I Know a Fancy Word!

For one of my classes I had to write an ekphrastic exercise. It is a pretty standard writing prompt. You take as your subject a particular thing (often a piece of art) and you use that as a starting point or as a central theme or as a structuring device. Basically you use the first thing as a jumping off point to do something else. Ekphrastics are pretty common in poetry (“Ode to a Grecian Urn” anybody?).

I’ve had the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch on my mind lately because there is a documentary coming out about him and I keep reminding myself that I need to catch it when it is in town. And because he was a super weird fucking dude. Kind of a mash-up of Dante and Salvador Dali.

So I decided to start with Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights". The results are below.

By no means am I claiming this is any good. It just happens to be a thing I wrote today.

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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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On Fancy Bags.

When I was properly college-aged I spent about zero time on college campuses. Later in life, having abandoned my adulthood to be a properly starving artist, I have spent a lot of time on college campuses.

I am always envious when I see the Art students moving purposefully across campus with their big black portfolio cases slung over their shoulders. Quite automatically an unreasonable thought always zings through my mind and makes me want to holler after them, “I want to do a thing that requires a big special bag!”  

Now I’m sure that those bags are a huge hassle and pain in the ass, especially if you have to take the bus or if there is a gust of wind, but still, they are kind of cool, right? I also like those long black (or sometimes ever dark leather) tubes that (in my mind at least) carry to transport blueprints and stuff.

At first I thought that maybe I have some secret desire to be a visual artist (like a painter), but now that I am being honest, I think that what I really want is just a really specific bag. I mean, I’m a writer. I always carry a good pen and a little notebook, but those don’t exactly scream, “LOOK AT HOW FANCY I AM!”

There is a great scene at the end of the movie Naked Lunch where Peter Weller (sort of playing William Burroughs) gets stopped at a quasi-Soviet border and the borderguard asks him what his business is. Weller says, “I am a writer” and the borderguard asks him to prove it and so he holds up a pen and says, “I have an implement of writing.”

I can’t just go around saying that to people. Or, at least, I shouldn’t.

Shortly after I moved to LA a million years ago I saw a guy in the Starbucks near Melrose and Fairfax wearing a black ballcap and that said in white letters: Writer. Man did I mock the crap out of that guy in my head while I waited in line and he pretended to work on his screenplay. Keep slinging that buddy, one day we will all believe you.

This why I need a fancy (but not ostentatious) bag to announce me!

(If you can’t tell yet, I am writing this post so that I can put off doing other work that I need to do.)

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I found a second-run, student-operated, art house movie theater with free popcorn! I'm about to watch an indie French horror movie that grossed $9,000 when it came out! #pretentious #sohappyrightnow

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A Very Boring, But Largely Accurate Poem.

A Very Boring, But Largely Accurate Poem

By James Bezerra

I am sick

and waiting for

rice to boil.

My life

this second inspires

uninspired poetry.

It is raining

and that affects my mood

not at all.

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An Odd Rainy Wonderland.

An Odd Rainy Wonderland

By James Bezerra

This odd and

rainy wonderland

of

sudden sidewalk

tent cities,

of

oddly expensive milk,

gas station attendants,

of

old pretty peaked homes

glimmering wet all day,

of

dense and ubiquitous forests

of tattoos on white skin

of

this place I feel

as I feel about Millennials:

envious, hopeful

quietly doubtful.

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I Think My Cat is Depressed.

I Think My Cat is Depressed

By James Bezerra

My cat

spends all day

sleeping.

My cat

experiences violent, rapturous

mood swings.

My cat

does not want

to talk about it.

My cat

glares at me,

claws back at my affections.

My cat

may be depressed.

Or is just a cat.

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