Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  I studied twelve Bruegels this morning.

  1) The Battle Between Carnival and Lent. 1559. In one corner is a man who may be Bruegel. I could start my novel right here.

  2) Children’s Games. 1560. A “wimmelbild” or seething picture.

  3) The Suicide of King Saul. 1562. Tiny, incredibly detailed, with a whole army no bigger than the palm of your hand.

  4) The Tower of Babel. 1563. The Tower is reminiscent of the Antwerp Cathedral, built during Bruegel’s time.

  5) The Procession to Calvary. 1564. In the foreground a solemn, hippie, wise, noble man who may be Bruegel is staring, hands folded, at Christ with the cross.

  6) The Gloomy Day. 1565. Rainy and stormy. A guy at the bottom left is pissing.

  7) Return Of The Herd. 1565. The beautiful fatness of the cows. The peaceful busy peasants no different than the cows. In the far background is a gallows.

  8) The Hunters In The Snow. 1565. How I long to travel into that landscape. The heartbreaking eagerness of the fat puppy amidst the dogs. The cold damp air. The exquisite tracery of the branches.

  9) The Conversion of St. Paul. 1567. Looking at this picture I forget to verbalize after awhile. My eye takes over and my inner voice falls silent.

  10) The Peasant and the Birdnester. 1568. What does it mean? The Smug Peasant ~ Italianate Art and the Thieving Peasant ~ Bruegel. The Nest is truth. Or pussy.

  11) The Peasant Dance. 1568. The frozen time of this picture. Always the same off-balance moment.

  12) The Peasant Wedding. 1568. The man pouring beer looks like my cousin Rudolf. Perhaps Bruegel is the clerk or notary at the right-hand corner.

  Overwhelming but not as effortless as Brussels where there was more a feeling of having the paintings to myself. There’s so many of them that I feel a little tense. It’s like every one of Bruegel’s paintings is an entire novel, and here’s this one room with so many of them on the wall. A feeling of intense urgency. I’ll have to go back a few times.

  The pictures here aren’t so easy to see. Some of them are glassed over, some are blocked by artists who are painting strong-smelling oil copies of their own, there are big tour-groups, there’s a rope that if you lean over it a beeper goes off, the light seems dim, my legs are so very tired. My “sperm tail” legs can barely beat anymore.

  I have lunch with Konrad Becker, the guy who organized my Munich gig, “Serious Killer Lounge,” a couple of years ago. Konrad and a friend, Marie Ringler, run something called Public Netbase, an Internet service provider with a few walk-in machines in the “Museumquartier” building near the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Very nice, hip people. They like the Generation X dark stuff, and urge me to see the pickled freaks in jars in the Narrenturm, an old round building that’s a medical museum. They’re enthused about a book they recently read which claims the years 611 - 914 didn’t exist.

  I see the truck of a butcher or caterer with GöD on the back. What an awesome name.

  I had a big supper: spaetzli, salad and some schnitzels of Steinpilz mushrooms. Pretty good, though I hadn’t been expecting deep-fried when it said the mushrooms were “gebacken” which sounds more like “baked”. But, hey, this is Vienna, where they fucking bread-n-fry anything, even a dog or a cat or the cook’s penis. Like the way Egyptians would mummify anything that changed to pass by—like there’s a mummy of a fish in the Rosicrucian museum in San Jose.

  September 25, 1998. Miss My Wife. Stoked Over Bruegel.

  So Sylvia couldn’t get that reservation for Venice so she’s coming here and then we we’ll proceed towards Rome together. I’m very happy to get to stay in Vienna three more days. I love it here.

  This morning I rode on the giant 1896 Ferris wheel called Der Riesenrad. One revolution for about five dollars, you’re in a cabin of about ten people, freely pacing, its like a long gondola with a wooden floor. When we got in, I was excited, and I yelled “Riesenrad!” What a funny word. Everyone laughed excitedly.

  I’ve shopped a little, doing Bower Bird, getting my nest ready to welcome the female. I got snacks for her, and a present, and I tidied up my meager, inexpensive room. From my actions one would deduce that I’ve missed the girl.

