Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch Source: WikipediazClick to see larger image
Date this lecture was recorded: August 1993
Today’s podcast features the last talk that Terence McKenna gave during his August of 1993 Scholar-in-Residence program at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. His topic for the evening was the way in which artists like Bosch and poets like Yeats imagined a trans-historical future in their work. Along the way, Terence inserts his views about art history and appreciation, and tells us why he believes that their work remains important to us yet today.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:35 ►
And before I introduce today’s program, I first want to thank Mac and Marcella for yet another donation to the salon to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts. I really appreciate your help and that of all of our other donors these past years, because that’s what keeps us keeping on.
00:00:45 ►
Now, for today’s podcast, guess what?
00:00:48 ►
I’ve come across a few more Terrence McKenna tapes, and, well, I thought that it’d be fun
00:00:53 ►
to end the year with a few more of his talks.
00:00:57 ►
This one seems to have been recorded with the microphone volume turned up a little bit
00:01:02 ►
high, but since I haven’t been able to find this particular talk anywhere else in the net, well, I thought that we should preserve it here.
00:01:09 ►
The label on the tape says that the title of the talk is Bosch and Yates on Parade,
00:01:15 ►
and when I searched on that title in quotes, there were no hits, so well, I guess this should be new
00:01:21 ►
to most of us. Now, I have to admit that at first this talk didn’t grip me like many of Terrence’s talks do,
00:01:29 ►
but that’s because I know next to nothing about art.
00:01:33 ►
As an undergrad in college, I studied electrical engineering, and in grad school I studied law.
00:01:39 ►
So I was trained to be an engineer and a lawyer, but I don’t feel like I was educated in any
00:01:45 ►
meaningful way. Basically, well, I’ve always done a lot of reading, and so I consider myself
00:01:51 ►
to mainly be self-educated. That said, I’ve done nothing to educate myself about art.
00:01:59 ►
But as I listened to Terence talk about Bosch’s painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights,
00:02:04 ►
I brought up a copy of it on my computer so that I could follow along with what he was describing.
00:02:11 ►
And if, like me, you don’t have a lot of art education, I highly recommend doing the same thing.
00:02:18 ►
In today’s program notes, I’ve included a copy of that painting,
00:02:21 ►
and if you click on it, you’ll get a larger copy that you can
00:02:25 ►
even enlarge more and scroll around on.
00:02:28 ►
And you’ll find that in today’s program notes at psychedelicsalon.com.
00:02:34 ►
Now here is Terrence McKenna on an August evening near Big Sur, closing out his monthly
00:02:40 ►
residency at Esalen back in 1993.
00:02:43 ►
monthly residency at Esalen back in 1993.
00:02:53 ►
This is the last of what turned out to be five lectures, if we include Brother David’s dialogue or our joint offering a few nights ago.
00:02:57 ►
The last of five lectures comprising my scholarship and residence at Esalen this year.
00:03:07 ►
It seems as though the theme sort of naturally solidified
00:03:12 ►
around the idea of final things, the eschaton.
00:03:17 ►
I mean, from Finnegan’s Wake through the time wave
00:03:21 ►
to the discussion of the fourth chapter of Daniel,
00:03:26 ►
I did notice that all of these meetings seemed to be about the end and final things,
00:03:34 ►
but in rather light-hearted and non-morbid approaches.
00:03:41 ►
I mean, I consider Finnegan’s Wake a delightful thing to discuss. The time wave
00:03:46 ►
appeals to my ego, so forth and so on. It was not a gloomy discussion of final time and things.
00:03:53 ►
What I thought of doing tonight, if it was a small group possibly, was discussing two poems by Yeats which deal with final things.
00:04:07 ►
And then the thing which broke down our effort to talk about Bosch
00:04:11 ►
was that we didn’t have an overhead projector.
00:04:14 ►
And I thought if the group was small enough, we could…
00:04:17 ►
How many people are familiar with Hieronymus Bosch?
00:04:21 ►
Not so many people.
00:04:23 ►
This guy didn’t make it into the top ten.
00:04:27 ►
Because he deals also with a whole bunch of themes that we’ve been talking about.
00:04:32 ►
First of all, this painting, which is the only one we would discuss,
00:04:36 ►
simply very large blow-ups of sections of his most famous work,
00:04:43 ►
of sections of his most famous work,
00:04:49 ►
deals apparently or ostensibly with paradise,
00:04:53 ►
with some other dimension, possibly beyond death,
00:04:55 ►
or possibly drug-induced.
00:04:56 ►
It’s not clear. We don’t have much of a context for Bosch.
00:05:01 ►
And what has always attracted me to him is that he’s a symmetry splitter. I mean,
00:05:10 ►
Bosch is almost impossible, and yet weirdly conservative at that. I mean, what you have in
00:05:18 ►
Bosch is a kind of fossilization of the late medieval mind,
00:05:28 ►
its obsessions, its symbolic associations, many now lost except to Chaucer scholars and medievalists.
00:05:34 ►
And yet, so the content of all these bizarre juxtapositions
00:05:40 ►
of symbolic animals and so forth is thoroughly medieval,
00:05:44 ►
but the overall impression is one of extraordinary radicalism of thought.
00:05:51 ►
I mean, this is a window into either the functioning belief system
00:05:55 ►
of a heretical sect or a very radical and peculiar notion of paradise,
00:06:04 ►
certainly no Christian paradise,
00:06:07 ►
judging by the amount of hanky-panky going on,
00:06:11 ►
and a curious creation scene.
00:06:15 ►
It’s a triptych, you see, so it opens up.
00:06:17 ►
A curious creation scene that’s ambiguous,
00:06:21 ►
then a paradise also ambiguous,
00:06:24 ►
and then a fairly horrendous hellscape that appears unambiguously
00:06:30 ►
designed to provoke a cautionary response toward life’s pleasures and the viewer.
00:06:40 ►
Okay, let me get into this.
00:06:43 ►
Okay, let me get into this.
00:06:52 ►
The tack that I wanted to take with this is sort of a sensual, art historical,
00:06:58 ►
aesthetically driven, tactile, psychedelic approach this evening,
00:07:02 ►
simply because this is what the sources are going to offer. So rather than formal mathematical models of history or the grim
00:07:08 ►
moral casuistry that leads us in and out of deserving an apocalypse, I thought I would just
00:07:18 ►
talk about this feeling which has always pervaded this idea.
00:07:25 ►
And strangely enough, it’s a feeling of sensual overload, lassitude, concupiscencia,
00:07:51 ►
A kind of long, golden, hashish-lit afternoon of the mind seems to pervade this idea complex, the idea of the eschaton conceived of as paradise,
00:08:10 ►
and the end of history conceived of as metamorphosis, crisis, and transition.
