Collected Essays (89 page)

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.

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.