  I bought tickets to the Italian commedia dell’arte type Circus Roncalli so I can take her there on Sunday afternoon. I saw a kind of preview of this circus by accident the other day. I snuck in at half-time because I was walking by at night alone. I saw a woman performer with red tights and red cones glued all over herself, like a hedgehog, and she gets on a slack wire and makes a weird bird noise and jiggles back and forth, hyper and funny.

  I’ve been to see the Bruegels every day—three days so far—and I’m learning more and more.

  I’m more and more stoked about Bruegel. I know so much about him now. I plan to do a historical novel (maybe not SF) about Bruegel’s life, and write it from the point of view of his friend Ortelius, who I can relate to as a voice because cartography is a bit mathy. The fractals of coastlines and of painting, although they wouldn’t mention fractals, of course (unless a time traveler gets involved). Bruegel had such an interesting life. As I say, I can relate to him, as he, like me, was a peasant who became a cultured man. (Kentuckian = peasant).

  The end of his life was clouded by the Spanish who were being real pricks. They controlled the Netherlands which was Holland and Belgium. It was the time of the reformation, when the Protestants (Anabaptists) split off from the RC church. There was a political thing about Spain being Roman Catholic and occupying the Netherlands, who were kind of Protestant. they hung a lot of people.

  Bruegel was mainly a humanist—a philosophy of the times—it meant that he cared about individuals, and not so much about the religious labels. He didn’t like seeing people get hanged. He was ill for the last year of his life—some say it was arthritis and a stomach ulcer. At the end he was painting fast, he did most of his cosmic masterworks in his last six years and then no paintings for a year, and then he was buried.

  At the time some of the occupying Spanish soldiers were quartered in his house. He drew some really mocking pictures of them that he had his wife burn so she wouldn’t get in trouble. His wife Mayken, great name. She was the daughter of his first teachers, a man and woman who both were artists in Antwerp.

  I feel like I know what Bruegel looked like because he put himself into some of his pictures. He had long hair and a long straight nose—he wasn’t a fat peasant type of guy. He looked more like a thoughtful hippie, maybe a little like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider—but with a much calmer vibe.

  I could go on about this stuff for a long time—and hopefully I will. I don’t think anyone has written a regular novel about his life yet, although there is a book that’s part novel and part ecstatic rumination—Claude-Henri Rocquet, Bruegel, or the Workshop of Dreams, originally published in French. If I can, I’d like to include some photos of his pix.

  September 26-28, 1998. Autumn at the Circus.

  So Sylvia showed up yesterday, it’s nice to have my big canary bird singing in the room. Another sunny day.

  It’s Saturday morning, and I just found out I can’t get my laundry back till Monday. I thought the laundress said Thursday afternoon, and I showed up Friday morning, she said no, Friday afternoon, and on Friday afternoon my feet and legs were too tired to walk the ten minutes to the damned Wäscherei, and now she’s closed till Monday at 8 am, and the train to Siena that we’d wanted leaves at 7:30 am. Trains and hotels, somehow it’s proving difficult to get into Italy. Well, we’ll just stay in Vienna till Tuesday.

  Listening to me rattle on about Bruegel, my wife remarks, “Why not just let the Bruegel thing be a hobby, something you’re interested in? It doesn’t necessarily have to turn into a book.”

  Which is true as well. I don’t have to own the subject and put my stamp on it. I could enjoy it, rather than making it a job. I could relax.

  We’ve been gone so long it’s unbelievable, sometimes it all blends and I can’t remember anymore what city I’m in
. But always I’m happy to be doing something so different.

  I’m totally physically exhausted from touring every day for over four weeks now. Greedy! I think it’s the walking on hard pavement, also you just do walk much more. I look forward to sitting on the train for fourteen hours tomorrow.

  I bought an extra wool sweater today. Wool! Sylvia is looking at Trachten which is this weird kind of Tyrolean clothes that they have, boiled wool mostly, with Edelweiss flowers embroidered on. Are short leathern breeches next?

  I got to see the Bruegels four times. Not fully sure I can do the book on him, I need to think about the angle some more. I acquired a number of books about him in the museum shop and mailed them back home today—five kilograms, too heavy to carry. The post-office woman was so unbelievably rude and unhelpful. I mentioned this to my Vienna friend Konrad Becker, and he said the Viennese postal workers treat everyone that way, not just the tourists. His theory is that Vienna is far east that it shades into having surly State employees along the lines of the Soviet Union’s.

