Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  I’m sitting by the Castel Sant’Angelo, off to my left is the Sant’Angelo bridge over the Tiber, the bridge lined with angels holding, some of them, big heavy crucifixes.

  My old dislike of Christianity and especially Roman Catholicism keeps wanting to flare up, and I keep wanting to try on a Bruegelian love of Christ instead.

  Imagine the Light of God shining through a human form: Jesus.

  “My problem isn’t Christ, it’s the Christians.”

  This line of thought could have been an issue for Bruegel as well. He certainly makes fun of the Church. And the Spanish Duke of Alba was laying waste to Bruegel’s people in the name of the Church. But even so, I’m sure he took the religion very seriously.

  For the purpose of getting the right mindset for my novel, I need to work on letting Jesus into my heart. And, yes, sometimes I can almost feel Him standing next to me.

  Of course after that last pious journal rap, I ended up doing something selfish yesterday by carelessly losing track of Sylvia at a chaotic bus stop. There’s a big risk in any human starting to think he or she is “walking with Christ.” I think this is even more dangerous than thinking one is “doing God’s will”. These lines of thought promote a tendency to still be the same asshole, but to be self-righteous about it. It’s a real dangerous area. The trap is that once you start thinking of any man (such as Christ) being God, it’s less of a jump to think of yourself as God. What a screwy religion Christianity is.

  Anyway, after losing my wife, I found her at St. Peter’s where we’d planned to go for the 5:00 pm Vespers Mass. Boy was I glad to find her, to see her head in the crowd. My one prayer at that point was to find Sylvia—and it was answered. Divine intervention? You decide.

  St. Peter’s—what would Jesus think of it? I guess He’d be glad. But what an encrustation of symbols and rites. And the intricate symbolic codes within all the sculptures and paintings.

  It’s raining, it’s Monday and the museums are closed—no idea what to do today. I can’t wait to go home—there, I’ve said it. Rome is filthy, noisy, expensive, and I feel like a rube & goob not knowing the language. We’re hemorrhaging money here, three or four hundred bucks a day. I want to get back to my real life. Well, it’s soon. The contempt of the Italians for me makes me hate myself, makes me feel stupid and ugly—how dreadful not to know the language.

  Time for a list of things I’m grateful for. I’m in Rome. We move to a better hotel today. Tomorrow I get interviewed by this Italian publisher DiRenzo for a book and he’ll give me some money. We’ve survived this trip, almost. I’m still healthy. I have a kind, beautiful wife.

  Later in the day we go to the Forum and to the Coliseum and see Italians dressed up like gladiators outside the Coliseum. They have red togas and those brush hats. Very funny, lively guys, trying to get money from each person who takes their picture, and threatening everyone with plastic swords. Fierce punks, actually. Not so different after two thousand years.

  October 6, 1998. Rome. Filosofo Cyberpunk. Arneson.

  We were in a cruddy bus-tourist hotel our first night, but I found a classier hotel and it’s great—it’s $320 a night marked down to $200. The nicest room I’ve ever slept in, I think. Striped wall paper above wainscoting, a twenty-foot coffered ceiling with a chandelier. A rug so nice you want to take your shoes off—as opposed to not wanting to walk on it barefoot.

  Today I did my (thin) booklength interview for Sante DiRenzo publishing, they put out slim volumes of modern thinkers’ ideas, for university students, mostly. This one will be called Filosofo Cyperpunk, or Cyberpunk Philosopher, an Italian-only book.

  Sylvia thinks this is funny, she’s been chirping, “Filosofo,” at me. “Oh, Filosofo!”

  I have an uneasy feeling I ego-tripped too much in the interview, talking mostly about my life, as opposed to my ideas. Well, I can fix the thing up in proofs, and chainsaw in some stuff from my Seek! nonfiction anthology.

  After the interview we went to the Capitoline Museum on the Campidoglio Hill. A great hall of busts in one room. The whole museum in glorious disorder, so Italian. No labels on anything other than the occasional engraved Latin ones. Cow skulls are a big motif in the friezes. Mur!

  The Roman noses on the busts so long and straight, like columns. And always a pulpy, twisted sensual little mouth.

  I touched the penis of Aristedes of Smyrra and got scolded by a guard.

  People crowded into a gallery—the live heads looking at the stone head. Really, how very much more interesting are the live ones. Yet we look at the stone ones.

  In the room of busts I saw one on the top shelf that was—I swear—the sculptor Robert Arneson, who so loved to make classical busts of himself. Yes, it was Arneson, looking quiet and sneaky, his eyes fixed on a corner up by the ceiling, his mouth tight, pulled to one side as if holding in a laugh and saying—oh—maybe he was saying:

  “I beat them all. I’m immortal. Ain’t death a bitch?”

  October 7, 1998. Rome. Galleria Borghese.

  Looming large among the treasures of the fabulous Borghese Gallery are the sculptures of great Gian Lorenzo Bernini. In his statue, The Victory of Truth, he’d wanted to show “columns, obelisks, and mausoleums destroyed by Time”—sounds like Rome! Actually he didn’t finish all that that part, though, he just has Truth, who looks like a Mountain Girl type hippie, peaking on acid.

