Seek!: Selected Nonfiction
Page 44
Instead of identifying with the man staring at the musician I - can with equal discomfiture - project myself onto the man running into the picture from the right, the guy arriving late at a party, trying to get into the swing of things, to be one of the revelers right away. "Hey, I'm cool too!" His face is a mask of harsh, naked desire. The man's redneck appearance and the dirt of the street puts me powerfully in mind of the years I've spent living in small towns, hungry for the distraction of my communities' small, puttering festivals. Though, really, so univer-
Page 358
sal is the Peasant Dance that the image overlays equally well onto the hippest scenes imaginable. Entertainment and the entertainees.
Let's look some more. At the table on the left are some seriously fucked up guys, they almost look like they might be blind and/or deaf. Blind to logic and deaf to reason, in any case. That odd, upside-down white shape on the table is, according to one commentator, a drinking glass that you can't set down (you have to chug it all), though another thinks it might be a dice-cup. Behind them are some fat lovers, behind the lovers is a shy guy watching the dancers, behind him are a man and woman in a tug of war at an inn-door - think he wants her to come out and dance, unless maybe she wants him to come in and fuck? Still further back is a man dressed in red and yellow fool's motley. What a scene! Way far back, partly glimpsed, are more and more people and what looks like the tops of booths selling stuff - it's a kermis, a street fair. In the middle ground two couples dance. Of the lefthand middle ground couple, the man seems ecstatically, or soddenly, involved in the dance; the woman is calm, happy, maybe a bit glazed around the eyes. She's having a good time dancing. The righthand couple seem uptight, athletic, intent on executing some specific step.
A final grouping of note is the two mutually absorbed girl children standing real short in the left foreground. Looking closer, you can see that the larger girl is probably teaching the smaller girl to dance. Her face is exactly the face of a mothering big sister, and the little one's face is perfectly that of a wondering toddler. The little one has a jingle bell pinned on her sleeve, perhaps so as not to get lost. The pair of girls are tender and heartening - how eager we humans are to grow, to teach, to learn.
I've been working on this essay for a week now, and something that begins to strike me, coming back over and over to the Peasant Wedding, is how the image is always the same. Everyone frozen there forever in time, with the trees against the sky making their beautiful shapes. A day like any day, yet a day that lasts forever.
It's nice that the picture waits up for me. But of course it's never quite the same picture. You never step into the same river twice - if only because you're never the same "you" again. Each time I look at the picture again I find something new to think about.
Page 359
How wonderful it would be to write a novel as rich as a painting by Bruegel - a masterwork that achieves the illusion of containing a cosmos. It's a goal to live for.
Appeared in World Art. #13, spring, 1997.
Page 361
Additional Information Dates of Composition
TITLE
DATE WRITTEN
Drugs and Live Sex
Spring, 1980
The Central Teachings of Mysticism
December, 1982
A Transrealist Manifesto
Winter, 1983
Jerry's Neighbors
May, 1984
What SF Writers
Spring, 1985
What Is Cyberpunk?
February, 1986
Haunted by Phil Dick
Fall, 1986
Welcome to Silicon Valley
Summer, 1988
Cellular Automata
May, 1989
Cyberculture in Japan
June, 1990 and Fall, 1993
Four Kinds of Cyberspace
Summer, 1991
Vision in Yosemite
August, 1992
Mr. Nanotechnology
December, 1992
Coming to California
January, 1992
Special Effects: Kit-Bashing the Cosmic Matte
May, 1993
Life and Artificial Life
July, 1993
The Manual of Evasion
January, 1994
Interview with Ivan Stang
Summer 1994
Fab! Inside Chip Fabrication Plants
June, 1994
Hacking Code
July, 1994
Art in Amsterdam
July, 1994
Tech Notes Towards a Cyberpunk Novel
July 1994
Memories of Arf
February, 1995
Goodbye Big Bang
April, 1995
A Brief History of Computers
Summer, 1996
A New Golden Age of Calculation
Fall, 1996
Cyberpunk Lives!
November, 1996
Pieter Bruegel's Peasant Dance
December, 1996
Island Notes
1996, 1997, 1998
(table continued on next page)
Page 362
(table continued from previous page)
In Search of Bruegel
Fall, 1998
Email Interviews
19941999
Seek What?
January, 1999
Page 363
Bibliography
Asterisks indicate the books that are out of print. I've included ordering information for the small press books.
Twenty Books
Realware, novel, Avon Books (to appear 2000).
Saucer Wisdom, novel/nonfiction, Tor Books (to appear 1999).
Seek!, selected nonfiction, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999.
Freeware, novel, Avon Books 1997.
*The Hacker and the Ants, novel, Avon Books 1994.
Transreal!, fiction and nonfiction collection, WCS Books 1991. (Order from http://www.cambrianpubs.com/Rucker/)
*The Hollow Earth, novel, William Morrow and Co. 1990, Avon Books 1992.
All the Visions, memoir, Ocean View Books, 1991. (Order from Ocean View Books, Box 102650, Denver CO 80250.)
Wetware, novel, Avon Books 1988, Avon Books 1997.
Mind Tools, nonfiction, Houghton Mifflin 1987.
*The Secret of Life, novel, Bluejay Books 1985.
*Master of Space and Time, novel, Bluejay Books 1984, Baen Books 1985.
The Fourth Dimension, nonfiction, Houghton Mifflin 1984.
*The Sex Sphere, novel, Ace Books 1983.
*The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka, story collection, Ace Books 1983.
Software, novel, Ace Books 1982, Avon Books 1987, Avon Books 1997.
Infinity and the Mind, nonfiction, Birkhäuser 1982, Bantam 1983, Princeton University Press, 1995.
White Light, novel, Ace Books 1980, Wired Books 1997.
*Spacetime Donuts, novel, Ace Books 1981.
Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension, nonfiction, Dover 1977.