write into the painting, I found myself in the position expressed by a line in a poem by Michel Deguy: “I know, or I invent.” Certain figures and image-combines appear to be the fruits of Bosch’s inventive arsenal and there is nothing at hand to call them. After two weeks, I hit the Bosch “wall” that I imagine all serious viewers of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” experience: there is no core meaning to uncover. While I sometimes disagreed with Fraenger and Dixon (both, in my view, impose elaborate systems on the triptych, moving it into a rational perspective rather than acknowledging its many obscurities), both writers had really studied Bosch’s painting, as had de Certeau, and their detailed commentaries helped me notice “minute particulars” that proliferate throughout it. I re-read my materials for a week, then continued to re-read while studying the reproduction, checking details in the Rowland edition, and writing notes in a large notebook. It would not have been strange to have seen Shelley or Rilke strolling through the olive grove a hundred feet below and beyond my window. The same vista, I felt, could have been beheld in the 19th century. In front of me was a window vista of a pristine cloud, mountain, lake scape, where the Como and Lecco lakes joined. Once at the Center, I tacked the reproduction (about one-third the size of the nine by seven foot original) to large sheets of cardboard and leaned it against the wall on a table next to my desk.
Being able to study separate portions in detail partially solved the problem of how to identify everything. I took along with me a rolled-up reproduction of the triptych in a tube, a xerox of Wilhelm Fraenger’s chapter “The Millennium: Outlines of an Interpretation” from his book, Bosch, a copy of Laurinda Dixon’s Alchemical Imagery in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, a xerox of Michel de Certeau’s “The Garden: Delirium and Delights of Hieronymus Bosch (from his The Mystic Fable, a book I discovered while reading Robin Blaser’s poem, “Image-Nation 25, Exody”), a couple of pages of bird lists from Terry Tempest Williams’ Leap, and John Rowland’s The Garden of Earthly Delights / Hieronymus Bosch, which reproduces colored panels of the triptych in the original size. My idea was to spend two months going through my materials and then, while at the Study Center, write into “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” My residency was accepted in May 2004, and my wife Caryl and I left for the Center on October 18. In 2003 I proposed a one month “Bosch project” for a residency at the Rockefeller Study Center at Bellagio on Lake Como in Italy.