Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  And then, as keeps happening, if one waits, something nice turns up, a huge stone fountain in front of a church called Saint-Sulpice. One tower is covered with cloth; the wind billows in it, making tense vibrations. Inside the church is holy water in a South Pacific giant clam shell, its big wavy edge is covered over with a brass border. Crushing, vast, crazy organ music is playing, and then the organ music stops and space expands.

  I venture on to the Jardins Luxembourg hoping to find my wife. So far no luck—I’m sitting here writing on a folded sheet of paper from my pocket. All caught up.

  September 12, 1998. London. The Museums.

  In London we initially stayed at a YMCA with endless alienating empty halls leading from our tiny wind-rattled room to athlete’s-foot-floor hideous-porcelain-bowl-shit-stain copious-pubic-hair bathrooms. It was so gnarly we switched hotels for the second night, me out at dawn to find another place.

  We were staying in the Bloomsbury district, around the corner from the British Museum, with its great Egyptian and Greek sculptures. The British were among the very first to rip off, plunder, and loot the cradle of civilization, back in the sun-never-sets-on-us days of the British Empire. The Egyptian holdings of the British Museum make the stuff in the Met in NYC look like the broken remains found on the floor after the burglars got away.

  I had a lot of uneasy feelings about the loot, in other words. But there were some great pieces. A granite Ramesses 2, 1270 BC from Thebes. So calm and beautiful, such a wonderful smooth curve in the cheek at the corner of this mouth—yet, really, how different is this Ramesses from a plastic sculpture of the hamburger icon Big Boy?

  There was a lovely queen—Amenophis—and her husband. Really clear lines along the edges of their lips. I finally grasp that Egyptians are Africans. Black people. Amenophis’s husband looked like Lightin’ Hopkins.

  I saw the best panel of Hieroglyphics ever, so clear, so deeply incised. Yet—mystery—I couldn’t find the panel the next day, although the hall was rather small. A secret teaching from time machine? You decide.

  Outside we saw a Classic Cameras store with lots of old Leicas, I wandered in, and “What can I tempt you with, sir?” asked the proprietor. So polite, the British. The place was in “Pied Bull Yard”, a courtyard, and in there was a pub, “Truckles of Pied Bull Yard.”

  Had lunch with Stella Wilkins, my English agent. My British editor for Saucer Wisdom says there’s a chance he’ll buy the four Ware books as well. It’s currently very hard—all but impossible—to buy my novels in England. So it would be great to get some of them into print there. I’d always thought the US imports were easy to get in England, but they’re not.

  I wander into a park near the Embankment tube stop near Trafalgar Square. There are blue-and-white-striped lawn chairs with, mostly, bums in them. I lie in one for awhile, it’s free. My legs are giving out from day after day of pounding the pavement. The lawn chairs billow chaotically in the breeze. It reminds me of a maze I saw years ago in a book by Shepherd; the obstacles in the maze were lawn chairs, and in fact you had to avoid the ones with bums.

  In the National Gallery I find a good Bruegel, The Adoration of the Magi of 1564. BRVEGEL MDLXIII says the signature. He didn’t like to put the letter “H” in his name, and I don’t know why some people still insist on using it and writing his name “Brueghel” or even worse, “Breughel” with the “e” and “u” in the wrong order, and then, ugh, pronouncing his name Broy-gull, which isn’t the way they would ever say it in the Lowlands. I say Broo-gull, which isn’t fully accurate either, but at least I don’t get the dipthong backwards.

  How clear and fresh the canvas is. The three kings are in a triangle of gaze, each looking at a gift held by one of the other kings. Balthazar looks like Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop festival. He has a beautiful pointed-toe red boot. Fringed chamois leather cape. His gift is a gold ship called a “nef”. It holds a green enameled shell, and within the shell is a tiny live monkey.

  The gallery note by the picture says that Bruegel put soldiers in his pictures because for most of his life the Netherlands were occupied by Spanish soldiers. This touch makes it seem so real. Makes me want to write Bruegel’s life. The rainy Flemish day, right here in front of me. I want to go there.

  Mary is a hot cutie with full lips. A guy whispers in Joseph’s ear. He’s saying “You’re a cuckold, Mary puts out.” Joseph looks undisturbed.

