The Fall of the Rebel Angels, Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1562)
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| A couch in the elevator in the museum - a great idea. |
On
Saturday, I sat in Café Floreo in Brussels drinking a green dragon, a lovely
concoction of vodka, melon, ginger, kiwi and soda. Kids played soccer on the street, asking me
the score in the Liverpool match. I
hadn’t been to Brussels since 1985 on my first trip to Europe. I wasn’t quite
the bon vivant as I was then. But I was still out there trying. Some words in
the bathroom grasped at a problem facing Europe and the world.
“We
will keep meeting ‘the other’ cause that’s how one builds a lovely &
peaceful world.”
In
a nutshell the graffiti said it all. When we embrace the other, the stranger,
building common cause, we dissolving borders and fears. We share our world
together. Could such an approach –
building friends – become a solution for a trading block reeling from the
impacts of refugees pouring in from the East, inspiring nationalist counteractions?
But
its not what’s happening everywhere in the world.
We’re
trying back
home in Brooklyn. But the backlash
is in full force around us, with fascism ascendant in the USA and nationalist
impulses everywhere.
So
a visit to my old friend Jamesy in Brussels felt useful, a time to celebrate
the of the schoolyear and welcome in the summer.
The mystery is everywhere here Magrite used to
say, building his own distinct surrealism.
It’s
a European capital, but it feels livable and alive, the streets have a Gallic vibe,
art and eros everywhere in the grey, rainy city. But people are riding bikes, working in
flower shops, enjoying living.
And
for a few days when I was there, the sun was shining.
Jamesy
suggested I meet him at L’Ultime Atome at place Boniface.
We
had not seen each other since Christmas. So there wa a lot to cover about our
changing lives, worlds, relationships, history, the usual topics, the Derick
and Rich updates of Vassar frienamies.
Etc.
The
evening was a blur of chat and gossip.
Jamesy
cooled sole meuniere, with a perfect layer of parsley.
In
the middle of it all, his son called and asked for a dad date.
So
we make arrangements to go to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Beaux Arts de
Belgique the next day.
Watching
kids grow is one of the majestic things one can ever see. Robert, James and I
horsed around, posing for snapshots, enjoying the day.
I
stumbled into a room showing a film about Breugel and his unseen masterpieces,
of St Michael and Lucifer, fighting apocalyptic beasts. With closeups of his
subjects, the regular people contending with proverbs and fears, objects of
devotion and everyday life, peasants and nobleman, St John and his followers,
looking at them as they listen to St John, with Bruegal pointing us toward an
image of ourselves. Closeup images of people from his paintings groveling,
crawling, listening, playing, flashed over the scream. His source was popular
life around him, fear and the unknown feeding a hellish imagination, his focus -
on our fragilities…. longing and fearing, hoping and striving, and stumbling.
Magritte
reminds us there are other ways of looking at things, if only we pay attention
to those voices.
We
spent the day at the museum, taking in the fin de siècle collection, Magritte
and masterworks from Memling, chucking at the obscene babies, who look like old
men by the northern masters, taking in the Memlings, Reubens and Weydens,
contemplating David’s The Death of Marat, and the Mars Disarming Venus. James unpacks the works for us and his son.
In
a post art haze, we drank rose wine at Pop Up Sablon bidding adieu to Robert
before the day unwound into an afternoon stroll to meet friends, chatting, off
to Café Floreo, and back to watch the majestic sun make its way into the
distance in St Catherine square.
There
are mysteries around us. This is a
majestic place to contemplate them.
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