Short Life in a Strange World
Birth to Death in 42 Panels
Toby Ferris

Copyright

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Toby Ferris 2020

Toby Ferris asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008340964

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780008340971

Version: 2019-11-06

Dedication

For Simon, Frank and Sid,

and in memory of Robert Henry

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Panels

I Flight

II Census

III Fire

IV Massacre

V Grey

VI Beggar

VII Cold

VIII Bear

IX Technique

X Gallows

XI Singularity

XII Crowd

XIII Home

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

List of illustrations

About the Author

About the Publisher

I Flight

‘… the boy a frolic courage caught To fly at random …’

Arthur Golding, translating Ovid

I once saw a young man fall from the sky.

I barely knew him. Dan was perhaps twenty, on leave from the army. My girlfriend’s sister, Zabdi, worked as a para​gliding instructor on the Isle of Arran, and Dan was a friend of her boyfriend, Chris. And so there we were on a September morning in the late 1990s, Dan and Chris and my girlfriend Anna and Zabdi and I, on the slopes of a green hill on the Isle of Arran, paragliding.

When we picked him up in the minibus, Dan, already a qualified and experienced paraglider, was watching a video of stunt paragliders performing wild manoeuvres, swinging energetically beneath their canopies in figures of eight, looping the loop, skirting crags, skimming lakes, and Dan was clearly inspired. Later, on the mountain, as I was harnessed up and ready to bumble into the air, Zabdi put her hand on my chest and told me to wait: Dan had taken off higher up and was coming overhead. We watched him glide over us for a few seconds, and then, at an altitude of a couple of hundred feet, he started to swing beneath his canopy much as we had seen them do on the video, back and forth, like a pendulum, higher and higher, six, eight swings sweeping out an ever-lengthening arc, just enough time for Zabdi to mutter something under her breath (for fuck’s sake, Dan). Sure enough, he got up too far above his canopy and dropped into it, and in the skip of a heartbeat was tumbling uncontrollably earthward. We watched him fall, lost in his billowing parachute silks, then part emerging, arms thrown out, wheeling, tumbling, and then, thud, into the hillside. As I recall it, the hillside shook, but perhaps it didn’t; perhaps it was just an interior thud I felt. I remember Zabdi screaming ‘Dan’ and belting down the hillside towards where he lay, invisible in the deep gorse. I unharnessed myself and ran after her. There he was, stretched out on his back, laughing uncontrollably. His canopy, we reasoned later, must have caught a little air just as he landed and broken his fall. And then there was that cushion of gorse. Lucky boy.

The helicopter, a red-and-grey Sea King, had to lollop over from the mainland, nevertheless, and airlift him to Glasgow. He was in traction for six weeks, broken bones and compressed vertebrae. He hated the army, didn’t want to go back, and was never happier, they told me, than when he was lying there, immobilized, contemplating his mad descent.

A couple of years later he went missing in Dundee after a night’s drinking and was believed murdered, or drowned, until they found his body in a disused factory. He had been climbing on the roof, and it had given way.

*

In 2012, at the age of forty-two, I decided that I would travel to see the forty-two or so extant paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. A mania for Bruegel had recently gripped me, and I had been thinking about little else. And then in early May of that year I realized that all of the paintings (except one) hung in public, or publicly viewable, collections. All were reachable. I suddenly saw that there was a great Bruegel Object out there, dismembered like the body of Osiris and strewn around the museums of Europe and North America, and I set myself to reconstitute it. I drew up a spreadsheet on which I recorded where the constituent limbs and parts of this prostrate god were located, and started to plan my journeys.

The Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, while it is on my spreadsheet, has been downgraded to a section devoted to probable copies, misattributions and mislabellings. Icarus is not one of the forty-two, is not authentic Bruegel but most likely a copy. It is unsigned and undated. It is painted on canvas. Most spreadsheet Bruegels are on wood panel, and can be dendrochronologically confirmed, and those that are on canvas are not in oil but in tempera. Radiocarbon dating of the Icarus is inconclusive – there are ambiguities in the calibration curve, thick layers of oxidized varnish which mask colours and throw off precision – but the samples of the oldest canvas harvested suggest a date from the end of the sixteenth century or the beginning of the seventeenth, thirty years after Bruegel died.

In January 2011, however, this doesn’t much matter: the spreadsheet is a year off, and the Icarus is the reason I am in the Bruegel room. I am drawn by its fame. W. H. Auden wrote a poem about it. So did William Carlos Williams. Everyone has seen it, in reproduction if not in fact.

I am in Brussels waiting for a friend whose flight is delayed; we are supposed to be on our way to Bruges, but I have a few loose hours to fill. I leave my bags at the station and walk up into the centre of the city, and locate what Auden called the Musée des Beaux Arts.

Museums are safe havens. International space. No one looks twice at you in a museum. No one expects you to speak French, for example, as they might elsewhere in Brussels, in the real city. So I have a cappuccino and a croissant, and I automatically belong. I start to breathe easy.

The museum is extensive, however, and, my coffee done, I get a little lost wandering in the modern wings. It turns out there is such a thing as nineteenth-century Belgian art. And a big thing it is. But eventually I clamber up to the upper galleries where they have constructed a chronological circuit from Van der Weyden to Rembrandt and Rubens, more or less. I pick a door at hazard: it is the wrong door, and I make my progress clockwise, back through history. I freefall past Rembrandts and Van Dycks and other brown paintings, start to meet some shuddering resistance around the end of the sixteenth century, and I am still some distance away from the fifteenth-century Flems where I expect softly to touch down and walk with the strange beasts in Eden, when I happen into the corner room of Bruegels.

