Leap

Acclaim for Terry Tempest Williams’s LEAP

Truly astounding.… [Williams] has somehow managed to turn her encounter with the Bosch masterpiece in Spain into an intense and profound meditation on faith and belief.

—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Brilliantly constructed and deeply moving, the writing catapults us out of the static role as reader into a direct experience of the revelations of a trembling open eye. Leap awakens a fresh way of seeing our lives, art, religion, and nature in the present."

—Parabola

Williams has crafted something special … a search for the entwined roots of faith, wisdom and creativity that are wrought in the landscape of the imagination.

—The Denver Post

"In a language that is deeply lyrical and critically intelligent.… Leap is a remarkable and wondrous book written by a writer at the height of her considerable power."

—The Rain Taxi Review of Books

"Leap is an intimate and revealing story. It solidifies Williams’ position at the forefront of writers dedicated to passionate exploration of the intersection of landscape and community."

—The Seattle Times

"Turns an ardent study of The Garden of Earthly Delights … into a meditation on her Mormon heritage and an arresting and creative inquiry into our relationship with nature, the divide between religion and spirituality, and the significance of art and wilderness."

—Booklist Editors Choice, 2000

"Leap is a devotional and a chronicle, an optics for the mind and spirit."

—The Bloomsbury Review

"Leap is an exhilarating and transforming meditation on art, spirituality and nature that is anchored to a vivid journey through Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece."

—Newsday, 2000 Critics’ Pick

A remarkable book that is part religious quest, part artistic investigation, and part psychological reflection.

—The Christian Science Monitor

"[Williams] moves through the painting as if it were alive, guiding us with a river of words and the lucid, fearless intensity that has defined her voice among nature writers.… Readers of Refuge … will recognize in Leap her willingness to bare anguish and ecstasy and find in the full range of human emotions, as she finds in nature, a rich moral vein."

—Orion Magazine

"In this lyrical, wise, and questioning book, Terry Tempest Williams leads us in and out of the double-sided looking glass that is Bosch’s Garden of Delights and of the heavens and hells of our own natural world. An innovative hybrid, woven of lived experience, visionary thinking, and critical intelligence, Leap points the way to new spiritual dimensions buried in art, ‘nature,’ and our own lives."

—Lucy Lippard, author of The Lure of the Local

"Confession: I sat down, opened the book in the middle of it and of a busy day. An hour later I got up from my chair. Page after page of discovery. What a marvelous manner of handling the interlaced themes of flesh and soul. The beauty of Terry Tempest Williams’s writing, her feeling, her devotion. Leap took me into the heart of Importance."

—James Hillman, author of The Soul’s Code

"Leap does what we hope literature can do—rinse the reader’s gaze, refreshing our sight and making the world new again."

—Mark Doty, author of My Alexandria

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS

LEAP

Terry Tempest Williams is the author of Refuge, An Unspoken Hunger, Desert Quartet, and Red. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she lives with her husband, Brooke Williams, in the redrock desert of southern Utah.

also by TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS

Pieces of White Shell

Coyote’s Canyon

Refuge

An Unspoken Hunger

Desert Quartet

Red

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2001

Copyright © 2000 by Terry Tempest Williams

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work appeared, in different form, in The Nation, Western Humanities Review, and Parabola, and in Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape by David T. Hanson et al. (New York: Aperture, 1997).

The Garden of Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, which follows the last page of this book, is reproduced by kind permission of the Prado Museum in Madrid. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. All rights reserved.

Permissions acknowledgments appear on this page.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

Williams, Terry Tempest.

Leap / Terry Tempest Williams.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

ISBN 0-679-43292-2

1. Williams, Terry Tempest—Religion.   2. Spiritual life—Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.   3. Bosch, Hieronymus, d. 1516. Garden of delights.   4. Bosch, Hieronymus, d. 1516—Criticism and interpretation.   I. Title.

