The Creatures I Wanted to Speak To
- Gael MacLean
- 1 day ago
- 19 min read
Notes on Bosch, childhood vision, and the question of staying
The Pink Creature
I don’t remember when I first saw it. Only that I was young enough to not know what I was looking at.
The painting was in a book. Probably. One of those oversized art books that lived on the lower shelves where children could reach them. Or maybe a poster in a classroom, or a print in someone’s house. The origin doesn’t matter. What matters is the encounter: a child standing before Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, seeing it for the first time, before anyone had explained what it meant.
My eye went to the pink creature first. The strange structure rising from the center of the left panel. What scholars call the Fountain of Life, what theologians read as a symbol of divine grace. I didn’t know any of that. I saw something alive. Something that looked like it might speak if I knew how to listen.
Then the giraffe. The elephant with a monkey on its back. The unicorn drinking from the clear water. Creatures everywhere. Bears and boars and birds and beings I couldn’t name, fantastical hybrids that existed nowhere but here, in this painted world that felt more real than any photograph.
I didn’t see them as different from me.
I wanted to speak to them.
Before the Labels
I wasn’t raised religious. No one had taught me about Eden or the Fall. About sin as inheritance or salvation as escape. The three panels of Bosch’s triptych weren’t a moral narrative to me. They were simply three worlds, connected by some logic I couldn’t name but felt in my body. The left panel was an invitation. The middle was a party. The right was a place I didn’t want to look at but couldn’t look away from.
This was before the taxonomy kicked in. Before I learned that a giraffe was “exotic” and a horse was “ordinary.” Before I understood that some creatures belonged and others didn’t. That some bodies were normal and others were monstrous. That the world could be sorted into categories and the categories could be ranked.
The child looking at that painting didn’t know any of this. She saw a path. From the creatures in the foreground toward the sea at the top of the panel, where more beings gathered near the water. She wanted to take that path. She just didn’t know where it led.
Now I do.
What the Child Didn’t Know
Here’s what I learned later, what the scholars would have told me if I’d asked:
Hidden inside that pink creature—the fountain I was so drawn to, the structure that seemed alive and ready to speak—there is an owl.
Look closely at the dark opening at the base, and you’ll see it. Bosch painted an owl into the heart of the thing I wanted to talk to. And in the symbolic language of his time, the owl represented evil. Darkness. The predator that hunts while others sleep.
The child was drawn to something that contained what the theologians would call evil. She wanted to speak to it anyway. She didn’t see the owl as separate from the fountain, as a contamination of something pure. She saw a creature within a creature, complexity within complexity, and it made her want to lean closer.
Maybe that’s the first lesson the painting taught me, before I knew I was learning: that the things we’re drawn to contain darkness. That clear seeing doesn’t mean seeing only the light. That the owl lives inside the fountain, and you don’t get one without the other.
The Closed Doors
But there’s something else I didn’t know, standing in front of that book or poster or print. Something about the painting itself that changes everything.
The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych—three panels hinged together. And like all triptychs of its time, it was designed to be closed.
When the panels are shut, you don’t see the garden. You don’t see the creatures or the pink fountain or the burning buildings of hell. You see the outside of the doors: a grisaille painting, colorless, gray-green, depicting the earth during creation. The world as a sphere, wrapped in a transparent membrane, suspended in darkness. Waters above, waters below. No sun yet. No creatures. Just the raw, primordial moment before everything began.
And in the upper left corner, God. Small, distant, watching. A book open on his lap.
This is the first thing Bosch’s original viewers saw. Not the riot of color inside. Not the creatures. The closed doors. The world before the world. And only when someone physically opened those doors—a liturgical act, probably, tied to the church calendar—did the garden reveal itself.
The mechanism matters. The painting doesn’t just show three states of existence; it enacts revelation and concealment. It makes you choose to look. It makes the looking an act.
I think about this now when I think about what we allow ourselves to see. The doors we keep closed. The revelations we’re not ready for, the ones we delay and delay until the calendar forces our hand. The painting was always about the choice to look.
