Earthly Delights.

Earthly Delights

By James Bezerra

Hell as television. This is the thesis.

We find the sins of others titillating, erotic even. We also like it when they’re punished for them.  

I had to fly all the way to Madrid to see this thing.

Let’s look at it:

It is a triptych. A three-part painting on three wooden panels. Left, center, and right. The center panel is twice the width of the first and third panels. The first and second panels are odd green landscapes populated by many long naked figures as pale as ghosts. We take it all in from a distance, as if we are watching from a hot air balloon, something which didn’t exist in in 1490 when Hieronymus Bosch painted these. The first two panels are strange. In the background, something like a submarine rises from the water of a lake. At each corner of the lake sprouts a pink castle shaped like a lung, or a maybe gallbladder.  In the foreground, a nude man and woman sit in a clear bubble that seems to be formed from the mucus membrane of a flower. His hand rests on her abdomen, below her belly button. Her hand sits restlessly on his arm. Elsewhere, a creature like a white giraffe with a bird’s head looks down into another lake, at the center of the lake stands something that is either a spacecraft made of meat, or an armor-plated sea creature. The panels are very busy and border on indescribably weird.

The third panel is different than the first two. It is darker both in color and in tone. There is no blue sky here, no rolling green landscapes. At the black horizon there is smoke lit only by the glow of distant fires. In the center of the third panel is a figure my professor used to call “The Tree Man”. He is only the torso of a man. Oriented away as if doing a push up. His arms plant into the ground like tree trunks. His chest has been cleaved open and inside the dry cavity three red figures sit at a table while a milk maid tried to open a barrel of milk. The Tree Man looks back at us over his shoulder. His expression seems to ask, “Who are these people inside of me?”

Below him are scenes of bizarre and intriguing torture. A naked man flayed on a giant harp. A naked man whose throat is being eaten by cats with lizard tails. A naked woman being grabbed from behind by a demon that might be a tree - it is hard to tell - as it drags her into the darkness.

For most of humanity’s time on this planet, we did not have television.

That is the first most important thing that no one teaches in any history class.

The second most important thing that no one teaches in any history class is that for most of our history, water was a dangerous thing to drink. Beer and ale and mead and wine were much safer. During virtually every moment of our modern history, the key players were drunk. We make so much more sense once you know that.

Prior to the invention of television, we had inferior forms of distraction. Books, but you had to know how to read. Paintings, like this one, but that’s not what this really is. It is called The Garden of Earthly Delights and there is so much to it, some many small vignettes - so many people naked or suffering or prancing or touching - that the eye can’t help but move, to flit from scene to scene, to experience this moment then that one, then that one, then this one. It tricks the brain and conjures the quality of movement and you realize that Bosch invented the first television. And you are here in the Museo del Prado watching it and the only thing on TV is a Christian horror flick.

That churches and theaters have essentially the same floorplan is not a coincidence. Your living room is aimed at your television for the same reason.

We find the sins of others titillating.  

And we like to watch them punished.

In the center of the center panel is a round lake and dozens of very pale, very young women stand knee deep in the water. A human figure as black as night makes them balance apples on their heads.

At the bottom right of the right panel, a pig in a nun’s habit tries to kiss a nude man studying scripture.

At the top of the third panel a set of floating human ears wields a large knife.

On the plane crossing the Atlantic I watched a cop show about a man who murdered female joggers in Central Park. Then I watched a movie about a man who abducted a woman and wore her skin around his house.

In the center of the left panel the pre-incarnate Christ is presenting a kneeling naked Eve to Adam, who lounges leisurely on a hillside.

My hotel TV offers incredibly expensive American porn films that have been dubbed into Spanish. They have English subtitles.

The right side of the third panel depicts a blue bird-like figure swallowing humans whole and then shitting them out through some sort of pale amniotic sac. They pass through the lining of the sac and fall through a hole in the ground. Anguished and barely visible faces gaze up through the hole.

I sit here in this gallery staring at these three panels.

I can’t turn them off.

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