When I was a care-free, peripatetic young man with a knapsack instead of a carry-on bag, when I had a ponytail instead of a bald spot, when I had a spring in my step instead of bone spur on my left heel, when I had two kidneys, you know this can go on and on.

 

I made my way into the Prado Museum by train and metro from the far-flung youth hostel on the outskirts of Madrid. It was a complicated ride. Madrid is an arid, brown city, and bigger than you think. The museum halls seemed dark, or it may have been the themes of the giant Goya’s that made my soul dark, or the faded, somber coloring of his dried oil paints, but the day, too, was dark. In those years, evidence of their civil war was still observable on the Spanish city streets. Weathered men with one leg and wooden crutches; men with moustaches and an arm with a folded-up sleeve pinned below the shoulder. And a visible police force on street corners, some armed with what we used to call Tommy-guns. I won’t trouble you with details of the failed romantic attachment that clouded my thinking, at the time, and may have contributed to my lugubrious pacing and the light with which I was seeing things. 

 

Through a Steppenwolf-like long passageway of tall doorways, I entered a room with “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” The painting by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch was executed in colors contrasting to not only the heavy works of the Spanish masters, but the theme of the painting itself, which in three panels, takes mankind from the Garden of Eden to the torments of Hell. I’m not qualified to be your art historian, but I can’t help musing on our present condition and where we are on the spectrum of human development Bosch framed in his human and pig pink flesh and greens and water blues. 

 

Aside from certain squabbles, my own life is like living in the original Garden of Eden, and, recently, I showed a man suffering from Lyme disease, a man seeking bee venom therapy, that we could stand directly to the side of a beehive and watch the action inches away and not feel threatened, nor threatening. He was amazed and wanted immediate treatment which would have meant me holding a bee against his back and he getting stung in the middle of his back at least three bee stings; the bee venom to counter the Lyme induced spinal arthritis. But he didn’t have his epi pen! Geesh! And I don’t have a medical degree. How to transition? Garden to disease to decay.

 

An increasing number of commentators are pointing out that in their view the world has passed the point of no return. In other words, we are well into the second panel of Bosch’s painting, living in a false paradise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) creation and data center construction. In the illegal war against Iran, the bombing sequencing and targeting that killed 180 schoolgirls was planned and run by AI. If that isn’t an approach to Hell, I don’t know what is. This is the third summer our skies have been blurred by Canadian wildfire smoke. It feels as if Earth is on the verge of catastrophe. Our cruel leaders show no mercy and kill survivors of their previous missile attack, survivors waving to us from the wreckage they cling to in the ocean. Debate on climate change has been silenced by the ridicule of those making the greatest profits in the least amount of time. When the Gulf Stream stops warming Great Britain and northwest Europe, temperature swings in those areas of the world could increase by 10 degrees Celsius in both directions. The great food basket in central Italy is in prolonged drought. Other areas of the world have seen floods that dwarf those of living memory. People are everywhere; it is impossible to drive in Lisbon. New York City is packed. I was behind five cars every mile I drove this morning. The systems we have devised to sustain ourselves are in overload. What if the price of electricity never comes down and keeps doubling? What of this winter’s heating oil price? That will double. What if the Straits of Hormuz never reopen? There is no turning down the energy need. It will come from somewhere. 

 

There is a theory in astrophysics that the reason we have never come across definitive evidence of an alien civilization is that amongst the billion and billions of stars, if a living culture advances itself to the point where it can evaluate and explore the stars from their end of the multiplex, as we have begun to explore our end, then that civilization self-destructs, becomes Bosch’s third panel. That the termination of any self-conscious tribe is inevitable seems to be the case, as, where is other life? Nowhere. It’s as if the Universe has an escape value on it, a pressure release valve that through the inability to evolve without greed and selfishness, the ending is within the painter’s imagination, no matter what planet you inhabit. Bosch’s prophetic painting doesn’t apply just to earth and humanity, but to the Universe. 

 

There’s too much turmoil to describe. Maybe it is time once again in our culture to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Check out the dark halls of some big museum. It’s where we all are going to be.

 

See you on the other side.