5 comments about Leap.

1. Terry Tempest Williams is first and foremost a naturalist. I say this not out of some secret biological knowledge of her, but simply as an extrapolation from her own writings. In her book REFUGE, she focuses on birds and the wild life preserve around the Great Salt Lake. The personal life bleeds out of the story of the natural in a way as to make the two seamless... and they are. In LEAP, Williams focuses her attention on the great triptych by Heronymous Bosch (El Bosco) - 'The Garden of Delights'. The triptych represents the three states of human (animal) existence as dictated by early Christian doctrine: Eden, Earth, and Hell. In each, human forms are involved - with an assortment of nearly unrecognizable creatures - in all manner of lewd, sensate, or holy activities. The painting perhaps is - for a naturalist like Williams - an unignorable bridge to a sort of philosophical incantation of one's own personal life.

   Though the book is told in four distinct parts, there is little cohesion. Each of the first holds some resemblance to the corresponding frame of the triptych it is supposed to represent, but not effectively enough to be truly meaningful. Essentially, I detected three distinct modes of writing scattered unpredictably throughout the book: an anecdotal style dedicated to Bosch and 'el Prado' (the museum in which it is housed) related activities, confessionals of the author's past and experiences, and an unexpurgated glut of rambling free-style writing that I guess is supposed to be philosophical or poetic, but is just sophomoric. It isn't difficult to find TTW's strengths. When speaking of nature - real nature, not the nature of the painting - her talents soar. Sadly, these moments are few and far between. The anecdotes of both TTW's life and others around her are fun, but not really enough to warrant more than a quick aside. The bulk of the book is in fact made up of those aforementioned stream-of-consciousness writing exercises that read like a teenagers angst-ridden journal more than the thoughtful prose of a serious adult writer. While Williams' attempts here are magnificent... she gets an A+ on concept (and what a truly excellent concept) the book fails in her lack of confidence. There is a clear insecurity here. TTW is best when at her calmest, but she wants to beef it all up, to be a serious writer, a stirring writer, a philosophical and educated writer; she so desperately wants everyone to be wowed by what she is saying that the result is a bunch of nonsense that doesn't amount to anything. With all said and done, there is no revelation about the painting, no revelation about Mrs. Williams and her relationships: to her father, her husband, and her religion (Mormon), and no real revelation about what we are supposed to think about all this writing. It all ads up to a boring bit of artistic voyeurism.




2. and this book has imspired me so much - What a wonderful depiction of eternal life or in other words - the eternal struggle - lived in modern times by a modern woman



3. Terry Tempest Williams has a lovely writing style, and she needs it to pull off the extreme abstractions she writes about. I couldn't finish the book because the subject was way too contemplative. It is only engaging because of her amazing ability to compose one beautiful sentence after another, a work of art in itself.
   
   If you enjoy going places deep in your mind, you may enjoy this book. I thought that was me, but it kept me wondering--is this going anywhere? After a while it was just tiresome.



