Gold Bug Variations

XVI

12/6/85

Our Dearest O'Deigh, Out of some terrifying collective unconscious, the phrase "Greetings from the Old Country" nags at me, although this place is one continuous novelty from Cisalpina to the Afsluitdijk. Do you remember that game show where contestants were sent into a supermarket for three minutes (our nation's chief contribution to world culture — shopping as a competitive sport)? Europe is exactly that; I've got this checklist of three-star Schatz chambres and a rail pass, and I can't come home until the art treasures have all been looted. Vermeers in the Rijksmuseum. Speyer Cathedral. Brueghels in Brussels. Haven't enjoyed myself so much since butterfly-collecting days.

I can haul body around faster than mind can follow — the goal all civilization has striven for since the Golden Age. I haven't words enough yet to tell you what I've seen. My teacher says (at least I think she says; all transactions are in Dutch, with scattered cloudy regionalisms) that words make up for lack of grammar better than grammar makes up for lack of words. The language methods here do no conjugations, declensions, paradigms. Only reading, speaking, and restoring sense to texts by supplying missing words. ("Vocabulary," beautifully enough, is woordenschat: word treasure. OE's word-hoard?) Only a little touring and I've discovered how beautiful Dutch is. On those city maps set up at strategic places for out-of-towners, the highlighted red arrow reads: U bevindt zich hier. You find yourself here.

Here's where I find myself. I now know that a bighearted person, in het Nederlands, is small-hearted, that the Holy Ghost and your basic pigeon roosting in the carillon bear the same name,that pijp uitkloppen, to clean out one's pipe, is to form a geslachtsgemeenschap, a "sex community" (the official term is even funnier than the euphemism. But then, "intercourse" is pretty funny at etymological level). Lenen is both to borrow and to lend, making it hard to translate Polonius. I've had my first Dutch dream: I stopped a wimpled woman in a begijnhof in some forgotten Belgian town and asked, "Is dit de weg naar de zestiende eeuw?" Roughly: Show me the way to the Renaissance.

I've brought my en face French partway back from the dead, although you'd be surprised at how little Racine contributes to an exchange in your basic Wallonia pâtisserie. In the tongue of the dreaded Hun, I begin to take a special delight in imbedding clauses and dropping fat, daylight verbal runs at sentence end. I can now read museum tags anywhere in Northern Europe, although a disturbing number are already in imperial Engels. Toward our Frenchified Anglo-Saxon, the whole continent seems to have developed a strange love-hate. Everyone wants to speak the language of power, but secretly, not far below the surface, runs the widespread conviction that ieder Engels is verschrikkelijk.

Thus a little protective coloration helps. Not that I can always pass. I asked directions from a díke-obsoleted fisherman up in Enkhuizen, and following his directions to the letter, found myself halfway out in the Zuider Zee. I had to know where I'd gone wrong, so I retraced my steps, found the fellow, and told him exactly what had happened. 'You followed the directions fine," he told me. "We always send you Germans into the water."

My tutor assures me that research shows that a core vocabulary of a thousand words will get one through 75 percent of ordinary conversation. Unfortunately tempera, patina, pigment, brushstroke, etc. tend not to be among the core one thousand. I have thus become adept at compound neologism. I learn nouns daily, but the arbitrarily of gender makes any decent American yearn for the syllogistic cleanliness of COBOL.

Everything I do all day depends on conversion. Exchange rates, distances. The visual road sign codes — supposedly in Universal Icon Language — are more inscrutable than I imagined. I swear to God there's one indicating that something up ahead is about to put your vehicle into a condition of religious bliss. I take no joy in driving a car, even one dangerously close to the kind Shriner clowns pile out of, in any country where mirrors on building walls assist you to take otherwise blind 90-degree turns at 90 km/h. But I am, at least, marginally better off than the Midwesterner on the Autobahn who kept wondering why he couldn't find this place Ausfahrt on the map.

All my primary sources are written in literary figures nobody has used for centuries. A greater competence than I'll ever possess would still not admit me into the real private clubs. Believe me, every backwater here has its secret speech. The more common the item, the more likely that the villager two kilometers down gives it a different name. That good Dr. Browne was right: jabbering is a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world.

