Master, Cut the Stone Out

“Master, cut the stone out, my name is Lubbert Das”

thus reads the inscription of Hieronymous Bosch’s enigmatic painting “The Stone Operation” currently on display in the Prado in Madrid. The painting is obscure even for an artist as mysterious as Bosch, whose nightmarish scenes and rumored dabbling in Christian esotericism have brought him a modern infamy disproportionate to his relatively small body of work produced in the late 15th century. In the picture, a doctor removes the Stone of Folly (a trope of Netherlandish folklore) from his patient’s skull, while a priest and a nun look on. It is probably the most famous Fine Art representation of trepanning, or something close to it.

Renaissance works like this intrigue us because there is a vacuum of meaning. The twentyfirst century understands realism, understands abstract modern art, but we have difficulty parsing these strange voices crying from the wilderness of the past, in which figures meant to represent human beings stare unblinkingly, almost with boredom, on the Holy Virgin enthroned and bursting from the seams of reality, or on horrific battlefields. There is a real disconnect, meaning that is impossible to embody, despite our best efforts to bootstrap ourselves into a bygone consciousness.

Bosch’s own trepanning has a dual significance for us. As writers and thinkers ever honing our critical and intellectual skills we hope to remove the “stone of folly” from our own skulls, but we also take an interest in the operation itself, this impossible maneuver, a siege on the house of subjectivity itself. In our capitalist world, where maximization of all desires and of all possibilities is an article of faith, such meaningless sacrifice of well-being offends us. But I believe more time should be spent looking at the places that such an exercise of imagination takes us; into worlds where value is not linear and infinite, where value is chattel for stranger things. Trepanning, so close to life itself, so far from “ours”, is a perfect symbol, a placeholder for the horror of ritual, of sacrificing value, where you can really get a whiff of the Other in the forest. And so I hope this blog will be both the removal of the Stone and the removing itself. The craniotome.