Here is Icarus. My idle descent through the gallery may have come to an abrupt halt, but my life has just accelerated without my realizing it. I have entered the slipstream of an as yet invisible project, a dark mass lying in the future. If I could look down on myself, see myself situated in all the meaningful relations of my life, my hair would be streaming, my cheeks juddering, in the chill jets of air.

Gravity is a weak but insistent force. Perhaps not a force at all, but a geometry. Who knows where its centres lie, or to what we are tending?

My notebooks of the time are sketchy on the subject of Bruegel. I see that I made a solitary note about the Icarus. That ploughman, I observed, was never going to be able to turn his horse and his plough at the bottom of that field.

It is not a profound observation. I have picked up on an oddity of composition – the narrow, constrained hundred, the clodhopping ploughman and his lean horse. But it leads, I see now, to others. The ploughman’s weight distribution is all wrong. The sheep, also, are ill-managed, crammed into a perilous corner of a field.

Clodhopping ploughman: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, detail.

And the ship is wrongly rigged. Bruegel made a number of drawings of ships for a series of engravings in the early 1560s, caravels and sloops and brigantines and oceangoing three-masters, all accurately observed and set down, their complex unreadable rigging read anyway by a sharp eye. An adopted son of the great port of Antwerp, he would have had time to learn. Anyway, this Icarus ship is wrongly rigged or cack-handedly painted (the anamorphic hull would suggest the latter). Expensive delicate ship, Auden calls it. But those tiny seamen are furling all the wrong sails, leaving the lateen at the back, the absurd straining foresail caught in a squall or a hurricane – how is the ploughman’s cap not blown off, zipped up into some vortex of winds? – the billow of the sail at odds, seemingly, with the play of its cross-spar, the whole contraption flapping about chaotically. The shrouds on the foremast are wrongly positioned (or again, poorly painted). Much too much sail, in too narrow a space (although a second ship in the background is charging into port with a full spread of sail and an apparent death wish).

The ship still manages to be a conception of no little beauty, stupidly buoyant and energetic, a Dionysiac vehicle.

Three of Bruegel’s ship engravings are ornamented with scenes from classical mythology: one, of three caravels in a rising gale, has Arion riding on his dolphin, playing his harp; another, of two galleys following a three-masted ship, has the fall of Phaethon unfolding like a great pantomime in the sky; and a third, of a ship not at all unlike that in the painting (only better done, and with a full spread of sail), has both Daedalus and a tumbling Icarus overhead.

Dionysiac vehicle: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, detail.

Bruegel rarely painted classical gods or myths. His themes were biblical, vernacular. But ocean-going ships, with their whiff of impossible distance and difference, seem to have brought it out in him. And so this ship, fabulous technology, churns up Icarus in its wake.

Experienced paragliders will skip from thermal to thermal, or dance on the uplift over a ridge. I never attained any such level of skill. I could only lumber off a hilltop like a misevolved seabird, and then hang inert beneath my canopy while it and I floated softly earthwards at an angle of, approximately, 11.5 degrees. I could take off from and land at given points, the one a straightforward geometrical projection of the other. And that was it. There was to be no soaring. Dan, or Icarus, I was not.

It was extraordinary, nonetheless. As I picture it in memory, the world stretched beneath me like a Bruegelian landscape, blue mountains on the horizon, sea skirting the world, little villages in the distance, tiny copses below, miniature cows grazing the verdant champaign. I would survey all this, rigid in my harness, listening to the calm directions of my instructor, Zabdi, whose voice was relayed over a radio strapped to my shoulder.

In the evenings Zabdi and her boyfriend Chris would share their folklore: tales of paragliders colliding, their cords twisted into some double-helix of destruction, or of gliders veering off course, into mountains, out to sea, disappearing.

Most striking of all were the tales of paragliders sucked up tens of thousands of feet into black storm clouds before plummeting to earth again, frozen and asphyxiated. These stories of cloud suck, as it is known, may be folkloric, but they are also true. Survivors tell of encountering marvels up there: furious, volatile darkness, hailstones the size of oranges, incredible forces of updraught and precipitation. They would be tossed around in regions of lurid physics, as though buffeted in the red eye of Jupiter, would black out, and then, if they lived to tell of it, would be spat back frostbitten, wild-eyed, jabbering: ancient mariners of the upper airs.

*

Icarus’s wings would not have melted, we must conclude, but frozen. He would not have splashed spreadeagled as in the pseudo-Bruegel, his feathers fluttering down after him. He would have plunged, an icy meteorite, into the green sea.

Daedalus should have known. He was the great artificer, the great engineer. He could have reasoned it out, drawn some sort of empirical conclusion. There are high mountains in Crete, mountains capped with snow in late spring, early summer. It is cold up there, in the White Mountains.

Perhaps he was blinded by the desire to escape his Cretan prison. It was Daedalus who had constructed the wooden cow for Pasiphaë so that she could couple with the white bull of heaven; Daedalus who had devised the Cretan labyrinth, modelled on the maze that led to the underworld, to house her ungodly progeny. Here was a man who understood longing and how to channel it, be that longing bestial and unsightly, or youthful and yearning. Who is to say he did not also yearn, in his way?