  There’s a snack stand by the street-car stop called Wurst Und Durst. Sausage And Thirst. Beer-drinking bums hang out there, sticking their heads into streetcars to ask for money.

  Sylvia and I went to the wonderful Circus Roncalli yesterday afternoon. One clown had a Fellini-style pointed hat and a spangled suit with high shoulders. Another clown walked around upside down on a ceiling suspended high in the tent. He was bouncing a ball up there, sweeping, and trying to drink from a bottle—but the liquid went the wrong way. We got so confused watching him. You couldn’t tell what was holding him up

  Everything in the circus entrance way was velvet, and people were drinking champagne—it was lovely, so full of color and laughter and love.

  Leaving the circus, we had a strange moment. As I say, it was Sunday afternoon, and when we came outside and there was a chill in the air, and some low gray clouds—although still with bits of blue showing through. Some of the leaves on the tree were yellow. All of a sudden it was Fall—it had come gradually and we’d been too busy playing to notice. It had been Summer when we left home, but now we’d stayed away so long that it was Fall, us off in a distant city. We’d stayed away longer than I’d realized. And I had feeling, too, that, in the great “year” of my life it had just now turned Fall. It turned to Fall while we were at the Circus.

  September 29, 1998. On the Train Through the Italian Alps.

  So now we’re finally moving into Italy. I was like a fly with my feet caught, pleasantly, in the sweet whipped cream—the Schlag—of Vienna the Zuckerbäcker (means Sugarbaker = confectioner) city. Six days.

  Our train is going through “Bruegel’s Alps” as I think of them now, the mountains at the top of Italy that he traveled through in 1552 on his trip from the Lowlands to Rome. Imagine Bruegel’s reactions to seeing the Alps.

  “The land—it rises up high high into the air!”

  The blue ranges of the more distant hills, the low gray clouds. The trees are displayed so three-dimensionally, rotating as you pass them by.

  More imagined remarks by Bruegel. I’m starting to hear his voice in my head.

  “And in places the rock bones show through the green flesh of the hills.”

  “The plane of the world is tilted.”

  “The hills rise up like waves in water.”

  As we come into Italy, I’m scared. On the other hand, it’s nice to hear two women chattering in Italian on the train. They seem like parrots.

  And, as soon as we’re in their home country, the waiters on the train become surly and rude.

  September 30, Siena. The Hotel Garden.

  We did about 16 hours door-to-door travel yesterday and landed in a hotel called Villa Scacciapensieri. The name isn’t someone’s surname, no, it means “scratch [out] thought” or relax, and also is the Italian name for the Jews-harp, which is the logo of the hotel. It’s further outside the town than I’d expected, kind of in a suburb by a busy road, though with a nice view of the Chianti hills and a lovely big flowering garden outside our window.

  I just had a good breakfast of Italian coffee and rolls. The room has nice tile floors and old, rustic-type furniture, quite elegant. It looks like another sunny day. I hope I don’t walk too much. Going biking might be good. The hotel has bikes you can borrow.

  I have an irritable tendency to want to complain about things like the traffic noise from the nearby road, but this seems unworthy and ungrateful. The very act of being on a vacation sets up—at least in me—an expectation of achieving some kind of perfection. A striving. When really I should be relaxing.

  I need to remind myself over and over that perfection is not a reasonable, attainable goal that I can be happy in pursuing. Instead my goal must be serenity, acceptance and love. It’s only me in only this same worldly world. Just as at home, beautiful things and moments are found not everywhere, but as gems set here and there. Never-quite-predictable glints in the fabric of ordinary life. Yes, yes. It’s nice sitting here in the sun writing this, my legs up, Sylvia just inside having breakfast. A bird flutters in a corner of a vineyard below.

  Siena makes me think of Bruegel landscapes. The successive scrims of the hills, bluer in the distance. The surface of the Earth here is like a restless sea. Looking at Sienese art, I note the crisp way the faces stand out in the 13th C icons.

  Humanity is everywhere, like fish in a reef, like flowers in a field, all with the same powers of visualization and planning.

