A Human Hunger

Leap. By Terry Tempest Williams. New York: Pantheon, 2000. 338pp. $25.00

The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.
Hence all art of the highest order is religious in essence.

--Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

There is, then, a real propriety in calling beauty a manifestation of God to the senses.

--George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty

A friend once recalled to me a curious scene she'd witnessed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, not on a canvas but in front of one. A man stood before a painting in a fury of concentration, head swiveling, eyes darting, his scrutiny propelled by the silent dynamism of form, color and line. "He looked like he was watching a football game!" she'd marveled. Though Terry Tempest Williams observes Hieronymous Bosch's El jardin de las delicias (The Garden of Earthly Delights) in Madrid's Prado over the course of seven years most often from the dignified repose of a crescent chair, the degree and quality of attention she brings to that disturbing painting is equally fierce. More so: seldom does Williams remain a spectator for long without imaginatively entering the painting as subject and participant. It must have been with the same chary regard as my friend's, for example, that the guards at the Prado eyed Williams the day she stood with binoculars lifted to her face counting and identifying Bosch's birds (35 species, from cuckoo to widgeon). One of the startling pleasures of Leap is its habit of conveying the reader, bodily, as it were, straight from the narration of a childhood memory or a meditation on free agency smack into the center of Bosch's phantasmagoria: with Williams, we find ourselves naked on horseback, part of the procession circling the "Pool of Desire"; or stooping to peer within one of the boll-like husks sheltering long-limbed lovers gazing boldly back at us; or scaling--naked, sweltering--the terrifying ladder to the entrails of the eggshell-bodied man in Hell as volcanoes explode and rivers flame all around.

Nakedness is the condition out of which this book arises and the condition which it demands. In an interview, Williams has said, "We protect our safest selves as long as possible. And then it happens, in an instant . . . our facade breaks, we stand in the center of our life, bare-bodied and beautiful, naked, exposed, courageous. . . . teachable again." In just that way does Bosch's painting strip the author bare of protective preconceptions the day she first stumbles upon it in the Prado. The triptych's wings depicting Paradise and Hell are already familiar to her from childhood (her grandmother had pinned reproductions of them over the grandchildren's bed). What floors her is the boisterous central panel she's never seen, The Garden of Earthly Delights. "So little is hidden in the center panel, why was it hidden from me?" she wonders.

Taking her cues broadly and free-associatively from Bosch's "map of the human mind," Williams embarks on a wide-ranging series of meditations on the meaning of earthly, sensory and sensual, here-and-now experience. Her premise: "Spiritual beliefs are not something alien to Earth, but rise out of its very soil." Her method: bricolage. She explores Spanish history (particularly the Inquisition), art movements medieval and modern (including the Brooklyn Museum's controversial Sensation show of 1999-2000), Mormonism, and her marriage. She suggests that Hell is, among other things, environmental destruction; she ponders the relationship between art and nature; she poses the intriguing question of what the preservation of art might teach us about the preservation of wilderness. Enlivening these weighty considerations are depictions of Madrid's cafe culture and strolls through botanical gardens and cathedrals. Chance meetings with equally learned and earnest fellow-travelers complicate the conversation: the painter Mariko Umeoka Taki spends years copying the El jardin; a slightly sinister Vincent Price-like medievalist...