In another version of the pseudo-Bruegel composition, also in Brussels, in the Van Buuren Museum, Daedalus is painted in the sky, looking back down at his tumbling boy. This may be a more precise copy of the lost original. Or, more likely, the mystified copyist has spelled out the logic which Bruegel deliberately elides. Bruegel wants the shepherd to be looking up at a great blankness, because it is out of just such an unknowable blankness – his father’s manic absence – that Icarus, solitary rebel angel, falls. There are no gods or men in the sky. They are all down here, slowly ploughing the heavy clay.

*

The Landscape with the Fall of Icarus came to light and was acquired by the Musées des Beaux-Arts in 1912, just nine years after the first powered flight. A painting for a modern age, an age of exhilaration.

The chief problem faced by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903, once they had got their Flyer miraculously, stupidly, airborne, was learning how to operate it. No one had ever flown a powered aircraft before, there was no manual; the brothers had previously built and flown gliders, but gliders rely on thermals and updraughts, on a different ethos of flying. Now they were out on their own, piloting their precarious bird of struts and wires and great-spruce wood, in ignorance of the physics which was keeping them in the air. Four short flights (of, respectively, 120 feet, 175 feet, 200 feet and 852 feet) on 17th December concluded with a tumbling nose-down landing which irreparably damaged the contraption, and it never flew again.

The concept, however, had got irrevocably aloft. Pretty soon, to fly was to live. I grew up on stories of my father’s wartime experiences in open-topped biplanes – specifically, in the Fairey Swordfish, a plane so antiquated, so creaky, so simple, it was hard to bring down since the only critical parts were the engine and the pilot. You could shoot a Swordfish full of holes, as my father told me and as the Bismarck would discover to its cost, and it would keep on coming at you. Very slowly, but with a big torpedo.

No one shot my father’s Swordfish full of holes. He was eighteen when he volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm. His call-up papers in 1943 instructed him to bring a tennis racquet to his basic training. An astigmatic left eye kept him from piloting, but he flew as a gunner-navigator over the grey North Atlantic from his base in Scotland. Later his squadron was located in Canada, then Northern Ireland, and he finished the war in Ceylon, preparing for an invasion of Singapore which never happened. He saw no action at all. But he returned with a repertoire of stories – of snakes in his shower, of feuds with Canadian lumberjacks, of leave taken in New York City – garnered by a boy of eighteen, nineteen, twenty who had spent his early manhood sitting at the whirring, clattering, piston-thumping centre of a machine of Daedalic absurdity, hunting an invisible, perhaps wholly absent, enemy, exhilarated beyond measure. It would get no better than this.

On the day I first took to the air in a paraglider I was asked by a ten-year-old boy, nephew to Anna and Zabdi, to describe the exhilaration. And I told him that it had not been exhilarating, exactly, but an exercise in control: there had been adrenalin, for sure, but it had been released in a glut of hyper-attention. I had been, above all, attentive to details of harness and rigging, to the mechanics and materials keeping me aloft. He seemed disappointed, and I did not know how to communicate to him that I was in fact excited about this.

It was a version of excitement known to Daedalus, and not Icarus. Wilbur and Orville Wright would have understood. For them on that first day the exhilaration would have been as much in the play of canvas and wood, in the creak of the struts and the stench of petrol, as in any sensations of buoyancy and velocity. Bruegel, a miniaturist by instinct, his nose close to the oils on the canvas or panel, must have known something similar, painting his absurd ship. A good painting, like a real ship, is a Daedalic object: not a pretty thing of spirit and billows for the painter who labours in front of it, but a straining, groaning, improvable, precarious livelihood.

The ship on Bruegel’s canvas, by contrast, is all fluttering impetuosity, out of control, ignorant of physics. Alive.

I like to think of my spreadsheet as a modern-day Daedalic object, a thing of glue and feathers and grids and spars designed to harness the airy desires of my midlife, or a parachute gradually rippling and filling as I block out the paintings I have seen, breaking my fall.

Daedalus means cunningly wrought, but I am not sure how cunning my spreadsheet is. It is a reductive object. Bruegel is broken down into a simple alphabetical list, with each painting further broken down into a location, a date, a medium (oil on oak panel; tempera on canvas), a series of dimensions. I have calculated the area of each painting, and the proportion of each painting considered as a fragment of a vast singular object, which I call the Bruegel Object.

Roughly 1,082 cells of information, as it stands.

Where the information tapers off – beyond, in other words, my 1,082 cells of data – there is an effective infinity of empty cells stretching beside and below. To be precise, according to Microsoft’s published data on Excel, there are 1.71798691 × 10¹⁰ cells, or 17 billion, give or take.

The totality of my data clings to the edge of a great sea of unknowing which represents, I suppose, everything which is not on the spreadsheet: my ignorance of Bruegel; my ignorance of the museums in which his panels hang; my ignorance of the cities which those museums grace; and my ignorance of the impulses or affinities which have brought me to the brink of this project.

Why Bruegel?, why all of it? and why now? are questions the spreadsheet is not designed to address.

Over 17 billion cells of ignorance, then. But I have my little monastic garden of 1,082 cells, my tidy simulacrum of the cosmos.

Why this mania to quantify? Bruegel himself was not immune. In all art, there is hardly a better documenter of his own work. Almost every panel is signed and dated. Logic demands that somewhere he kept a ruled notebook in which he listed each painting that he completed, its subject, its medium and materials, its size, its destination, its cost and price and sale date, perhaps a note on problems overcome, solutions supplied.

