Bosch Came To Gehenna On All-Hallows Eve

[Robert Crisman]

Bosch entered the triptych that night, the right panel, the one overlooking the gates of far Hell.

Off in the distance a city on fire: discharged black smoke and hot yellowed breath, white light screaming skyward; backlit, the throne held by Moloch when Sodom was young, and behind it, charred Timur, still regal, whose empire choked in the dust outside Babel.

Below the city an underground grotto the color and stench of piss-soaked intestinal waste, with maimed armies on horseback scattered in rout, and ahead of them, up a slight rise, a stoked furnace, ingesting the last of the shrieks of their comrades and belching gas up through the crust of the horror toward Tarsus.

Stretching toward Bosch, a vast, open plain the width of a country: below him, two giant ears pressed together, a knife pointing outward wedged in between them, advancing somewhat like a tumbril-cum-panzer, to slice up a bladder with oboe-like lips; behind them a host of dead men fleeing sucked-white, winged creatures, all of them, dead men and creatures alike, sporting outsized, vermillion erections...

Bosch sank to his knees and retched out his sickness, and when he looked up he saw Satan in plumage, at table, dining on dead and excreting them into a jar.

Satan looked up and saw Bosch, waved a bone in the air as if to greet him, and off to his left the late-night morgue laughter of soul-shifting women, the spawn of torn screams, now kicked into gear as Bosch choked denial of all that the Church Fathers claimed he had done in the Lowlands...

[Angela]

Robert, your pictures of Hell make me want to behave better.

[Diana E. Backhouse]

You obviously have an affinity with Bosch's paintings. I don't think he could describe them better himself.