by Rudy Rucker
Outside I see the truck of a butcher or caterer with Göd on the back, would be a great heavy metal band name. And then I happen upon what looks like a circus, set up in a tent in front of a very fancy white stone building, the city hall. It turns out to be intermission at the circus, people are drinking champagne, and I blend into the crowd and wander in for the second act. It's called the Circus Roncalli, and it's awesome. They have a clown with a traditional pointed hat and spangle suit with high shoulders and everything velvet, just like in a Fellini movie. And then there's a skinny performer in red tights and with red cones glued all over himself, big cones, so prickly, and he gets on slack wire and makes a weird bird noise and jiggles back and forth so hyper and funny. I'd like to see that again. What an unexpected treat.
September 25, 1998. Vienna. Learning About Bruegel.
I'm stoked about Bruegel. I'm learning so much about him. In the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, there are pictures by his father-in-law and his sons and his grandson and his friends, I can start to get the context.
The end of his life was clouded by the Spanish who were being
Page 289
real pricks. They controlled the Netherlands which was Holland and Belgium. It was the time when the Protestants split off from the Roman Catholic 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, he cared about people, not so much about the religious labels. He didn't like seeing people get hanged. Bruegel died in his early forties. He was ill for the last year of his life, we know he didn't die suddenly because before that he was painting really fast, turning out his masterworks, and then suddenly there were no paintings for a year and then he was buried. At the time some Spanish soldiers were perhaps quartered in his house. He made some really mocking drawings that he had his wife Mayken burn so she wouldn't get in trouble. Mayken was the daughter of a man and woman who both were artists in Antwerp, Bruegel started out as her father's apprentice. I could go on about this stuff for a long time . . . and hopefully I will.
September 26, 1998. Vienna. Audrey is Here.
Audrey showed up yesterday, it's nice to have my big canary back singing in the room. Another sunny day. Yesterday shopped a little, doing bower bird getting the nest ready to welcome his mate. I got snacks for her, and a present, concert and circus tickets, and tidied up the room. From my actions one would deduce that I've missed the woman.
I've been to see the Bruegels every day - 3 days so far - and am learning more and more. I have a lot of notes. I always carry a folded-in-four piece of paper in my back pocket to write on.
I'm excited about the idea of writing a novel about Bruegel. There actually is already a kind of novel about Bruegel's life.53 It's pretty good, but it leaves me plenty of room to work in. Bruegel's a big guy.
53. Claude-Henri Rocquet, Bruegel or the Workshop of Dreams, (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1991). Originally published in French by Denoël in 1987. Another relevant novel is Marguerite Yourcenar, The Abyss, (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, New York 1976), which gives a good picture of the Netherlands in the 16th Century. The Abyss is the life story of an alchemist named Zeno, rather than being about painters.
Page 290
Rudy in Vienna.
(Photo by S. Rucker.)
September 29, 1998. Vienna to Siena. Autumn at the Circus.
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 (Sugarbaker = confectioner) city. Six days.
Four days I visited the big B. in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. One day the museum was closed and one day I was too tired. So tired, my legs and body are. The fifteen hour train trip comes as a welcome rest.
Now the 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 1554. Imagine B'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. I try to imagine more remarks by B: "And in places, the rock bones show through the green flesh of the hills." ''The plane of the world is tilted." "The hills rising up like waves in water."
The other day in Vienna, there was a strange moment - Audrey
Page 291
and I went to the Circus Roncalli on Sunday afternoon, it was lovely, so full of color and laughter and love. And then we came outside and there was a chill in the air, and some low gray clouds - though still with blue showing through - and some of the leaves on the tree were yellow and it was like all of a sudden it was fall, and it had come perhaps 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, a feeling of having stayed away longer than I'd realized, and a feeling, too, that in the great "year" of my life' it's fall. It turned to fall while we were at the circus.
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. 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 sixteen 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 time-wasting mouth-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 fab-
Page 292
ric of ordinary life. Yes, yes. It's nice sitting here in the sun writing this, my legs up, Audrey just inside having breakfast, a bird fluttering in a corner of a vineyard below.
October 1, 1998. Siena. Women Walking. Landscape.
Observing tourists, I note that Japanese women don't move their hips when they walk. They kind of stomp along like Frankenstein. At the other extreme, looking at an Italian TV show about models (our room has a TV), I realize that the secret of the way models walk is that they cross their legs at each step. This exaggerates the hip motion and keeps a tapered silhouette for their body.
Siena makes me think of Bruegel landscapes. The successive scrims of the hills, bluet 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 Century 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 - all fit together in a musky, nutty whole.
October 2, 1998. Bike Ride, Jesus.
This morning I borrowed a mountain bike from the Villa Scacciapensie
ri and rode out into some of the Chianti hills. I had a lovely view of Siena from one 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. And I was thinking about Chris Langton, what he said in his talk at the Digital Biota 2 conference in Cambridge, it went something like this.