The hardest code to break out here — not recorded in any grammar — is greeting kisses. Every dorp has its own dialect. Do I kiss this woman one, two, three, or four times? Do I start on the left cheek or the right? Do I kiss this guy? They don't put this stuff in the Michelin. The exchange frequently leads to jarred eyeglasses and bruised noses. There's a similar dance to find a common denominator language for conversation. Observe clothes, ported books, license plate. Try a few mumbled words. I overheard two men in the Liège (Luik, Luttich) railway station conclude, after halting negotiation, that their strongest common language was Latin. A Belgian friend's advice: if you need to address someone in Brussels and can't tell whether to use French or Vlaams, speak English and walk away healthy.

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.

New skills, new materials, the sluiceways of travel thrown open: the man lived on the leading edge of an age of altered maps, radical overhauls: Copernicus's De Revolutionibus, apocalyptic showdown in the Church, Peasants' Revolution, Mercator's Most Exact

Description of Flanders. When a man can't himself taste the main enterprise of the day, it wrecks him for secondhand excitement. I speak as one who picked up just enough computer competence to get his name paraded through the papers for twenty-four hours.

Still, in Herri's brief flourishing, even an archaic skill provided vicarious thrill, a whiff of the spark that charged the old atmosphere. The printed word was suddenly everywhere, proliferate, vital, and at last affordable. Even art seemed sufficient, rich beyond imagining. New perspectives filtered up from Italy. Genres opened; vistas grew ambitious. Once over the threshold, it would never again be enough just to match the effect of the previous generation. All the attention once lavished on the past was now requisitioned by the unrealized future.

But possibility is only born in a blaze. Dross must be burnt off. The doors at Wittenberg got the stigmata, and there was no turning back. Art, once healing, was enlisted in the longer war. Painting, if bolder than ever, was no longer an authority on the question it had posed since the first cave scratchings: How did I come to be trapped here on earth, at the mercy of strangers? For a long time, pigment had given the answers. Now panelists were as bewildered as anyone.

Jan-o, if it weren't for the collector's thrill — the chance to sample the mythical auras of Ghent and Delft, cityscapes whose views I have wasted my life studying at second hand — I could not keep slogging pointlessly. Every day, between the novelty of new vocabulary and the art treasure map, I am consumed with the whole debacle, how badly I abused us. I miss you intensely, in my sleep. I miss the professor. I need to talk — one more late evening with the two of you. Why have we had to keep apart this year? Tell me exactly: what was it we tried to pull off? Oh, I know the motive, the virtue we made of necessity. I've kept the clippings, the accounts of how we walked away scot-free from the corporate mauling we had coming. But I've seemed to walk away with nothing except the unmistakable sound of missed calling.

Me and my Antwerp master: no better response to looming contemporarily than to set up on a distant hill and catch the conflagration in oils. While his fellow guild members inhaled the whiff of combustion, broadening their palettes, taking on the awful, widening world, Herri staked out a modest line of sight, reworked the Wallonia horizon — the same three-star valleys I traveled yesterday — until it became a jagged, escapist kingdom, more seductive because of the lazy threat hanging perennially about it. Perhaps he was the first modern, after all.

So it is with me: guiltless, evasive sightseeing. I take the cathedral tours, sketch in galleries until the guards chase me out, rediscover the tissue of simile that passes for linguistics, learn enough Flemish figures, of speech to pore over obscure, outdated books: waste, in short, whatever gifts I might otherwise have staked against the ascendancy of nonsense. Oh, I've turned up my share of objective fact. I've even indulged in small doses of induction. But data spell out so blessedly little about the man that I am free to spend my days in speculation. The principal attraction in choosing Bles in the first place. His panels were manageable; I hoped to knock out a quick study, earn the degree in two years. At the time, it struck me as courageous, to turn my back on the present — to proclaim, in those faraway mellifluous blues of a milky, indifferent sky, an anodyne for current event, a technique, if not astonishing, at least caressing, resonant enough to salve without shame.

I write you, seated at a desk by a medieval stone casement, breaking from a paragraph to stare out on an enclosing countryside that, in its essence, Herri himself once studied. The place I stay at tonight is a town like any other: a tuck-pointed, half-timbered, bacon-stripped, step-gabled Flemish village, circa 1500. It nestles over an expanse of hills like a case of cowpox. The view is succinct, following the familiar formula developed by Bles's predecessors: foreground in brown, submerged sea-green middlescape, and background of serene mineral-and-linseed blue, wandering out of the available frame and off the edge of the visible spectrum. A lily pond of slate shingles and mansards, the ideal place to produce a minor student piece about a minor genre painter specializing in minor fires.