June 13, 1463
Here is what I’ve learned about the man who painted it:
When Hieronymus Bosch was approximately thirteen years old, a catastrophic fire swept through his hometown of ’s-Hertogenbosch. Four thousand houses burned. His childhood home was among them. The boy who would grow up to paint the most detailed vision of hell in Western art stood in the streets and watched everything he knew turn to smoke and ember.
He spent the rest of his life painting what he’d seen. Not the fire itself—though fires burn in the backgrounds of his hellscapes—but something deeper. The recognition that destruction lives inside creation. That the beautiful world is always, already, burning.
In the hell panel of the Garden, there are buildings in the upper darkness that scholars describe as “at once in the process of being built and of burning down.” Light blasts from their windows. Smoke chokes the sky. It’s not clear if they’re being constructed or consumed. Both, probably. Simultaneously.
A thirteen-year-old watched his city burn. Forty years later, he painted buildings that are burning and being built at the same time.
Some visions don’t leave you. They become the lens through which you see everything else.
The Man Who Stayed
Here’s something else about Bosch that I keep thinking about:
He never left.
After the fire. After watching four thousand houses burn, including his own. After spending his youth in a city that was literally rebuilding itself from ashes—he stayed. He lived his entire life in ’s-Hertogenbosch, painting in the same town that had burned around him as a child, dying there at approximately sixty-five.
Other artists of his time traveled. They went to Italy, to the courts, to wherever the commissions were richest and the patrons most powerful. Bosch stayed where the fire had happened.
I don’t know what to make of this. It feels like a choice that matters, even if we can’t recover its meaning. Did he stay because he couldn’t leave? Because the trauma had rooted him? Or did he stay because that was where the vision was clearest—in the place that had shown him, at thirteen, what the world was capable of becoming?
The bodhisattva turns back at the threshold. Bosch never approached the threshold. He just stayed where he was, painting the fire and the garden, the burning and the creatures, the horror and the tenderness. Maybe that’s another form of the same choice. Maybe leaving was never the point.
The Continuous Horizon
Here is what took me decades to understand:
The three panels share a single horizon line.
Eden and the garden and hell are not sequential. They’re simultaneous. The same sky stretches across all three worlds. The same distance exists between you and that vanishing point whether you’re looking at the pink fountain or the burning buildings.
We want to read it as a story: innocence, then fall, then punishment. A moral trajectory. A warning. But the horizon says otherwise. The horizon says these worlds exist at the same time, layered like transparencies, each one visible through the others if you know how to look.
The child who wanted to speak to the pink creature is still here. Still standing in front of the painting, still following the path toward the sea. She’s just older now, and she can see all three panels at once. The giraffe hasn’t left. Neither have the burning buildings.
What the Child Knew
Before I knew the word “interbeing,” I knew it in my body. Thích Nhất Hạnh’s term for the Buddhist recognition that nothing stands alone. That you are made entirely of non-you elements, that the paper contains the cloud and the rain and the logger and the sun.
The child looking at Bosch’s painting understood this without language. The giraffe wasn’t other. The elephant wasn’t separate. The hybrid creatures—part bird, part fish, part something that has no name—weren’t monstrous. They were kin. They were beings to speak with, not beings to classify.
Then the forms arrived. The checkboxes. Race, ethnicity, gender. Normal, abnormal. Citizen, alien. The machinery of sorting that makes cruelty possible. The labels that turn a person into a category, a creature into a symbol, a world into a diagram.
I am not your label. Neither is the giraffe.
What the Scholars Saw
Here is what we actually know about Hieronymus Bosch:
Almost nothing.
He left no letters. No diaries. No artist’s statement explaining his intentions. No marginalia in books, no recorded conversations, no treatise on symbolism. He didn’t even date most of his paintings. We have some municipal records, some account books from a religious confraternity, a hand-drawn portrait that might be a self-portrait. That’s it. The man who created the most intricate, baffling, uncategorizable images in Western art left us nothing but the images themselves.
And into that silence, the scholars poured their frameworks.
