by Rudy Rucker
In the background are a bunch of interesting characters. A scholarly fellow with glasses. Joseph's accountant? One of the soldiers is a classic, pie-eyed fool. Next to him is a fat guy like the oyster man at our market.
There's a second, small Bruegel too, a grisaille of Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery. Jesus is writing in the sand. "DIE SONDER SUND IST / DIE . . . " This is the beginning of the Flemish for "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." The picture is signed
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BRUEGEL MDLXV. Kind of incredible to see Bruegel's signature. The picture is small, I have trouble looking at it well. This story it illustrates was said to be a favorite among Protestants, another heavy historical touch, to know that the Protestant reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation were raging through the Lowlands.
Getting into the subway the next day, Audrey got ahead of me and she got on and the door closed me off. A door that had a slanting section at the top, like a greenhouse. Audrey looked 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 British "tube" subway trains, the dangling hand grips are coiled springs with black Bakelite bulbs.
September 13, 1998. Cambridge, My a-Life Talk.
So now we've been to London and came to Cambridge for the Digital Biota 2 Conference, the guys who paid our airfare. It's Sunday night, the conference is over. I gave a good talk this morning, trying to make two points: (1) the Ware series is a thought experiment about artificial life, and (2) A-life can have soul because God is everywhere. And I ran my CAPOW continuous-valued cellular automata screensaver as a background behind me, showing oozing colored computational liquids.
Actually I stood in the projection beam a lot, I like to feel the CAs on my body, but probably it would have been better to stand to one side. In the light of the computer projector, I always think of Tim Leary onstage in NYC with big oil-drop light-show images on him as he gives a group "Guided Trip." In my talk I mentioned that I'd told Audrey I kind of wanted to take my clothes off so I could feel the CAs on my bare skin, but she'd said she didn't think it was a good idea. What she really said was, "Now that you're not drunk and stoned, why act like you are?"
September 16, 1998. Edinburgh.
Up at the Edinburgh Castle today, there was a stained glass window knight standing on a knotted shape and Audrey thought it was a bagpipe, but it was a dragon, coiled Celtically. I love the ambiguity between dragons and bagpipes.
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What a spooky town. Halloween-like. Such flinty hard gray brick walls, with spectral spires and steeples poking up at the crests of the craggy hills and at the ends of the long, dwindling avenues. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was set in Edinburgh.
Lovely faces the British have, all so fair and clear-skinned and crisp-featured. Why was I against British things for so long? I was a fool. It's nice here. Easy to talk the language. Everyone polite.
The Scots really are frugal. Scrooge McDuck and Lord Quackly's castle. In our hotel room, there's a slot in the wall where you put your room key, and when you take the key out to leave, all the power to the room is cut off. It's handy for rebooting the timed bathroom vent-fan.
My legs are very tired. In a big landscape my legs are like - I often think - a spermatozoon tail beating. And now the beating grows pained and feeble.
September 21, 1998. Antwerp. Bruegel.
We're in Antwerp now. I've had breakfast and taken a walk. I got a book about Bruegel by Keith Roberts in Edinburgh and have been reading it. I've decided to make Peter Bruegel the Elder my focus for this trip. I'd kind of like to write a historical novel about him. After Antwerp, while Audrey makes another stop in Geneva, I'll hit Brussels and Vienna. Vienna has the Kunsthistorisches Museum where so many Bruegel paintings live. There's several in Brussels as well.
There's some pictures by Bruegel's sons in Antwerp. Peter the Younger copied a lot of his paintings, but Jan struck off on his own topics. He painted flowers, for instance. Jan was fat and rich, a friend of Rubens, a good dresser, they called him "Velvet" Bruegel. The Rubens religious art has huge mannerist human figures.
I keep looking for parallels between myself and Bruegel. Me as a novelist and nonfiction writer, him as a painter and engraver. His paintings never made it into churches as altarpieces because they were satirical (e.g. a man who won't help Christ carry His cross is wearing a rosary) and often vulgar (with people shitting and pissing). He possibly came from a peasant background, but as an adult he was a cultured man. (Kentuckian = peasant!) He worked a lot with the tension between his overall landscape or theme (cf. plot or science concept) and the specific individuality of his people. Later in life Bruegel started to
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paint increasingly large and detailed human figures, akin to a writer beginning to use stronger, more fully developed characters. Bruegel prided himself on drawing sketches from life; a bit like the transreal notion of working real settings and people into your art.
