Collected Essays (92 page)

In each, the information has a kind of fractal structure. I would define a fractal as something that has this property: when you look twice as hard at a fractal, you see three times as much. Language is fractal with words suggesting words suggesting words, while paintings are fractal with their details within details within details. A basic problem is that in either case only a limited amount of information is really being given. Fractal nature has an essentially infinite precision, but a novel or a painting is radically finite.

How finite? It depends. A significant difference between paintings and novels is that when you get a printed copy of a novel you get
all
of the available information: all the letters of all the words of the text. But when you get a reproduction of a painting, you are settling for a degraded semblance of the original. Given that a painting is a non-digital object, it’s not even clear how much information really would be needed to perfectly specify the image. This is a real problem when you want to get deeper and deeper into a detailed image such as a Bruegel.

At this stage in human technology there’s no replacement for going to a museum to look at the original of some beloved masterwork—although, sadly, the very fact of being in a museum involves its own distractions, of standing in a public space watched over by museum guards, with your schedule subject to opening and closing times and your senses impinged upon by the other tourists.

Over the years I’ve made a point of visiting as many Bruegel paintings as possible. The world’s richest trove of Bruegels is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; they hang together in a single high-ceilinged room. I well remember the sensation I get going into this divine: a feeling of great urgency. Each picture is filled with individual specific people, places and things, all presented as the most delightful visual forms: the arabesque two-dimensional curves, the sensual massings of three-dimensional shapes, and the scumbled color fields. One of my favorite paintings there is
Peasant Dance
.

Peter Bruegel’s Peasant Dance.

Before going into detail about
Peasant Dance
, I want to add a detail about detail. I always have a certain disappointment when I get an extremely close look at a beloved painting, either by seeing it in person or by looking at a magnified view of some small section. At a certain level of enlargement, the painterly illusion goes away and all you see are brushstrokes. Blow up a small figure’s face and instead of pores, you see daubs of paint. The same thing is true of novels. If, for instance, you flip through a book and carefully read all the descriptions of some one favorite character, you’ll notice a certain mechanical element: certain identifier phrases and attributes occur over and over. These fictional “brushstrokes” are used by authors to give their fictional people an air of persistent existence. The seeming reality of a novel or a painting is an artful construct that only pops into focus at a certain distance. It is only the cosmic fractal of real life which allows for endless zooming.

Peasant Dance,
also known as
Peasant Kermis,
is one of Bruegel’s last paintings, completed a year or two before his death at about age 44 in 1569. What do we see?

A little dirt road through a village beneath a gray sky; there’s leaves on some trees but it doesn’t feel like summer; I’d say it’s spring. Gray sky and muddy buildings, a small town. Some people dancing in the middle ground. In the foreground are two main groups, one on the left, one on the right. On the left is a bagpiper with a drunk man watching him from a few inches away. On the right, a couple is running into the canvas from outside the frame, they’re late, they’re hurrying, their attention is focused ahead of them on the dancers and probably on some food and drink back there to the left. The man is hard-faced and black-toothed, his run is already breaking into a bit of a dance, he has a spoon tucked into his hat. The woman he tows behind him is too busy hurrying to dance, she seems a pale-faced unlovely goose with room for but one thought at a time in her head.

I always think of Jack Kerouac when I look at the drunk man watching the bagpiper, of the
On The Road
passages about Jack and Neal digging jazz, “Blow man, blow!” And I cringe a bit, remembering the times I’ve been like this myself: crowding up to a guitar-playing friend and fixating on his performance, “gloating over it,” as Jack says in
Visions of Cody
, thick-tongue-edly urging the musician on, lost in the inebriate’s self-centered feeling of creating (“realizing” by observing!) the air-vibrations and the sight trails of the soundy scene around. Meanwhile the musician is playing on, his small eyes fixed on the distance, he’s putting the music out there, grateful perhaps for the accolades of his drunken acolyte. After all, unheard sound is hardly music at all, any more than an unseen picture is a painting, or an unread text a novel—communication is one of art’s several vital organs.

Instead of identifying with the man staring at the musician I can—with equal discomfiture—project myself onto the man running into the picture from the right, the guy arriving late at a party, trying to get into the swing of things, to be one of the revelers right away. “Hey, I’m cool too!” His face is a mask of harsh, naked desire. The man’s redneck appearance and the dirt of the street puts me powerfully in mind of the years I’ve spent living in small towns, hungry for the distraction of my communities’ small, puttering festivals. Though, really, so universal is the
Peasant Dance
that the image overlays equally well onto the hippest scenes imaginable. Entertainment and the entertainees.

Let’s look some more. At the table on the left are some
seriously
fucked up guys, they almost look like they might be blind and/or deaf. Blind to logic and deaf to reason, in any case. That odd, upside-down white shape on the table is, according to one commentator, a drinking glass that you can’t set down (you have to chug it all), though another thinks it might be a dice-cup. Behind them are some fat lovers, behind the lovers is a shy guy watching the dancers, behind him are a man and woman in a tug of war at an inn-door—I think he wants her to come out and dance, unless maybe she wants him to come in and fuck? Still further back is a man dressed in red and yellow fool’s motley. What a scene! Way far back, partly glimpsed, are more and more people and what looks like the tops of booths selling stuff—it’s a “kermis,” a street fair. In the middle ground two couples dance. Of the lefthand middle ground couple, the man seems ecstatically, or soddenly, involved in the dance; the woman is calm, happy, maybe a bit glazed around the eyes. She’s having a good time dancing. The righthand couple seem uptight, athletic, intent on executing some specific step.

