The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  Instead, I walked back through the living park and on to 53rd, the Museum of Modern Art. Time to see how Brueghel had evolved, survived, passed down to my own generation. All morning I discovered again that every observer’s notebook, every act of seeing even the harshest, most politically indicting, alienated, abstract, cynical acrylic, is a frightened, desperate, amazed recapitulation of the natural kingdom. More: an effort to mimic it. Always inexhaustibly to recombine, to classify.

  I stood in front of Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine, a created thing at once both mechanism and inexplicable bird. It had been so long since I’d looked at anything but genetics that the sleight of hand seemed crammed with associations. I thought of Emily Dickinson’s secret reaction to Darwin, five years after the publication of the Origin. Split the Lark—and you’ll find the Music. Loose the Flood—you shall find it patent. Now, do you doubt that your bird was true?

  On the train back, I knew it would have to be poetry for me, as well. I scribbled my fille de Klee on the back of a MOMA flyer:

  star start itself

  seeds blueprint climb:

  egg alone and only gear

  for eatrock lichen or

  unlacing umbel veil.

  chance, the sole mode assay-

  able: tumult of twitter-

  ing ovation is all word

  forward can enlist to move

  embryo to ember, or drive

  cold scale from first bird.

  It smacks of effusion and will embarrass me by next week. It contributes less than nothing to my understanding of Ressler’s aborted bid for love, discovery, the Swedish Sweepstakes. But as poetry, it doesn’t have to be good. It only has to contain a testable guess about being alive, the incomprehensible ability.

  Back in my apartment I remember two things I long ago lost words for. The paradoxical breakout of life from mere preservation to runaway self-threat depends on two subtle phenomena. First, information represented in a certain way emerges as instruction. As in the gene, all observation is a command to observe. Dr. Ressler once showed me how an ordinary drinking glass is a data structure informing liquid where to go. The information in the life molecule is a similar vessel, informing itself how to describe the condition it finds itself in.

  Second, small initial changes ripple into large differences. The constricted initial alphabet of four letters produces a journey many million species long. The only astonishment great enough to replace that ectomized maker: all this proliferation results from one universal and apostolic genetic code. The fantastic diversity of outward form doesn’t begin to anticipate the leaping, snaking, wild logic that develops in response to the far more complex internal, intracellular environment. Once DNA began to speak, not only the carrying medium but the message itself was susceptible to evolution. Even to approximate that polyphonic, perpetual baying, I’ll have to go back down, square off against the living, purposive program incorporated in the enzyme.

  Tonight in History—12/9/38: A coelacanth caught off Africa, a third of a billion years after it was supposed to have vanished from the earth. Not the first extinct animal to return from living fossilhood, nor the last. Far stranger things are afoot. Quaggas rebuilt from the residual ghost in their zebra cousins. Frogs cloned. Talk of reviving mastodons from single frozen cells. I sit at my desk, overwhelmed but still among those throwing their insufficient efforts against the unlistable world.

  I know nothing about the place. But the nothing I’ve ascertained has already changed everything. I learn that I live in an evening when all ethics has been shocked by the sudden realization of accident. I must ask not how many kinds of life there can be, nor even how there can be so many kinds of life. I must learn how, out of all the capricious kinds of cosmos there might have been, ours could have lucked, against all odds, into that one arrangement capable of supporting life, let alone life that grew to pose the hypothetical in the first place. How quantum physics allowed room for a rearrangement capable of learning the outside chance hidden in quantum physics. How this tone-deaf conservatory could produce the Goldbergs.

  I review the record of care we’ve given a spark we once thought was lit for our express warming. I feel sick beyond debilitation to think what will come, how much more desperate the ethic of tending is, now that we know that the whole exploding catalog rests on inanimate, chance self-ignition. The three-billion-year project of the purposeful molecule has just now succeeded in confirming its own worst fear: this outside event need not have happened, and perhaps never should have. We’ve all but destroyed what once seemed carefully designed for our dominion. Left with a diminished, far more miraculous place—banyans, bivalves, blue whales, all from base pairs—what hope is there that heart can evolve, beat to it, keep it beating?