Walking around inside the big Antwerp cathedral today. Christ, but religious art makes me want to puke after awhile. So vapid and unreal and knuckled-under to the fat-bellied powers of the Church. Might Bruegel have felt this way?
In the streets of Antwerp, I'm thinking that the genes walking around me are the same genes that Bruegel was surrounded by. Like a little pond of fish. It's been four hundred fifty years, about fifteen generations.
The people here so far have seemed a bit rapacious and unfriendly. They speak Flemish, which is really the same language as Dutch. The museum in Antwerp that has the one Bruegel (the Mad Meg of 1564) is closed for renovation. The streets stink of sewer gas; it must be hard to drain here in the wet lowlands. 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 and fresh bright red blood. Some of his friends were trying to catch him. He wasn't so much screaming as squealing. 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.
But I'm a baby to be complaining. Here's a list of some things 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 (witloof) salad with Roquefort cheese. I have good shoes. I have a nice new shirt and a new vest from Scotland. I found a cybercafe where I can check my email. The world exists and I'm alive.
September 22, 1998. Brussels. Bruegel; I Become Him.
Audrey's on the train for Geneva now, and I'm alone till I see her again in three or four days. I miss her, but it's exciting to be alone.
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Well, actually it feels rootless and mortal, I feel like a piece of dust drifting around. But what adventure.
I'm getting the night train, fourteen hours to Vienna, so I have the day to kill here in Brussels. In the train station a sign warns to look out for zakkenrollers, which is Flemish for "pickpockets." I checked my bags in at the station and visited the six Bruegels in the Belgian Royal Museum of Fine Arts.
1) The Adoration of the Magi. 1556. A tempera on canvas, an early work in poor condition.
2) Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. 1557? Several versions exist, and this may be a copy. Heavily retouched in any case.
3) The Fall of the Rebel Angels. 1562. A Boschian work, complete with lobster-demons.
4) Yawning Man. 1563. A miniature, of questionable provenance.
5) Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap. 1565. One of Bruegel's most copied pictures. The birds are so full of character.
6) The Numbering at Bethlehem. 1566. A Bible scene set in a winter Flemish village. A masterpiece.
Brussels is French-speaking, unlike Antwerp, which was Flemish-speaking. In Antwerp people repeatedly started talking to me in Fl
emish. I look Flemish! "These are my people," I kept telling Audrey. There is a well-known ancient Flemish family of harpsichord makers called Ruckers. I always thought the Bosch and Bruegel faces looked like mine, e.g. the drunk man in The Peasant Dance. 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.
In Antwerp yesterday, 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!
I just visited the house of Bruegel's granddaughter - and possibly his house as well - in the Marolles district of Brussels on a street called Hoogstraat, just a few blocks down from the Notre
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Dame de la Chapelle, which is where Peter and Mayken were married in 1563, and where Peter was buried in 1569. If he lived in that house, how local and touching. Six short blocks down Hoogstraat from the church to his house. I lit a candle by his grave marker, knelt and prayed - for what? Oh, to say "Hi" to Bruegel, and that I'm thinking about him and might try and write about him.
I wrote this up over an omelet in a sidewalk cafe in Brussels. While I was writing, a man begged me for money, he had the gentlest smile, his hat held out, I shook my head, continuing to write, and he said "C'est l'article important . . . " and wandered off - what if it was Bruegel I just refused?
I then walked a block, and sat down for a dessert in a different cafe. I saw one of those European women who make me think of a big '50s populuxe American car - the plump lips and strong teeth like a grille, the Bezier curve cheeks, the thick bob of dyed blonde hair, huge knockers under a tight silky chartreuse woman top, skin bronzed from studio tan. She was two cafes down. 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 any populuxe Euro woman, dessert is readily attainable, even for a fifty-two-year-old man.
I'm going back to the museum to look at some engravings (I think) that I requested at the Cabinet des Estampes of the museum. I asked for La Cuisine Maigre, La Cuisine Grasse, and L'Homme à la Recherche de Lui Même. Thin Man, Fat Man, and me.
So I went and did that. Actual fucking Bruegel drawings had been engraved and printed by Hieronymous Cock in 15-whatever and I was sitting there looking at them and even touching one with the tip of my finger. They gave me four different versions (states? editions?) of the Man in Search of Himself. He's labeled Elck (everyman) and holds up a lantern to peer inside a barrel, the goof.