  In the background are a bunch of interesting characters. A scholarly Jew with glasses. Josef’s accountant? Also a classic Bruegel fool. And a fat guy like Bill the oyster man at our farmers’ market.

  There’s a second, small Bruegel too, a grisaille of Christ with The Woman Taken In Adultery. Jesus is writing in the sand—”DIE SONDER SUND IST.” It’s the story about “Who without sin is/ the [first stone let them throw.]” Signed BRUEGEL MDLXV. This picture is small, I have trouble looking at it well. The story was said to be a favorite among Protestants, which is another heavy historical touch—to know that the Protestant reformation and the Catholic counter-reformation were raging through the Lowlands in Bruegel’s time.

  I see a Lewis Carroll photo exhibit in the National Portrait Gallery next door. The show is drab and depressing—all his desperate, longing photos of little girls—it kind of weakens my years-long tie to Carroll.

  Getting aboard the subway the next day, Sylvia is ahead of me and the door closes me off. A door that has a slanting section at the top, like a greenhouse. She looks so excited behind the door, like a tropical bird, kind of gleeful and triumphant. She waited for me at the target stop, Picadilly Circus. On the way there I saw a Japanese woman with a London map that opened up like a flower or a cootie-catcher. The subway’s dangling hand grips are coiled springs with black Bakelite bulbs. Everything different in this parallel world.

  September 21, 1998. Antwerp. Bruegel. I’m Flemish.

  We’re in Antwerp now. I’ve had breakfast and taken a walk. In Edinburgh I bought a good book by Keith Roberts about Bruegel and his art, and have been reading up. I’ve decided to make Peter Bruegel the Elder a focus of this trip. I’d kind of like to write a historical novel about him and his family.

  I feel there’s some parallels between myself and Bruegel—me as a novelist, him as a painter.

  Bruegel’s paintings never made it into churches as altar pieces because they were satirical (e.g. a man who won’t help Christ carry His cross is wearing a rosary) and vulgar (often including people shitting and pissing). I’m never quite accepted into the standard SF canon, perhaps due to vulgarity—and, I’d like to think, because my works are ahead of their time. Misled by Bruegel’s vulgarity, Victorian scholars mistook him for a peasant, not realizing that he was in fact a highly cultured man. That’s me!

  There’s a tension between Bruegel’s overarching parable-like scenes and the the specificity of his people. This is akin to my transrealist implementations of classic SF tropes. Just as Bruegel prided himself on drawing his characters from life; I pride myself on my trick of basing my characters on real people. As the years go by, I try and present ever-stronger characters, and this is akin to Bruegel’s use of increasingly large human figures in his late works.

  Walking down the streets of Antwerp, I’m thinking that the genes walking around me are the same genes that Bruegel was surrounded by. It’s like a little pond of fish here, not all that greatly changed over the past four hundred and fifty years. Fifteen generations.

  People repeatedly started talking to me in Flemish. I look Flemish! For instance a really pretty, tall, Bruegel-faced young woman with dark hair and a baby stroller asked me, in Flemish, what time it was. She could have been Mayken Coecke van Aelst, Bruegel’s wife.

  “These are my people,” I kept telling Sylvia.

  I always thought that the Bosch and Bruegel faces looked like mine, e.g. the drunk man talking to the bagpiper in Bruegel’s The Peasant Dance, or the giant, hollow-bodied man standing in the boats in the hell panel of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly
Delights. My twins.

  And now I learn that there’s a well-known ancient Flemish family of harpsichord makers called Ruckers. The “s” at the end of “Ruckers” means nothing, it’s common in the Lowlands to put an “s” after the name of the son.

  So from now on, when anyone asks what kind of name Rucker is, I’ll say “Flemish”! It’s not German after all. Indeed, when I lived in Germany, the name “Rucker” was quite unfamiliar to them, and they often spelled it “Rocker”.

  Some years later, researching in the Lowlands again: with a Bosch painting in Ghent.

  The Flemish cabdriver from the train station to the hotel claimed the local cathedral is sitting on “cow hides”, and that’s why it doesn’t sink into the soft mud. The streets stink of sewer gas; it must be hard to drain here in the wet lowlands.

  Our room looks right out on the square in front of the cathedral which is cool. In the morning when we stepped out into the square with the huge cathedral, there was a twentyish boy running along screaming. His hair was soaked with dried blood and with fresh bright red blood. Some of his friends were trying to catch him. He wasn’t so much screaming as squealing.