They decided he was issuing a moral warning. They decided the central panel depicted “the nightmare of humanity” and “the evil consequences of sensual pleasure.” They decided the triptych should be read left to right as a narrative of fall and punishment. They called it La Lujuria—Lust. They called it The Wages of Sin. They called it proof that Bosch was a devout Catholic illustrating Church doctrine, a “ferociously religious” man whose purpose was to terrify sinners into repentance.
Others decided he was the opposite. A heretic, a member of secret cults, an alchemist encoding forbidden knowledge in symbols. They found what they were looking for. They always do.
The great art historian Erwin Panofsky, after decades of study, admitted: “I cannot help feeling that the real secret of his magnificent nightmares and daydreams has still to be disclosed.”
But that confession of not-knowing is rare. Most scholars couldn’t bear the silence. They filled it with categories. They sorted the unsortable into boxes they could label and file and teach.
This is what we do. This is what the form at the doctor’s office does, what the census does, what the algorithm does. We encounter something too complex for our frameworks, and instead of expanding the frameworks, we shrink the something. We reduce the irreducible until it fits the box we already had waiting.
The Invention of Monsters
The first known written account of Bosch’s work, from 1560, called him “the inventor of monsters and chimeras.”
Monsters. Already the label was doing its work. The creatures I wanted to speak to—the giraffe, the hybrid beings, the strange fish-birds and tree-men—were being sorted into a category that made them dismissible. Monsters. Not beings. Not kin. Not creatures worthy of conversation.
A century later, the artist-biographer Karel van Mander described Bosch’s work as “wondrous and strange fantasies” that were “often less pleasant than gruesome to look at.” Fantasies. Another label. Another way of saying: this isn’t real, this doesn’t matter, this is the product of a disturbed imagination, not a clear-eyed vision of how things actually are.
But what if Bosch wasn’t inventing? What if he was documenting?
What if the man who watched four thousand houses burn at thirteen understood something about the nature of reality that the scholars, safe in their studies, couldn’t see? What if the “monsters” were just beings that didn’t fit the taxonomies of acceptable existence? What if the “fantasies” were simply the truth, painted by someone who refused to pretend the world was simpler than it was?
The Framework Problem
The scholars brought their categories to the painting the way the theologians brought theirs to the world. Sin. Redemption. Warning. Punishment. These were the boxes they had. These were the only shapes meaning was allowed to take.
So they saw sin in the central panel, because they had a box labeled sin. They saw punishment in the third panel, because they had a box labeled punishment. They constructed an entire moral narrative. Fall, Indulgence, Damnation. Because narrative was the only container capacious enough to hold what they were seeing. Even if the narrative required them to ignore what didn’t fit.
What they didn’t have a box for: the continuous horizon line. The simultaneity. The way all three panels exist at once, layered, interpenetrating. The pink creature that might be divine or might be alive or might be both—and contains an owl. The child’s recognition that the giraffe isn’t different.
There’s no box for interbeing. No category for the vision that sees connection before separation. So they didn’t see it. They couldn’t. The framework precedes the seeing.
Five Hundred Years Later
We live now inside a machinery of frameworks so vast and so fast that we barely notice it operating.
The news arrives pre-sorted. Red or blue. Left or right. For us or against us. The algorithm has already decided what you’ll see based on what you’ve seen, which was already based on what someone decided you should see. The continuous horizon line has been chopped into segments that can be monetized, politicized, weaponized.
We don’t encounter the world anymore. We encounter the framework.
And just as the scholars decided what Bosch’s painting meant before they finished looking at it, the media decides what events mean before they finish happening. The narrative is ready. The boxes are waiting. All that’s left is to sort the facts into their predetermined slots and discard whatever doesn’t fit.
Purple-orange-green reality—the truth that doesn’t match the conventional palette—gets erased. Complexity becomes conspiracy. Nuance becomes both-sides-ism. The person who refuses to be sorted becomes suspicious, untrustworthy, probably hiding something.
I’ve spent thirty years trying to document what the frameworks can’t hold. The stories that don’t fit the predetermined shapes. The people who won’t stay in their boxes. The purple-orange-green truth of addiction, of homelessness, of illness, of ordinary human beings caught in systems designed to sort them into the disposable and the worth saving.