00:08:21 ►
So I thought to begin by reading a very short, well-known, and simple, actually, poem of Yeats, because almost every schoolchild knows this poem,
00:08:28 ►
and yet exactly what it’s talking about is fairly ambiguous,
00:08:32 ►
although I think the tone of eschatological menace is fairly clear.
00:08:40 ►
This is from The Second Coming.
00:08:43 ►
Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
00:08:47 ►
the falcon cannot hear the falconer.
00:08:50 ►
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.
00:08:54 ►
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
00:08:58 ►
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
00:09:01 ►
and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
00:09:07 ►
The best lack all conviction,
00:09:15 ►
while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand, surely the second coming is at hand, the second coming, hardly are those words out when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight.
00:09:27 ►
Somewhere in sands of the desert, a shape with lion body and the head of a man,
00:09:34 ►
a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun is moving its slow thighs,
00:09:41 ►
while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
00:09:47 ►
The darkness drops again, but now I know
00:09:51 ►
that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
00:09:59 ►
and what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
00:10:04 ►
slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.
00:10:08 ►
You all know this poem, I presume, in some form or another.
00:10:13 ►
So, you know, just to get the referential crap out of the way,
00:10:20 ►
obviously this poem is operating under the shadow of Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias.
00:10:27 ►
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.
00:10:30 ►
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair, and all about the desert wreck.
00:10:37 ►
You know this poem, right?
00:10:40 ►
So it’s operating in the light of that same feeling,
00:10:43 ►
but where what we get out of Shelley is an archaeological site, a shattered wreck.
00:10:50 ►
What we get out of Yeats is something much darker and more menacing, something Lovecraftian, something old, something alive, and something on the move.
00:11:02 ►
This rough beast that now slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.
00:11:09 ►
This poem was published very much under the influence of the events of World War I
00:11:17 ►
and is more prescient with each day.
00:11:24 ►
is more prescient with each day.
00:11:27 ►
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,
00:11:30 ►
more anarchy is loosed upon the world.
00:11:33 ►
This is the feeling of the 20th century,
00:11:36 ►
turning and turning in the widening gyre,
00:11:39 ►
the best lack all conviction,
00:11:42 ►
the worst are full of passionate intensity. This is a fairly dark vision out of Yeats,
00:11:48 ►
and he hooks it up to, I mean, obviously,
00:11:53 ►
the image that is invoked is that of the Sphinx.
00:11:56 ►
That is this lion-headed thing in the desert.
00:12:00 ►
But the implication is, I think,
00:12:02 ►
that this is the birth of the beast of the apocalypse this
00:12:06 ►
is the second headed I mean I’m sorry this is the seven headed lamb of the revelation of John
00:12:13 ►
of Patmos so I wanted to go through that and then I wanted to read and this will lead us into Bosch
00:12:25 ►
a somewhat different
00:12:27 ►
take or maybe a different take
00:12:29 ►
on an entirely different subject but to
00:12:31 ►
my mind these two poems
00:12:33 ►
are clearly connected
00:12:35 ►
the first one
00:12:37 ►
is about the second coming
00:12:40 ►
this peculiar entry
00:12:42 ►
of God into history
00:12:43 ►
that we talked about in relationship to the eschaton.
00:12:48 ►
This second poem, nearly equally short,
00:12:53 ►
is much more complicated
00:12:54 ►
and seems to deal with the after-death state
00:13:00 ►
and the theme of paradise
00:13:03 ►
and a theme relative to the survival after death
00:13:08 ►
that we’ve talked about here many times,
00:13:11 ►
which is the transformation of human beings into machines,
00:13:17 ►
a kind of organomechanistic fate
00:13:22 ►
that seems to lie ahead
00:13:25 ►
in the historical continuum
00:13:27 ►
this poem
00:13:28 ►
well let me read it
00:13:30 ►
then we’ll talk about it
00:13:32 ►
it’s fairly straightforward as well
00:13:34 ►
Sailing to Byzantium
00:13:37 ►
- That is no
00:13:39 ►
country for old men
00:13:40 ►
the young in one another’s arms
00:13:43 ►
birds in the trees, those dying
00:13:45 ►
generations, at their song
00:13:48 ►
the salmon falls,
00:13:50 ►
the mackerel crowded seas,
00:13:52 ►
fish, flesh, or
00:13:54 ►
fowl, commend all summer
00:13:56 ►
long. Whatever is begotten,
00:13:58 ►
born, and dies,
00:14:00 ►
caught in that sensual
00:14:02 ►
music, all neglect,
00:14:04 ►
monuments of unaging intellect.
00:14:06 ►
Two, an aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick,
00:14:13 ►
in less soul clap its hands and sing and louder sing,
00:14:18 ►
for every tatter in its mortal dress, nor is there singing school,
00:14:23 ►
but studying monuments of its own magnificence,
00:14:27 ►
and therefore I have sailed the seas, and come to the holy city of Byzantium.
00:14:35 ►
- O sages standing in God’s holy fire, as in the gold mosaic of a wall,
00:14:42 ►
come from the holy fire, purr in a gyre, and be the singingosaic of a wall, come from the holy fire,
00:14:46 ►
purr in a gyre,
00:14:49 ►
and be the singing masters of my soul.
00:14:52 ►
Consume my heart away,
00:14:53 ►
sick with desire,
00:14:56 ►
and fastened to a dying animal.
00:14:58 ►
It knows not what it is, and gather me into the artifice of eternity.
00:15:04 ►
00:15:13 ►
Once out of nature I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing, but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make, of hammered gold and gold enameling, to keep a drowsy emperor awake or set upon a golden bough to sing
00:15:26 ►
to lords and ladies of Byzantium
00:15:29 ►
of what is past or passing or to come.
00:15:34 ►
To me, the interesting part about all this,
00:15:37 ►
this whole first business is pretty straightforward.
00:15:42 ►
Well, let’s talk about the first one, though,
00:15:44 ►
because this we will meet in Bosch.
00:15:48 ►
That is no country for old men,
00:15:51 ►
the young in one another’s arms,
00:15:53 ►
birds in the trees,
00:15:54 ►
those dying generations at their song,
00:15:57 ►
the salmon falls.
00:15:58 ►
This is a literal description
00:16:00 ►
of the Garden of Earthly Delights.
00:16:02 ►
There are no young.
00:16:03 ►
People are literally falling in each other’s arms.
00:16:07 ►
All kinds of sexual preferences are being expressed,
00:16:10 ►
and people are completely and congruously
00:16:13 ►
wandering through a world of enormous birds,
00:16:17 ►
finches, starlings, and tropical birds of some sort.
00:16:23 ►
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
00:16:27 ►
whatever is begotten, born, and dies
00:16:30 ►
caught in the sensual music of all neglect,
00:16:35 ►
caught in the sensual music of all neglect,
00:16:38 ►
monuments of unaging intellect.
