Bosch Came To the Mountain And Met Giacometti

[Robert Crisman]

And now Bosch came to black mountains, which thrust abruptly like something shoved out of the earth, sheer-walled escarpments rising three miles, God's own iced shadows, while back on stone ground, worlds bloated and buckled and burned.

A pall settled on him as sickness will in a plague year; he'd breathed the destruction of every last semblance of life on that ground spread behind him, and death inhaled becomes one, bleeding through every least recess where, lodged, it issues calls for the heart's last surrender.

Death rasped, croaked, and hissed, and the face its voice conjured was the mask Bosch had worn when he took his first Holy Communion...

His tears turned to dust and blew toward Gehenna...

He made his way into the mountains, through a slit that became an ascent as tortured rock closed overhead.

And found himself winding past clustered gray chisels of bas-relief figures gouged out by a fierce Giacometti--vomits of sorrow, indifference, starvation, and waste, and on the last figure, a grin and a wink splayed the face of his mother, whose grave lies untended in lost, salted ground...

[Angela]

This gave me such a sense of claustrophobic vertigo.  Magnificent.  I believe I have come late to a series.  My loss.

[Diana E. Backhouse]

I am more than impressed at the way you have put yourself in Bosch's shoes, Robert. I hope that you aren't feeling the torment that he obviously did when he painted. I hadn't come across Giacometti's work before, so had to Google him. You embodied him as well!