Easy to imagine him looking out the same window, breaking the scene into constituent geometries. He still searches for the gnostic equivalence that will turn the tricks of the painter's toolbox, the daub-formulas for producing a bird, tree, or frightened stag into a vessel able to unleash, from the dark cave of mind, the animate Original. Science is still in infancy — unweaned from vital essences — but already urging the skepticism of measurement onto the senses. Paint enjoys its last few years in the lost kingdom of parable before its exile. Years when the eye for the last time, alarmed by the discovery of what actually lies outside the window, still has half a retina full of the afterimage of preexistent places.

Bles's era is the last to hope that even a journeyman drafter might assemble, from egg, oil, and slats of hardwood, a graphic equivalent of essence erupting in halftones. Painting, for the last time, is not a process of application but of stripping off, revealing underpainted layers that had been covered, steaming the glaze from between the eye and the form-doused world. Painting and science, for a brief moment before Bles's last serene panel, are after the same key: that book — tucked away in the stacks of a secondhand vendor the way a master of the next generation will tuck a nativity in a hidden village corner — that will prove to be, under its binding, the forgotten alchemist's almanac condensing, in one pass of the alphabet, the whole roll of landscape, the view from the lancet.

I trace him, embroidering the sketchy sources, in his pursuit of this index to seeing. I see him, up before six for perfunctory matins, waiting the descent of journeyman's grace. After a spartan breakfast, he sets to work in suggestive silence. There is no time like the early day for observation. He works alone, in the middle of this Brabant scene, out of reach of easy communication, so no man can say exactly what, if anything, he accomplishes.

His day's big meal comes on the stroke of eleven: fish and fowl, sauce, fruit, nuts, fresh bread to stave craving. After this heroic undertaking, he naps, to release dreams of the unity of all living things. He wakes, spends what remains of afternoon (marked out in the intervals of new mechanical clocks) in repetitive labor, waiting for the visual trick that might unlock the safebox. Lost to work until dinner, revising and undoing the morning's base. Now, if ever, with a few scrapes of the palette knife, he might turn a competent genre piece into dangerous prediction, the living syllable that pierces opaque nature.

Dinner is light, as light as breakfast — modest indulgences at day's ends, falling away from the midday feast in a curve that science will formulate three centuries later. There follows the pursuit of women by night, alluring, unattainable shapes in stone passages, shadowy countenances rendering each shiveringly desirable. He enchants these midnight nuns with a thousand verbal inventions, seductions ranging from blunt frontals to coy flanking maneuvers. None works so well as the invitation to sit for a portrait, a misrepresentation as blatant as any, since he has long sworn off studies of the face, too important a subject for his own passing competence.

Those nights when he fails to procure he is left alone, recalling that this is how he likes best to end days, in the tallow-glow of winter. Waking the next morning to the blessings of solitude, he throws himself again into the schedule of early production, midday gorging, afternoon nap. And further evenings in pursuit of that other whom he has never found, who exists only and precisely nowhere.

He follows this invariant routine for a year or three. But at the instant when habit becomes inhibiting, he upends his carefully cultivated schedule, reneges on debts, chases off his few friends, sends them away berated. He liquidates stock, leaves his rent in arrears, and packs off to another town, another time, taking nothing but his private formulae and all the panels he can carry. He chooses a direction and begins walking. When he grows hungry, he stops and sets up shop. He puts his head down to work, eat, nap, describe this new landscape, find out its fires, rousing himself from routine only when awakened by a surprise ambush of forgotten fields from another century.

He flourishes before an ornate gate unequaled in history. A few years after Gutenberg, a few before Shakespeare, unrepeatable era of giants: da Vinci, Erasmus, Michelangelo, Rabelais. All a fellow condemned to marginalia can do to avoid the sink of afternoon is turn back to the morning's unfinished panel, betray no barometer of hope except what eye can observe, hand mirror.

This, the implicit advice of his paintings, is what I search for in his biography. But a paragraph into exegesis and I gaze again out of this stone casement in the medieval attic I have sublet. On second glance, the countryside is overhauled. All vestige of Brabantine gothic dissolves, and I am in another small town, just as sleepy. The window fills with a different formula for depicting houses, churches, the tucked-away, unobserved miracle. Bles becomes, say, Thomas Hart Benton. The era of infant exploration, its flirtation with parachutes, cadaver dissections, and the sextant gives way to the International Geophysical Year, scientific discovery in full flower, the year of my birth. The moment when that centuries-long investigation, begun on Bles's doorstep, converges on a complete theory — the revelation that experiment has spent four centuries preparing for.