  We pass a painting by Giampietrino of Mary Feeding Jesus, made about 1550. I mentioned this work in my novel The Sex Sphere, which has a big scene in the Galleria Borghese based on our earlier visit here—wow—twenty years ago.

  Looking at Bernini’s marvelous Rape of Persephone and seeing real people around it, I kind of have to think that the real people are more important. So why am I so happy to be looking at the statue, with the incredible doughiness of its stone flesh? Why did I stand in line to get in here it? Well, people go away, but the art is always the same. It’s a fixed centerpoint.

  The Galleria Borghese is rife with portrait paintings and portrait sculptures of rich pricks, ward-heelers. The spiritual and stylistic bankruptcy of religious art peaks in Titian with his Play-Doh people. I’m not big on seventeenth-century art. It’s little like Seventies arena-rock. Empty, mannered, bombastic.

  Cardinal Scipio Borghese who built this gallery, and Bernini did two busts of the Cardinal—the first had a crack in the marble, so Bernini copied it over three feverish days.

  When they were excavating near the Termini train station in Cardinal Borghese’s time, they found a Roman statue they dubbed Ermafrodito, or Hermaphrodite. It presents us with a nearly full-sized youth lying on his side, with his butt invitingly pointed at you, and his small, stiff dick laid out on one thigh so cute. He has nice little boobs.

  Cardinal Borghese flipped for this sculpture, natch, and he had Bernini make a pillow and a mattress for the ermafrodito! Outta marble, you wave, with all that skillful Bernini touches to make the stone look soft and real. A number of stubborn stains on the ermafrodito.

  October 8, 1998. Italian Landscape. Bruegel in Naples.

  Speaking of Italian youths, I had breakfast with a boy, a ragazzo named Roberto. He’s one of my fans, a physics student in Rome. He had a list of big philosophical questions for me, like the lists I used to have when I’d see the great Kurt Gödel, and indeed Roberto said, “I’m twenty-one, I feel like you visiting Gödel, there is a similar ratio.” A nice thought, although I’m certainly no King Kurt.

  I’m taking the train alone to Naples for a day. Looking out the train window. The beauty of the sky . Low fluffy clouds, almost touching the ground, but well separated, with a goodly amount of watery blue sky to see—like Spring. But, no, it’s Fall, isn’t it. The clouds are low and close enough to be noticeably three-dimensional, like weightless thickets in the air. Ravishing. The heart-blooming feeling of soft clouds and streaks of light rain.

  Roberto said, “I’ve never traveled, but I’m sure that nowhere is the sky so beautiful as in Rome.”

/>   I spend the day visiting two Bruegels in the Museo Nazionale in the Capodimonte park of Naples. Hard to find the two Bruegels in the endless galleries. The unbelievable size of the collection. The chatting, sensual Italians and their insane trove of art.

  Nobody but nobody is in the museum except the Italian guards. It feels like a high-school late in the afternoon after almost everyone’s gone home, just a small clique of people left, a clique I’m not in.

  The Bruegels are an oasis of intelligence in a wilderness of schlock and shit, mostly religious of course. Yes, of all the paintings in the enormous Museo Nazionale, only the Bruegels, only his Misanthrope and his Parable of the Blind have something to say.

  Some notes on The Misanthrope.” This could be Bruegel’s last self-portrait. Admittedly the line of the nose doesn’t match the line of the nose in Procession to Calvary. But the beard and the folded hands are the same. I have the feeling that when Bruegel painted this he knew he was mortally ill. The Misanthrope is headed to the left, into death, with mushrooms growing under the rotten trees.

  The picture has a caption painted onto it, in a really weird script:

  Om dat de Vierelt is soe ongetru

  Daer om gha ic in den ru.

  [Means]

  For that the World is so untrue

  Therefore go I in the sorrow.

  The “in den ru” is squeezed together. It hits me—wow—that I’m the Ru! In a heavily synchronistic sense, Bruegel is saying that he will go “in den ru” meaning “into a book by Rudy Rucker”! Too bad he doesn’t look a little happier about it.

  The Misanthrope and The Parable of the Blind right next to it have the same milky gray sky and dun Earth. Winter. A depressing pair. Yes, Bruegel knew he was dying.

  Riding back to Rome on the train, the clouds are lit from behind, the sun down west over the Mediterranean. Fields with streams, irrigation ditches, ponds, fens. Now and then the orange-edged clouds can be seen reflected in a patch of ruffled green water—exquisite. A line of pines, their green tops blended into one worm, their bare trunks twisting down like legs.

  Thoughts on Bruegel’s Peasant Dance

  (This part is separate from the previous travel notes.)