The documentation of the Bruegel Object is secure. This is, in part, its attraction. We know what, we know where, we know when. Exclusions and reassignments, among the panels if not the drawings, are minimal, almost impossible, at least since the nineteenth century when Bruegel’s panels were routinely ascribed to Bosch.

Bruegel understood. Quantified objects are easier to handle. They are a necessary simplification. Just as mathematics does not represent some underlying truth of the cosmos, but is a simplification of it, its noise and bustle and impurity reduced to clean lines, or just as a Wright Flyer or a Fairey Swordfish is a simplification of a kestrel and thus, like mathematics, a new thing of its own, so too my spreadsheet is a manageable representation of an unimaginable complexity: the Bruegel panels, their endlessly interacting content, and their filigree intersections with the world, and with me.

The labyrinth that Daedalus invented to house the Minotaur was a way of ritualizing, hence managing, monstrous and unnameable desire. And we, too, need a way either to handle or net the creatures of imagination which rear up in the recesses of the night: black certainty of failure, nebulous inadequacy, hints of diminishing power, the ghosts of age, decay and death. And conversely, we need a way to detect whatever fleet and fugitive neutrinos of joy, or curiosity, or bliss, or ecstasy, remain to us, interstitial but real. Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight, says Shelley. But the next time thou do comest, I’ll have spread my nets. I’ll be ready.

‘Language is a perpetual orphic song,

Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng

Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.’

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Act 4: 415–17

On that first viewing of the Icarus, if my notes and my memory are anything to go by, I missed the dead man. At the bottom of the field, in the bushes, barely visible, there is the top of the bald or balding head of a dead man. An old man. A corpse. Icarus may have been escaping, on a mad escapade; this dead man was never so fleet of foot.

Perhaps it is proverbial (there are old Dutch proverbs about dead men and ploughs). Perhaps it is cryptic, a trace element of something strange. Bruegel liked to encode his paintings. It takes a moment to find Icarus, for one thing, and once you have him you can read all of Ovid in the canvas, near-enough. So here is a fragment of information that might be unspooled.

A banal fragment. Death lies concealed in everything, we all know that. There is no project conceived, just as there is no human or indeed mammalian or vertebrate or eukaryotic child conceived or split off, that does not contain the miniature story of its own end. But containment works two ways: that which is contained is also isolated. Bruegel has trapped this little death demon in his painting, and can then, for a spell, walk away from it. Think of him now, the painting done (even if this is not his painting), a youngish, moderately famous man, walking around in the sunlight somewhere, in Antwerp or Brussels, greeting his neighbours, clearing the smell of oils and turpentine from his nostrils, catching some early spring, perhaps, watching the ships spread economical sail with their cargoes of pepper and worked cloth for Lübeck or Cadiz, his spirits buoyant on the soft airs. For a while yet.

I never dared much, nor aspired to dare. I never risked much. There is very little risk in these projects, certainly. There is only a long slow gliding descent through the museums of Europe and North America, safe in international space: hotel, station, airport, museum. I expect no exhilaration, and no escape to speak of, because for all that motion in air is a form of freedom, at some point you will land again, and one rocky shore is much like another.

The world has its systems and those systems are your freedom. You cannot escape them. Go where you will, do whatever you do, you can only step from one path to the next, one script to another. Not only is there nothing new under the sun: it has all been commoditized for your convenience. Icarus, at the dawn of the historical world, assumed that up there somewhere transformation would be available. His world is Ovidian, after all, and at any point he might sprout branches, scales, talons, tusks, the whole calculus of his trajectory might alter. His father knew otherwise. But his father also knew that although one rocky shore, one Aegean tyranny, is much like another, there are, even so, gradations. Fine gradations of freedom. We are not all equally free, and we are not all equally bound. Some scripts are better than others. Marginally.

I clamber about over my spreadsheet these days much as Dan clambered over his factory roof. With less jeopardy, perhaps, but you can always fall through where you least expect. We do not approach death as from a distance, down a perspective avenue: we walk about on top of it, constantly, our feet touching the feet of the unremembered traces of ourselves which will one day replace us.

As a young teenager I, like Dan – only not like Dan, never with that much gaiety and abandon – climbed over the roofs of disused factories. Growing up, I lived near a concrete works in partial desuetude. These were factories that in their heyday had spun concrete lamp posts for the municipalities of England. But a concrete lamp post was, by the 1980s, a costly item, durable, but expensive. Steel was the thing now. Aluminium. So the factory was running down to nothing. In a couple of years the site would be a housing estate; for now the old concrete posts were left lying around overgrown by brambles, or half-buried like amphorae in Rome.

My brother and I roamed pretty freely over the site. It had its dangers but this was the 1980s, the last days of the wild youth of the world, in this corner of it anyway, and no one cared. On one occasion I slithered merrily on my arse down a sloping roof of corrugated fibreglass, and down the ziggurat of water tanks and drainpipes and packing cases at the corner of the building which had served as our ladder up, and then turned to watch my brother follow me. He descended with ashen care.

My brother was less fearful than me, by and large, so when he finally got down I made him explain: he had watched me go, and had seen how the roof had bowed and sagged under my weight. It had looked certain to him, he said, that I would plummet through it, on to the disused workbenches and ironmongery and cement floor many metres below.