Dropped into this alien landscape of block apartments swept by overhead satellites, my journeyman is forced to abandon painting. He takes up the vocation of the times — cashes in palette for vernier gauge. He has no choice but to go on working at the same scene, his eye still after the underlying mechanism that infuses life with its surprising form. Work remains a question of catching, in one sweep, the quiet neighborhood crisis that knowledge always circumscribes. The world by mid-twentieth century has expanded unprecedentedly toward that watershed moment when it will comprise nothing except measure. Met de Bles, symbol depictor, takes up a profession still obsessed with eavesdropping on the world's interior monologue, but wildly enlarged in power of material manipulation, closing in on the symbol table itself.

You see, I start with every intention of cranking out a chapter of Bles's bio, but after a few subordinate clauses, find myself deep in Ressler's. Obsessed, reticent, demure, brilliant, intense, driven, asocial, truculent, lonely, vulnerable, abandoned: the professor, for all we got from him, remains a thesaurus of contradictions. Ressler, at my age, lived for one thing only. To unravel the complexities of personality at its source. Being alive is a one-shot affair: a window, small, blurred, but miraculously permitting a cramped, flattened, two-dimensional, distorted view of the terrain.

Before the perverse thing closed for good, the professor wanted to find the first landfall of the full map, the rule that dictates his generative unfolding. To name, translate his own breathing, his own infolded instinct for love from out of the formal language of chemistry. He is the one I want to flesh out. Why did he let us so far into his life, only to hold us at arms' length? Nature's decoder, who thought that if he could just get to the generating tape, say what "A" meant, then "AT," then "ATG," he would sniff the source, the panel's panel, and could then let the window close peacefully over him. But at bottom, laid bare, solved, the tape read only, "Obsessed, reticent, demure, brilliant, intense, driven, asocial, truculent, lonely, vulnerable, abandoned." The old thesaurus.

Being in the same room as Ressler, just sitting with him in silence, was like filling my lungs with the air of galleries. The chamois cloth of his eye sockets, those pressed seersucker suits no one has worn for twenty years emitted unfinished labwork, interrupted notebooks, glimpses under the electron microscope rendering the familiar mechanics of life alien, less survivable, more unlikely than any oil. I know more about Bles than about the man we sat with.

Think what it must have felt like, to be in your twenties, to rip out of yourself in cerebral caesarean the formulation of an idea two thousand years old. A confirmation so simple, so unexpectedly whole that the only available response was militant, head-bowed humility. Then think the unthinkable. At the moment of confirmation, when the connection screams into proximity, you stumble onto another discovery, one that will disperse without trace the instant you formulate it: cracking the program does not mean exemption from having to follow it.

Because Ressler too erased himself from the guild records, I am free to elaborate. Even as he rushes the unavoidable outcome, he gives in to the trivial joy of being twenty-five, more soaringly ill-considered. He can do nothing but savor, as long as possible, that temporary, timid kindness of doomed courtship. What exactly, at this watershed, does she seem to him? She manages to look beatific without being ludicrous. She commits to precious little on the surface. She limps through labwork, by turns bright, sultry, competent, demure, vivacious, dumb. Joanne Woodward's contemporary Oscar performance as a multiple personality has nothing on this woman. Her body's message alters itself at its base: in her step, arrogantly light, she conveys, over the general noise of the lab, the campus, the apocalyptic meander of 1957, that all manner of things will be well, now and in the enzyme.

For his part, he sinks to a parody of reconciled Goodwill. The continued explosion of American Vanguards, the detonation of Soviet nuclear weapons in the Arctic — the whole market of current events fails to flap him. This vestigial, infant happiness is a chemical sluicegate flushing him with unbuffered ions; a thickness in the winter air, his youth triggered by irresistible stimulus — the mechanism he had hoped to overcome by translating.