  Inside the cathedral—Christ, but Roman Catholic religious art makes me want to puke. So vapid and unreal and knuckled-under to the fat-bellied powers of the Church. Might Bruegel have felt this way?

  The museum in Antwerp that has the one Bruegel painting called Mad Meg or Dulle Griet is closed for renovation. When we walked by the renovation-closed museum a bald old man stopped and stared at us all the way down the block. Very surreal.

  Flemish words. In the elevator it said Uit Sluitend, meaning I don’t know what, but it sounds slatternly. Pickpocket is zakkenroller, a wonderfully dynamic sound.

  “I’m gonna zack and roll, man.”

  A hoer is a whore, but huur is to rent. We blundered through a red light district yesterday where you could huur a hoer. They were sitting in windows with red & blue fluorescent lights—seemed like all of them were either bitter-looking (and why shouldn’t they be?), or were men in drag with bulges in their undies. Not for me.

  Travel is never quite what you expect, but I have a lot to be grateful for. I’m not working. I have a sexy, loving wife. I can afford this big trip. We have a good hotel room in the heart of town. I have a new research topic—Bruegel—which I’m excited about. I finished writing Realware. I’m sober. It’s a sunny day. I’m healthy. I just ate a great Belgian endive salad. I have good walking shoes. I have a nice new shirt and a new vest from Scotland. I’ve found a place to check my email. The world exists and I’m alive.

  I got an email message from the past—Jay Semel from the early 1970s. He owns a painting by Sylvia, and he remembers me painting the car-length flames on the sides of our white Ford back then.

  September 22, 1998. Brussels. I Become Bruegel.

  My wife’s on the train for Geneva now, and I’m alone in Brussels. I’ll see her again in three or four days. I miss her, but it’s exciting to be alone, an adventure. Of course I also feel rootless and mortal, like a piece of dust drifting around.

  I’m getting the night train, a fourteen-hour ride to Vienna, and I have a day to kill here in Brussels. I visited the six Bruegels in the Belgian Royal Museum of Fine Arts.

  (1) The Fall of the Rebel Angels. 1562. Fabulous, Bosch-like.

  (2) Landscape With The Fall of Icarus. 1567. Reminds me of Thomas Hart Benton, the plowing.

  (3) The Numbering At Bethlehem. 1566. Someone dragging out a pig to slaughter. Holding him by his ear.

  (4) The Adoration of the Magi. 1556. Faded tempera on canvas.

  (5) Winter Landscape With Skaters And Bird Trap. 1565. Subtly sinister. The birds look smart and wised up.

  (6) Yawning Man. Tightly captured realistic miniature painting.

  I took a lot of handwritten notes on these pictures, but I’ll be transcribing most of those in a new Bruegel Notes document I’ll create back home—possibly for use with the novel I want to write.

  Get this, diary, I just saw what may have been Bruegel’s his house and studio—in the Marolles district of Brussels on Hoogstraat a narrow main street. The house is just six blocks down from the Notre Dame de la Chapelle, which is where Pieter and Mayken were married in 1563, and where he was buried in 1569. How local and touching.

  I lit a candle fro Bruegel in the church, then knelt and prayed—for what? Oh, to say “Hi” to Bruegel, and that I’m thinking about him and that I might try and write about him and/or try and learn to paint a little like him.

  And then I had an omelet in a sidewalk cafe in Brussels, writing my thoughts in my notebook. A man begged me for money, he had the gentlest smile, with his hat held out. I shook my head, writing with my pen, and he said wistfully “C’est l’article…” meaning something like “You’re busy writing an article.”

  He wandered off—and then I worry: What if that was Bruegel who I just refused? I should give to the next beggar I see.

  I walked a block, and sat down for a dessert in different café, where I saw one of those wealthy European women who make me think of big Fifties populuxe American car—the plump lips and strong teeth like a grille, the Bezier curve cheeks, the thick bob of dyed blonde hair—and huge knockers under a tight silky chartreuse woman top with skin bronzed from studio tan. She was very snobby-looking. Now she’s gone, I missed seeing her walk by because I was distracted by my outrageously delicious Belgian dessert, a cylinder of cream and meringue covered with chocolate shavings. Never mind about the populuxe Euro woman, dessert is readily attainable.