  XVI

  12/6/85

  Our Dearest O’Deigh,

  Out of some terrifying collective unconscious, the phrase “Greetings from the Old Country” nags at me, although this place is one continuous novelty from Cisalpina to the Afsluitdijk. Do you remember that game show where contestants were sent into a supermarket for three minutes (our nation’s chief contribution to world culture—shopping as a competitive sport)? Europe is exactly that; I’ve got this checklist of three-star Schatz chambres and a rail pass, and I can’t come home until the art treasures have all been looted. Vermeers in the Rijksmuseum. Speyer Cathedral. Brueghels in Brussels. Haven’t enjoyed myself so much since butterfly-collecting days.

  I can haul body around faster than mind can follow—the goal all civilization has striven for since the Golden Age. I haven’t words enough yet to tell you what I’ve seen. My teacher says (at least I think she says; all transactions are in Dutch, with scattered cloudy regionalisms) that words make up for lack of grammar better than grammar makes up for lack of words. The language methods here do no conjugations, declensions, paradigms. Only reading, speaking, and restoring sense to texts by supplying missing words. (“Vocabulary,” beautifully enough, is woordenschat: word treasure. OE’s word-hoard?) Only a little touring and I’ve discovered how beautiful Dutch is. On those city maps set up at strategic places for out-of-towners, the highlighted red arrow reads: U bevindt zich hier. You find yourself here.

  Here’s where I find myself. I now know that a bighearted person, in het Nederlands, is small-hearted, that the Holy Ghost and your basic pigeon roosting in the carillon bear the same name, that pijp uitkloppen, to clean out one’s pipe, is to form a geslachtsgemeenschap, a “sex community” (the official term is even funnier than the euphemism. But then, “intercourse” is pretty funny at etymological level). Lenen is both to borrow and to lend, making it hard to translate Polonius. I’ve had my first Dutch dream: I stopped a wimpled woman in a begijnhof in some forgotten Belgian town and asked, “Is dit de weg naar de zestiende eeuw?” Roughly: Show me the way to the Renaissance.

  I’ve brought my en face French partway back from the dead, although you’d be surprised at how little Racine contributes to an exchange in your basic Wallonia pâtisserie. In the tongue of the dreaded Hun, I begin to take a special delight in imbedding clauses and dropping fat, daylight verbal runs at sentence end. I can now read museum tags anywhere in Northern Europe, although a disturbing number are already in imperial Engels. Toward our Frenchified Anglo-Saxon, the whole continent seems to have developed a strange love-hate. Everyone wants to speak the language of power, but secretly, not far below the surface, runs the widespread conviction that ieder Engels is verschrikkelijk.

  Thus a little protective coloration helps. Not that I can always pass. I asked directions from a dike-obsoleted fisherman up in Enkhuizen, and following his directions to the letter, found myself halfway out in the Zuider Zee. I had to know where I’d gone wrong, so I retraced my steps, found the fellow, and told him exactly what had happened. “You followed the directions fine,” he told me. “We always send you Germans into the water.”

  My tutor assures me that research shows that a core vocabulary of a thousand words will get one thr
ough 75 percent of ordinary conversation. Unfortunately tempera, patina, pigment, brushstroke, etc. tend not to be among the core one thousand. I have thus become adept at compound neologism. I learn nouns daily, but the arbitrarity of gender makes any decent American yearn for the syllogistic cleanliness of COBOL.

  Everything I do all day depends on conversion. Exchange rates, distances. The visual road sign codes—supposedly in Universal Icon Language—are more inscrutable than I imagined. I swear to God there’s one indicating that something up ahead is about to put your vehicle into a condition of religious bliss. I take no joy in driving a car, even one dangerously close to the kind Shriner clowns pile out of, in any country where mirrors on building walls assist you to take otherwise blind 90-degree turns at 90 km/h. But I am, at least, marginally better off than the Midwesterner on the Autobahn who kept wondering why he couldn’t find this place Ausfahrt on the map.

  All my primary sources are written in literary figures nobody has used for centuries. A greater competence than I’ll ever possess would still not admit me into the real private clubs. Believe me, every backwater here has its secret speech. The more common the item, the more likely that the villager two kilometers down gives it a different name. That good Dr. Browne was right: jabbering is a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world.