Admission discounts nothing. The moment flushes him. He feels the rush, no matter what the equation. He thinks of her all day, wants nothing more reprehensible than to spread over her surface like a roosting flock. He willingly gives her every chance to waylay him, to wreck him for what he is after. If the worst should turn out true, the contemptible clarity of his love will redeem everything. The full force of luteinized want — his body conversing with its own attraction — leaves him more laughable perhaps, but no worse off than others, who must also dodge missiles, fend off conflagrations, name the crisis of knowledge. No worse off for his petty attempts at — call it care. Under the circumstances, isn't even care born in sexual aggression sufficient and worth savoring?

Remember the night when we confronted him point-blank with the dossier you'd assembled — every mention of him ever to appear in print? Confirm me: his shoulders slumped imperceptibly, he looked off and cleared his throat, willing to answer anything, but only this once. Remember how he shrugged, a stream of sympathy, invention without cleverness? The slight catch snagging his words wrung all our ingenuity out of me, the pride of authorship I'd felt in his friendship. The valence of the fellow we'd been trying to ascertain became real. Ressler's fingers gripped a card deck, some pointless data-processing task he was about to shove into the hopper. His knuckles turned transparent; his veins and cartilage were the color of an oil-slicked puddle. A thousand cells in that hand split and replicated in the time it took us to speak again.

He'd set out to uncover the principle uniting all animate matter and discovered something simpler instead. Ear to the clicking telegraph key, to the message coming across the wire, the sequence he heard the answer to "What hath God wrought?" was "Who's asking?" Lost to science the moment he cannot put into words, into chromosome strings, why he loves this woman. Reductionism supplies no reason except her clothes, random, mismatched, pastel; her graceful gawkishness between the legs; the absolute lightness of her limbs moving against gravity in all directions at once; her globed cheeks; her wide, scared child-eyes; her visits, quick and brief as accident. No specific part but gives her an uncaring, lissome urgency, wholly beautiful because wholly ephemeral. He is condemned to loss, from that day forward, never quite able to return to the text he had been seeking, for no reason except that she has made him realize, at cell level, that the only message worth receiving will be intercepted, garbled, lost in translation.

He must have seen this before, this slipping off, recalled it from the histories, even as indifference came over him. I'm sure of it. He felt the slow unfolding, long before he showed any sign. He had all the motive in the world to keep from disappearing: the experimental method, all but resting in his hands, a trick for reading the banished original. All the magazines predicted results. Couldn't he have lasted another year?

But he knew the work would get done whatever happened to him. If he did nothing, shut down his tabulations, spoke not another word of his insights, any of countless, equally talented researchers would have his method in a year or two. His year produced a focus of scientific talent unparalleled since Herri's. An all-out marshaling of forces cutting across disciplines had already begun that grade-school recruiting process that would brush the two of us. Sputnik wasn't the catalyst, for my money. His 1957 was just the first of a stream of IGYs.

Before we said goodbye, the night we took our electronically permanent step, he reprised for me in a few, condensed measures his own bitter disappearance. Before we jimmied the packs, he thought it only fair to pass on to me details I might be able to use. "What we need," he told me, "is the code for the synthesis of the forgiveness enzyme. Self-forgiveness. Forgiveness for having wanted what we are born wanting."

Not that I can now hope to ask you for it, after everything, any more than Herri can ask me to forgive him for not being Van Eyck. He and I were born wanting the same thing, and neither of us will ever come close to it. We will never make an Arnolfini Wedding or a Hunters Homeward in Snow. Herri sees, through the stone casement, that he will be forgotten, demoted to shadowy myth, despite his sole biographer. And with his unrealized landscapes will go that compulsion to imitate, to name the crisis lingering over the indifferent town.

It has become night as I write. Soft chiarascuro transforms the casement view into interior: has any painter ever made such a composition? The graveyard shift in an airplane hangar full of infernal calculating machines and peripherals. The machines themselves are as serene as Titians. But underneath the skin seethes a public chaos of crowds, a roll call crammed with as many encapsulations of misery as were ever wedged into any last judgment. The foreground is still blue, merging into a sea-green midrange nativity. But the background now takes its tones from the red of ambulance lights. About suffering, they were never wrong, the Old Masters. Even the minor ones. Even met de Bles, or Blesse. With the blaze. Or wound. You see I am thrown in over my head, asked to judge this contest between observation and invention. All I can concentrate on long enough to write about is those overlookable almosts in his aborted landscapes. I wait by windows, half-maker of the range of creation I'm supposed to describe.