00:16:40 ►
So it’s a picture of sensual lassitude
00:16:43 ►
and fin de siècle decadence,
00:16:47 ►
and it’s almost a narcotic sensuality that comes out of these images.
00:16:57 ►
Then the next section is typical Yeats,
00:17:00 ►
an aged man is but a paltry thing.
00:17:03 ►
It’s invoking the transience
00:17:06 ►
of the Barbie and all that
00:17:07 ►
but then, the last two sections
00:17:10 ►
where
00:17:11 ►
assuming
00:17:14 ►
that we are now in the
00:17:16 ►
after death state, which for him
00:17:18 ►
is the holy city of Byzantium
00:17:20 ►
then the last line
00:17:22 ►
the last two lines of part
00:17:24 ►
three,
00:17:29 ►
it knows not what it is, speaking of the soul,
00:17:32 ►
it’s fastened to a dying animal, it knows not what it is,
00:17:35 ►
and gather me into the artifice of eternity.
00:17:37 ►
This is what I wanted to get to.
00:17:44 ►
The artifice of eternity is an extraordinarily peculiar concept, Western, kept alive, present in Bosch,
00:17:49 ►
in the strange mechanical devices and towers that we’ll see here,
00:17:55 ►
but in the artifice of eternity.
00:17:58 ►
And then the entire fourth section
00:18:01 ►
adumbrates this concept brilliantly.
00:18:07 ►
And, you know, in, what is it,
00:18:09 ►
what have we got here?
00:18:10 ►
Eight lines, seven lines.
00:18:13 ►
I think it gets it better
00:18:14 ►
than just about anybody ever did.
00:18:16 ►
Once out of nature,
00:18:18 ►
meaning quite simply once dead,
00:18:20 ►
once out of nature,
00:18:22 ►
I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing,
00:18:28 ►
but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make of hammered gold and gold enameling,
00:18:34 ►
to keep a drowsy emperor awake or set upon a golden bough to sing
00:18:40 ►
to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past or passing or to come.
00:18:46 ►
It’s a weird image.
00:18:48 ►
He’s saying once out of nature he would take the form of a mechanical bird,
00:18:56 ►
that a toy to amuse the emperor,
00:19:04 ►
to invoke a sense of eternity in the courtly life of this Byzantine paradise that he imagines.
00:19:11 ►
It’s a very explicit and very early image of what in Finnegan’s Wake we get
00:19:16 ►
where he says, man will be dirigible.
00:19:20 ►
This is now how Joyce does it.
00:19:23 ►
Only 11 years
00:19:25 ►
later we go from
00:19:27 ►
I would be a thing of gold and gold
00:19:29 ►
enameling to man will be
00:19:31 ►
dirigible but it’s the same thing
00:19:33 ►
it’s the anticipation of the
00:19:35 ►
cyborg
00:19:36 ►
mechanical
00:19:37 ►
apotheosis
00:19:40 ►
that is somehow sensed
00:19:42 ►
to lie ahead and yet it’s very psychedelic.
00:19:46 ►
It’s very DMT-like.
00:19:49 ►
This idea of being, well,
00:19:54 ►
the beginning lines of Part 3,
00:19:58 ►
sages standing in God’s holy fire
00:20:01 ►
as in the gold mosaic of a wall,
00:20:10 ►
in God’s holy fire as in the gold mosaic of a wall is an extraordinary image of shamanic transcendentalism, contact, connection. Come from the holy fire, burn in a gyre. That’s
00:20:19 ►
a special vocabulary of Yates. It means simply turn in a spiral and be the singing masters
00:20:26 ►
of my soul. So, this kind of thing, coming out of Yeats, is a product of what’s called
00:20:34 ►
the Celtic revival, and in a sense, the last gasp of a certain kind of romantic attitude toward these images.
00:20:47 ►
And, you know, in spite of the attractiveness of this,
00:20:51 ►
it is incredibly recidivist.
00:20:54 ►
I mean, you know, Yeats was associated with the pre-Raphaelites.
00:20:59 ►
Well, when you stand in, for example, the Tate
00:21:03 ►
and look at the pre-Raphaelites and realize that Manet
00:21:07 ►
was painting at the very same moment, then you realize that for all its illustrative
00:21:15 ►
beauty and opalescent beguilement, it’s very conservative.
00:21:25 ►
It’s very set against the strain of modernity.
00:21:30 ►
It’s the last of a whole tradition of romanticizing these febrile and paradisical and hallucinatory states.
00:21:47 ►
It reaches back into people like Redon and Gustave Moreau,
00:21:52 ►
French symbolist painters of the 19th century.
00:21:55 ►
You see this in Turner, in paintings of Turner’s such as The Decline of Carthage.
00:22:13 ►
You see this twilight lassitude in the midst of incredible imperial opulence and sensual excess and exotic.
00:22:17 ►
I mean, in a sense, I mean, Bosch’s dates are 1450, I’m sorry, yes, 1450 to 1516.
00:22:26 ►
And this painting arguably could have been painted while America was being discovered.
00:22:32 ►
We don’t know the exact dates of the painting of the Garden of Earthly Delights,
00:22:36 ►
but if Bosch was born in 1450, then he would have been 42 in 1492.
00:22:43 ►
He would have been at the height of his artistic power.
00:22:48 ►
So it’s also, it’s a prophetic painting, you know,
00:22:52 ►
in this depiction of overflowing pagan nakedness
00:22:56 ►
and exotic flora and strange animals.
00:23:00 ►
It is, in fact, you know, a photograph of the European mind
00:23:04 ►
at this extraordinary moment
00:23:07 ►
when the second half of the planet swims into their tin.
00:23:13 ►
And it’s a moment not unlike our own moment.
00:23:19 ►
It’s a moment when literally new worlds beckon.
00:23:23 ►
It’s a moment when literally new worlds beckon.
00:23:27 ►
Remember when we read from Finnegan’s Wake,
00:23:33 ►
I said that the first page of the wake was evocative of the close triptych of the Garden of Earthly Delights.
00:23:35 ►
Here it is. It’s hard to see. It’s designed to be hard to see.
00:23:38 ►
It’s basically a cloudy, opaque, swirling look into an alchemical retort.
00:23:44 ►
It’s colorless and chaotic and primordial.
00:23:49 ►
It’s the moment before the drama of creation is set in motion.
00:23:57 ►
It has to be said, you know, we have no interpretation of Bosch.
00:24:02 ►
He’s been much fought over.
00:24:02 ►
interpretation of Bosch.
00:24:04 ►
He’s been much fought over.