After the engravings there was almost no time and I ran back up to the Bruegel paintings. I felt such sorrow leaving them, especially The Numbering at Bethlehem. "Goodbye, I love you." The other painters of the time are muddy and dumb. Bruegel is clear, intelligent. I was almost in tears leaving the museum.
I ducked into a museum of musical instruments hoping to see a 16th
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Century Flemish bagpipe - they had lots of bagpipes there, but only from the 19th and 20th C, and none from Flanders. I would suppose the leather sack would rot away over the years, but some 16th C nozzles could have survived. The thing I did see in the music museum was a "virginal" - a keyboard instrument like a rectangular box on legs - made by Andreas Ruckers, Antwerp 1620. My ancestor Peter Rucker came to America in 1690, twelve generations ago. The Andreas Ruckers virginal appears in a painting by Vermeer. They had a print of the painting right next to the instrument. 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, in fact Bruegel's name is spelled ''Bruegels" in one document. Since I'm Flemish, maybe Bruegel and I are related! After today, I feel a spark of him alive in me and will fan it more.
Late in the afternoon, I get the Brussels subway to the train station to catch the night train to Vienna to visit Bruegel's twelve pictures there. And on the subway I get into my SF trip that Bruegel's alive inside me, looking through my eyes. I've "twinked" him as I used to say - this being the word I made up to mean thinking or praying 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 so odd - is it a dragon? The columns holding up the roof look thin and strange. A girl is sitting and singing - beautifully - for money and for the second time I deny a beggar, though the Bruegel inside me wants to go over to her, she's the only living lovely thing in this human ants-nest subway dungeon.
I follow signs for the train station - supposedly reachable from the subway stop - and end up in half-finished construction (there's a lot of that in Belgium, they seem to be slackers). The sun is setting, light on a glass building, no sign of green, just metal 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 Bruegel down so I can find my train, get my suitcase out of baggage claim, change some money to pay for that, look out for zakkenrollers, etc. And finally I'm up on the platform and - for Bruegel - fill my fountain pen from a bottle of ink
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I carry in my suitcase. Bruegel is interested in the fountain pen of course. I take out a paper and try to draw a few faces I'd seen, in particular the face of a new Mayken I saw, she sat across from me in the Metro, sweet mouth intelligent eyes, and where is my Mayken-Audrey now - I'm such a piece of dust.
September 23, 1998. Vienna.
I took the overnight train here yesterday. It was good, I slept quite well. Just talked to Audrey on the phone; she's frazzled, she can't find a hotel for us in Venice, I suggest she come meet me in Vienna, though she's also thinking of Verona. All "V" cities all of a sudden. Vienna is nice, I wouldn't mind spending extra time here.
I saw twelve Bruegels this morning! Among them are his greatest works; he only did about two dozen major paintings. The Hapsburg Emperor Rudolf II was a great art collector, and his older brother Archduke Ernst was the governor of the Netherlands. They acquired all the Bruegels they could find by 1600.
1) The Battle Between Carnival and Lent. 1559.
2) Children's Games. 1560.
3) The Suicide of King Saul. 1562.
4) The Tower of Babel. 1563.
5) The Procession to Calvary. 1564.
6) The Gloomy Day. 1565.
7) Return of the Herd. 1565.
8) The Hunters in the Snow. 1565.
9) The Conversion of St. Paul. 1567.
10) The Peasant Wedding. 1568.
11) The Peasant Dance. 1568.
12) The Peasant and the Birdnester. 1568.
The Procession to Calvary is particularly interesting because on the right edge there's a portrait in profile of a man that's believed to be Bruegel himself. He has long hair, a beard and a long straight nose; he's not a fat peasant at all. He looks a little like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, only kind and gentle instead of tense and crazed. It's incredible to see Bruegel right there, calm and serious, staring at Christ carrying his cross.
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The net impact of so many masterpieces in one room is overwhelming, so much so that I kind of short out. The paintings in Brussels were easier to approach, the place was all but deserted and there was a feeling of having them to myself. The pictures here aren't so easy to see. Some are glassed-over, some are blocked by two artist women who are painting strong-smelling oil copies of their own, there are big tour-groups, there is 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.
In any case, the world looks fine now, I just had a big meal: spaetzle, salad and some schnitzels of Steinpilz mushrooms. Pretty good, though I hadn't been expecting deep-fried when it said the mushroom
s were "gebacken" (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 chanced to pass by - there's a mummy of a fish in the Rosicrucian museum in San Jose.