BX8695.W547 A3   2000

289.3′092—dc21

[B]   99-057914

Vintage ISBN: 0-679-75257-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-91242-3

Author photograph © Arturo Patten

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

For the men in my family:

John Henry Tempest III

Stephen Dixon Tempest

Daniel Dixon Tempest

William Henry Tempest

and, especially,

Brooke Williams

mi guía y amor para siempre

Otro día veremos la resurrección de las mariposas disecadas.

We must follow the vein of our blood.

—Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding

CONTENTS

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

I

PARADISE

II

HELL

III

EARTHLY DELIGHTS

IV

RESTORATION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PERMISSIONS

I

PARADISE

The new can bear fruit only when it grows from the seeds implanted in tradition.

—Paul Tillich, The Dogma of the Trinity

I once lived near the shores of Great Salt Lake with no outlet to the sea.

I once lived in a fault-block basin where mountains made of granite surrounded me. These mountains in time were hollowed to house the genealogy of my people, Mormons. Our names, the dates of our births and deaths, are safe. We have records hidden in stone.

I once lived in a landscape where my ancestors sacrificed everything in the name of belief and they passed their belief on to me, a belief that we can be the creators of our own worlds.

I once lived in the City of Latter-day Saints.

I have moved.

I have moved because of a painting.

Over the course of seven years, I have been traveling in the landscape of Hieronymus Bosch. A secret I did not tell for fear of seeming mad. Let these pages be my interrogation of faith. My roots have been pleached with the wings of a medieval triptych, my soul intertwined with an artist’s vision.

This painting lives in Spain. It resides in the Prado Museum. The Prado Museum is found in the heart of Old Madrid. I will tell you the name of the painting I love. Its name is El jardín de las delicias.

The doors to the triptych are closed. Now it opens like a great medieval butterfly flapping its wings through the centuries. Open and close. Open and close. Open. Hieronymus Bosch has painted, as wings, Paradise and Hell. The body is a portrait of Earthly Delights. The wings close again. Open, now slowly, with each viewer’s breath the butterfly quivers, Heaven and Hell quiver, the wings are wet and fragile, only the body remains stable. The legs hidden, six. The antennae, two. The eyes, infinite. The artist’s brush with life, mysterious. Close the triptych. The outside colors are drab. Black, grey, olive blue. The organism is not dead. Hear its heart beating. After five hundred years, the heart is still beating inside the triptych. The wings open.

I step back.

Red. Blue. Yellow. Green. Black. Pink. Orange. White. Gold.

As a child, I grew up with Hieronymus Bosch hanging over my head. My grandmother had thumbtacked the wings of Paradise and Hell to the bulletin board above the bed where I slept. The prints were, in fact, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s series of discussions designed for home education. The Garden of Eden to the left with Christ taking Eve’s pulse as Adam looks on—opposite—Hell, the bone-white face of a man looking over the shoulder of his eggshell body as the world burns: these were the images that framed the oughts and shoulds and if you don’ts of my religious upbringing.

Whenever my siblings and I stayed overnight, we fell asleep in the grandchildren’s room beneath Truth and Evil.

Standing before El jardín de las delicias in the Prado Museum in Spain, now as a woman, I see the complete triptych for the first time. I am stunned. The center panel. The Garden of Earthly Delights. So little is hidden in the center panel, why was it hidden from me?

The body.

The body of the triptych.

My body.

The bodies of the center panel, this panel of play and discovery, of joyful curiosities cavorting with Eros, is not only a surprise to me, but a great mystery.

I stare at the painting. My eyes do not blink. They focus on the blue pool of bathers standing thigh-high in the middle of the triptych.

Bareback riders circle the black and white women bathing in the water, the black and white women who are balancing black and white birds on top of their heads. Cherries, too. Faster and faster, the bareback riders gallop their horses and goats and griffins; bareback riders, naked men, riding bulls, bears, lions, camels, deer, and pigs, faster and faster, circling the women.