00:24:09 ►
William Frasier, who was an art historian,
00:24:12 ►
argued, I thought persuasively,
00:24:16 ►
in a book called The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch,
00:24:19 ►
that Bosch was probably an Adamite, a member of a sect of heterodox Christians
00:24:24 ►
that practiced ritual nudity,
00:24:27 ►
a sect particularly associated for some reason with printers and families of printers.
00:24:33 ►
Only the bizarreness of the content of the work gives any support for these kind of speculations.
00:24:41 ►
We possess no writings by or about Bosch.
00:24:45 ►
The conventions that he developed to portray infernal regions,
00:24:54 ►
you know, fish mouths, vomiting souls,
00:24:59 ►
biomechanical creatures, graphic piercing,
00:25:03 ►
botanical creatures, graphic piercing.
00:25:10 ►
All of this was then developed into a whole school of apocalyptic portrayal.
00:25:15 ►
The most famous student, not student directly,
00:25:21 ►
but the most famous later painter influenced by Bach,
00:25:27 ►
or Bosch, not a painter, but in this case in his etchings,
00:25:29 ►
was Peter Bruegel, the elder, who did a series of seven deadly sins
00:25:34 ►
that you can’t tell whether what you see in Bosch
00:25:39 ►
is supposed to horrify or delight you.
00:25:42 ►
Bruegel was pretty explicitly horrific.
00:25:46 ►
These strange vegetable forms
00:25:48 ►
and animals fill this painting.
00:25:51 ►
One of the odd things about this painting
00:25:54 ►
that I’ve never heard any art historian discuss
00:25:57 ►
is that there are human beings with wings
00:26:01 ►
and there are human beings riding cats
00:26:03 ►
and there are human beings carrying cats, and there are human beings carrying
00:26:05 ►
strawberries around on their back. When you actually try to cast your mind into this painting,
00:26:12 ►
there’s a bizarre confusion of scale. None of the people portrayed in this painting seem
00:26:19 ►
to be anywhere close to full size. Possibly it’s a kind of
00:26:26 ►
fairyland.
00:26:28 ►
We have been
00:26:29 ►
conditioned by Disney
00:26:32 ►
to overstress the
00:26:34 ►
cute in fairies.
00:26:37 ►
Fairies are actually
00:26:38 ►
fairly peculiar and
00:26:39 ►
ambiguous entities to deal
00:26:42 ►
with. This may picture
00:26:43 ►
a kind of late Flemish recrudescence of the Celtic faith,
00:26:50 ►
something like that.
00:26:52 ►
I mean, it’s pretty wide open for speculation.
00:26:56 ►
After all, we’re looking at something pretty peculiar here.
00:27:00 ►
Of course, drugs have been brought forward as a suggestion.
00:27:04 ►
I’m always an enthusiast for pharmacological explanations,
00:27:09 ►
but in this case, the material is not really there to support a drug hypothesis.
00:27:16 ►
I mean, what drug?
00:27:18 ►
There is one very suggestive panel,
00:27:22 ►
panel because this object
00:27:25 ►
might very well
00:27:27 ►
be the seed capsule of
00:27:29 ►
Datura Stramonium
00:27:30 ►
which would have implicated Bosch
00:27:33 ►
in some kind of
00:27:35 ►
a Datura cult and this was
00:27:37 ►
a plant known to European witchcraft
00:27:39 ►
and there is a fairly rich
00:27:41 ►
literature about it
00:27:43 ►
the toad here accompanying the motif of magical flight, suggests the possibility.
00:27:51 ►
And it’s interesting, this particular panel is the extreme left upper section
00:28:00 ►
of the main panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights.
00:28:04 ►
And here we have the jimson
00:28:05 ►
weed seed capsule the toad although for medieval symbolism this is the female genitalia always
00:28:13 ►
but also look at this mushroom here this is quite distinctive and if you were to read the Garden of Earthly Delights as a text
00:28:25 ►
with the conventions of English,
00:28:28 ►
you would start reading it in the upper left corner.
00:28:32 ►
So it’s interesting that in the upper left corner
00:28:34 ►
we immediately meet these symbols.
00:28:37 ►
But outside of this there is no particular evidence of mushroom use.
00:28:48 ►
These things are fantastic.
00:28:50 ►
I mean, if you’re familiar
00:28:51 ►
with the canon of imagery
00:28:54 ►
of the middle
00:28:55 ►
1500s, and
00:28:57 ►
then you come upon Bosch,
00:29:00 ►
I mean, if it’s startling to us,
00:29:02 ►
you can barely conceive
00:29:04 ►
of the effect that it had on its viewers in the 1490s or around 1500.
00:29:12 ►
It’s hard for you to know.
00:29:14 ►
See, I know, but these substances are clearly polished stones, and in some cases glass tubing is very prominent, and these things are incredibly imaginative
00:29:31 ►
in the context of the late medieval imagination.
00:29:36 ►
And what we’re looking at is architectural structures
00:29:40 ►
that are in the distance of a paradisical landscape.
00:29:45 ►
Everyone is naked.
00:29:46 ►
95% of everybody is totally naked.
00:29:50 ►
And they seem to be engaged in various forms of erotic play
00:29:58 ►
and aimless wandering around.
00:30:02 ►
They are, you know, knitting flowers into necklaces,
00:30:07 ►
sitting, conversing.
00:30:08 ►
And there are these peculiar mer-knights,
00:30:14 ►
or mer-robots, mer-men,
00:30:17 ►
whose upper torsos are armored,
00:30:21 ►
and they seem to inhabit lakes in this region.
00:30:26 ►
Here’s a group of people gathered around a giant strawberry.
00:30:31 ►
People marching into this egg.
00:30:34 ►
A mer-woman making love with a man here.
00:30:38 ►
More of these mer-knight bots parading around.
00:30:44 ►
Gazelles, all kinds of exotic animals,
00:30:48 ►
porcupines, finches, birds,
00:30:50 ►
people of all races, many black people,
00:30:52 ►
men and women portrayed,
00:30:54 ►
interracial sexual activity is going on,
00:30:59 ►
feats of acrobatics,
00:31:01 ►
all kinds of horsing around with birds.
00:31:04 ►
There’s a lot of birds in this painting.
00:31:07 ►
If anybody has any questions, feel free.
00:31:10 ►
I basically just want you to have a feeling for how exotic this is.
00:31:15 ►
And in the absence of any knowledge of Renaissance painting…
00:31:24 ►
Yes, here’s a unicorn. What did you ask about it? of, you know, Renaissance painting.
00:31:27 ►
Yes, here’s a unicorn.
00:31:28 ►
What did you ask about it?
00:31:30 ►
What symbol was that?
00:31:33 ►
Well, when you go into the symbolism,
00:31:37 ►
Bosch is just an encyclopedia of late medieval symbolism.
00:31:40 ►
Most of it can be sussed out.
00:31:43 ►
It’s conventional.
