The Notation on the Buttocks

Hieronymus Bosch spent his entire life in a single Dutch town, joined a respectable Marian brotherhood, and left behind about twenty-five paintings and almost no words. What he did instead was paint Hell, and he painted it like a man filing a deposition.

His Hell was not vague. In the right panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights, hanging in the Prado on a single oak board, a bird-headed prince sits on a toilet-throne, eats damned souls, and excretes them into a transparent bubble. Nearby, a hollow Tree-Man with legs of dead branches and boats for shoes stares out at the viewer. Inside his cracked eggshell torso is a tavern. People are drinking in it.

And then there is the choir of the damned, huddled around a fallen harp, singing from sheet music. The music is tattooed across a sinner's bare buttocks. Bosch painted the notes.

He painted them correctly.

In February 2014, an Oklahoma Christian University sophomore named Amelia Hamrick leaned close and transcribed what she saw, then posted it to Tumblr as The 500-Year-Old Butt Song From Hell. Anderson Cooper interviewed her. Choirs perform it. Hurdy-gurdy arrangements exist.

Bosch had been waiting five hundred years for someone to read it.