A final grouping of note is the two mutually absorbed girl children standing real short in the left foreground. Looking closer, you can see that the larger girl is probably teaching the smaller girl to dance. Her face is exactly the face of a mothering big sister, and the little one’s face is perfectly that of a wondering toddler. The little one has a jingle-bell pinned on her sleeve, perhaps so as not to get lost. The pair of girls are tender and heartening—how eager we humans are to grow, to teach, to learn.

I’ve been working on this essay for a week now, and something that begins to strike me, coming back over and over to the
Peasant Wedding
, is how the image is always the same. Everyone frozen there forever in time, with the trees against the sky making their beautiful shapes. A day like any day, yet a day that lasts forever.

It’s nice that the picture waits up for me. But of course it’s never quite the same picture. You never step into the same river twice—if only because you’re never the same “you” again. Each time I look at the picture again I find something new to think about.

How wonderful it would be to write a novel as rich as a painting by Bruegel—a masterwork that achieves the illusion of containing a cosmos. It’s a goal to live for.

Note on “In Search of Bruegel”

Written 1988 and 1997

Appeared in
Seek!
and in
World Art #13, 1997.

The first part of this piece consists of handwritten travel notes, written on a trip around Europe in Fall, 1998.  The second part is a note on one of my favorite Bruegel paintings. I wrote it at the request of the editors of
World Art
.

Part 7: MENTORS

Kurt Gödel

I didn’t know where his real office door was, so I went around to knock on the outside door instead. This was a glass patio door, looking out on a little pond and the peaceful woods beyond the Institute for Advanced Study. It was a sunny March day, but the office was quite dark. I couldn’t see in. Did Kurt Gödel really want to see me?

Suddenly he was there, floating up before the long glass door like some fantastic deep-sea fish in a pressurized aquarium. He let me in, and I took a seat by his desk.

Kurt Gödel was unquestionably the greatest logician of the century. He may also have been one of our greatest philosophers. When he died in 1978, one of the speakers at his memorial service made a provocative comparison of Gödel with Einstein…and with Kafka.

Like Einstein, Gödel was German-speaking and sought a haven from the events of the Second World War in Princeton. And like Einstein, Gödel developed a structure of exact thought that forces everyone, scientist and layman alike, to look at the world in a new way.

The Kafkaesque aspect of Gödel’s work and character is expressed in his famous Incompleteness Theorem of 1930. Although this theorem can be stated and proved in a rigorously mathematical way, what it seems to say is that rational thought can never penetrate to the final, ultimate truth. A bit more precisely, the Incompleteness Theorem shows that human beings can never formulate a correct and complete description of the set of natural numbers, {0, 1, 2, 3, …}. But if mathematicians cannot ever fully understand something as simple as number theory, then it is certainly too much to expect that science will ever expose any ultimate secret of the universe.

Scientists are thus left in a position somewhat like K. in
The Castle
. Endlessly we hurry up and down corridors, meeting people, knocking on doors, conducting our investigations. But the ultimate success will never be ours. Nowhere in the castle of science is there a final exit to absolute truth.

This seems terribly depressing. But, paradoxically, to understand Gödel’s proof is to find a sort of liberation. For many logic students, the final breakthrough to full understanding of the Incompleteness Theorem is practically a conversion experience. This is partly a by-product of the potent mystique Gödel’s name carries. But, more profoundly, to understand the essentially labyrinthine nature of the castle is, somehow, to be free of it.

Gödel certainly impressed me as a man who had freed himself from the mundane struggle. I visited him in his Institute office three times in 1972, and if there is one single thing I remember most, it is his laughter.

His voice had a high, singsong quality. He frequently raised his voice toward the ends of his sentences, giving his utterances a quality of questioning incredulity. Often he would let his voice trail off into an amused hum. And, above all, there were his bursts of complexly rhythmic laughter.

The conversation and laughter of Gödel were almost hypnotic. Listening to him, I would be filled with the feeling of perfect understanding. He, for his part, was able to follow any of my chains of reasoning to its end almost as soon as I had begun it. What with his strangely informative laughter and his practically instantaneous grasp of what I was saying, a conversation with Gödel felt very much like direct telepathic communication.

The first time I visited Gödel it was at his invitation. I was at Rutgers University, writing my doctoral thesis in logic and set theory. I was particularly interested in Cantor’s Continuum Problem. One of Gödel’s unpublished manuscripts on this problem was making the rounds, and I was able to get hold of a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox.

I deciphered the faint squiggles and thought about the ideas for several months, finally giving a talk on the manuscript at Rutgers. I had a number of questions about the proof Gödel had sketched and wrote him a letter about them.

He probably would not have answered—Gödel almost never answered letters. But I happened to be attending a weekly seminar at the Institute with Gaisi Takeuti, an eminent logician who was there for a year’s research. Gödel knew this, and one day while I was at the seminar in Takeuti’ s office, he phoned up and asked that I come see him.

Gödel ‘s office was dim and unlit. There was comfortable carpeting and furniture. On the empty desk sat an empty glass of milk. Gödel was quite short, but his presence was such that visitors sometimes left with the impression that he was very tall.

When I saw him he was dressed as in all his pictures, with a suit over a warm vest and necktie. He is known to have worried a great deal about his health and was always careful to keep himself well bundled-up. Indeed, in the winter, one would sometimes see him leaving the Institute with a scarf wrapped around his head.