00:31:45 ►
Some of it doesn’t make any sense at all.
00:31:48 ►
The thing most startling about this is the absolute absence of Christian morality or modesty
00:31:57 ►
or any notion of Western European social mores of the day.
00:32:04 ►
And yet it does not seem to be prurient either.
00:32:08 ►
This is why the theory was advanced that these Adamites were using it as an altarpiece.
00:32:15 ►
Now Bosch’s other paintings are bizarre, there’s no doubt about it,
00:32:19 ►
but here he outdid himself.
00:32:22 ►
People riding on giant birds, glass helmets,
00:32:28 ►
people carrying a flag with a porcupine on it.
00:32:33 ►
People, yes, a lot of these animal symbols relate to medieval allegories
00:32:40 ►
that to the medieval viewer made perfect sense.
00:32:43 ►
This was all pretty much on the surface.
00:32:46 ►
There’s a civet cat being ridden.
00:32:50 ►
Painting, and why do you say that that’s not…
00:32:53 ►
Well, there’s just no…
00:32:55 ►
First of all, if you take de Tura,
00:32:57 ►
which is actually portrayed here,
00:33:00 ►
this isn’t exactly where you would end up.
00:33:03 ►
I mean, this is not no de detour vision I’ve ever heard of.
00:33:07 ►
This, given that it’s 1492, I don’t know, could Hashish do this to you?
00:33:14 ►
It’s a fascinating question.
00:33:17 ►
The question of how much the content of one’s psychedelic experience
00:33:23 ►
is a reflection of one’s position in history.
00:33:26 ►
In other words, when I take psilocybin, I see enormous machines in orbit around the planet
00:33:32 ►
and all kinds of servomechanical, machined, high-tech stuff.
00:33:38 ►
Well, what would a person in 1820 have seen?
00:33:44 ►
What would a person in 1820 have seen?
00:33:47 ►
Would they have seen visions of the steam engine?
00:33:51 ►
Visions of pistons and sliding mechanisms? What exactly is going on there between the collectivity as an expression of technique
00:33:58 ►
and the mind of the perceiver?
00:34:04 ►
This is very interesting.
00:34:05 ►
I mean, if this is a drug vision,
00:34:07 ►
then it’s a wonderful fossilization
00:34:09 ►
of the late medieval imagination.
00:34:13 ►
Now, the whole period
00:34:15 ►
from roughly the invention of printing
00:34:18 ►
in 1440, ten years before Bosch’s birth,
00:34:21 ►
to the Thirty Years’ War in 1619,
00:34:25 ►
is, we talked about this, this era that I’m calling the Age of the Marvelous,
00:34:31 ►
when the European mind just went absolutely nuts for the Baroque,
00:34:36 ►
the peculiar, the exotic, the Byzantine, the specific fossils, butterflies,
00:34:43 ►
birds of paradise, detritus from the Greco-Roman civilizations, obelisks, scarabs, alchemical procedures.
00:34:52 ►
This is the era of the Rudolfin court in Prague and the great era of the Wunderkammer of Europe when before Linnaeus and scientific classification of objects,
00:35:07 ►
all kinds of strange exotica were just collected together by very wealthy people.
00:35:15 ►
Now the Italian Renaissance is raging at the very moment that this is going on,
00:35:21 ►
but the news has not yet reached Flanders.
00:35:25 ►
The Northern Renaissance is going to come along in Bosch’s later years
00:35:30 ►
and toward the end of his life.
00:35:31 ►
This does not show any of the concerns or conceits or clichés of Renaissance painting,
00:35:41 ►
Italian Renaissance painting, even some of the more exotic stuff.
00:35:45 ►
No, we know surprisingly little about him.
00:35:49 ►
We know his date of birth because it’s in the parish register
00:35:53 ►
of the village of Parentheses-Herquotenbosch,
00:35:58 ►
some wide place in the road in Flanders.
00:36:03 ►
We know that he made a trip to Rome late in life
00:36:08 ►
and that he viewed the Titians.
00:36:12 ►
We know this from a letter.
00:36:16 ►
He did etchings, engravings.
00:36:19 ►
He did seven deadly sins.
00:36:24 ►
But mostly what he’s
00:36:26 ►
known for are a very small
00:36:28 ►
number of paintings.
00:36:29 ►
The most extravagantly imaginative
00:36:32 ►
being the Garden of Earthly
00:36:34 ►
Delights.
00:36:36 ►
There’s the
00:36:38 ►
Haywain Triptych,
00:36:39 ►
another huge painting that
00:36:42 ►
depicts a hay wagon,
00:36:44 ►
but it’s the world as allegory,
00:36:47 ►
and all kinds of bizarre symbolism is going on.
00:36:51 ►
It’s the Ship of Fools theme,
00:36:53 ►
and he in fact did a Ship of Fools.
00:36:56 ►
Ship of Fools is a trope of late medieval literature.
00:37:01 ►
Sebastian Brandt being one of the great expositors of that thing.
00:37:07 ►
Much of this, this is like Finnegan’s Wake, you know,
00:37:10 ►
the best art historians can take you through some of it,
00:37:13 ►
telling you what they know,
00:37:15 ►
but a huge residuum is left over under the category
00:37:19 ►
anybody’s guess, you know, I mean,
00:37:22 ►
and yet Bosch, by virtue of the length
00:37:26 ►
of his career
00:37:27 ►
and the fact that these paintings
00:37:29 ►
have survived
00:37:29 ►
and that they were
00:37:30 ►
very large paintings,
00:37:31 ►
they must have commanded
00:37:32 ►
a fair price
00:37:33 ►
even at that time.
00:37:35 ►
Surely then he was not
00:37:36 ►
a pathological personality
00:37:39 ►
or a nut of some sort.
00:37:41 ►
He was a very respected painter
00:37:43 ►
who carried on a career
00:37:45 ►
that stretched over 40 years.
00:37:48 ►
And his paintings ended up
00:37:50 ►
in some of the great houses of Europe.
00:37:52 ►
Here’s a person inside a mussel shell
00:37:54 ►
with a pearl between their legs.
00:37:57 ►
Though this is a famous one.
00:37:59 ►
This gentleman has placed
00:38:01 ►
a bouquet of flowers up his anus.
00:38:05 ►
You just don’t see that much in medieval paintings.
00:38:09 ►
In fact, I believe that’s the unique, the single instance.
00:38:14 ►
And more malarkey and carrying on here.
00:38:19 ►
And what’s interesting is that these kinds of structures are not really identifiable.
00:38:23 ►
They are not botanical. They are not botanical.
00:38:26 ►
They are not architectonic.
00:38:28 ►
They can’t be traced to earlier conceits
00:38:31 ►
by other painters.
00:38:34 ►
We just don’t have a clue.