The triptych begins to blur. My eyes begin to blur. I resist. Focus. I rein my eyes in from the pull of the bodies, the body of the triptych, the bodies bare, bareback on animals, circling, circling, circling them, circling me, black and white bodies, my body stands stoically inside the Prado determined to resist the galloping of my blood.

I feel faint. I turn from the painting and see a wooden chair shaped like a crescent leaning against the wall. The wall is white. I sit down, stare at the floor, the granite floor, and get my bearings.

I begin counting cherries in Bosch’s Garden. I lose track, they are in such abundance. I stop at sixty. Cherries are flying in the air, dangling from poles, being passed from one person to the next, dropped into the mouths of lovers by birds, worn on women’s heads as hats, and balanced on the feet as balls.

In Utah, my home, cherries are a love crop. They are also our state fruit. They grow in well-tended orchards along the Wasatch Front. Cherry picking was a large part of our childhood. Our parents, aunts, and uncles would load up their station wagons with kids and drop us off in one of the orchards alongside Great Salt Lake with empty buckets in hand. Sometimes we were paid by the pail or given bags to take home for our families. Once we were up in the trees, out of view, we could eat as many as we wanted.

One day, my great-uncle was standing on a ladder picking cherries with my cousin and me. We were perched on sturdy branches above him, ten-year-old girls unafraid of heights.

What principle of the Gospel of Jesus Christ means the most to you? he asked, filling his bucket.

Mormon children are used to these kinds of questions practiced on them by their elders, who consider this part of their religious training.

Obedience, my cousin replied, pulling a cherry off its stem.

Free agency, I answered, eating one.

It is early morning on my way to the Prado. Pink camellia petals cover the path inside the Real Jardín Botánico adjacent to the museum. I love coming here first before watching the painting. Flocks of white butterflies appear to have lit on bare branches. Up close, I recognize them as magnolia trees in bloom.

It is difficult not to touch everything. Blue hyacinths line the walks. Daffodils and narcissus tower above them. Red and yellow striated tulips are now cups holding last night’s rain.

The gardener’s hand is evident. There is an overall narrative to be followed, nothing is random. Each hedgerow, each bed now flowering was an idea before it took root in the land. The leaves of each plant express themselves rhythmically. Iambic pentameter. Blank verse. A sonnet. The arrangement of leaves can be read as poetry.

The miniature rock garden stops me. Sage grows next to verbena. I bend down and rub its blue-grey leaves between my fingers and smell the Great Basin of home.

Paradise.

The Tree of Life stands behind Adam. Vines of raspberries wrap around its trunk. Christ, who appears to be staring outside Eden, is dressed in a pink robe. He holds Eve’s wrist. Eve kneels. Adam sits. Neither is clothed.

Focus on Eden. Remain in Eden. Today it is Christ’s hand on Eve’s that holds my attention. Eve’s head is bowed. Her eyes are closed. Her knees are tight against each other. Eve’s obeisance becomes my own baptism and confirmation.

I am dressed in white and descend into the warm waters of the baptismal font accompanied by my father, also dressed in white. We stand in the center of the pool and face family witnesses. My father raises his right hand to the square, fingers pointing toward heaven. He delivers a prayer, then holds my wrist as I hold my nose and with bended knees, I am leaned back into the holy waters. With one quick swoosh through the process of immersion, I am happily declared a Mormon.

I am eight years old.

The following Sunday, I wished I had not worn the white headband to keep my bangs out of my eyes. Even before the confirmation began, the weight of the men’s hands on top of my head was forcing the plastic teeth to bite into my scalp. I opened my eyes seconds before the blessing to see the varied shoes pointing toward me around the circle: wing tips, Hush Puppies, and boots. I recognized the black polished cowboy boots as my father’s, the wing tips belonged to the bishop, the slip-ons were his counselor’s shoes. I couldn’t wrap my eyes around far enough behind my ears to see what shoes my uncle or the remaining priesthood bearers were wearing.

