A Bosh-Like World
by Ken Sanes
In the works of Alto Bosh and the School of Metaphysical Possibility
he founded, we see the world as it might be if nature catered to our
narcissistic desires and our wishes took material form. In one of Bosh’s
visions, branches lower themselves politely as people pass by, so they can
pick the succulent fruit, while fish jump joyously into nets, and streams
offer up airborne fountains of water so passersby can drink and be
refreshed. In another vision by Bosh, death makes people younger -- and
thinner -- so they wake up from their own absence full of energy and
enthusiasm, ready to have a good day. And when, despite all of these
wonderful things, life still gets people down, Mother Earth wraps them
in her loving arms and rocks them to sleep, while the clouds sing a
lullaby, until they waft away on an airy cushion of sweet dreams.
But it is a universal principle that sweetness and light call forth
their opposite and so, in other works by Bosh, nature is transformed
into an embodiment of nightmare in which everything is malevolent and
alive, or folded into the darkness of night. Here, Bosh shows us a world
in which the road unexpectedly turns the wrong way to trick the weary
traveler so she will move further from
her destination. It is a world where the Earth opens its jaws and
swallows a city, and ships that travel too far from land fall off the
edge, plummeting in the direction of absolute down. It is
also a world where the devil pokes fleeing miscreants in the bum with a
poker-hot pitchfork, as blood curdling screams and pleas for mercy echo
through the caverns of the underworld.
But Bosh’s greatest works of genius, for which he won numerous awards,
show us a vision of the world as it might be if nature embodied our
spiritual desires. In these magnificent visions, love benevolently
bubbles up from a landscape of celestial fountains and people bathe nude
in streams of compassion, standing under waterfalls as the liquid
cascades around their soft flesh. In this alternative world, not only
does the lion lie down with the lamb, but the parasite dines in a
civilized fashion with a bib, alongside its host, rather than on and in
it. And every morning is bright and clear, with the sun casting rays of
wisdom on us as we wake up and see the light. Travelers in this world
even pass through the stages of personal growth until they arrive at a
state of wholeness and completion. Then, some continue traveling beyond
the realm of the fleshly world until they become celestial orbs that
float through the ether, merging with the source of utmost radiance and
transcendental light at the center.
Looking back at Bosh’s visions now, we can see that he was a true
prophet of the universal state of mind and that he had already
incorporated cosmic-cognitivity into his thinking. But like many
prophets he was scorned in his own time. As a movement started to form
around him, there was a backlash led by one of the most prominent
critics of that era, P. E. Hume. To Hume’s dyspeptic eye, Bosh offered
“something out of a cold cereal commercial, full of synthetic sweetness
and halogen lighting,” in which good and evil are unnaturally separated
into different worlds. Hume also famously noted: “Where’s the sex? One
of Bosh’s visions is of a world of fulfilled desires, and the best he
can come up with is a branch that lowers itself to offer succulent fruit,
and a hug from Mother Earth. Pathetic! Why don’t we see men in his
vision intertwined with a voluptuous nature that is full of rounded
forms and soft openings, transformed into a visible expression of the
allure of the eternal feminine? I’ll tell you why. It's because all
Bosh can offer is children’s stories masquerading as a vision suitable
for adults. Streams of compassion, indeed! This is a view of the world
by a sad little gnome of a man who has fled into childish dreams because
he doesn’t have the courage to face adult reality, the hard thud of it,
where life is work and other people’s opinions of us are hell, and we
sweat for our bread and still have to butter and jelly it ourselves.
That’s what we should be focusing on, not a world where we waft by on
heavenly rafts made of giant daffodils, winding our way around celestial
waterfalls of prismatic light.”
Sadly, as we all know, it was the persuasive power of Hume and his
intellectual toadies that won the day and, after the early accolades,
Bosh's work was ridiculed and forgotten. As Bosh ran out of both fame
and money, he was reduced to peddling his wares at outdoor flea markets
and once even tried to ride piggyback on somebody else’s garage sale. It
was, of course, at one of those flea markets that a customer purchased
some of his work, leaving it boxed in a basement where it was unearthed
centuries later, along with clippings of reviews, so it could
become the guide to living that it is today. Who that customer was, we
will probably never know. But in the end, they say, a drunken Bosh, now
mostly blind and living in public housing, disavowed his own work,
claiming it was the invention of an imposter.
The rest, of course, is history. Having failed to recognize his
significance when he was alive, humanity wandered through the wilderness
for centuries while it followed the work of other supposed masters who
were actually leading it away from the truth. In retrospect, there were
also a number of works created during that time that captured the truth
in bits and pieces, edging toward it, then shrinking away, without
anyone realizing their significance. In fact, in one of those other
works, it was all there, fragmented and out of order, buried in various
addenda to the main work, which the creator almost didn’t include.
Little did humanity suspect, during all those centuries, that there was a
prophet who had already revealed the truth about a world in which the
products of the imagination are real and everything is a fully
developed extension of ourselves.