00:38:35 ►
I wanted to get to this one
00:38:37 ►
because this is a very controversial panel.
00:38:39 ►
First of all, this bizarre object
00:38:41 ►
which appears to be transparent.
00:38:43 ►
We can see this woman through it.
00:38:45 ►
This man is pointing to her.
00:38:47 ►
He is the only person out of several hundred figures who is clothed.
00:38:53 ►
It’s in a very unobtrusive part of the painting, if you see the whole thing.
00:38:57 ►
It’s thought to be a self-portrait.
00:38:59 ►
It’s his little cameo appearance.
00:39:03 ►
And if true, then he looks to be a man of perhaps 30.
00:39:09 ►
So we’re talking 1480, 1485, something like that.
00:39:15 ►
And then, other people’s favorite, not mine, but in fitting with our theme,
00:39:21 ►
the central panel is, as we’ve seen, this garden of earthly delights, this
00:39:27 ►
paradise, or if it’s a hell, a very strange hell. But the right side is an unambiguous
00:39:36 ►
inferno, a scene of fire and ice where lost souls are being tortured and tormented in countless ways.
00:39:48 ►
But this is the great prophetic vision of Bosch.
00:39:51 ►
I mean, this is Bosch anticipating the 20th century.
00:39:56 ►
This is Dresden.
00:39:57 ►
This is Berlin.
00:39:59 ►
This is Coventry.
00:40:01 ►
This is Saigon.
00:40:02 ►
This is all the places hammered to pieces by aerial bombing in the 20th century.
00:40:08 ►
It’s an extraordinary thing.
00:40:10 ►
This, and this is just a section, this is the high background,
00:40:16 ►
but quite dramatic, very modern, very impressionistic.
00:40:22 ►
I mean, it’s as dramatic as any art of this sort done in this century.
00:40:28 ►
Here’s more of this.
00:40:29 ►
He invented this, the bombed-out landscape with bonfires,
00:40:34 ►
refugees, shattered structures, busted-up military equipment.
00:40:41 ►
It was early for this.
00:40:43 ►
I mean, the Thirty Years’ War lay
00:40:45 ►
quite some time in the future.
00:40:48 ►
This is really coming out of the Middle Ages.
00:40:50 ►
But these night-lit
00:40:52 ►
landscapes of
00:40:54 ►
flame, suffering,
00:40:56 ►
and ice, and then
00:40:57 ►
these very, very surreal
00:40:59 ►
sadomasochistic
00:41:03 ►
scenarios of torture going on.
00:41:07 ►
We’re dropping down into it now,
00:41:10 ►
and you can begin to see there are all these demons,
00:41:13 ►
and they are tormenting people for various sins in various ways.
00:41:19 ►
And here is where a student of Dante or something like that
00:41:23 ►
can step in and interpret and tell you what all these sins are that are being dealt with.
00:41:30 ►
Actually, some of this is quite horrifying.
00:41:33 ►
The body piercing here, or these hyena-like creatures feeding on this knight,
00:41:39 ►
or this strange moth-winged creature piercing this person.
00:41:46 ►
Dead tree creatures and human tree amalgams are typical of Bosch
00:41:53 ►
and were carried over into Bruegel.
00:41:56 ►
The whole thing is called the Garden of Earthly Delights triptych,
00:42:00 ►
and we’re looking now at the Inferno section.
00:42:03 ►
Very dark, all done in black.
00:42:05 ►
A strange pictorial space that
00:42:07 ►
cascades over the
00:42:10 ►
painting surface.
00:42:12 ►
It’s
00:42:12 ►
it pictures a world of
00:42:16 ►
ice. It’s like a river.
00:42:18 ►
A frozen river at night.
00:42:20 ►
There’s a lot of sleds
00:42:21 ►
and skating going
00:42:24 ►
on. Here you see them. Sleds that have crashed through the black ice. So it’s a lot of sleds and skating going on. Here you see them, sleds that have crashed through the black ice.
00:42:29 ►
So it’s a combination of all kinds of different forms of discomfort.
00:42:36 ►
Here’s someone spitted on the strings of a musical instrument,
00:42:42 ►
and incongruously, in this hell,
00:42:48 ►
musical instruments figure very prominently.
00:42:53 ►
Bagpipes, lyre, lute,
00:42:57 ►
and whatever this thing is, I’m not sure.
00:42:59 ►
And here’s someone striking a tambourine.
00:43:01 ►
I think, and there are drums as well. I think the idea is, among others, obviously,
00:43:04 ►
that it’s an extraordinarily cacophonous place.
00:43:08 ►
It’s full of noise and explosions and dissonance.
00:43:13 ►
And here is the central protagonist,
00:43:16 ►
who is assumed, although it’s a curious portrayal without precedent,
00:43:23 ►
assumed to be Satan,
00:43:27 ►
who wears a chamber pot on his head,
00:43:38 ►
and he’s sitting on a commode, he’s sitting on a toilet, and he’s eating people one by one,
00:43:45 ►
in the midst of all of this horrendous going on. We’ll get back to him in a minute.
00:43:48 ►
This is an interesting section here.
00:43:49 ►
I’m not sure what’s going on.
00:43:57 ►
This person has musical notes, either tattooed on their bottom, or, I don’t know, being projected.
00:44:06 ►
And this woman, who probably represents a prostitute, the dice because of the rabbit,
00:44:08 ►
the dice on her head, all of this is one of these memory juxtapositions
00:44:14 ►
from the Ars Memoria
00:44:15 ►
to associate a whole bunch of various themes
00:44:21 ►
with the theme of gambling and prostitution. Notice the
00:44:26 ►
prominence of blades and knives.
00:44:28 ►
This demon holds
00:44:30 ►
a backgammon board with
00:44:32 ►
three dice on it there.
00:44:36 ►
And then
00:44:36 ►
I wanted to show you
00:44:38 ►
this is the bottom half of
00:44:40 ►
the privy on which Satan
00:44:42 ►
sits.
00:44:44 ►
And it’s not clear exactly what this is.
00:44:48 ►
In the most disgusting interpretation,
00:44:50 ►
it was imagined to actually be his lower colon sticking through this thing.
00:44:56 ►
And these people are being excreted into this toilet hole.
00:45:01 ►
People are also shitting money into the toilet hole and vomiting.
00:45:07 ►
And here you see a woman with a toad on her chest
00:45:12 ►
being embraced by a demon
00:45:15 ►
and also being reflected in a parabolic mirror
00:45:20 ►
that is on the rear end of this other demon.
00:45:23 ►
It’s bizarre that Bosch’s imaginations
00:45:25 ►
seem to be equally at home
00:45:27 ►
with the sublime and the horrible.
00:45:31 ►
I mean, he portrays it all
00:45:33 ►
with this curiously neutral hand.
00:45:36 ►
This is not sensationalistic.