  I’ve loved Bruegel for a long time. When I was thirteen, my parents sent me away from Kentucky to live with my grandmother for a year in Germany. She was a wonderful old woman. To teach me German, she helped me read and reread a fairy tale about a child that falls down a well and finds another world down at the bottom, an apt image for a parallel world such as, e.g., Germany relative to Kentucky. To further educate me, Grandma showed me Das Bruegel Buch, a book of Bruegel’s paintings. I was particularly impressed by the apocalyptic Boschian painting The Triumph of Death, with its armies of skeletons. “This is cool,” I remember thinking while looking at that picture. “This is like science fiction.” I was also naively pleased with Bruegel’s hundred-in-one pictures like Netherlandish Proverbs. In later years I became more fond of Bruegel’s mature, non-seething paintings such as Peasant Dance. Thanks to their deep, detailed pictorial space, these paintings look into worlds that are very large.

  I think of Bruegel’s paintings as being like novels, so filled are they with character, incident, narrative and landscape. I feel a pang of sorrow when I stop looking at one of Bruegel’s pictures, just like when I finish reading the last page of a great novel. I don’t want to leave, I don’t want it to be over, I want to stay in that world. How far into the world of a painting or a novel can you get?

  In each, the information has a kind of fractal structure. I would define a fractal as something that has this property: when you look twice as hard at a fractal, you see three times as much. Language is fractal with words suggesting words suggesting words, while paintings are fractal with their details within details within details. A basic problem is that in either case only a limited amount of information is really being given. Fractal nature has an essentially infinite precision, but a novel or a painting is radically finite.

  How finite? It depends. A significant difference between paintings and novels is that when you get a printed copy of a novel you get all of the available information: all the letters of all the words of the text. But when you get a reproduction of a painting, you are settling for a degraded semblance of the original. Given that a painting is a non-digital object, it’s not even clear how much information really would be needed to perfectly specify the image. This is a real problem when you want to get deeper and deeper into a detailed image such as a Bruegel.

  At this stage in human technology there’s no replacement for going to a museum to look at the original of some beloved masterwork—although, sadly, the very fact of being in a museum involves its own distractions, of standing in a public space watched over by museum guards, with your schedule subject to opening and closing times and your senses impinged upon by the other tourists.

  Over the years I’ve made a point of visiting as many Bruegel paintings as possible. The world’s richest trove of Bruegels is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; they hang together in a single high-ceilinged room. I well remember the sensation I get going into this divine: a feeling of great urgency. Each picture is filled with individual specific people, places and things, all presented as the most delightful visual forms: the arabesque two-dimensional curves, the sensual massings of three-dimensional shapes, and the scumbled color fields. One of my favorite paintings there is Peasant Dance.

  Peter Bruegel’s Peasant Dance.

  Before going into detail about Peasant Dance, I want to add a detail about detail. I always have a certain disappointment when I get an extremely close look at a beloved painting, either by seeing it in person or by looking at a magnified view of some small section. At a certain level of enlargement, the painterly illusion goes away and all you see are brushstrokes. Blow up a small figure’s face and instead of pores, you see daubs of paint. The same thing is true of novels. If, for instance, you flip through a book and carefully read all the descriptions of some one favorite character, you’ll notice a certain mechanical element: certain identifier phrases and attributes occur over and over. These fictional “brushstrokes” are used by authors to give their fictional people an air of persistent existence. The seeming reality of a novel or a painting is an artful construct that only pops into focus at a certain distance. It is only the cosmic fractal of real life which allows for endless zooming.

  Peasant Dance, also known as Peasant Kermis, is one of Bruegel’s last paintings, completed a year or two before his death at about age 44 in 1569. What do we see?

  A little dirt road through a village beneath a gray sky; there’s leaves on some trees but it doesn’t feel like summer; I’d say it’s spring. Gray sky and muddy buildings, a small town. Some people dancing in the middle ground. In the foreground are two main groups, one on the left, one on the right. On the left is a bagpiper with a drunk man watching him from a few inches away. On the right, a couple is running into the canvas from outside the frame, they’re late, they’re hurrying, their attention is focused ahead of them on the dancers and probably on some food and drink back there to the left. The man is hard-faced and black-toothed, his run is already breaking into a bit of a dance, he has a spoon tucked into his hat. The woman he tows behind him is too busy hurrying to dance, she seems a pale-faced unlovely goose with room for but one thought at a time in her head.

  I always think of Jack Kerouac when I look at the drunk man watching the bagpiper, of the On The Road passages about Jack and Neal digging jazz, “Blow man, blow!” And I cringe a bit, remembering the times I’ve been like this myself: crowding up to a guitar-playing friend and fixating on his performance, “gloating over it,” as Jack says in Visions of Cody, thick-tongue-edly urging the musician on, lost in the inebriate’s self-centered feeling of creating (“realizing” by observing!) the air-vibrations and the sight trails of the soundy scene around. Meanwhile the musician is playing on, his small eyes fixed on the distance, he’s putting the music
out there, grateful perhaps for the accolades of his drunken acolyte. After all, unheard sound is hardly music at all, any more than an unseen picture is a painting, or an unread text a novel—communication is one of art’s several vital organs.

  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 universal 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—I 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.