  The hardest code to break out here—not recorded in any grammar—is greeting kisses. Every dorp has its own dialect. Do I kiss this woman one, two, three, or four times? Do I start on the left cheek or the right? Do I kiss this guy? They don’t put this stuff in the Michelin. The exchange frequently leads to jarred eyeglasses and bruised noses. There’s a similar dance to find a common denominator language for conversation. Observe clothes, ported books, license plate. Try a few mumbled words. I overheard two men in the Liège (Luik, Luttich) railway station conclude, after halting negotiation, that their strongest common language was Latin. A Belgian friend’s advice: if you need to address someone in Brussels and can’t tell whether to use French or Vlaams, speak English and walk away healthy.

  The whole EC is one, huge, macaronic verse. Who invented all these ways of saying? Does the proliferation of dialects come from innate dissatisfaction with any one set of tools? Or is it just another case of Us having to distinguish ourselves from Them? Even folk songs propagate like viruses. When one is struck up in a café, I can generally sing along, although I must substitute my cowboy stanzas for the local lyric. In any case, I’m proud of what modest Dutch I’ve gotten beneath the knee (under the belt). I manage a bit like that pooch I had as a child, who could sit, lie down, beg, jump, roll over, and play dead, but not necessarily to the right command. I know just enough to get me in trouble with the “strange police,” who did not believe that an American could really be writing a thesis on a four-hundred-year-old Flemish nonentity. They were on the verge of quizzing me on Rubens’s dates before giving me the visa.

  Herri hangs around my neck. I still can’t say I know the first thing about the man. I’ve spent weeks in million-volume libraries, half a dozen first-rate art history collections, and no end of regional stadhuizen, and have turned up only the tip of already familiar evidence. Bles’s life span remains, despite Yankee ingenuity, framed in question marks. I’ve nailed down an account of Patinir, with a suggestion that Bles was the older man’s nephew or cousin. Fault Flemish; neef means either. What to do when one language has two words that the other smears into a single concept? Modalities continue to elude me: two kinds of forgetting, living, believing, remembering. Two distinct becauses! My attempts to read primary sources are humbling lessons in how enormously my own thoughts are bound in native lexicon. Whatever I call a thing, it is never quite what I’ve called it. It’s miraculous that my mother tongue allows me to realize even that much.

  I’ve come across a source that confuses my man’s dates with his cousin-uncle’s. (I remember, two years ago, your take on those art-jargon letters fl. “How beautiful; it doesn’t matter when the man lived—he flourished around 1542.” Believe me: half the charm of this European supermarket raid is imagining what you would make of the Leuven town hall.) Met de Bles, or Blesse. Topknot. How’s about Middle High Dutch: with the Blaze. An accident of health left a livid mark across his forehead. Or I could fake a theory: Blessé, a bleeding in of the French wound. Where’s my co-conspirator when I need her?

  You want to know whether I have any new angle on the paintings themselves. The most convenient conclusion would be that met de Bles was actually a pseudonym, a composite of student panelists from Patinir’s workshop, an art factory at least partly documented. I’ve hunted down a dozen panels. In the paintings themselves (all that’s left of Herri, now that his blaze has faded), nothing but the trace of competence—a jagged line, an apprentice, conventional, narrow use of color, a formulaic compositional sense. None is more than marginally memorable except the occasional pastoral arrangement with, somewhere in the background, the chance catastrophe—the painted town in the nonchalant process of being lost.

  Particularly skilled in the depiction of silent crisis. His single gift is to make flame realistic but still lazily surreal enough to be congenial. Trivial, banal, quotidian cataclysm. He is no accomplished graduate of the previous generation—no Memling or Metsys, skilled in the unsurpassed stillness of reality. He holds up no perfectly burnished fidelity to the look of surprise. In verisimilitude, his eye is shaky. If the panels have any resonance, it comes from their perch over invention’s chasm.