Perhaps the roof was not as fragile as all that. Perhaps I did not come close to death that day. Perhaps some of the other structures I climbed on – water towers, stacked concrete pontoons, assorted roofs – were more perilous. I did in fact fall once or twice, once from some pontoons, once from the high ceiling of a building I was abseiling into down a steel wire; but I always just got up and patted myself down. On I plodded, through an ordinary life, past this individual I briefly met called Dan, and on from that. Until that day I stood in a room of the Beaux-Arts in Brussels, looking at the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

II Census

Brussels (8.284%)

‘The more things happen to you the more you can’t Tell or remember even what they were.’

William Empson, ‘Let It Go’

Two days after my encounter with the Icarus, I am back in Brussels and back in the museum, this time with my friend Steve Barley, who has finally arrived from Rome. Now I know how to get the chronology right, ascending to the empyrean of Bruegel as though by a winding stair or a twisting thermal. Thus we eddy from Robert Campin to Van der Weyden to Bosch to Joachim Patinir to Herri met de Bles. And so on and up.

We enter the corner room and I make a rapid audit, reminding myself. The right side of the room as you enter is Elder Bruegel; the left side is Younger Brueghel. I am here for the Elder Bruegel. Elder Bruegel is the great Bruegel. I ignore the Younger and settle to the business of scrutinizing Bruegel.

However, there is a distracting oddity. On the west wall of the room hangs the Elder’s Census at Bethlehem, a large panel painted in 1566. But on the south wall, roughly 8½ yards distant and hanging at an angle of 90 degrees to it, is another, near-identical Census at Bethlehem, painted by his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger in about 1610. It is one of at least thirteen copies the Younger made of the original, all of them faithful and well executed.

I start by trying to ignore it: it is good, but it is hack work, a cynical workshop production, a pointless replica. I am here to focus. But it happens that there is a spot, situated at the apex of a triangle the base of which is formed by the two paintings, where you can take them both in. If you had bovine eyes, the whole corner would become a giant and blurry and (to your cow mind) bewildering stereoscope.

I do not have bovine eyes or a cow mind. If I want to compare Bruegel with Brueghel, Elder with Younger, I have to swivel my head. And in reality, there is not one triangle at the apex of which you stand. Either you stand in front of the Elder and glance at the Younger, far away, or you stand in front of the Younger and look over your shoulder obliquely at the Elder. There are two triangles (at least); you move in a zone between their vertices.

And in this god-like, cow-like zone, what do you see?

In both cases, a snowbound village scene dominated by children playing and scuffling in the snow and their elders scratching out a living with their fardels and pigs’ blood and snowed-under carts, their small and wintry concerns. Around the inn in the left foreground a crowd gathers, submitting their names to the census; others straggle in across the frozen river, and across the frozen pond. Mary and Joseph are unobtrusively there: Mary, riding on an ass, nine-tenths concealed in her blue robe; Joseph likewise hidden behind a large hat but waggling a two-handed saw over his shoulder.

They are both as yet unnumbered.

For Pieter Bruegel the Elder, there was only ever one Census. It was a singular object. Unlike his son, he did not run an extensive workshop, did not bang out copies. He made few paintings, each one in his own hand.

When he died in 1569 at the age of about forty-two, his eldest son was four or five years old, his youngest, Jan, just one. In terms of art history, there is no genealogical connection between father and sons, merely a tectonic overlap. Pieter the Younger inherited a series of world-famous images (if by world you are content to understand Northern and Habsburg Europe), probably in the form of what are known as cartoons, drawings used to transfer an image to a panel. His entire career down to his death in 1636 was grounded on these images, whether he was making direct copies or spinning genre pieces from them.

He most likely saw little of his father’s original work, much of it already carted away to the great imperial collections – hence the small differences which creep in, the errors in replication, the drift.

As with his name. Pieter the Elder had started out plain Pieter Brueghel of Breda, signing his name with a calligraphic flourish on the drawings he produced as a young man. When he started painting in oils towards the end of the 1550s, he dropped the ‘h’ and began signing his name Bruegel in chiselled capitals, frequently with a ligature between the v (the Roman u) and the e, usually with the date (and after 1562 the date is generally written in Roman rather than Arabic numerals, with two or three exceptions), never with a P. or Peter – in the couple of cases where a P. was placed in front of bruegel, the paintings later turned out to be rather careless modern forgeries. ‘Brueghel’ was a bit burgher, perhaps, a bit stomping peasant; ‘BRUEGEL’ is cleaner, more Roman, befitting a Stoic observer of stomping peasants.

His sons for some reason restored the ‘h’ to the family name. Brueghel. Early in his career, Pieter the Younger aped his father’s Latinizing capitals, but reverted to small-case letters for most of his copies, and he never creates a ligature between the v and the e, although he does occasionally between the h and the e. Until 1616, he always appended his initial, ‘P-Brueghel’. After 1616, he altered the spelling of his surname once again, reversing the v (or u) and e, ‘P-Breughel’. In these ways, the Younger distinguished himself not only from his father, but from his younger brother Jan, who always signed simply ‘Brueghel’. Subsequent generations, notably Jan Brueghel’s son, Jan Breughel the Younger, retained the order of e and the u: ‘Breughel’.

Father and sons and grandsons and great-grandsons, taken together, make a blurry bruegel/Brueghel/Breughel object.

There was also a daughter, Maria Bruegel. Or Brueghel? We are not even sure about Maria: some have it as Marie. We know nothing about her. Older than her brothers, most likely, and certainly older than Jan, who was born only months before his father died. Probability suggests death in infancy. Her brother Pieter the Younger would have seven children, only one of whom would survive to adulthood.

