Collected Essays (91 page)

“Why should I be scared,” I’ll rudely respond. “I already live with one.”

“Yes, but I know how sneaky we really are,” she answers.

We saw a woman dressed all in black bent almost double, with a cane, and a little small black backpack inching through the plaza in front of the Pantheon. A snobby Italian waiter had just finished shooing her away from a cafe, really ruthlessly, and she had angled off in a new direction like a deflected slow-moving wind-up toy. Sylvia was sure it was a gypsy or a kid pretending to be old, so we went and looked, and
whoah
she really was old, ancient, a Medieval type crone, so I gave her a couple of hundred-lire coins.

It’s raining pretty hard. The first real rain of the trip. The cybercafe popped up blessedly just at the right moment.
California Dreamin’
by the Mamas and Papas is on the sound system here. Kinda perfect. Always cozy to plug back in.

October 4-5, 1998. Rome. Bruegel and Christ.

The first place we visited in Rome was the ancient Pantheon. It has Corinthian columns and a hole in the middle of its dome roof.

I keep having this feeling of having stayed here too long. Like in a fairy tale where the girl goes down for a day to the land at the bottom of the well, and when she comes back, she’s been gone for a hundred years.

How best to do the Bruegel book? I’d like something I can polish off in a year—I don’t want to make a life’s work of it. A simple option: show the pictures and for each one have a reminiscence by Ortelius, and it adds up to a novel. I could even hoax it and say I
found
the Ortelius writings. And then I’m just writing an intro.

“I’m Flemish.” I love it. My new line. My roots!

Rome—the Eternal City. Lots of noisy traffic. Wonderful yellows, pinky-beige, ochers, fauns, umbers in the colors of the walls.

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 Deat
h, 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?