4. Reading and re-reading Terry Tempest Williams over the past three decades has been to journey from the American west into landscapes of the heart, from the political into the personal and around to activism again, from a naturalist's cool sensibilities into the sizzling passions of a visionary. In LEAP that trajectory continues. Williams' edgy artistry -- heretofore offered most tellingly in the title essay in the collection AN UNSPOKEN HUNGER (Pantheon, 1994) -- has consistently infused her writing, but with this sojourn she has taken full flight. The unifying story here is that of a painting, the masterpiece by Hieronymus Bosch ("El Bosco") known today as "The Garden of Delights." The author enters fully into the work, announcing from the outset that she has moved because of a painting, moved from Salt Lake City (her home of many decades) to the Paradox Basin (no more apt name is possible, and yet, it is in fact the name of the geologic locus of her new home). And we learn that she moved there after seven years travel in a canvas, through Paradise, Hell, Earthly Delights and Restoration, and moved on from her natal Mormonism. This book is a journal and a poem, a paean and a polemic. This book is brilliant. Tripping from the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to the tribulations of Joseph Smith, clipping newspaper accounts of genetically modified headless frogs and children fallen to convulsions while viewing Japanese cartoons, caroming from Czech poetry to Blake to Joan Miro, back to the wetlands rimming the Great Salt Lake, and forth to Madrid's Prado and the presence of Bosch once more, Williams compasses whole galaxies. Visiting La Albufera de Valencia, one of the largest freshwater lakes in Spain, the author writes, "Walking around the shoreline, stepping over heaps of garbage braided into the bulrushes, the familiar grief I know at home returns. I came to Spain to get away from my torn heart ripped open every time I see the landscapes I love ravaged, lost, and opened for development. "There are too many of us, six billion strong and rising, our collective impact on fragile communities is deadly. "No wonder El Bosco's birds torture us in Hell." Later, she recounts a wilderness rite in which she and her husband sever their marriage from Mormon orthodoxy, and exposes her heart at the moment when she realizes that she has outgrown her heritage, weeping in a crowded Salt Lake City stadium, knowing that ties no longer bind. Further on, into the personal and painterly Restoration, Williams asserts, "This is my living faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. "To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers." A seeker's tale, LEAP conveys the reader into and out of dark corners and glimmering fountains, to the embrace of wilderness and high culture, and to dare to act from conviction. Terry Tempest Williams has herewith delivered a powerful testament to life and love and intellect, LEAP is a work of terrible beauty and exquisite craft.



5. Refuge is one of my favorite books. Sadly this one by comparison is awful. It seems way over written--like she is trying too hard to be literary and it just didn't work. I thought her exploration of her Mormonism and falling way from it was interesting (hence two instead of one stars), but all in all it sort of wandered around and actually bored me. I think part of it may have been that my expectations were so high from her previous work that this seemed more of a let down in comparison.

No comments about Hieronymus Bosch: New Insights into His Life & Work.

No comments about Complete Drawings of Hieronymous Bosch.

No comments about Green Man and Other Plays (includes the plays Greenman, The Woodman and The Goblins, Specter, The Daughters of Edward D. Boit, and Hieronymus Bosch).

2 comments about Bosch: Master of the Grotesque--His Life in Paintings.

1. We may never know much about him, as there are so few histories written about him. This is a great book for those who've never heard of him and for art enthusiasts wanting to expand their shelves on books about artists, but there's not much new and different biographical information about Bosch's like in it. The explanations of his works are phenomenal, however.



2. An excellent intro for the newbie to Bosch as well as a nice pickup for the experienced Bosch connoisseur. This 143 page paperback with color plates has color-coded edges corresponding to three overarching sections in the painter's oeuvre: Background, Life and Works, and Masterpieces. The book's cover indicates a "life in paintings" yet the real biographical information is interspersed with the presentation of the pieces, and the details of Bosch's life are themselves sparse. However for a quick overview and summary of this amazing artist's career, the book is second to none. There are certainly other books which provide a larger quantity of information and interpretation about the paintings as well as enlarged details of the paintings themselves, but what is here is impressive. The book will whet the appetite of any starting Bosch student through the discussion of Bosch's motives and possible meanings in scenes from his work, with elucidative lines of text nearby the selected detail. Particularly useful are the paragraphs setting up the historical context for all of this mystifying imagery. Overall a solid book, the only possible drawback the brevity of the text itself. Contains an index of people and places.

No comments about Bosch: C. 1450-1516 Between Heaven and Hell (Basic Series : Art).

No comments about Bosch (Library of Great Painters).

No comments about The Unknown Hieronymus Bosch.

1 comments about The Essential: Hieronymus Bosch (Essentials).

1. I did a double-take when this author attempted to explain details of Roman Catholicism as a key to grasping Bosch's paintings.
   
   "The ceremony takes place at an altar that contains precious relics, which are real pieces either of the body of Christ or of a saint, or of something they have touched."
   
   Ok, that's not Christian theology at all. Simply put, it is blasphemy. No editor caught this one?
   
   Luckily, the author seems to be much better at writing about art than theology. However, as I am a neophyte about art (hence, my reading of this book) it makes me much less sure of the accuracy of the author's views after seeing such a huge blooper about something that even the most basic Christian knows.
   
   I am enjoying the art info enough to give it this four star rating.