  The olive trees are shoots from centuries old trunk stubs. The stubs are covered with thick green moss, and the dirt around the trunks is plowed, probably to keep the weeds down.

  The Tuscan hills. The chestnuts, oaks with acorns, porcini mushrooms and wild pigs—they all fit together in a musky, nutty whole.

  October 2, 1998. Bike Ride. Vision of God.

  This morning I borrowed a mountain bike from the Villa Scacciapensieri and rode out into some of the Chianti hills. I had a lovely view of Siena from a mountaintop winery. I kept thinking about Bruegel. A few peasants were visible working the fields, six of them even picking the big sweet dark Chianti grapes, the peasants dressed in light blue cotton overalls and using red plastic buckets.

  I was thinking about Chris Langton, what he said at the Digital Biota 2 conference in Cambridge: “It’s all biology, folks: our cities, this projector, and even this damned computer. Our artifacts are things that we grow—no different than seashells or termite mounds.”

  His idea is to think of man not as some mistaken invader, and of our machines not as some blight upon Nature. It’s a comforting, integrated, Bruegelian world view.

  On my bike ride I stopped in a small stone church on a hilltop and had a kind of vision of God.

  “I made all of this,” He seemed to say. “It’s all biology, all part of a whole, my divine Light is in each and every fiber of everything there is.”

  Looking there at yet another painting of Christ being lowered from the cross, I thought, “Oh, all right already, I’ll let this into my heart.”

  I was thinking of the image of solemn, noble, wise, hippie-like Bruegel staring, hands folded, at Christ carrying the cross in The Procession to Calvary. Bruegel my role model in all things these days.

  What does the Christ story mean? God is universal, yet Christ is just a man. Even if you get crucified, the gospels tell us, God can still save you, He can still raise you from the dead.

  I remember a folk-song that Roger Shatzkin used to sing on the Parrish steps back at Swarthmore.

  I walked into a church one day

  While travelin’ on my way

  I gave my heart to Jesus there

  He’s comin’ back to Earth again

  To save us from our sin

  And if you would believe in Him

  He’ll take you ‘way where there’s no fear.

  October 3, 1998. Rome. Gypsies.

  So here we are, the travel twins, sitting in The Netgate cybercafe in Piazza Firenze, doing emai
l.

  “Are you Romulus or Remus?” I ask Sylvia.

  No answer for now. This is beyond a long vacation by now, this is becoming a new way of life.

  “Look out for the gypsies,” says Sylvia every time we enter a big monument area.

  “Why should I be scared,” I’ll rudely respond. “I already live with one.”

  “Yes, but I know how sneaky we really are,” she answers.

  We saw a woman dressed all in black bent almost double, with a cane, and a little small black backpack inching through the plaza in front of the Pantheon. A snobby Italian waiter had just finished shooing her away from a cafe, really ruthlessly, and she had angled off in a new direction like a deflected slow-moving wind-up toy. Sylvia was sure it was a gypsy or a kid pretending to be old, so we went and looked, and whoah she really was old, ancient, a Medieval type crone, so I gave her a couple of hundred-lire coins.

  It’s raining pretty hard. The first real rain of the trip. The cybercafe popped up blessedly just at the right moment. California Dreamin’ by the Mamas and Papas is on the sound system here. Kinda perfect. Always cozy to plug back in.

  October 4-5, 1998. Rome. Bruegel and Christ.

  The first place we visited in Rome was the ancient Pantheon. It has Corinthian columns and a hole in the middle of its dome roof.

  I keep having this feeling of having stayed here too long. Like in a fairy tale where the girl goes down for a day to the land at the bottom of the well, and when she comes back, she’s been gone for a hundred years.

  How best to do the Bruegel book? I’d like something I can polish off in a year—I don’t want to make a life’s work of it. A simple option: show the pictures and for each one have a reminiscence by Ortelius, and it adds up to a novel. I could even hoax it and say I found the Ortelius writings. And then I’m just writing an intro.

  “I’m Flemish.” I love it. My new line. My roots!

  Rome—the Eternal City. Lots of noisy traffic. Wonderful yellows, pinky-beige, ochers, fauns, umbers in the colors of the walls.