The pressure of the warm hands on my head increased. I quickly closed my eyes. My father began, Our beloved daughter of Zion, by the authority vested in me …

And then the words Receive the Holy Ghost.

The hands lifted. My eyes opened. I stood up and faced the congregation as the bishop congratulated me on becoming a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All the men in the circle shook my hand. My father put his arm around me as we walked back to where my mother and her mother and her mother’s mother were sitting.

I sat down on the pew. My grandmother took my hand and patted it.

I am possessed, I thought. I am possessed by the Holy Spirit and protected from evil. I am a clean slate. There are no sins on my record before God.

The Paradise of childhood.

Bosch is rubbish, I hear a British guide say to her group. She is wearing a brown wool suit just below her knees. He ate rye bread that was rotten, which most certainly brought on the cruelest of hallucinations.

My view of Paradise is often blocked by other visitors. I have no choice but to watch them interact with the painting.

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a massive orgy. It is rumored Hieronymus Bosch belonged to a religious sect that believed in purification through gratification.

Some of the visitors cluck their tongues.

Notice the preponderance of strawberries and other fleshy fruits, symbols of lust. It is true God said, ‘Go forth and multiply,’ but we are not supposed to enjoy it like we see here. Bosch presents a perversion, ladies and gentlemen. I ask you to note the clear references to bestiality as men and animals prance around the pool in a state of arousal.

The guide points to the naked women cavorting in the pool that the cavalcade circles.

"And here, please witness Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’ who, as you recall, possessed a libido much too strong for her own good. ‘A likerous mouth moste han a likerous tayl. In wommen vinolent is no defence, This knownen lecchours by experience.’ "

As the matron of arts begins to lose herself in Chaucer’s tale, her group are showing their own signs of arousal. Suddenly aware of her own titillating vocabulary, she quickly shifts her analysis to Hell.

I must say, I find great comfort in Bosch’s depiction of Hell. We will pay for our bloody sins if we cannot control our bodily obsessions. Here we see the lovely, dreadful sophistications of the Middle Ages. Each sin has its appropriate payback. Rightfully so; if you are gluttonous, you will be eaten gluttonously.

A man who seemed to be preoccupied with one section of Hell in particular raises his hand and points to the panel. Might these be vats of semen?

She lifts her arm high over her head. Follow me, please.

My view of Paradise returns. Why has Bosch’s panel of Paradise evoked the religious teachings of my childhood? Eve kneels before Christ with her eyes closed. Meanwhile, a world of exotic flora and fauna surrounds her. White-robed salamanders evolve on shore.

Minerals. Gemstones. Jewels. I stand up and walk past my own species toward the fertile mound that supports a tall pink fountain where water cascades into a clear pool. I wade in, dig my hands into the rich black soil and bring up emeralds, sapphires, rubies, and bloodstones, my body sinking under the weight of what I have found.

I leave the Prado. I am surprised to see it has been raining. Clouds seem to be traveling quickly down Calle Alcalá. The gold-winged messenger on top of the Metrópolis building is flying. Madrid is glistening. Blue skies are breaking. Elongated shadows walk down the sidewalks and appear more real than the silhouettes of pedestrians caught in the glare of the sun as it sets over the Puerta del Sol.

The clarity of light, the perfection of this moment, this very moment, seems to be winter passing its mantle to spring. What is the date? I’ve forgotten the date. The month, I know, is March. I squint. The sun is directly in my eyes about to disappear behind the skyline of black iron crosses and red-tiled roofs. I wrap my black shawl tight around me as I pick up my pace and turn left.

Before going to sleep, I open The Waves by Virginia Woolf:

I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs.

I cannot stop reading. It stays my hunger for words, for my own language.

Let us now crawl … under the canopy of the currant leaves, and tell stories. Let us inhabit the underworld. Let us take possession of our secret territory, which is lit by pendant currants like candelabra, shining red on one side, black on the other.