It's all biology, folks: our cities, this projector, and even that damned computer. Our artifacts are things that we grow - no different than seashells or termite mounds.
To think of man not as some mistaken invader, and of machines not
Page 293
as some blight upon Nature - it's a comforting, integrated, Bruegelian world view.
On my bike ride I stopped in a big church on a hilltop and was struck by thoughts of God. "I made all of this," He seemed to say. It's all biology, all part of a whole, the divine Light in each and every fiber of everything there is. Looking at yet another painting of Christ being lowered from the cross, I'm thinking, "All right already, I will let this into my heart." Remembering solemn, hip, wise, noble Bruegel staring, hands folded, at Christ with the cross in The Procession to Calvary - what does the Christ story mean? God is universal, yet Christ is just a man. His story means Love and Compassion and Trust God. Even if you get crucified, the Passion Story tells us, God can still save you, can still raise you from the dead.
I recall the song Roger 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 5, 1998. Roman Gladiators.
We're in Rome, it's raining, it's Monday and the museums are closed. I go to the Forum and to the Colosseum and there are Italians dressed up like gladiators outside the Colosseum. They have red togas and those brush hats. Very funny, lively guys, trying to get three bucks from each person who takes their picture, threatening everyone with plastic swords. Fierce punks, actually. Not so different after two thousand years.
October 6, 1998. Rome. Book Interview, Capitoline Museum.
Today I did a booklength interview for Sante DiRenzo publishing - it'll be a thin book, DiRenzo puts out slim volumes of modern
Page 294
thinkers' ideas, for university students, mostly. I have an uneasy feeling I ego-tripped too much, talking mostly about my life, as opposed to ideas. Well, I can fix it up in proofs, chainsaw in some stuff from Seek!
After the interview I 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. Myoor! There was a bust of a guy called Massimino. "Little Max."
In the room of busts I saw one on the top shelf that was - I swear - the deceased California 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, "I beat them all. I'm immortal. Ain't death a bitch?"
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 Smyrna 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.
"Hi, I'm Ken and this is Barb." The American couple next to us at the pizzeria full of bus tourists.
October 7, 1998. Rome. Galleria Borghese.
The great Gian Lorenzo Bernini has a sculpture of the victory of truth, says he wants to show "columns, obelisks, and mausoleums destroyed by Time," that's Rome. He didn't finish that part, though, just has Truth, who looks like some mountain girl hippie peaking on acid.
The Galleria Borghese is largely filled with paintings and sculp-tures of rich pricks, ward-heelers. The complete bullshit bankruptcy of religious art peaks in Titian with his Play-Doh people.
Looking at Bernini's Rape of Persephone and seeing real people around it, I have to think that the real people are more important. So why am I looking at the statue? Why did I stand in line to see it?
Page 295
Well, people go away, but the art is always the same. It's a still center-point.
Cardinal Scipio Borghese, called Scip for short, built this gallery. Bernini did two busts of him, the first had a crack in the marble, so Bernini copied it in three feverish days.
When they were excavating near the Termini, they found a Roman statue of an ermafrodito or hermaphrodite, a guy half on his stomach, his butt invitingly pointed at you, his small and stiff dick laid out in front of him so cute, and he has some nice small boobs. Cardinal Scip flipped for this sculpture, natch, and had Bernini make a pillow and a mattress for it! Outta marble, you wave, with all the skillful Bernini touches to make the stone look soft and real. A number of stubborn stains on that ermafrodito, though.
October 8, 1998. Rome to Naples. Landscape, Museo Nazionale.
I had breakfast with a boy, a "ragazzo" named Roberto, one of my fans, a physics student in Rome. He had a list of big questions for me, like I used to have for Gödel, and indeed he said, "I'm 21, I feel like you visiting Gödel, there is a similar ratio." A nice thought, though 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 today. 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 have never traveled, but I am sure that nowhere is the sky so beautiful as in Rome."
I spend the day visiting two Bruegels in the Museo or Galleria Nazionale in the Capodimonte park of Naples. Hard to find the two Bruegels in the endless galleries. The unbelievable richness of the collection. The unfriendly jabbering Italians and their insane trove of art. Nobody but nobody is in there 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
Page 296
Bruegels are such a sudden oasis of intelligence in this wilderness of schlock and shit. Yes, of all the paintings in the enormous Museo Nazionale in Naples, only the Bruegels - The Misanthrope and The Parable of the Blind - only these seem to have something to say.
The Misanthrope is on cloth. There's vertical oval patches of water damage along the left half. It's scraped near the top center right. Signed BRVEGEL 1568, the year before he died.
It strikes me to think of this as 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 remind me of the Bruegel likeness in Procession to Calvary. I have the feeling that when he painted this he knew he was mortally ill. The Misanthrope is headed to the left, into death, with mushrooms growing under the rotten trees. Shrooms = decay.
It has this caption, in a really weird script:
