Bruce Sterling - Essays. Catscan Columns

History lives in the Mauritshuis, shelter to a horde of Rembrandts and Vermeers. Portraits--with that pre-photographic intensity that an image had when it was one-of-a-kind, likely the only visual record of the sitter that would ever be made. The portraits are formalized, flattering, very studied, and they lie a lot. The children of the rich pick garlands of flowers in unlikely getups of velvet and chiffon, expensive fabrics that a grass-stain would ruin forever. This kind of portraiture is a dead visual language now, and when the language no longer works, the lies become evident, like someone else's old propaganda.

It was a rich and earthy life. Leather, wood, wool, bloody still-life heaps of slaughtered game. A woman in satin rides side-saddle with a boar-spear in one dainty gauntlet. Huntsmen let fly with flintlock muskets at a foam-snorting pig. The sky has never known an airplane; these are clouds that have never been seen from above, fleecy and untainted by smog.

But there is honesty, too. Vermeer's famous Girl in a Blue Turban is not posed, but caught in an instant in the mind's eye. She is plainly dressed, and her sweet frail face strikes the viewer in a sudden rush, the very opposite of all those formal images of Dutch aristos with unearned power and too much jewelry.

Here are Rembrandt's self-portraits--a big-nosed kid of twenty-two or so, striking a pose in fake- looking armor, the detail excellent, but perhaps a bit forced. Transmuted by time and experience, he becomes a big-nosed saggy-eyed veteran, a gold pendant in one earlobe. Less youth--but more gold. And a lightening- quick brushwork that catches the play of light with an almost frightening ease.

Flattery was their stock in trade. They knew it was a shuck, a stunt, a trick. Ever notice how good artists can make each other look? With their palettes hooked over their thumbs they resemble philosopher- kings. The big money was in flattery, but they were restless. Here and there real-life boils out in a rush. J. V. D. Heyde (1637-1712) paints the Jesuit Church of Dusseldorf. A couple of black-clad Jesuits tramp the street talking, very likely up to no good. A beggar-woman nurses a baby, with an older kid taking alms in the gutter. Who is the father? Ibn Battuta? Some working-stiff and his wife push a monster wheelbarrow up the hill, putting their backs into it. Dogs piss and tussle, and loungers bowl ninepins in the public square.

F. van Mieris (1635-1681) clearly spent a lot of time in bars. Here, taken from low-life, is a wasted blonde barmaid in a white dress, pouring wine for a redheaded captain-at-arms. In the doorway, a red dog fucks a white bitch, a symbol as stone-obvious as being hit in the head with a bung-starter.

A block away from the Mauritshuis is a shopping district, the streets bent and skinny and pre- automotive, an open-air mall. MEGA WORLD COMPUTERWINKELS, reads the sign outside the software shop. Soon all Europe will be mega world computerwinkels, cool nets of data, a cybernetic Mecca. Our Mecca will be electronic, and you'll be a nobody 'till you've made that sacred pilgrimage.

We look to the future. Extrapolation is powerful, but so is analogy, and history's lessons must be repeated helplessly, until they are seen and understood and deliberately broken. In 54 Javastraat, the Ambassade van Iran has telecameras trained on its entrances. A wounded Islam is alive and convulsing in fevered spasms.

65 Zeestraat contains the Panorama Mesdag, the nineteenth century's answer to cyberspace. Tricks of light are harnessed to present a vast expanse of intricately painted, cunningly curved canvas, 360 degrees in the round. It presents, to the stunned eye, the seaside resort of Scheveningen, 1881 A.D. You stand on the center on a round wooden platform, a kind of faux-beachhouse, fenced in by railings; at your feet stretches an expanse of 100% real sand, studded with torn nets, rusting anchors, washed-up wooden shoes, fading cunningly into the canvas. This must surely be Reality--there's trash in it, it has to be real. The Panorama's false horizon will not sit still for the eye, warping in and out like a mescaline trip. Coal smoke hangs black and static from a dozen painted stacks, the bold ancestry of our current crimes against the atmosphere.

There used to be dozens of these monster Panoramas, in Paris, Hamburg, London. The Panorama is a dead medium, as dead as the stereograph, whose ungainly eye-gripping tin hood is now reborn as the head-wrapping Sony Watchmans of Jaron Lanier's Virtual Reality.

It all returns. The merchants and pilgrims of Ibn Battuta's flourishing Islam push their trade- routes farther, farther. Trade expands, populations swarm, laws and libraries grow larger and more refined. At length trade opens to an obscure corner of Siberia, where a certain species of rodent harbors a certain flea.

Ibn Battuta witnesses the result, without ever understanding it. June, 1348: travellers tell him of a virulent unknown disease raging in Gaza, a thousand people dying every day. Swellings appear in groin and neck and armpits, with nausea and delirium. If it takes to the lungs, the victim spits blood and dies within hours. In the town of Homs, in Syria, Ibn Battuta is engulfed by the wave of Black Death. Three hundred die on the day of his arrival there.

In Damascus, two thousand are dying each day and the great polyglot metropolis has shuddered to a halt. The amirs, the sharifs, the judges, and all the classes of the Moslem people, have assembled in the Great Mosque to supplicate God. After a night of prayer, they march out at dawn, barefoot, the Holy Koran in their hands. And then:

"The entire population of the city joined in the exodus, male and female, small and large, the Jews went out with their book of the law and the Christians with their Gospel, their women and children with them; the whole concourse of them in tears and humble supplications, imploring the favor of God through His Books and His Prophets."

As the pestilence lurches from city to city, from mosque to caravanserai, the afflicted scatter in terror, carrying their fleas like pearls throughout the vast linked network of the civilized world. From China to the Atlantic coast, Ibn Battuta's world is one, and therefore terribly vulnerable. The Great Wall of China is no defense; and Europe's foremost traders, the cosmopolitan Genoans and Venetians, will ship a cargo of death throughout the Mediterranean. Paris, Barcelona, Valencia, Tunis, Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo and Bordeaux will all suffer equal calamity in the dreadful spring and summer of 1348. Their scientific experts, those doctors who survive, will soberly advise their patients to apply egg yolks to the buboes, wear magical amulets, and have their sickbeds strewn with fresh flowers.

Ibn Battuta is now forty-five. Perhaps unnerved by the plague, he decides to return home to Tangier after twenty-five years on the road. For a while, the seasoned traveller outruns the horror, but it soon catches up with him again. When he reaches Tangier at last, the Death has come and gone. His father has been dead for fifteen years. But the plague has killed his aged mother. He misses her by mere months.

The havoc is unspeakable, beyond imagination. The Plague will return again in the next generation, and the next again, emptying cities and annihilating dynasties. The very landscape will change: irrigation canals will silt up, grass will grow over the trade- roads, forests will grow in old villages. It is Apocalypse.

Life will, nevertheless, go on. Civilization, pruned back bloodily and scourged by God Himself, refuses to collapse. History lurches under the blow, changes course--and moves on. A century of horror will fade, and, unguessed by anyone, a Renaissance beckons...

Ibn Battuta will meet a young Muslim poet from Spain, named Ibn Juzayy. Together they will compose a formal rihla of his travels. He works from memory--a vivid and well-trained memory, for Ibn Battuta, as a scholar of repute, can recite the entire Koran unaided, as well as many canons of the sacred law. Nevertheless, some poetic license will be taken, some episodes distorted, mis-remembered, or confused, some outright lies told. The great traveller will be regarded by many as a charlatan, or as a mere entertainer, a spinner of fantastic tales.