Did Virginia Woolf visit the Prado? The old ones who remember her at the Hotel Inglés say they have never met anyone so enthralled with Madrid. They say she was a woman who made people tired. I wonder if she ever stood before El jardín de las delicias?

This is our world, lit with crescents and stars of light; and great petals half transparent block the openings like purple windows. Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. The stalks of flowers thick as oak trees. Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals. We are giants here, who can make forests quiver.

It is Monday. The Prado is closed. An old woman dressed in a turquoise sweater and a black skirt with black stockings and shoes is breaking bread for the pigeons. There must be fifty pigeons cooing and circling around her. I see her every morning. She finishes her sacrament for the birds and always leaves with a couple of loaves under her arms.

I watch her walk away, legs bowed, toward the Plaza de la Cibeles, Madrid’s great fountain named after Cybele, the goddess of caverns, who stands in the center of the city on a lion-drawn chariot. A fast-moving river of traffic flows around her. They say that during the Spanish Civil War, citizens risked their lives protecting her, sandbagging the monument while General Franco’s army bombed Madrid.

Ten pigeons pick up the remaining crumbs left by their patron. A sudden flap of wings, they rise, bank, and return.

While of these emblems we partake,

In Jesus’ name and for his sake,

Let us remember and be sure

Our hearts and hands are clean and pure.

For us the blood of Christ was shed;

For us on Calvary’s cross he bled

And thus dispelled the awful gloom

That else were this creation’s doom.

I think of all the years I have taken the formal sacrament in my church and the beautiful hymns sung with solemnity prior to the blessing given on the bread and water; the communal silence that permeated the chapel as silver trays were passed; the silence I loved and how I was taught to use this time each week to honor the broken body of Christ and His spilled blood. Oh God, the Eternal Father, we ask thee in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify this bread to the souls of all those who partake of it, that they may eat in remembrance of the body of thy Son … that they do always remember him, that they may have His spirit to be with them. Amen. I hold these moments of reflection dear, and I wonder how I too have come to a sacrament of birds.

And then I remember standing on the edge of Great Salt Lake as a young girl, watching hundreds and thousands of birds fly over me, feeling the wind of wings, the songs of a world in motion.

Yes.

Yes, I would partake and participate.

Yes, I would break bread for the birds and say a prayer for safe travel, each one a cross against the sky.

On this particular day in the Prado, I begin my observation of the triptych with binoculars. I want to see what birds inhabit the Paradise of Bosch.

The cradle chair in the corner of the gallery is empty. I sit down and begin bird-watching.

A mute swan floats gracefully in the pond behind Eve. It has an orange bill with a black knob. The knob is greatly enlarged in the male in the spring. This bird would have been familiar to Bosch in the Low Countries. This swan is not mute but makes a formidable hissing sound. In its wild state, it frequents remote wetlands. Why not Eden?

Mallards and shovelers float nearby as three white egrets stand in shallow water perfectly still, eyes intent on fish. Their long, sinuous necks and spearlike bills are mirrored in the pool alongside a unicorn bending down to drink. Their feathers form an elegant cloak easily unraveled by the wind.

Close to them is a spoonbill. I walk slowly toward this long-legged bird, a standing grace in the water. It swings its peculiar beak side to side in the white marl for crustaceans. The quivering nerve endings that line the interior of its mouth are feeling for clues and will send messages of what is below. Adam and Eve would do well to pay attention. Life is to be touched. The bill snaps shut, a crayfish struggles. It is decided: the crayfish becomes the spoonbill, who continues walking in Eden, seen or unseen, it does not matter.

North of the wading birds, flocks of swifts are swirling like smoke through a furnace-like mountain, transforming themselves from black to red to white, the colors of alchemy.

I sit down on the grassy hillside near the congregation of birds below the stone furnace. Wild geese fly in the formation of an arrow. If we follow their migrations will we better understand our own spiritual genesis?