00:45:39 ►
I mean, it’s sensational,
00:45:42 ►
but it’s not prurient.
00:45:43 ►
It’s not erotically driven.
00:45:45 ►
It’s not appealing to some base drive in the viewer.
00:45:51 ►
It’s just simply pictorial and representational.
00:45:55 ►
Similarly, the paradise scenes are frankly erotic,
00:46:00 ►
but not explicitly so, and certainly not pornographic.
00:46:05 ►
It’s a very gentle eye.
00:46:08 ►
I mean, you get the feeling that you could have cut a deal with this guy.
00:46:12 ►
A strange piece of symbolism here.
00:46:15 ►
The hand with the dice mauled by the knife to the plate,
00:46:20 ►
and this curious creature holding this man down.
00:46:26 ►
Well, that’s enough of that.
00:46:28 ►
I just wanted to go through it.
00:46:30 ►
I didn’t want to lecture entirely on Hirana Mospash,
00:46:34 ►
but I wanted to draw the point that this imaging of a trans-historical future
00:46:44 ►
has been going on for a long, long time in the West.
00:46:47 ►
We listened the other night to the fourth chapter of Daniel when Brother David read it.
00:46:54 ►
We talked about the apocalypse of John of Patmos,
00:46:59 ►
Hieronymus Bosch sailing to Byzantium, Finnegan’s Wake,
00:47:10 ►
Bosch, Sailing to Byzantium, Finnegan’s Wake, all of these efforts to give a feeling tone picture to this trans-historical state that in many of our efforts to talk about it, we’ve
00:47:18 ►
tried to talk about it theoretically, tried to talk about it doctrinally, even mathematically, but not
00:47:26 ►
to try to understand the feeling. And the feeling, I think, is one of complex unification.
00:47:38 ►
The world is like a thousand museums all flowing together.
00:47:45 ►
History is redeemed in the present moment, presumably,
00:47:51 ►
by being brought to a kind of a crescendo of association.
00:47:58 ►
That’s why all of these works of art that we studied,
00:48:03 ►
a general characteristic was Baroque complexity. These are not minimalist
00:48:10 ►
works. We’re not moving here in the realm of the sound of one hand clapping. We’re moving
00:48:17 ►
in a realm of incredible efflorescence of detail, resonance, adumbration, allegorical reference,
00:48:27 ►
precursive anticipation, all the tricks are being used.
00:48:32 ►
The 20th century is like that, and therefore illuminated by this kind of thing.
00:48:42 ►
The 20th century, like the 16th,
00:48:46 ►
is a century of enormous transition.
00:48:49 ►
I mean, forever behind us
00:48:51 ►
is the gentlemanly world
00:48:54 ►
of well-regulated commerce
00:48:56 ►
and industry of the 19th century.
00:48:59 ►
And ahead of us lies God knows what.
00:49:02 ►
I mean, either extinction
00:49:04 ►
or some kind of radical transformation which
00:49:07 ►
could leave your grandchildren looking like office machines. So the 20th century is a
00:49:14 ►
century without bearing the way the 16th was. And of course, how this settled out for the
00:49:21 ►
16th century was the Thirty Years’ War was fought in the first half of the 17th century,
00:49:28 ►
and the medieval structures were swept away.
00:49:32 ►
Nothing was left.
00:49:33 ►
In a sense, the apocalypse anticipated by the medieval eschaton actually occurred,
00:49:42 ►
but it occurred over a hundred years and slowly,
00:49:44 ►
actually occurred, but it occurred over a hundred years and slowly. And when it was finished, the conceits of medieval civilization had been completely swept away.
00:49:53 ►
And where there had been popes and kings, there were suddenly parliaments and peoples.
00:49:59 ►
Our situation is probably much more radical.
00:50:03 ►
Our situation is probably much more radical,
00:50:13 ►
and so I think it’s worthwhile to draw, you know, to look back at prophets, essentially. And, of course, somebody that we didn’t go into because he rates his own slot, if not course,
00:50:21 ►
was William Blake, who saw all of this,
00:50:25 ►
who saw what science meant, who wrote about the dark satanic meal,
00:50:30 ►
who wrote about the prophecy of America,
00:50:33 ►
and who saw that history was a kind of distillation of apocalyptic dreaming.
00:50:45 ►
And it still very much is.
00:50:47 ►
It is more than ever.
00:50:48 ►
I mean, with virtual reality, psychedelic drugs,
00:50:54 ►
you know, digital everything,
00:50:57 ►
our dreams are more and more becoming
00:51:01 ►
the stuff of the cultural medium of exchange.
00:51:07 ►
This is necessary.
00:51:08 ►
I mean, we have to switch from stuff to dreams,
00:51:11 ►
but we also have to deal with dreams that can be fulfilled.
00:51:16 ►
I think I said the other night, I can’t remember who I said what to,
00:51:20 ►
but talking about how after the fall of,
00:51:24 ►
after the fall of,
00:51:28 ►
after the defeat of Germany in World War II,
00:51:35 ►
the prevailing social experiment which had been underway in the United States was the New Deal, and people just wanted to return to normal.
00:51:39 ►
I mean, it was called, you know, the return to normalcy.
00:51:43 ►
Get married, get a house in the valley, have some kids, work at the aircraft factory.
00:51:48 ►
That was the plan.
00:51:50 ►
And the expectation for a kind of a millennium, a secular millennium,
00:51:57 ►
the expectation that American life would deliver everyone into the hands of plenty,
00:52:05 ►
in order to meet that, a kind of ersatz paradise
00:52:10 ►
or a kind of pseudo-eschatology was created
00:52:16 ►
out of stucco and suburbs and mall culture and TV
00:52:21 ►
and packaged food and mass marketing of products.
00:52:29 ►
It was essentially paradise on the cheap.
00:52:33 ►
But it shows that this drive for this level of completion remains very strong in people.
00:52:43 ►
I mean, this is what we want.
00:52:46 ►
We want the earth to be a place of leisure and plenty
00:52:50 ►
and a natural theater for the reflection of natural erotic impulse.
00:52:59 ►
This is a vision deeper than romanticism, deeper than classicism.
00:53:06 ►
It’s part of this impulse back to the archaic that I talk about.
00:53:12 ►
And if you had to have a virtual reality,
00:53:16 ►
Bosch would be a good blueprint to begin from.
00:53:20 ►
The sensibility seems to be right.
00:53:24 ►
Will anybody have anything to say about that?
00:53:27 ►
Or anything else?
00:53:29 ►
Could you view Bosch like a seer like Lusportano?
00:53:35 ►
Well, in a sense, a more interesting seer
00:53:38 ►
because less specific, more general.
00:53:43 ►
Yeah, I mean, I view it as prophetic painting.
