Here I must speak of a particular phenomenon and to do so I must refer again to Hieronymus Bosch, that marvel among painters who never fails to notice the butterfly in Samson’s field of vision. Bosch is above all the master of what is seen out of the corner of the mind, the essential reality behind the agreed-on appearance of things. Sometimes I manifest myself as an owl painted by Bosch and in this way I fly through the skies of his paintings and observe what is happening. My owl-by-Bosch manifestation is not a superficial one, it follows virtual lines back to his pencil and charcoal sketches and forward from underpainting to varnishing.
A very good example of the accuracy of Bosch’s observation of the real behind the apparent is the upper left-hand side of the central panel of the Temptation of Saint Anthony’ triptych. It is not necessary to have seen this painting to recognize immediately what I am about to describe; I refer to it only as a convenient example.
The upper right-hand side of the central panel shows a daytime sky; extraordinary things are to be seen in it but none the less it is an ordinary daytime sky; the left-hand side of the central panel shows the night that is always waiting within the day and the fire that is always waiting within the night. It is in this night within the day, this fire within the night, that what I am going to talk about is to be seen. Bosch gives us burning farms and churches, falling steeples and gibbets, winged creatures (one of them with a ladder) flying through the air, companies of horsemen, sundry peasants and animals, and a woman washing clothes in the river by the light of the burning. One sees at once that this fire has not spread gradually from a small beginning; no, it has from its waiting state exploded into being, has burst the skin of night and time that could no longer contain it. On the right-hand edge of this night with the fire in it, in the space between the night on the left and the day on the right, the illumination is like that of a twentieth-century sports stadium in which a night game is being played; only there does one see light of such preternatural brilliance as that through which the creature (is it an angel or a devil?) with the ladder flies. Bosch could have seen such light and shadow only in a flash of lightning. But the light in this picture, this light between the night on the left and the day on the right, is not the flash that is gone in a fraction of a moment, it is lightning sustained and steady. This shows Bosch’s virtuality as well as his virtuosity; I have flown beside that creature with the ladder (always uncertain as to its allegiance; it has a tail but I cannot be sure it’s a devil) and I can testify that Bosch experienced that sky by quantum-jumping to the strange brilliance of total Now.
This condition of total Now manifests itself in a number of ways and one of them is that extraordinary lucence that I have just described, that epiphany of light immanent in our being and experienced in certain heightened states as the light-as-bright-as-day within the night, the light as bright as lightning. Now as I lie in the darkness on the wet and maggoty grass under the headless naked body of the tax-collector it is not darkness that I see but the crystalline vibrations of the purple-blue. These vibrations I recognize as being of the spectrum of total Now, that moment without beginning or end in which all other moments are contained.
I have spoken before this of the Now of Sophia’s nakedness in my mind but it is not with Sophia nor with Jesus that I have seen the light of total Now. No, the headless naked body of the tax-collector has been the first thing that I have seen in this unearthly light. Now lying on the ground under his hanging body I hear in the purple-blue the multitudinous leaves whispering Now in the rising wind.
The purple-blue withdraws, the sky goes black; the thunder rolls, the lightning crashes and the jagged black doors of the sky jump apart to reveal the purple-blue multiplied, intensified to unbearable brilliance. Now I see that the life of humankind, the life of the world even, fits easily into the space of that lightning-flash. And how many lightning-flashes have there been, will there be. It is with the dead tax-collector that I have seen this and I begin to pray for him. The words come into my mind:
What is man that thou art mindful of him …
But no more words come; I don’t know to whom or to what I pray. I perceive that what is receiving my prayers is nothing with whom one speaks in words, nothing of whom one asks anything, nothing to whom one tells anything.
The thunder crashes where I am, the lightning cleaves the tree to its roots, the stinking maggoty corpse falls on me. I jump up and run through the dark wood, and as I run I hear the bell that had been nodding slowly now ringing fast, I hear the clatter of bones, the neighing of the pale horse, the low chuckle of Gevatter Tod, Goodman Death himself. The Bath Kol hisses wordlessly in my ear; I stop running and walk forward slowly, feeling with my hand in the darkness before me. My hand finds a wire, a man-snare.
I draw my dagger and go on. In the air on my face I feel the approach of something, I step to the right, a blade rips through my left sleeve, someone grunts as with my left arm I get him in a neck-grip and with my right hand I strike with the dagger. ‘O my God!’ cries a man’s voice. Again and again I strike, there is gurgling, gasping, coughing, he falls to the ground and is silent. I move back off the path into the trees and wait to see if anyone else is coming. I am not afraid and this surprises me; I think: When I had balls I didn’t have this much balls.
While I lean against a tree, panting in the dark of that dire wood and listening to the hooting of an owl, the world is full of domes: golden domes and leaden ones; domes with crosses, domes with crescents, great domes and small ones; broken domes and whole ones; domes in Jerusalem, domes in Constantinople. The biggest dome of course is that of the heavens, one can’t in this world have a bigger one than that; but there is a human urge to enclose domes of air as large as possible, to shape lesser heavens in domes of human manufacture. So many domes!
It must be borne in mind that one is part of a vast picture the whole of which can never be seen; in this picture, as in Bosch’s ‘Temptation of Saint Anthony’, night and day are side by side — I have seen this myself. The world is two domes put together, the night curves round it, fading into day. Somewhere, while I lean against this tree in the dark, it is already broad day. This little wood of night with its tiny figures, its owls and mice, its rotting corpse, its luminous Death on his pale horse with its nodding bell, its river running beside it humming in the starshine, is a background detail; in the foreground of the central panel flash the gold, the domes, and among them none greater than that one enclosing its vasty heaven of silvery lucence, blue and golden dimness in Constantinople, decked with jewels and hung with lamps and lustres, starred with glimmering suspended candles burning in the air that is smoky with incense: the Church of the Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia. This dome that I have never seen has because of its name and the mystery of itself incorporated itself with Sophia in my mind.
Now, however, in my little wood in this little night part of the background, I see nothing of domes, I see only the darkness, hear only the owl, listen for Death, listen for my Bath Kol. I hear nothing for a long time but when I move away from the tree I do hear something; I throw myself to the side, hear a knife smack into the tree. Before I can make a move with my dagger a powerful female voice bellows, ‘Don’t hurt me! I’m only a poor widow woman, I meant no harm!’
I grab her arm; even as she begs for mercy she is pulling with all her might to get the knife out of the tree for another try. ‘Meant no harm!’ I say. ‘You tried to kill me!’