Collected Essays (88 page)

After looking at Brancusi’s studio we here music in the street—a woman singing opera, coming from the loudspeakers of music store. Endless flowing tones. Across the way a lady sits, her leopard scarf fluttering in the wind like the flowing music, like the shapes of Brancusi, like the years that swallowed Brancusi’s eighty-year life and flew on, leaving his shapes, his cast-off shells.

Yesterday we went to the Picasso museum. Across the street from it was an abandoned building full of squatters. They called the “Anti-Museum”. They had rough studios, graffiti everywhere, no fixtures, very odd.

Picasso—the slobbering zest with which he draws women. Always with the crotch triangle and its little line. He makes it seem like such a wonderful thing to have a woman to live with.

September 7, 1998. Paris, the Gustave Moreau House.

I’m out alone today, we’re taking a day off from each other. It’s raining and a bit hard to get around, and if we’re separate it’s less hard.

Almost all French tobacco shops have the same sign. “TABAC” written inside a vertical lozenge. A few modernists have rotated the lozenge to make a double frustum shape which is made of red neon helices.

I take the Metro to the Gustave Moreau house and museum in the Pigalle neighborhood—this is a museum Sylvia definitely doesn’t want to see, she looks down Moreau. Moreau is a “symbolist”, a decadent
fin du siècle
Romantic, a bit like the Jugendstil artists Böcklin and Stuck—like theirs, his pictures have an SF/Fantasy-illo quality. These guys do art that looks, she wife says, like they never went outside. I’ve always like Moreau because he’s technically so inept that he gives hope to a would-be artist like me.

The Moreau house includes his apartments on the1
^e
étage. Notable here is how the walls of his living quarters were filled with small pictures like a photo album. He had a glass dome, shaped like a very large snow dome, with nineteen stuffed rare birds inside positioned on a dusty branch. A big ivory-billed woodpecker at the bottom, and hummingbirds at the top. What carnage.

He had a favorite small painting of his representing Pasiphae—the Greek queen who fucked a bull—there’s a white horse to the right, and in the center Pasiphae is slipping off her robes, behind her is a big black bull, to the left is a bummed-out-looking guy in a red toga. Her husband?

On the 2
^e
étage is a huge room with a spiral staircase, very ornate, leading up to the 3
^e
. The ceiling is about forty feet high. Immense muddled canvases. I go on up to the 3
^e
where the guard gets into conversation with me. He says the effect of all the pictures together is
surchargé
. There’s a really scary painting of a Christ leaning off the cross, spectral, reaching out an arm to a startled pilgrim who’s using an uprooted tree as his official pilgrim staff. The pilgrim is all “
Whoah
!”

Another interesting picture has nine panels. Left to right is time of “day”, i.e. morn, noon and eve. Top to bottom is historical era, i.e., Gold Age, Silver Age, Iron Age. The Gold Age shows Adam and Eve: Prayer, Ecstasy, Sleep. Silver Age is Orpheus and the Muse: Inspiration (Muse in full color), Song (Muse is an outline, drifting away), Tears (Muse is a faint little figure up in the sky.) The Iron Age shows Cain and maybe his wife: Work, Rest, Death. That’s modern life!

I’m somewhat amped up about drawing from doing all my illustrations for
Saucer Wisdom
. So I brought my sketch pad and some pens and pencils along for this trip, as well as a bound notebook for writing in.

Inspired the look of the Moreau museum, I retrieve my sketch pad from the coat check and sit down on little bentwood chair in the huge 2
^e
étage, trying to draw the room, including some of the paintings and above all the ornate spiral staircase. The guard for this floor hears my decisive pencil lines as I lay our my perspective axes, and he’s suspicious. He comes over to look over my shoulder. I don’t realize he’s a guard, I think he’s just a noser.

“
Vous êtes architect
?” he asks.

I answer that I’m an author who wants to sketch this space. “
Je suis écrivain. Je veux escisser cette espace.
”

The guard says that only
artists
are supposed to draw in here—to copy the pictures. He’s not sure if what I’m doing is allowed. But then I say that, within the context of my sketch, I’m going to copy the paintings into the frames that I draw, and the guard relaxes. My drawing comes out pretty well.