4 comments about The Secret Heresy of Hieronymus Bosch.

1. This must be the answer to the mystery of Bosch's paintings. A fascinating book which keeps you hooked to the end. Full of new ideas.



2. At last a new angle on the strange paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. This is a well written and researched book, and seems to solve many mysteries in the artist's work.



3. This book presents the intriguing theory that the fantastic Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch was a member of a heretical sect called the Cathars, who believed that Satan created the Earth and trapped human souls in living matter (bodies). That is why, according to Harris, Bosch paints the Earth as a place inhabited by his famous and fanciful demons. The Cathars apparently believed that you must escape this hell on Earth to be reunited with the heavenly spirit.

   The problem with this theory is that there is not a shred of evidence to support it, and Harris herself apparently isn't able to present any. Very little is known about the life of this artist. Harris tries to convince us that her theory is correct by interpreting the paintings as Cathar symbols -- an argument that goes something like: "Here is another Cathar symbol; that confirms my theory. Bosch was a Cathar, etc." The trouble is that most of the "Cathar" symbols are more generally Christian symbols and have been agreed to as such by most other Bosch scholars. There is no need to regard them as heretical. Most of the "anti-religious" symbols in Bosch's paintings are explanable as criticism of a corrupt Catholic clergy just before the advent of Martin Luther. Widespread discontent was understandably in the air.

   An example of Harris's biased eye is her forced interpretation of Bosch's painting of "John the Baptist (JB) in the Wilderness", pages 155-156. The Cathars regarded JB as an agent of Satan who falsely set himself up as a divine messenger of God. To the Cathars JB was the Anti-Christ. If Bosch were the Cathar zealot that Harris portrays, one would expect to see demons and evil symbols covering this painting, both in the landscape and even on JB himself. After all, they are present in most of Bosch's paintings, even those of a less provocative topic to Cathars than JB. But I see nothing of the sort here. JB is portrayed benignly reclining on the earth and gently pointing to a lamb, the symbol of Christ, as if to say "Here lies the way". What Harris calls the "Tree of Death" is central to the painting and her argument, but it appears to be very much alive, bearing plentiful seeds or fruit which birds are finding delicious and hearty. This, she simply ignores. None of the satanic symbols that Harris herself describes in other paintings appear here. Where is the evil owl, the malignant crescent, the devilish toad, etc? Instead, there is a beautiful pastoral scene, with the gentle Saint lying in peaceful contemplation. There is no hint at all that JB is an agent of the Devil -- quite the contrary.

   Despite this major flaw, one can obliquely glean interesting insights from this book. The writing is clear and the examples are relevant to the text. Harris probes the symbolism in detail and analyzes several paintings with interest. But, interpreting them as Cathar political statements is simply incredible. I'm not saying that Harris is necessarily wrong, but that the argument just doesn't support her theory. I find her argument to be less than convincing.




4. I read this book with real interest, and am very impressed by the author's arguments. As I see it, none of the other interpretations (Bosch as a Catholic; Bosch as an Adamite; Bosch as an Alchemist) ring true to the same extent. When Harris discusses the hidden Cathar (ie, Gnostic) meanings in Bosch's paintings she exposes hidden depths. We find convincing explanations for quirky images like saints surrounded by devils, monsters in the Garden of Eden, the strange unified landscapes of Hell and Earth in the Last Judgement scenes, and the peculiar gates and the circle of animals in the Garden of Earthly Delights, to name just a few. All Bosch's works are covered, and all fit into the overall world-view of the Cathars.

   Who would have guessed, for example, that Bosch's Seven Deadly Sins painting had so many hidden heretical symbols, or that his picture of life after death can also be seen on 15th century Bosnian tombstones? Who would have realized that Bosch's art contained so many Italian Renaissance features? All this is not what you'd expect, and it's the originality and excitement of discovery that makes this book so especially interesting.

   Traditional Bosch fanciers may not agree with Harris's new interpretaton of Bosch's paintings, but original ideas often take a long time to sink in. For me, this well produced book, with its many illustrations, its sympathy with the spiritual side of the Gnostic Cathar religion, and its wide ranging subject matter, is a real eye opener.