00:53:46 ►
I don’t know, you know, we can’t talk to Bosch,
00:53:51 ►
so we don’t know how he viewed it.
00:53:53 ►
Some artist homes have seen him as incredibly conservative,
00:53:57 ►
backward-looking, reflecting the medieval world.
00:54:01 ►
But I view it as very prophetic of the 20th century.
00:54:07 ►
Those images aren’t that unlike the bizarre dream that I’ve touched on.
00:54:13 ►
Well, and also, in every case you have this question of cultural context.
00:54:19 ►
Like, Finland’s wake, granted, is a real tough sled,
00:54:24 ►
but I mean, if you live in Dublin for six months,
00:54:28 ►
not studying the wake, but simply living in Dublin for six months, I’m sure the wake is
00:54:35 ►
20% easier, because the street memes, the band memes, the blog, all of this makes it fall into context
00:54:45 ►
like one of the things that’s so worrisome
00:54:49 ►
about Finnegan’s Wake is we’re in danger of losing it
00:54:52 ►
because we’re in danger of losing the context
00:54:55 ►
I mean the way to understand Ulysses
00:54:59 ►
is read the Irish news
00:55:02 ►
and world of those months surrounding Bloomsday,
00:55:08 ►
and then you pick up on the sports teams,
00:55:12 ►
the political figures engaged in various brawls,
00:55:16 ►
the news stories of the day,
00:55:18 ►
the racehorses and movie queens that were fascinating people in the moment.
00:55:24 ►
Bosh, it’s a similar problem.
00:55:26 ►
We’re in danger of losing the context.
00:55:29 ►
I mean, what looks one way to us is something to somebody else.
00:55:34 ►
The juxtaposition, like this question of the mouse in the glass tube,
00:55:39 ►
it may be a clear reference to something that is culturally slipping beyond us.
00:55:48 ►
How will aspects of our culture look?
00:55:52 ►
How long will it be interpreted?
00:55:54 ►
Something like Michael Jackson, for example.
00:55:56 ►
How long will this remain coherent to historians of culture?
00:56:04 ►
They may just finally say,
00:56:05 ►
well, these people were just fascinated
00:56:07 ►
with the bizarre and the utre.
00:56:09 ►
What they really mean is we can’t understand it,
00:56:12 ►
so that’s how we see it.
00:56:15 ►
For example, you know,
00:56:16 ►
there were these Ars Memoria techniques
00:56:20 ►
in the late Renaissance
00:56:22 ►
where orators, to memorize speeches they would juxtapose grotesque
00:56:31 ►
symbols so that for instance if you were giving a speech on the seven deadly sins when you came to
00:56:39 ►
lust you would have prepared in your mind in an imaginary building that you were walking through
00:56:49 ►
an image of a nun lifting her skirts or something and the idea was that this image be as shocking
00:56:56 ►
as possible because it’s supposed to be memorable and so they created these bizarre juxtapositions of swords, weapons, people, genitalia, so forth and so on,
00:57:10 ►
which when we look at it, it’s just, you know, it looks like the creme de la creme of surrealism.
00:57:18 ►
A medieval person looking at it would realize that this is designed to recall a certain line of cicero,
00:57:24 ►
would realize that this is designed to recall a certain line of Cicero and would then proceed to deliver the line,
00:57:28 ►
completely reading it rather than seeing it, you see.
00:57:32 ►
And when you cease to understand a work of art,
00:57:35 ►
you don’t read it anymore, you see it,
00:57:38 ►
and you’re outside it because you have lost connection
00:57:41 ►
with the integrated set of associations and cultural values that make it make sense.
00:57:48 ►
I mean, in a sense, Camille Paglia has attempted to do a kind of restoration of this for our culture.
00:57:56 ►
I mean, when you see these outlandish mythological scenes from the late Rococo,
00:58:02 ►
scenes from the late Rococo you know
00:58:03 ►
we are trained not to think
00:58:07 ►
gee
00:58:08 ►
there are a lot of tits
00:58:10 ►
in this picture
00:58:11 ►
but it turns out
00:58:13 ►
when you actually get the context
00:58:16 ►
right that the people for whom
00:58:18 ►
it was made this was their
00:58:20 ►
major concern
00:58:22 ►
on one level that
00:58:24 ►
art is often what it appears to be.
00:58:26 ►
It’s good to take children with you to art galleries.
00:58:30 ►
They cut through a great deal of art historical camp.
00:58:34 ►
I mean, I don’t line up with Camille Paglia all the way,
00:58:38 ►
but I think that it’s a very refreshing kind of approach to art history
00:58:44 ►
rather than all this mumbo-jumbo and reverence.
00:58:48 ►
I mean, if you look at enough of this stuff, you begin to get its real value in perspective.
00:58:59 ►
And there are individual masterpieces that stand out,
00:59:05 ►
but the great broad river of art historical,
00:59:07 ►
art of Fractria, is popular and kitschy, largely,
00:59:17 ►
has been for 500 years.
00:59:20 ►
Well, maybe that’s a decent enough place to end it.
00:59:24 ►
It hasn’t been a continuous group. Well, maybe that’s a decent enough place to end it.
00:59:27 ►
It hasn’t been a continuous group.
00:59:32 ►
People have come and go at their leisure, which was how it was designed.
00:59:36 ►
But I am grateful to Esalen for having me back and to the people who stuck with this through thick and thin,
00:59:40 ►
and maybe we’ll have an opportunity to do it again.
00:59:43 ►
So thank you very much.
00:59:46 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
00:59:50 ►
thought at a time.
00:59:53 ►
Well, I don’t know about you, but he really got me to thinking more about what was taking
00:59:58 ►
place, historically speaking, when various works of art were created.
01:00:03 ►
For a long time now, I’ve been thinking that what we call news
01:00:07 ►
and what will be called history many years from now,
01:00:11 ►
well, all of that noise is essentially the background music of our lives.
01:00:15 ►
And that’s why I sometimes bring up what was going on in the world
01:00:19 ►
when some of Terrence’s talks were given.
01:00:21 ►
For example, during the month before Terrence gave the talk that we
01:00:25 ►
just heard, Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to fire an FBI director. Did you think
01:00:34 ►
about that when it happened again this year? Well, the summer of 1993 was also when the movie
01:00:40 ►
Jurassic Park came out. Now, I remember seeing that movie for the first time, but
01:00:45 ►
I had completely forgotten about Clinton firing Sessions. So, I guess we know where my priorities
01:00:51 ►
were back then. But now I think I’m going to go back and re-listen to the last 20 minutes or so
01:00:57 ►
of this talk, because while I listened with you to the ending of it for the first time, well,
01:01:02 ►
he got me thinking about so many things that
01:01:05 ►
I’m sure I must have missed a few more ideas that I’d like to pursue.
01:01:09 ►
So, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdellic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.