Later I walk up the street and enter the intersection of Pigalle and Clichy, a sex-industry zone. A woman in gold hot pants plucks my sleeve outside a little theatre. If I linger, her harpy sisters will flock onto me, stingers at the ready. I move on, and get in the subway and go to a stop called Sêvres-Babylon. I get out there because “Babylon” sounds cool.

But it’s a pretty bland neighborhood. I walk on, fighting a feeling of loneliness. Wondering why I’m here. Have to keep reminding myself this is fun—even the slack bits. I miss Sylvia, but I imagine she’s having a good time—she hasn’t been alone for two weeks.

And then, as keeps happening, if one waits, something nice turns up, a huge stone fountain in front of a church called Saint-Sulpice. One tower is covered with cloth; the wind billows in it, making tense vibrations. Inside the church is holy water in a South Pacific giant clam shell, its big wavy edge is covered over with a brass border. Crushing, vast, crazy organ music is playing, and then the organ music stops and space expands.

I venture on to the Jardins Luxembourg hoping to find my wife. So far no luck—I’m sitting here writing on a folded sheet of paper from my pocket. All caught up.

September 12, 1998. London. The Museums.

In London we initially stayed at a YMCA with endless alienating empty halls leading from our tiny wind-rattled room to athlete’s-foot-floor hideous-porcelain-bowl-shit-stain copious-pubic-hair bathrooms. It was so gnarly we switched hotels for the second night, me out at dawn to find another place.

We were staying in the Bloomsbury district, around the corner from the British Museum, with its great Egyptian and Greek sculptures. The British were among the very first to rip off, plunder, and loot the cradle of civilization, back in the sun-never-sets-on-us days of the British Empire. The Egyptian holdings of the British Museum make the stuff in the Met in NYC look like the broken remains found on the floor after the burglars got away.

I had a lot of uneasy feelings about the loot, in other words. But there were some great pieces. A granite Ramesses 2, 1270 BC from Thebes. So calm and beautiful, such a wonderful smooth curve in the cheek at the corner of this mouth—yet, really, how different is this Ramesses from a plastic sculpture of the hamburger icon Big Boy?

There was a lovely queen—Amenophis—and her husband. Really clear lines along the edges of their lips. I finally grasp that Egyptians are
Africans
. Black people. Amenophis’s husband looked like Lightin’ Hopkins.

I saw the best panel of Hieroglyphics ever, so clear, so deeply incised. Yet—
mystery
—I couldn’t find the panel the next day, although the hall was rather small. A secret teaching from time machine? You decide.

Outside we saw a Classic Cameras store with lots of old Leicas, I wandered in, and “What can I tempt you with, sir?” asked the proprietor. So polite, the British. The place was in “Pied Bull Yard”, a courtyard, and in there was a pub, “Truckles of Pied Bull Yard.”

Had lunch with Stella Wilkins, my English agent. My British editor for
Saucer Wisdom
says there’s a chance he’ll buy the four
Ware
books as well. It’s currently very hard—all but impossible—to buy my novels in England. So it would be great to get some of them into print there. I’d always thought the US imports were easy to get in England, but they’re not.

I wander into a park near the Embankment tube stop near Trafalgar Square. There are blue-and-white-striped lawn chairs with, mostly, bums in them. I lie in one for awhile, it’s free. My legs are giving out from day after day of pounding the pavement. The lawn chairs billow chaotically in the breeze. It reminds me of a maze I saw years ago in a book by Shepherd; the obstacles in the maze were lawn chairs, and in fact you had to avoid the ones with bums.

In the National Gallery I find a good Bruegel,
The Adoration of the Magi
of 1564. BRVEGEL MDLXIII says the signature. He didn’t like to put the letter “H” in his name, and I don’t know why some people still insist on using it and writing his name “Brueghel” or even worse, “Breughel” with the “e” and “u” in the wrong order, and then,
ugh
, pronouncing his name
Broy-gull
, which isn’t the way they would
ever
say it in the Lowlands. I say
Broo-gull
, which isn’t fully accurate either, but at least I don’t get the dipthong backwards.