  I’ve spent hours in front of each, acclimating, learning to read him. I have hypnotized myself in the process; his panels, undeniable Patinir derivatives, grow vastly if intangibly different. I stare at them, like Leonardo trancing out for hours on his spittle, until they become more than masterpieces—immense, jagged, Manichean battlegrounds between the real and the imagined. His expertise at depicting the imminent catastrophe waiting patiently at panel edge, tucked away in back rooms of huge art repositories, are scrolls that have waited four hundred years to tell one sleepy museumgoer that he hasn’t the faintest idea of the apocalypse waiting in the front foyer.

  I obsess on the idea that it is up to me, FTODD, to translate these sirens into terms my contemporaries can comprehend. I sit down to write, fired with conviction, but can get no father than “He became a master in Antwerp by 1535,” before I bog down again in qualifications. Crippled by the clubfootnote. I attempt to make a case for his minor, desperate genius, and wind up trotting out that he was said to have enjoyed a friendship with Dürer, as if only this dubious acquaintance with the great Nuremberger might legitimize my fellow. What can I say about him that would be above dispute? That he may have ended his life in Ferrara, in the blessed South, some time around 1555.

  The only indisputables are the fantastic, allegorical landscapes. The handful of scenes I’ve been able to find—after the years of authenticity debates have taken their toll—contain no stamp of flamboyance, heartbreak, or eschatological revelation, nothing to interest the armchair aesthete, no announcement for anyone except the ambivalent, diverted, exnight-shift computer operator with two degrees from impeccable schools and two overextended credit cards. Man and work are unremarkable, irretrievable blurs—the perfect topic, in this age of reductionism, for a dissertation.

  You loved the scenes, didn’t you, when I first showed you them? A flat-out fascination with the threat, soberly maintaining that the only thing to do when the world begins to end is to stand aside and paint it. Uncover it. Name it. Your belief in the ability of words to intervene, even after intervention failed the three of us, keeps me here. The inarticulate love I have found for you, the chance that I might in some impossible future arrive on your threshold, paper in hand …

  Every morning I wait for the museum library to open, and every afternoon I ask what the point is. I swear to God no one could possibly care. The utter irrelevance of foliage technique in the face of acid rain or Afghanistan or the ozone layer, the great foregone shoot-out: paint versus proof. Remembe
r what the professor said, just before we committed to data-terrorism? “A talking cure must be transacted in the illness’s own idiom.” Who speaks art anymore? At its golden apex, it was already stilted discourse, a kind of leftover court lingo. Even at the supreme Quattrocento moment, the fablespeech of pictures was doomed by the creeping success of new prose. The year Herri was born, if I commit to one of the question marks, Leonardo invented the parachute. Herri (safe to assume) was born into the same zodiacal configuration as Magellan. The year Herri turned seven, astonished Dias, emerging from a storm, found he’d been blown off course around the Cape of Good Hope. New worlds, no longer the province of the landscapist.

  His fate was sealed early, apprenticed from youth, perhaps against his will, to a painter’s factory, where he gained a modicum of skill in elevating ordinary countryside to travelogue. But no technique imaginable could match the travel reports then coming in. Even before Herri served out his apprenticeship, Columbus had made the most important miscalculation in history. By the time Herri flourished (your face, in front of me as I write the word), Europe was grudgingly accepting the absurd conclusion that a world existed between Here and There.

  Let me be blunt: he was in the wrong line of work. That’s why I sought him out, the patron saint of fallen-away technographers. He should have been on shipboard from the start. What he lacked in skill of hand he might have made up for in his demonstrated capacity for mental leaps. As fabulous first mate, he might have told Columbus, after weeks of skimming the north edge of Cuba: “This is just pitiful prologue. Think, man. Think big.” Instead, the only chance of exploration life threw his way came at night, in the security of Antwerp’s back streets, under cover of dark, annexing uncharted female isthmuses.

  New skills, new materials, the sluiceways of travel thrown open: the man lived on the leading edge of an age of altered maps, radical overhauls: Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, apocalyptic showdown in the Church, Peasants’ Revolution, Mercator’s Most Exact Description of Flanders. When a man can’t himself taste the main enterprise of the day, it wrecks him for secondhand excitement. I speak as one who picked up just enough computer competence to get his name paraded through the papers for twenty-four hours.