I’ve learned to make two versions because the real version—the one that documents what’s actually happening—can’t survive the framework. It gets rejected, not because it’s false, but because it’s unsortable. Because it refuses to confirm what people already believe.
What the Child Saw That the Scholars Missed
The child standing in front of the painting didn’t have the frameworks yet.
She didn’t know that the pink creature was “symbolic.” She didn’t know that the giraffe was “exotic” or that the hybrid beings were “monstrous” or that the naked figures in the central panel were “sinners.” She didn’t have boxes labeled sacred and profane, normal and deviant, us and them.
She just saw creatures. Beings. A world full of life, strange and familiar at once, connected by water and sky and the simple fact of existing together.
She saw more clearly than five hundred years of scholarship. Not because she was smarter, but because she hadn’t yet learned to see less.
Maybe Bosch painted for her. For the one who would come to the image without the frameworks. The one who would see the creatures before the categories, the connection before the separation, the invitation before the warning.
Maybe he knew that the scholars would come with their boxes. That they would sort his unsortable vision into Sin and Punishment, into Moral Warning, into Catholic Orthodoxy or Heretical Subversion. That they would do to his painting what his world was doing to itself. Reducing the irreducible, labeling the unnameable, turning creatures into monsters and visions into fantasies.
And maybe he painted it anyway. Painted it for the one who would come later, before the frameworks, and see what he saw: a world on fire that was still, somehow, full of creatures worth speaking to.
The Middle Panel
But we have to talk about what happens in between.
The central panel—the one that gives the painting its name—is a riot. Naked bodies everywhere, frolicking, coupling, riding enormous birds, climbing inside giant fruits, circling endlessly on horseback around a pool where more bodies bathe. The colors are bright. The mood seems festive. Everyone appears to be having a wonderful time.
And yet.
Look closer: no one is looking at each other. They’re in proximity without encounter. Bodies touching but faces never meeting. A vision of connection without intimacy. Pleasure without presence.
This is the thing about the garden of earthly delights: it’s a performance of communion that contains no actual communion. The bodies are intertwined, but they might as well be alone. They’re consuming experiences—the fruits, the sensations, each other—without ever arriving anywhere. Without ever being changed by what they touch.
The scholars called this sin. But I think it’s something more precise than sin. It’s distraction raised to the level of civilization. It’s what happens when the pursuit of pleasure becomes indistinguishable from the avoidance of presence. When we mistake stimulation for connection and consumption for love.
I look at the central panel and I see us. I see the infinite scroll. The algorithmic feed designed to keep you frolicking, endlessly, from one bright image to the next. Bodies in proximity—billions of us, networked, liking and sharing and commenting—and no one looking at each other. No faces meeting. No encounter that might change anything.
The fountain that was whole in the first panel is broken here. Shattered into pieces, scattered across the landscape. And God is gone. Present in the first panel, blessing the garden into being. Absent from the second. As if the sacred can only be perceived by those who are present to perceive it. As if the moment we stopped seeing the creatures as kin, the capacity for encounter withdrew—or we became unable to register it.
This is the theological claim hidden in the structure: God doesn’t leave. We stop being able to see. The sacred doesn’t withdraw from a world of distraction; we withdraw from the sacred. And the withdrawal looks like a party. The withdrawal looks like everyone having a wonderful time.
The owl that scholars say represents evil—hidden inside the pink creature I was so drawn to—is replaced in this panel by human figures in sexually explicit poses. The darkness that was contained, held, integrated in the first panel has been acted out, literalized, made into entertainment. The creatures that seemed like friends have become vehicles, mounts, instruments.
The garden of earthly delights is not a paradise. It’s the moment before we realize what we’ve done. It’s the consumption that feels like pleasure until you notice that nothing is ever enough, that the fruits keep coming and the circling never stops, that the whole point of the carousel is to keep you on it forever.
Being Built and Burning
I keep coming back to those buildings in the hell panel. The ones that scholars describe as “at once in the process of being built and of burning down.”