As a child I remember believing that if I could ride on the backs of Canada geese they would deliver me to the future because they had arrived from the past. When I would bear my testimony before members of my own congregation, I would say I believed in God not because of what I had learned in church but because of the geese I watched each spring and fall, the fact that they knew their way, that they always returned. My parents said it was a sweet analogy. Not knowing what that word meant, I said, No, they are not my analogy, they are my truth.

Rooks. Ravens. Crows. True conspirators. They converse in pairs while sitting on the rims of Bosch’s canyons. One by one, they drop like stones only to recover in a joyous upswing. Back on the rim, they sit as bards disguised as birds and listen to everything being said. At night, they will enter Adam and Eve’s dreams as subversive thoughts.

In Eden, I continue my search for birds.

Below Eve, there is a kingfisher with red legs, two toes forward, two toes back, syndactyl, speaking to a three-headed phoenix while a grey bee-eater fans its short broad wings and bows. Pheasants in courtship strut on the bottom margins of Paradise, a female opens herself to the approaching male, the spurs on her tarsi are exposed should she need to defend herself.

I turn around.

There, inside the eye of the pink fountain, sits a yellow-eyed owl, possibly Tengmalm’s owl, distinguished by its round head, deep facial disks, and chocolate plumage. It nests in the cavities of trees. I kneel behind the thicket and watch. I have never seen this bird before. It scarcely moves. Were Hieronymus Bosch’s acute skills as a naturalist appreciated? Were there medieval ornithologists who caught the painter’s sardonic humor in Paradise, knowing this particular owl’s call is a rapid, musical phrasing of poo-poo-poo?

I take down my binoculars and let them dangle around my neck. The guards are staring. I open my notebook and make a checklist of all the birds seen so far in El jardín de las delicias.

Swifts

Scarlet Ibis

Great White Egret

Little Egret

Wagtail

Blue Rock Thrush

Cuckoo

Spoonbill

White Pelican

Night Heron

Blue Heron

Stork

White Ibis

Jackdaw

Stonechat

Redstart

Rook

Brambling

Pheasant

Jay

Mallard

Gadwall

Hoopoe

Green Woodpecker

Kingfisher

Robin

Magpie

Goldfinch

Great Tit

Long-eared Owl

Tengmalm’s Owl

Tawny Owl

Pygmy Owl

Little Owl

Widgeon

I look up. The guard nods. The Prado is closing. Who knows how much time has passed in the country of Bosch? I tuck my binoculars into my bag with my notebook and leave.

Walking up toward the Parque del Retiro, I hear the tapping of typewriter keys. There is a window open on the ground floor of an apartment building. I stop and stand quietly to the side of the open French doors. Looking in, I can see only a woman’s hands. No jewelry. Rounded, short red nails. A wall of books from floor to ceiling ascends behind her. White woodwork, white walls, wood floors. I suspect a Persian carpet comforts the writer’s feet.

The woman takes a break, her right hand reaches for a cigarette. She strikes a match with her left, lights it. The smoke curls around her hands, shaping words, crafting sentences. I covet this stable desk where a black leather container holds the blood instruments of pens and pencils.

A large door, very tall, is ajar to another room. I stretch to see. The woman’s dog, a schnauzer, gives me away, yet the writer is so deep in trance she is oblivious to another writer imagining her life outside.

On the corner of Calle de Ruíz de Alarcón and Calle de Felipe IV there is a flower vender. He tries to sell me a bouquet of tulips. I would have loved to have left them on the steps of the writing woman with words from Virginia Woolf, Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, but I do not have enough money in my leather pouch to buy them. I savor their extravagant beauty without ownership, an interlude of color, simply that. The tulips will move and arrange themselves in someone else’s arms, in someone else’s vase.

I am simply a traveler, a voyeur who casts no shadow.

There is a Japanese woman who is painting El jardín de las delicias. Her name is Mariko Umeoka Taki. She has been working on