  I’m going back to the art museum to look at some engravings that I requested from their print department, called the Cabinet des Estampes. I asked for La Cuisine Maigre, La Cuisine Grasse, and L’Homme A La Recherche De Lui Même. Pictures of Thin Man, Fat Man, and The Man In Search of Himself—me.

  So I went and did that. Actual fucking Bruegel drawings had been engraved and printed by Hieronymous Cock in the 1500s and I was sitting there looking at the prints and even touching one with the tip of my finger. The diligent officials gave me four different states or versions of The Man In Search Of Himself. In the picture he’s labeled ELCK (for “everyman”), he’s depicted multiple times in the image, looking with a lantern inside things like sacks and barrels, the goof.

  After the engravings there I was starting to run out of time. I ran upstairs for a last look at the Bruegel paintings. I felt such sorrow leaving such perfection!

  “Goodbye, I love you.”

  The other painters of Bruegel’s era are muddy and dumb. He’s clear, intelligent.

  Before heading for the train station, I ducked into a Museum of Musical Instruments hoping to see a sixteenth-century Flemish bagpipe, like from Bruegel’s time. They had lots of bagpipes there, but only from the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, and none from Flanders. You’d suppose the leather sack would rot away over the years, but some sixteenth-century nozzles could have survived. But no.

  The thing I did see in the music museum was a “virginal”—this being a keyboard instrument like a rectangular box on legs—made by Andreas Ruckers, Antwerp, 1620.

  The first American Rucker was Peter Rucker who arrived in 1690, by way of London. Probably he was a Huguenot fleeing the Lowlands.

  The Andreas Ruckers virginal appears in a painting by Vermeer—they had a print of the painting right next to the virginal. So, okay, if I’m Flemish, maybe Bruegel and I are related! I beginning feel a spark of him alive within me and I’ll fan it more.

  So I got on the Brussels metro to the train station to catch the night train to Vienna to visit Bruegel’s dozen or so pictures there. On the metro I’m pushing my SF trip that Bruegel’s alive inside me, and he’s looking through my eyes. I’m twinking him as I like to say—this being a word I made up to mean emulating or somehow summoning up a replica-model of another person in your own head. And I’m looking with Bruegel eyes at the subway platform.

  The diabolical magic moving stairs, is
this Hell? Yet the people look the same, albeit very strangely clothed. The sight of a train is so odd, also the columns holding up the roof. A girl is sitting and singing in a lovely voice for money—and for the second time today I deny a beggar, walking past her, even though the Bruegel inside me wants me to go over to her. She’s the only living lovely thing in this human ants-nest subway dungeon.

  I follow signs for the path from the metro stop to the train station—supposedly reachable through tunnels—and I end up outside amid half-finished construction.

  The sun is setting, light on a glass building, no sign of green, just pipes and stone and glass and asphalt and for a minute I’m so into being Bruegel that I’m utterly lost and confused.

  So then I have to push my Bruegel down so I can find my train, get my suitcase out of baggage claim where I left it earlier today, change some money, etc.

  And finally I’m up on the platform and—for the sake of Bruegel—I fill my fountain pen from a bottle of ink I carry in my suitcase. Pelikan ink. Bruegel is interested in the fountain pen of course. I take out a paper and try to draw a few faces that I’d seen, in particular the face of yet another image of Bruegel’s wife Mayken whom I saw—this one she sat across from me in the Metro, with sweet mouth and intelligent eyes. And where is my wife now—I’m a drifting piece of dust.

  As I write this I’m in a sleeps-three train cabin all my myself, the two others get on in Cologne at 10:40 pm, I think I’ll get myself in bed before they show up, perhaps two ,—fat chance and anyway 3’s a crowd. I went for the 3-cabin over the 2-cabin both because its $30 cheaper and because it feels “safer” not to be cooped up with one other person.

  September 23, Vienna.

  The overnight train was good I slept quite well—no interruptions from tipsy, randy populuxe women stumbling into the sleeps-three cabin at midnight or anything.

  I just phoned Sylvia in Geneva. She’s frazzled, she can’t find a hotel for us in Venice like we’d planned. That’s okay, Vienna is nice, I wouldn’t mind spending extra time here.