Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The whole EC is one, huge, macaronic verse. Who invented all these ways of saying? Does the proliferation of dialects come from innate dissatisfaction with any one set of tools? Or is it just another case of Us having to distinguish ourselves from Them? Even folk songs propagate like viruses. When one is struck up in a café, I can generally sing along, although I must substitute my cowboy stanzas for the local lyric. In any case, I'm proud of what modest Dutch I've gotten beneath the knee (under the belt). I manage a bit like that pooch I had as a child, who could sit, lie down, beg, jump, roll over, and play dead, but not necessarily to the right command. I know just enough' to get me in trouble with the "strange police," who did not believe that an American could really be writing a thesis on a four-hundred-year-old Flemish nonentity. They were on the verge of quizzing me on Rubens's dates before giving me the visa.

Herri hangs around my neck. I still can't say I know the first thing about the man. I've spent weeks in million-volume libraries, half a dozen first-rate art history collections, and no end of regional stadhuizen, and have turned up only the tip of already familiar evidence. Bles's life span remains, despite Yankee ingenuity, framed in question marks. I've nailed down an account of Patinir, with a suggestion that Bles was the older man's nephew or cousin. Fault Flemish; neef means either. What to do when one language has two words that the other smears into a single concept? Modalities continue to elude me: two kinds of forgetting, living, believing, remembering. Two distinct becauses! My attempts to read primary sources are humbling lessons in how enormously my own thoughts are bound in native lexicon. Whatever I call a thing, it is never quite what I've called it. It's miraculous that my mother tongue allows me to realize even that much.

I've come across a source that confuses my man's dates with his cousin-uncle's. (I remember, two years ago, your take on those art-jargon letters fl. "How beautiful; it doesn't matter when the man lived — he flourished around 1542." Believe me: half the charm of this European supermarket raid is imagining what you would make of the Leuven town hall.) Met de Bles, or Blesse. Topknot. How's about Middle High Dutch: with the Blaze. An accident of health left a livid mark across his forehead. Or I could fake a theory: Blesse, a bleeding in of the French wound. Where's my co-conspirator when I need her?

You want to know whether I have any new angle on the paintings themselves. The most convenient conclusion would be that met de Bles was actually a pseudonym, a composite of student panelists from Patinir's workshop, an art factory at least partly documented. I've hunted down a dozen panels. In the paintings themselves (all that's left of Herri, now that his blaze has faded), nothing but the trace of competence — a jagged line, an apprentice, conventional, narrow use of color, a formulaic compositional sense. None is more than marginally memorable except the occasional pastoral arrangement with, somewhere in the background, the chance catastrophe — the painted town in the nonchalant process of being lost.

Particularly skilled in the depiction of silent crisis. His single gift is to make flame realistic but still lazily surreal enough to be congenial. Trivial, banal, quotidian cataclysm. He is no accomplished graduate of the previous generation — no Memling or Metsys, skilled in the unsurpassed stillness of reality. He holds up no perfectly burnished fidelity to the look of surprise. In verisimilitude, his eye is shaky. If the panels have any resonance, it comes from their perch over invention's chasm.

I've spent hours in front of each, acclimating, learning to read him. I have hypnotized myself in the process; his panels, undeniable Patinir derivatives, grow vastly if intangibly different. I stare at them, like Leonardo trancing out for hours on his spittle, until they become more than masterpieces — immense, jagged, Mani-chean battlegrounds between the real and the imagined. His expertise at depicting the imminent catastrophe waiting patiently at panel edge, tucked away in back rooms of huge art repositories, are scrolls that have waited four hundred years to tell one sleepy museumgoer that he hasn't the faintest idea of the apocalypse waiting in the front foyer.

I obsess on the idea that it is up to me, FTODD, to translate these sirens into terms my contemporaries can comprehend. I sit down to write, fired with conviction, but can get no father than "He became a master in Antwerp by 1535," before I bog down again in qualifications. Crippled by the clubfootnote. I attempt to make a case for his minor, desperate genius, and wind up trotting out that he was said to have enjoyed a friendship with Dürer, as if only this dubious acquaintance with the great Nuremberger might legitimize my fellow. What can I say about him that would be above dispute? That he may have ended his life in Ferrara, in the blessed South, some time around 1555.

The only indisputables are the fantastic, allegorical landscapes. The handful of scenes I've been able to find — after the years of authenticity debates have taken their toll — contain no stamp of flamboyance, heartbreak, or eschatological revelation, nothing to interest the armchair aesthete, no announcement for anyone except the ambivalent, diverted, ex-night-shift computer operator with two degrees from impeccable schools and two overextended credit cards. Man and work are unremarkable, irretrievable blurs— the perfect topic, in this age of reductionism, for a dissertation.

You loved the scenes, didn't you, when I first showed you them? A flat-out fascination with the threat, soberly maintaining that the only thing to do when the world begins to end is to stand aside and paint it. Uncover it. Name it. Your belief in the ability of words to intervene, even after intervention failed the three of us, keeps me here. The inarticulate love I have found for you, the chance that I might in some impossible future arrive on your threshold, paper in hand—

Every morning I wait for the museum library to open, and every afternoon I ask what the point is. I swear to God no one could possibly care. The utter irrelevance of foliage technique in the face of acid rain or Afghanistan or the ozone layer, the great foregone shoot-out: paint versus proof. Remember what the professor said, just before we committed to data-terrorism? "A talking cure must be transacted in the illness's own idiom." Who speaks art anymore? At its golden apex, it was already stilted discourse, a kind of leftover court lingo. Even at the supreme Quattrocento moment, the fablespeech of pictures was doomed by the creeping success of new prose. The year Herri was born, if I commit to one of the question marks, Leonardo invented the parachute. Herri (safe to assume) was born into the same zodiacal configuration as Magellan. The year Herri turned seven, astonished Dias, emerging from a storm, found he'd been blown off course around the Cape of Good Hope. New worlds, no longer the province of the land-scapist.

His fate was sealed early, apprenticed from youth, perhaps against his will, to a painter's factory, where he gained a modicum of skill in elevating ordinary countryside to travelogue. But no technique imaginable could match the travel reports then coming in. Even before Herri served out his apprenticeship, Columbus had made the most important miscalculation in history. By the time Herri flourished (your face, in front of me as I write the word), Europe was grudgingly accepting the absurd conclusion that a world existed between Here and There.

Let me be blunt: he was in the wrong line of work. That's why I sought him out, the patron saint of fallen-away technographers. He should have been on shipboard from the start. What he lacked in skill of hand he might have made up for in his demonstrated capacity for mental leaps. As fabulous first mate, he might have told Columbus, after weeks of skimming the north edge of Cuba: "This is just pitiful prologue. Think, man. Think big." Instead, the only chance of exploration life threw his way came at night, in the security of Antwerp's back streets, under cover of dark, annexing uncharted female isthmuses.