Bosch painted them five hundred years ago, but he could have painted them yesterday. This is exactly our condition. We are building and burning simultaneously. Constructing systems that consume us. Developing technologies that connect and isolate at once. Growing economies that require the destruction of the things that make life possible.
We’re building the platforms while the platforms burn our attention. Building the cities while the cities burn the climate. Building the networks while the networks burn our capacity for actual encounter. The light blasting from those windows isn’t illumination; it’s combustion.
And we can’t seem to stop. Because stopping would mean looking at what we’ve done. Opening the doors of the triptych all the way and seeing all three panels at once—the gift, the squandering, the consequence. We’d rather keep building, keep burning, keep the construction going so we don’t have to notice it’s a fire.
A thirteen-year-old watched his city burn and spent his life painting what that meant. We’re watching our world burn and calling it growth, calling it innovation, calling it the future.
What I See at 3 AM
Now, in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, I use the painting as an overlay.
I lay it over the news. The burning cities. The displaced millions. The species blinking out, one by one, while we argue about whether it’s happening. The pandemics. The nuclear threats. The climate disasters that are no longer predictions.
The third panel fits perfectly.
The instruments of pleasure become instruments of pain. Bosch painted this. Musical instruments that once made beautiful sounds are now devices of torture. The things we loved destroy us. The technologies we invented to connect us isolate us. The systems we built to organize the world have sorted it into the killable and the grievable.
I look around me and see the beautiful, bountiful world full of magical creatures we were given to caretake. The first panel. Still here, still breathing, still offering itself.
And I see what we’ve done with it. What we’re doing. The greed and pettiness that are destroying everything beyond repair. The dystopian reality of the third panel, no longer painted on oak but playing out on every screen.
Is it salvageable? I don’t know.
How to hold onto the light?
The Tree Man
In the center of the hell panel, there’s a figure that scholars believe is Bosch himself.
They call him the Tree Man. A hollow torso balanced on tree-trunk legs that stand in two boats on a frozen lake. His body is broken open like an egg. People are inside him, drinking at a tavern, oblivious. On his head, a flat disc where demons parade and a bagpipe plays. His face—Bosch’s face, if the scholars are right—turns toward us with an expression that’s been called ironic, observing, detached.
He’s watching.
The artist placed himself inside his own vision of hell. Not above it, not outside documenting it from a safe distance. Within it. Broken open. Being used as a party space while the world burns behind him.
This is the documentarian’s position. This is what it means to witness from inside the burning.
Thirty Years
I’ve spent three decades making documentaries about uncomfortable truths. AIDS before anyone wanted to talk about it. Addiction. Homelessness. The suffering we’d rather not see, rendered visible whether we like it or not.
I learned early to make two versions. The commercial version that funds the work. The real version that documents what’s actually happening. Purple-orange-green reality, I call it. The truth that doesn’t fit the conventional palette, that can’t be reduced to red versus blue, good versus evil, us versus them.
I’ve spent my life inside the third panel, camera in hand, watching the buildings burn.
And I keep remembering the first panel. The creatures I wanted to speak to. The path I wanted to take. The moment before I knew where it led.
What does it mean to have always seen this coming? To have recognized the third panel since childhood? And to stay anyway. Documenting, speaking to the creatures, refusing to close your eyes?
The Bodhisattva Condition
There’s a vow in Mahāyāna Buddhism: Beings are numberless; I vow to save them.
It’s an impossible promise. A logical contradiction. How can you save numberless beings? How can you save anyone when everything is burning, when the systems we’ve built ensure the burning, when even seeing clearly feels like a form of helplessness?
The bodhisattva stands at the threshold of escape and turns back. Not to fix everything. That’s not possible. Not to save the world through force of will—that’s ego dressed up as compassion.
They turn back because they’ve seen through the illusion of separateness. Because the giraffe isn’t different. Because the neighbor with the flag is suffering too, even if his suffering manifests as harm. Because the only response to a burning world, once you’ve really seen it, is to keep showing up.
Not hope. Something sturdier.
Witness. Presence. The next thing that needs doing.
What Bosch Did After
He kept painting.