Creation is at present limited to exotic holidays. Not far back, I was sitting in a buitenlanders language class full of earnest young Germans when our teacher announced that there would be no school tomorrow. Incredibly, the most towheaded kid asked why. The teacher tactfully explained that the day commemorated her exemption from obligatory German. For Hemelvaartsdag I went to Brugge, an urban time capsule, where I took part in the Procession of the Holy Blood. In the town center, along a fossil gothic-walled circuit, with the great cloth hall and belfry as backdrop, comes this procession of thousands of townspeople in costume, acting out, along the length of their parade ribbon, the history of the world from the Garden to present-day politicos. Animated time flowed past me on the street, a ritual that has been going on, unchanged except for appended length, since 1150. As the procession ended, each block of crowd milled into the street, following the flow, becoming the last, contemporary, costumed participants.

Time, static stuff, is reified here. The granddaughter of collaboration can't marry the grandson of underground. I heard a German ask a price in a bordertown bric-a-brac shop. The proprietor— Common Market be damned — gave the standard reply — allusion to the million conscripted vehicles that aided the Wehrmacht in initial blitzkrieg and sped the surviving sixteen-year-olds reeling from advancing Americans: "Give me my bicycle back and I'll answer you."

Time is a place here, a tangible landscape. Last week I took a day trip to Münster. Disconcerting: still attached to the steeple of St. Lambert's, the iron cages where they displayed the bodies of the Anabaptists. The cathedral was softly disappointing. It had its great astronomical clock: Herri's contemporary universe as flywheel. But I'd expected something more articulated, nuanced. A clause and a half into a wall plaque on the south porch, I realized I was reading English. Stone from Coventry Cathedral, given to the people of Münster. Let us forgive one another as He forgives us. Caption in two languages, each translating the other.

Stupider than my towheaded classmate, I get no closer to this place's meaning than porting over. I will never fully "understand," because I can never fully "begrijp." The verbal myth of standing under a thing is as unrealizable as that of grasping it. I came to class last week to discover that my towheaded friend had suffered an auto accident. My distraught teacher, confusing my native tongue with the victim's, blurted out, "Rudy ist tot." That much I grasped, stood under. She passed out copies of the death notice, that final declension. We students spent the morning looking up, in our wordbooks, the names of grief in translation.

It did not stand in the dictionary, but these death notices make a local spreekwoord: "He lies like a remembrance card." For they are always filled with love, these after-the-fact summaries. Is what I feel for you at this moment the distortion of loss, waiting until separation to say it? I think of you, want nothing more than to see you and hear your voice.

Instead, I send you this botched dissertation draft. This letter may be the closest I ever come to writing it. You alone are easy to write to, perfect audience, someone who will see, in the weak paraphrase I here throw together, that I am building my apology— explaining why I could not become a sketcher in this world. Now is not the time for drawing. What limited skill we've developed to describe the place we long ago consigned to the laboratory. It may take generations before we remember how big the world is, how much room it has for all sorts of observation.

According to the professor, one single science stands between us and our address. Only we don't see the link; we grasp it only in bits — the pay telescope that magnifies but constricts, and that snaps shut on your quarter after a lousy two minutes. Let me paraphrase the vulnerable Bede: what I put my hands on is the sense, but not the order of the words as the man painted them. For travel scenes, however perfectly composed, can never be ported from one world to another without loss. Perhaps neither beauty nor exactness nor profundity nor meaning, but something will not go over the bridge intact.

The words that might tell me who the fellow was are no longer the words of the original. A coat of metaphor between me and the life I want to write. Words are a treacherous sextant, a poor stand-in for the thing they lay out. But they're all I have — memory, letters, this language institute. Translation would be impossible, self-contradicting at the etymological core: there would be no translation were it not for the fact that there is only translation. Nothing means what its shorthand pattern says it does. Everything ever uttered requires cracking. So I keep busy, travel, learn some words__"I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children how to read." Full marks for identifying.

You may find it as hopeful as I did to discover that the Dutch for weather" and "again" are the same. Let me say at least that I love you, and all other untranslatables.

FTODD

P.S. If I were you, I would write me back quickly and affectionately, an irrefusable letter from home. Something along the lines of "The age of Europe is past. That of America is ending. Get back fast before it's all over." In the meantime: Waarom hangt je was niet op de Siegfried Lijn? Roughly ported over: Why not hang your wash out on the Siegfried Line?