Garden of Earthly Delights

“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” – Leonard Cohen

Hieronymus Bosch, a Medieval Dutch Painter, is renowned for his triptych oil painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. From a fantastic blue horizon he both graciously and uniformly brings the observer into a majestic enterprise that abruptly ends in a bosh of twisted imaginings. As your virtual curator, it will be my honor and pleasure to guide you through this work of art beginning with the beatific simplicities of life and ending in mindless debauchery.
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Along the way (as you observe the video above) pay special attention to the objects that appear as ‘spheres’. Notice how they gradually dwindle into absurdity as the story unfolds through this artistic splendour of delights. This feature is by no means part and parcel to Bosch’s work but is more of an introspective exercise by which to elicit and make further connections into the psyche of one who intimately felt the pulse of the zeitgeist. And not just the pulse of a middle age, but that which stretches back to the beginning and onward to the end of times.
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This painting remains relevant to every generation of people who turn to pause and behold the unseen psychological forces that carry us along with the turbulence of a stream towards a waterfall. It’s as though the majority of us are asleep and oblivious to the fact that our end awaits us, whereas an artist like Bosch reveals the inconvenient truth in such a manner that we naturally come to experience the transcendent virtues – be it love, hope or faith – so as to counter our mindless spiral into existential absurdity.
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So instead of asking what’s in it for me, we find ourselves inquiring into how best to contribute towards the common good, realizing that our little part in this turning of events is but short lived and insignificant compared to the continuation of it all. We can envision a sustainable coexistence that avoids the extremes if we learn to let go of our aberrations of selfhood.
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Therefore on one side of the painting we have a singular reality or an overly rigid representation of life. On the other end we have complete chaos and ruin. Yet in the centre of the extremes resides a middle ground, an equanimous state of affairs, and the height of human flourishing while in balance with nature.
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While standing facing out from the center of this landscape you have the gravity of conservatism on your far right and on your left you have the pull of liberalism. As a human being, neither of these polar ends alone can empower you to thrive without equilibrium. In fact they undermine your individuality and freedom to be what you choose to be, but they also attest to the natural law that we must comply with in order to live well.
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From the orderly part of the garden you hear a voice that says: “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life will find it.” Let’s face the music here! Such an invitation doesn’t attract the majority of people eh.
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From the disorderly part of the garden you feel the lure of an orgasmic bliss! Every fibre of your biology, reinforced with the sophistry of academia, including the whispers of the snake (Neo-liberalism) that slithers deep into your dreams made of night, seem to all so seductively nudge you in this open free-for-all direction. Yet some part of you continues to hear the voice from the other side of the garden admonishing you to enter ‘through the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.’
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So we make some wayward attempts to heed its warning. Perhaps we parade around in costumes in the name of this, that and the other thing, making empty promises as we gather others into our ‘bubble’, like Babylon buying a stairway to heaven, careful not to rock the boat so as to stir the dragon that looms underground, now more cyborg than beast.
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This dichotomy can be likened to wrestling with a supernatural creature which will eventually break us at the hip, rendering our egotistic paradigm of the world as invalid. Perhaps this particular myth is more of a symptom of our inner crises or maybe it’s an archetypal story that can be spun in multiple ways to address all sorts of complexities.
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Either way, blessed be the house of Cohen & Bosch, for it’s through the ‘crack’ that the light shines in, which will be made clear to you in the end; i.e., at the end of the video above. Our imperfections and blemishes bring colour to the mindscape of our make pretend, by which the artist can sing over and over and again, we must all come to realize the whole through the part, that which brings soulful resilience to our art. So whether we ‘art’ in heaven, or do ‘art’ below in hell, that which brings us together, has the power to break the spell.

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