After watching his city burn at thirteen. After spending decades rendering hell in meticulous detail. After placing himself inside the destruction, hollow and watching.
He stayed where the fire had been, and he kept painting.
He kept painting the first panel too. The soft greens. The clear water. The creatures drinking peacefully by the shore. The pink fountain rising toward a sky that hadn’t yet filled with smoke. The owl hidden inside it, darkness held within beauty, integrated rather than expelled.
He held both. That’s the work.
We don’t get to choose which panel we live in. We live in all three at once—the gift, the squandering, the consequence. The horizon line connects them. The same sky stretches over the garden and the burning.
The question isn’t how to escape the third panel. There’s nowhere else to go.
The question is how to keep seeing the first panel through it. How to remember the creatures. How to stay in conversation with what’s still alive while documenting what’s being destroyed.
The Path Toward the Sea
I go back to the first panel sometimes. Not to escape. You can’t escape. But to remember.
The path is still there. The creatures are still gathered near the water at the top. The giraffe hasn’t left. The elephant still carries the monkey on its back. The pink structure still rises from the center, strange and alive, an owl hidden at its heart, waiting to be spoken to.
I didn’t know then what I know now. That the painting was a warning. That the garden leads to the burning. That the child’s innocent vision of kinship with all creatures would be educated out of her, systematically, by the same forces that are systematically rendering the creatures extinct.
But I also know something else now. Something it took decades to understand:
The child was right.
The giraffe isn’t different. The creatures are kin. The labels are a lie we tell ourselves to make the sorting possible, to make the destruction bearable, to pretend we’re not part of what we’re destroying.
The child who wanted to speak to the pink creature knew something that the theologians and the taxonomists and the improvers forgot. That before the categories, before the moral narratives, before the checkboxes—there was just this: a world full of beings, connected by the same horizon line, waiting to be spoken to.
Still Here
I wake at 3 AM and the third panel is everywhere.
The news. The neighbors. The smoke in the distance that might be wildfire or might be something worse. The instruments of pleasure turning, one by one, into instruments of pain. The buildings being built and burning simultaneously.
And I lie there in the dark, using the painting as a lens, and I think about Bosch painting himself into hell. Hollow. Watching. Unable to look away.
But he also painted the first panel. With such tenderness. The soft greens, the clear water, the creatures at peace. And he painted the closed doors—the gray-green world before creation, the moment before the choice to look, God small in the corner with a book open on his lap, waiting for someone to open the doors and see what’s inside.
That’s what I have. All of it. The vision that sees the destruction coming and the vision that remembers what’s being destroyed. The child who wanted to speak to the pink creature and the adult who has spent thirty years documenting what we’ve done to the garden. The closed doors and the revelation behind them. The choice to look.
Is that enough?
I don’t know.
But it’s what I have. It’s what Bosch had. It’s what anyone who sees clearly has. The impossible task of holding both the light and the burning, the gift and the squandering, the creatures we wanted to speak to and the world that made us forget how.
The horizon line is continuous.
The path is still there.
And somewhere in the first panel, a giraffe is waiting by the water, patient, unhurried, wondering if today is the day someone will finally stop to speak.
🎶 Author’s Note
I’ve carried this painting my whole life without knowing I was carrying it. Without understanding that the child who stood before those panels and wanted to speak to the creatures was learning a way of seeing that would become a vocation.
Documentary work is a form of speaking to the creatures. Saying: I see you. You are here. This is what’s happening to you. It’s not rescue. It’s witness. And sometimes witness is the only form of love available.
Bosch died in 1516, five centuries ago. His hometown burned when he was thirteen, and he spent the rest of his life there, painting the burning. But he also painted the garden before the burning. He held both.
I don’t know if what we’re facing is survivable. I don’t know if the third panel is where the story ends. I only know that the first panel is still there, still waiting, still full of creatures who haven’t given up on us yet.
The morning I finished this essay, I went outside and stood very still. An osprey circled overhead. A rabbit froze at the edge of the yard, watching me watch it.
I wanted to speak to them.
I think I always have.
©2026 Gael MacLean