Some children barely draw breath. My mother recollects a brother, Harry, who died before morning on the night he was born. She says she heard him crying that single night in the 1930s, in the solitary room in the west of Ireland that would constitute his universe. Crying perhaps under the baptismal hand. Harry, in the eye of God. And then he was gone.

So too Maria. Gone. The merest flicker of data in the endless ticker-taping lists of the quick and the dead.

I move between the invisible apices of my triangles, comparing Bruegel with Brueghel. It is a midweek morning in early January, raining outside the museum and largely empty inside. This is where my as yet undefined project has brought me, dead-reckoning in a room of old paintings.

I am forty-two, around the age at which the Elder died. Forty-two is the number of Bruegels on the spreadsheet. My own father has died, a year or two previously, aged eighty-four. When I was born he was forty-four. I was the second son. There are two years between my brother and me. I have also recently become a father myself, to two sons, between whom there are two years. Pieter Bruegel had two sons: the Younger, and Jan the Elder, between whom there were four years.

And so on. You do not really explain an intersection by following up or down any of its convergent, or for that matter divergent, paths. It is sufficient to note that my midlife is characterized by the interaction of multiple convergent (divergent?) vectors: my dead father, my brother, my small sons, myself, and the Bruegels. Many similar triangles.

*

The census is an unusual subject. Bruegel has painted one of the culminating moments of bureaucratic life. Bureaucracy is the science of docketing the routine comings and goings of existence – births and deaths, taxes paid and taxes owing; it is a rolling programme of work, one without end.

A census, however, is a one-off. It is a flourish of the bureaucrat’s art. You do not merely keep the ball of a census rolling: it wants planning and execution. It is, properly speaking, a project, a projection of bureaucracy. And it has an end: a Domesday Book of taxable, pressable souls.

From a distance – to the administrator or historian – a census is an exercise in control and power, not always pleasant, but always impressive in its way, like a datastream ziggurat or Hoover Dam. Seen close to, however, it pixilates into a sequence of inexact iterations. The bureaucratic ground troops do not mechanically fill in blanks. They have to keep a weather eye cocked on the confusion of crowds, have to sort quickly, roughly (there are only so many categories) but accurately. They have to fix a point in time where there are no points in time.

Bruegel’s Census at Bethlehem therefore depicts a world in transformation. The census is drawn through the village, through that mess of humanity at the inn door, like the carding of wool. The stream of individuals passes back and forth over the frozen river: people come in nebulous and free to have their names written down in a book, their existence validated in ink; they go out docketed and numbered, but also informed, no longer unlicked stray lumps of humanity but named individuals, with a location and an occupation and a marital status, enjoying a spark of existence beyond their own clay.

*

How, then, to number the paintings which hang in this room? How to enter them on the spreadsheet?

On an adjacent wall to the Census in Brussels is the Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, a small sepia painting. Little figures skate on the frozen river, or huddle over their game of curling. On the bank, under a tree, a trap is set for birds: a heavy assembly of planks (in construction, not unlike the panel it is painted on) is propped up on a stick, a lure of crumbs beneath it; from the stick, there is the merest trace of a taut string leading into a house on the left of the panel. Snatch the stick from under the planks and you might catch a bird or two, just as the painter of panels, ever watchful, might catch and trap a soul, or a village of souls. Snatch the ice from under those skating children, and you might drag one or two down. The birder, the painter, the Devil are always watching, always waiting.

Always watching, always waiting: Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, detail.

The skaters and the birds are linked by two stylized black birds in the foreground. They are the same size in real terms as the skaters, the same tonality also; they could be mistaken at first glance for skaters.

Birds and skating villagers live a similar existence: birds have wings and skaters ease along at great speed; both are in danger, both seem at liberty. The birds could fly away, live in the woods, while the villagers could slide around that bend in the river and be gone in minutes, never to return. But the ice will melt and the villagers will remain. Winter birds, too, are territorial. All are rooted here.

Including Bruegel. Bruegel might have skated around that bend and away, to Antwerp, to Royal Brussels, to Rome and Naples and Calabria. But he came back. According to Karel van Mander, who included, in his 1604 Schilder-boeck, or Book on Painting, brief lives of the great Netherlandish painters, Bruegel frequently visited the villages around Antwerp and Brussels in disguise, infiltrating festival and kermis (a kermis – from ‘kirk mis’ or ‘church mass’ – being the annual festival held in honour of the village church’s named saint), observing but unobserved.

His panels are littered with figures standing on the edge of crowds, watching. Some are well-heeled, clearly not village folk, returned from the city for family weddings, to partake again, briefly, of the drunken, cavorting rhythms of village life.

One way or another, in paint as in life, this was Bruegel’s world.

*

Bruegel’s Bird Trap was a popular subject. There are at least 125 known and documented copies.

But what is a copy? If I were to take out paint and easel now, and run up some version of my own, would that constitute a copy? Number 126. Mark it down. At what point does the painterly spore of Bruegel peter out to blank snow? When can we say that the code has replicated itself into muddy, unrecognizable progeny, into mass reproduction?

On the wall opposite the Census, there is a large canvas, an Adoration of the Magi. This is not generally attributed to Bruegel, but may be after a lost composition, like the Icarus. It is in watercolour, an unusual medium for Bruegel. There is a tempera Blind Leading the Blind in Naples, and a Misanthrope; there is The Wine of St Martin’s Day in Madrid; otherwise it is all oil, all panel.

