Calendar of Regrets

September

January February March April May June July August September October November December   & & &3' Hieronymus Bosch dabs paintbrush to palette and confers with the small round convex mirror floating alone in an ocean of bonewhite wall on the far side of his studio. Sharpness of eye, thinness of lip, satirical rage, he thinks: his whole family of attributes, God willing, will be out of this mess soon enough. Rotating back to his work at hand, he touches color flecks to the insectile legs rooted in the dwarf’s shoulder. Appraises. Travel is sport for those who lack imagination. Bosch is sure of it. Take, by way of illustration, that huge hideous Groot. That huge hideous Groot does not possess a nose. He possesses a greasy vein-webbed tumor partitioning two puckered purple assholes. A homuncular likeness of him hunches in the dark sky above the rendered Bosch’s raised left hand. Groot appears piggish as a gluttonous priest, ears donkey-large with gossip. The heavens churn with hell smoke. Below, the hilly countryside blazes with the firewind of belief. Yet, despite his mass, the noisome emissary from the Brotherhood of Our Lady cannot stop moving. ‘S-Hertogenbosch to Tilburg, Tilburg to Eindhoven, Eindhoven to Brussels, and back again, busying himself with business. What Groot’s sort does not know, cannot fathom, is that movement is nothing more than a forgetting , foreign landscapes forms of amnesia, journeying a process of unstudying. One must learn to stay put in order to see. Become a place. A precise address. Lot’s wife, that salty pillar. 4 b & LANCE OLSEN ' Huge hideous Groot dropped by this morning, unannounced. Bosch is still trying to figure out why. Prattle over coffee before heading to Helmond. A shared prayer for the Virgin through a cheek squirreled with sugar cubes and ginger snaps. Scuttlebutt about Brinkerhoff, the Brotherhood’s banker, between slurps. Groot’s sticky mouth sounded like a sea-creature oozing in a fishmonger ’s bucket. Bosch knew the boob would not recognize himself in the painting. No one ever does. Every man believes it the next who is worthy of scorn. So Bosch left his easel unveiled as the two sat opposite each other like chess players on the two chairs, stiff-backed as Groot’s personality, that comprised the better part of Bosch’s cramped workroom. Because behind the heavy green curtains (he has had them manufactured especially for this severity of space) hovers a window out of which Bosch is proud to say he has not peered for almost sixty-six years. His days are nights lit by eleven lamps. Beyond the window hovers a reeking market square through which he cannot at this instant remember ever having ambled, although he has done so to bring his humors into balance every day since he was thirty at precisely two o’clock with his wife, skeletal Aleyt, and every day at precisely five o’clock, alone, in preparation for the evening meal. He cannot remember the neat rows of slender two-story whitewashed and redbrick houses adorned with stepped gables, tiled roofs, glossy black highlights. He cannot remember the cobblestone lanes shiny with horseshit, wet hay, rotting vegetables , foamy piss, shabby beggars, and ballooned rats rigored under the autumnal mizzle, or, as must be the case on this warm summer afternoon, were he to allow himself the luxury of a glance, the fly-hazed heifers dumbly raising their heads not to reflect a little longer throughout the pastures beyond that slide toward infinity beneath a sky sewn from Siberian irises. Bosch consults the mirror again. He specks ochre along the dwarf’s beak sparkly with slobber. & calender of regrets ' b 5 His grandfather was a painter. His father, too. His big brother Goosen. Three of his four uncles. Yet for the life of him Bosch cannot comprehend whence his own style swelled. It resembles that of the other members of his clan not in the least. Unlike them, unlike his peers, from the instant Hieronymus Bosch kissed brush to canvas he took the greatest pleasure in leaving a faintly rough surface behind him that announces this is a picture of my mind’s picture, which is, he believes, as it should be: the world alla prima, a single sketchless application. Underpainting, he is convinced, is the technique of genius gimping. The skin of any one of his paintings is more Bosch, more fully himself, than the...