How clear and fresh the canvas is. The three kings are in a triangle of gaze, each looking at a gift held by one of the other kings. Balthazar looks like Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop festival. He has a beautiful pointed-toe red boot. Fringed chamois leather cape. His gift is a gold ship called a “nef”. It holds a green enameled shell, and within the shell is a tiny live monkey.

The gallery note by the picture says that Bruegel put soldiers in his pictures because for most of his life the Netherlands were occupied by Spanish soldiers. This touch makes it seem so
real
. Makes me want to write Bruegel’s life. The rainy Flemish day, right here in front of me. I want to go there.

Mary is a hot cutie with full lips. A guy whispers in Joseph’s ear. He’s saying “You’re a cuckold, Mary puts out.” Joseph looks undisturbed.

In the background are a bunch of interesting characters. A scholarly Jew with glasses. Josef’s accountant? Also a classic Bruegel fool. And a fat guy like Bill the oyster man at our farmers’ market.

There’s a second, small Bruegel too, a grisaille of Christ with
The Woman Taken In Adultery
. Jesus is writing in the sand—”DIE SONDER SUND IST.” It’s the story about “Who without sin is/ the [first stone let them throw.]” Signed BRUEGEL MDLXV. This picture is small, I have trouble looking at it well. The story was said to be a favorite among Protestants, which is another heavy historical touch—to know that the Protestant reformation and the Catholic counter-reformation were raging through the Lowlands in Bruegel’s time.

I see a Lewis Carroll photo exhibit in the National Portrait Gallery next door. The show is drab and depressing—all his desperate, longing photos of little girls—it kind of weakens my years-long tie to Carroll.

Getting aboard the subway the next day, Sylvia is ahead of me and the door closes me off. A door that has a slanting section at the top, like a greenhouse. She looks 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 way there I saw a Japanese woman with a London map that opened up like a flower or a cootie-catcher. The subway’s dangling hand grips are coiled springs with black Bakelite bulbs. Everything different in this parallel world.

September 21, 1998. Antwerp. Bruegel. I’m Flemish.

We’re in Antwerp now. I’ve had breakfast and taken a walk. In Edinburgh I bought a good book by Keith Roberts about Bruegel and his art, and have been reading up. I’ve decided to make Peter Bruegel the Elder a focus of this trip. I’d kind of like to write a historical novel about him and his family.

I feel there’s some parallels between myself and Bruegel—me as a novelist, him as a painter.

Bruegel’s paintings never made it into churches as altar pieces because they were satirical (e.g. a man who won’t help Christ carry His cross is wearing a rosary) and vulgar (often including people shitting and pissing). I’m never quite accepted into the standard SF canon, perhaps due to vulgarity—and, I’d like to think, because my works are ahead of their time. Misled by Bruegel’s vulgarity, Victorian scholars mistook him for a peasant, not realizing that he was in fact a highly cultured man. That’s me!

There’s a tension between Bruegel’s overarching parable-like scenes and the the specificity of his people. This is akin to my transrealist implementations of classic SF tropes. Just as Bruegel prided himself on drawing his characters from life; I pride myself on my trick of basing my characters on real people. As the years go by, I try and present ever-stronger characters, and this is akin to Bruegel’s use of increasingly large human figures in his late works.

Walking down the streets of Antwerp, I’m thinking that the genes walking around me are the
same genes
that Bruegel was surrounded by. It’s like a little pond of fish here, not all that greatly changed over the past four hundred and fifty years. Fifteen generations.

People repeatedly started talking to me in Flemish. I
look
Flemish! For instance 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.

“These are my people,” I kept telling Sylvia.

I always thought that the Bosch and Bruegel faces looked like mine, e.g. the drunk man talking to the bagpiper in Bruegel’s
The Peasant Dance
, or the giant, hollow-bodied man standing in the boats in the hell panel of Bosch’s
The Garden of Earthly Delights
. My twins.

And now I learn that there’s a well-known ancient Flemish family of harpsichord makers called Ruckers. 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.

So 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”.