The canvas is badly damaged. Who knows how many panels have been lost over the years, painted over, chucked in skips, on bonfires. Van Mander mentions two versions of Christ Carrying the Cross (one remains); a Temptation of Christ, with Christ looking down over a wide landscape; a peasant wedding, in watercolour, with peasants giving presents to the bride; and one other watercolour in the hands of the same collector, undescribed. We know of others, gone missing. A crucifixion. A miniature Tower of Babel. The first in the sequence of The Months (April/May).

Whatever Bruegel saw when he contemplated his own Bruegel Object is lost to us, a ghost configuration. Whatever might be vouchsafed to posterity from a life lived – in Bruegel’s case, a lot; in my case, as in most cases, nothing – is only very approximately indexed to that life. I have very little interest in biography. It is not Bruegel’s completeness that I am interested in but my own. But I am conscious that the dead panels stand whispering beyond my spreadsheeted ring of firelight, and no amount of conjuring will induce them to step forward. It is too late.

When my father died in 2009, he was eighty-four years old. A double-Bruegel. The parallelisms proliferate. I consciously peg each year in my life, for example, to a year in my father’s, according to the age of our children: so in 2017, when my Bruegel project finished, my children were nine and eleven; my brother and I were nine and eleven in 1978.

Robert Henry Ferris in 1978 was making his last throw of the dice, leaving GEC, the General Electric Company – the huge conglomerate where he had worked, barring an interruption for war service, for nearly forty years – for a much smaller company, where he might just hope to be a bit of a big fish. That didn’t really work out either. He was fifty-three, and his heart wasn’t in it. He told me after he retired that, in all the years of his working life, he had never been early for work once. He had a lively mind and a fairly dull job. He didn’t travel much. He just sort of stopped.

One evening, at around that time, he sat down and wrote in an enormous year diary one line: It is said that in every life there is one story. This is mine.

One line a night was enough, he said. If you wrote one line a night you would soon have a great big book. I was nine, and I was impressed. But it was too late. He liked his sedentary whisky too much, could never find the energy to add anything to that one line. He could certainly write, but he lacked technique and discipline. And there it stayed on a shelf, the weighty volume with the solitary line and several hundred enormous blank pages, like the blank cells of my spreadsheet. A metaphor, and a bit of a shitty one at that. From time to time my brother or I would take down the volume and study it, either to shame him publicly (and he would laugh along jovially enough at his own foolishness) or to teeter privately on the brink of some immense intuition: not only was our father’s life unfulfilled, but all life was most likely unfulfillable. ‘It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange,’ writes the poet William Empson. And there it was, this deep blankness, sitting on a shelf in our living room.

My father went on in due course to his deeper blankness, his long home. But when he was in hospital dying, my brother was searching the census records of our paternal family. My father was always reticent with family history. He had been born in 1925 in Camden, had grown up there and on Portpool Lane off the Gray’s Inn Road, and later in Lee Green. There were some disconnected anecdotes – a story about a broken radio, about a Jewish funeral, about an aunt who sprinkled sugar on his buttered bread – not much else.

His mother had died of heart disease during the war when he was a very young man. He rarely spoke about her, but on one memorable evening over whisky towards the end of his life he found he could not recall her name. The grip of my father’s memory was utterly secure until his last day. But he could not remember his mother’s name.

Later, he dredged it up from somewhere. Anne. My brother uncovered more detail, and relayed it to my father in hospital. She was recorded as Annie on the census of 1911, at nine years old the youngest of five sisters growing up on what is now Tavistock Street, just off Drury Lane. She had been born around the corner on Stanhope Street, coloured black on Charles Booth’s poverty map of the late 1880s to designate ‘Lowest Class. Vicious, semi-criminal’. Stanhope Street along with the whole rookery around Clare Market was bulldozed soon after to make way for the arterial Kingsway. No. 1 Kingsway would become, until 1963, the head office of GEC, my father’s first place of work. In 1940, during the Blitz, he would firewatch from its roof, and could have lobbed a cricket ball through the vanished window of his mother’s slum birthplace.

Years later my grandfather told my mother that his wife – Annie – had had a temper on her. Choleric. Hot blood. Hasty heart. The death of her. She died, as I say, of heart disease in 1944, aged forty-two. Years of Bruegel. My father travelled down from Scotland where he was based with Coastal Command, whether in the nick of time, to watch by her bedside as the candles flickered out, or too late, I do not know. He was an only child. He and his father were thrust together to deal with this small loss in a world undergoing incalculable loss.

My father was not obviously close to his father. Pop, as he called him, lived with us until he died when I was eight. My mother says my father rarely addressed him, never had a conversation with him. Who knows if it was trauma, or sadness, or indifference which sundered or secretly united them.

When Pop died, only my father and my mother attended his funeral. My father took Pop’s remaining possessions – a few books, razor, alarm clock, wallet and clothes – and put them in a bin bag and slung them on the municipal dump. There was to be no gravestone, no memorial rose, no bench in a park, nothing to visit.

But within the year my father sat down at the empty diary and confronted its alarming blankness.

In truth, all this biographical detail was probably less use to my father than his anecdotes, and in any case it was difficult to gauge his response – his circuit of interest had contracted to the point where all that concerned him were the minutiae of the routines that were eking out his life.

But for my brother and me it assuaged the sense that here was a disconnected dot, about whom we knew not very much, going into the darkness. There was a chain. He was linked, and so were we. It was written in the census.

People may be numberless, but they are not identical; you are defined both by your similarity to and by your discrepancy from them. So, spot the difference.

