The Garden of Earthly Delights

[ picture of Hieronymus Bosch's painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights"]

It never occurs to me to paint a picture (actually "create" is more like it, writing is what I had in mind) of a moment to set the scene... set the tone for an entire piece. I always get wrapped up in the fluidity of words - their flavor, their potential - that I get side-tracked into their sound and weight, as individual words and images within themselves. I think it's an indication of the (as of yet) lack of my maturity as a writer. I'm too fixated (enamored?) by language itself to really churn out truly beautiful but meaningful pieces.

S. said something a few days ago to jar the idea into consciousness - how the best writing makes you see something in a light you haven't seen it in before - something mundane and yet described often enough in the past to merit legitimate literature, yet different in how it has been described in your hands so that it grows into an animorphous entity that dwells in the reader's subconscious as a never-before-heard reality that makes perfect sense... and weighs in like a truth unspoken but hereafter marked as real.

Like my "dust" blog (of which I have posted a fragment at the bottom of this page). It is malleable in the writer's hands, in the way they choose to give life to it. I've been pondering a lot over my craft the past few weeks. I feel like something has been ignited and is waiting to take shape. Again (ha!) I'm feeling liminality sneak into my thinking -- but this time not as it applies to my individual transformation... but in how it applies to the transformation of my writing.

"Pish posh, said Hieronymus Bosch" -- a children's book from my youth. My mother sent it to us when we were still in Baguio, and it has stayed with me ever since. Not in tangible see-before-me format, but somewhere in the corners of my brain where it lurks... popping up at moments, plastering a smile on my face. I've always (since then) thought that Bosch had an endearing way of painting for you worlds that you've never considered. Sure, it's obvious in the frames of the otherworldly creatures he paints (pickle-winged fishes, praying mantis bishops), but also in the way he bends un-reality into a reality. Neither true nor false, but just as it is. Our garden of earthly delights is tangible. as is his, but is manifested with unmanifestable images. creatures swollen and pale, swallowed by bird-beaked entities and cowering beneath bolts of cloth. If this is delight, what is pain? if this is earth, what is real? If this is real, what is the subconscious. I want to think this way. Paint words this way. Jar the reader into a consciousness where my words make meaning out of mundanity. Fragmets of a broken claypot take shape; birds' feathers are heavy; dust isn't just an incongruous being sleeping on our sills.

I feel it -- something is taking shape within my fingers. Building in my bones is a syrup, sweet and rife with meaning. I'm about to pour it out into the world. Perhaps writing about my craft will help do so. Perhaps this is the year that I start something big. <3