The Younger’s panel is fractionally larger – he may have been working to Antwerp rather than Brussels feet. Whatever the reason, the result is that figure groups, for which there would have been separate cartoons, are pulled this way and that within certain tolerances, marginal plays.

No two figures are dressed alike, fabrics change colour, there are odd reversals. The woman in the lower right, for example, wears a red-green combination of overskirt and underskirt inverted in the Brueghel copy. There are microscopical differences between faces, individual posture. The Younger had his own way with trees, bushy rather than twiggy.

Criss-cross tracks, paths, desire lines: The Census at Bethlehem, detail – Younger (left) and Elder (right).

And then, more slowly, I see that the Younger favours tracks. From the bottom right, where Mary has entered on her donkey or ass, to the top left across the frozen river; and again, from the wheels of the foreground frozen carts, there are criss-cross tracks, paths, desire lines, animating the space. This is a frozen world, but there is evidence of networks, organized around an axis.

The Elder’s foreground carts, by contrast, are going nowhere. There are no paths, just yellowish ice wallows. He has painted a village of spindly cartwheels, a spindly ladder against a spindly barn, spindly trees. And he has painted a world of endlessly repeated circles – the wreath, the barrels, and especially the cartwheels, thirty-one of them, including one a fraction below dead centre, hitched to no wagon and orthogonal to the viewer, as though it were not a material object at all, but a diagram of the interlocking cycles of village life and the seasons, of the great wheels of history and Christian redemption.

Hitched to no wagon: The Census at Bethlehem, detail.

And then finally I recognize what sets the two paintings apart: the Younger, perhaps seduced by those few inches in hand, has raised the branches of the largest foreground tree a fraction to reveal what in the Elder there is none of – a vanishing point, or what the Italians call a punto di fuga, a fugitive point, a point of escape. The Younger’s brown frozen river winds out of the panel. His father’s, by contrast, is entangled in the branches, perhaps coils around the back of the village, a labyrinthine waterway.

The only thing vanishing is that peculiar sun. The old world is ebbing to its conclusion.

The Younger – wittingly? unwittingly? – has made this dead cosmic circuitry bearable, transient. Along those paths and on that frozen river our eye is made to criss-cross, not circle, and finally escape the painting. And he has done all this in direct contravention of the central thought process of the original – that these circles go nowhere for a reason.

A vanishing point: The Census at Bethlehem, detail – Elder (top) and Younger (bottom)

Pieter Brueghel the Younger may not have been a painter at all. He was unarguably an eminent man in the Antwerp art world – there is a portrait etching of him by Anthony van Dyck, in which, as it happens, he projects the sort of patient melancholy common to men with drooping noses and straggling moustaches. But he may only have been the inheritor of the cartoons and the general manager of a workshop which employed anonymous hands to complete the copies. It is possible that he had no artistic personality, nothing but a signature and a locked chest of cartoons which he carefully opened and closed as required, a bureaucrat among artists, ghosting through the system, the painted artefacts. The notion that somewhere in that swirl of hands and methods and corporate production was the memory of a five-year-old boy transfixed by the death of his father is nothing more than an absurd projection of my own.

But this is why I am here. I did not come into this room in Brussels to discover a truth, but to impose one. To make something of all this. This is one way in which we react to the accumulation of life. We make spreadsheets, trace genealogies, embark on projects, write essays. We pore over the data in search of patterns. All this must and will be made to mean something.

I stand in the corner room of the museum, then, observing small differences. Discriminating.

And there is in fact one final difference – a figure, present in the Elder’s panel but absent in all the Younger’s copies, suggesting a late emendation on the father’s part, a final gratuitous flourish of his art: it is the youth pulling on his skates, below the tiny child who cannot yet summon the courage to go out on the ice.

Life is treacherous, says the figure, but we have resources. We have skates. We can make of this treacherous ice our element. Sooner or later, we all pull on our skates and go out on the ice – as the father might have remarked to the son, had he had time.

We have resources: The Census at Bethlehem, detail – Elder (left) and Younger (right).

This whole village, in fact, suddenly seems to be poised by the ice, spilling uncertainly but inevitably over its edges. Just to the right of the large tree by the water a father stands hands in pockets and watches his two small children testing the curious element.

The skater’s absence from all copies (bar one – a recently discovered panel has the skater, suggesting a late, rectifying glimpse of the original, or a post-mortem addition) implies that it was the father who was diverging, making changes on the hoof, inserting figures at the last minute, blotting out the vanishing point in a moment of inspiration, and the son who adhered more faithfully to the earlier version, the cartoon or, more likely, sheaf of cartoons. There is, after all, a sensibility in copying well, an alertness to detail. One of the Younger’s guiding virtues, you could say, was fidelity. Copying is meditative and respectful work, itself a way of thinking.

If he was occasionally caught out by the odd detail it hardly matters. At some point the fractional differences collapse into the far greater mass of similarities. The census is not a record of our individuality in the end, but of our solidarity. Thus there is not a source of pictorial DNA – the Elder – and a series of ever-degrading replications. Rather there are versions of versions all orbiting a hypothetical centre of mass (the cartoon), just as the small children of the village eccentrically orbit the centres of mass set up between them and their parents, and their parents in turn orbit the invisible barycentre which lies between them and their ancestors, and which we commonly call the community. Each of us, present or absent, exerts our own small constant gravitational tug, variable in time, hard to calculate, take account of; but there, nevertheless, in the mass of data points, and the geometry which comprehends it.

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