Essays in Idleness

Not enough attention has been given to Pieter Bruegel (the elder, of Antwerp, mostly). This is a situation I have been able to remedy, at least for myself, over the last week or so. I have the old Phaidon collections, of the drawings and of the paintings respectively, and being an idle person I have been flipping through the pages, while sometimes pausing, to stare.

Bruegel’s landscape drawings, especially one which shows a sketcher, very small, at work within the mountains, is an autobiographical indication that he will abscond when the sketch is finished. He is “the master of moving on.” Bruegel never did portraits, consciously — depicting only beggars, peasants, and connoisseurs as they happen across his way. He “graduated” into colour painting and more visionary and apocalyptic compositions, just as he was retiring from the trade of producing pretty prints for the tourists. And, having not participated in the lucrative market for religious genre paintings — it was a quick way to make a Guilder in bourgeois Netherlandish times — he instead wandered off, quite by himself. He persists in being more draughtsman than composer, even as a painter. He is no surrealist; he has no plan. He paints just what he sees. Sometimes it is of the moral universe within nature.

His landscapes, like his people, are so very much alive. They are moving, and seem never awkward.

The Fight Between Carnival & Lent is the Plate from which I extracted the detail, mentioned in my headline. It is a scene mixed rife with gaiety and tragedy, outdoors and urban, in the shadow of a church. Bruegel has humour, but it is amazing what he is without. He lacks mockery.

I must ask gentle reader to forgive me, for I’ve had another rather grim prang. (A prang is an entirely physical condition, as when sports cars collide, though it can carry spiritual implications and cosmic effects, such as death to all parties.) I fear I won’t be writing, even awkwardly like this, for at least another week, and perhaps even longer. For I’m spending too much time collapsed on the floor, up here in the High Doganate. Really I would prefer to be preparing for Christmas, and upsetting the usual hateful customers, although being annoying might not be a spiritual requirement for either task. I might think, theologically, that abstention might be because “I have passed out entirely.” But no; fasting is supposed to be voluntary. So, wrong again.

Cost is often numerated in dollars or pounds, plain and material. They can be counted, using simple arithmetic, which is why we go to such trouble to conceal our costs. But still more, we go to the trouble of pretending that things which are very expensive must really be almost free, when we decide that each is necessary.

Cars, for instance; who would be without a car, if he has a job? He rides it just to get to work, or on holiday sometimes, for “leisure” has also become a necessary convenience. Therefore cars are as if free, unless one cannot be satisfied with a car that is boring and conventional. Then one buys a car that costs real money, though of course little of it if one can also afford a private jet. Getting to the aerodrome then becomes the convenience. Or the aeroplane is only a convenience, if one is Elon Musk, or an elected politician.

But generally, it is convenient to be rich, on the large scale, but also on the small. There are more and more things that one may take for granted, and therefore count as a convenience. And under socialism, the expensive infrastructures are also a convenience, though only for the ruling class. They are expensed, to the taxpayer, in the welfare state, where everyone expenses more and more, so there is always an insoluble “debt crisis.” Only right-wing people realize there are some limits, and then only when paying for things they don’t want.

My fanciful suggestions about roads and highways are meant to call attention to this. Who will pay for the convenience of having a drive, even in a bus, instead of walking? One may try to calculate our expenditures on roads, directly and indirectly, and for all the vehicles and necessary services, now that we live in megacities and no longer in farms, villages, and towns (which now smear into conurban districts). Hint: a vehicle is the cheapest item.

The thing about the cost of convenience is that it mops up what we might spend, beyond the choices dictated by politicians, and the various other control-freaks. Cathedrals, for instance, used to be more common.

And let us forget about healthcare. For getting well is, too, a convenience, only “necessary” for getting back to work. Though usually it happens without the intercession of medicine; except “big pharma.”

Strive, instead, “Against the Bogus prophets of the Day / Chained to Corruption, Failure, and Decay.”

A correspondent reminds me that we have too narrow a definition of “noise.” As we had been discussing roads, and were considering traffic signs, and as Donald Knuth was mentioned (who once refused to move into a town whose signage was typographically vile), the need to erase unnecessary traffic instructions was raised. And all traffic instructions are unnecessary, or will become unnecessary when we have deleted the highway system.

My correspondent also included photographs of a selection of street signs, monstrously numerous, and viciously ugly, from around the city of London, Ontario (whose excess population now includes a hundred thousand cars). There were many satanic touches, such as the shrieking clash of competing illegible signs, replaced by the moronic bureaucrats who run that city with a single large sign incorporating all the little signs in every detail, so that the clash could be fully appreciated. These malefactors, and many of the other functionaries in that town, could benefit from vigorous punishment.

One of the advantages of closing down all (the typically asphalt-paved) public streets and highways, is that we can make a clean sweep of all the road signs. I suggest melting them down before randomly distributing the remains in junk yards. Alternatively, the wise riflemen of the remoter Ontario districts already use them for target practice, and they rust much faster when they are full of holes. No one should ever be reminded of this age of slavery to crude automotive and pedestrian commands, once we have been freed of them. And of course not just appalling road signs in point sizes some twenty times that used for Shakespeare. For they constitute an assault of aggressive bullyings that abridge our liberties.

The Internet tells me that truck-driving has become an issue in the United States. (Everything is an issue in Canada.)

In my view, which is obeyed throughout this website, nothing legal needs to be done about the truck-driving industry. All regulations and licensing requirements on the length, height, width, weight, and speed, of vehicles or drivers, should be abrogated throughout all constituencies. This should disapply even if they use enough wheels to float, or are piloted by centenarians or Somalis — so long, of course, as they do not make loud, distracting noises.

My one restriction would be that no vehicle over nine feet long, or unnecessarily ugly, may be displayed on a public road or driveway. But this could be enforced by extra-legal means, merely by defunding the upkeep for all roads. Indeed, this will save money, and discourage corruption. Anything that is oversize or awkward will have to go off-road; and of course, never faster than a horse. (Perhaps spiffy bicycles will have to be prevented; whereas ostrich tongas will not have to be.)

All this should apply only outside city limits. Inside, anything with a disagreeable motor must go deep underground.

The unemployed truck-drivers might want to look into “regenerative agriculture.” It promises a fulfilling hobby for all the empty spaces, created by the abandonment of our antiquated highway networks.

“I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school; — the school of Walter Scott, and Homer.” I copied this motto into one of my adolescent notebooks.

My own education in fanaticism was conducted and directed by John Ruskin, about that age of fourteen. To him I owe my continuing depreciation of Renaissance and Modern Art, even of the greatest draughtsman, Rubens; though truth to tell, I despise the Pre-Raphaelites, too, and tend to dismiss them as sentimental vomit.

Ruskin was, however, my Western drawing master for rocks, rivers, trees, and ferns, in addition to the Eastern masters, and I read his instructive, fanatical works quite irresponsibly. He delivered me into J. M. W. Turner’s hands, so that I spent too much of my time in England in the Turner galleries.

I even discovered Marcel Proust there, when I found that he was another Ruskin fanatic.

Indeed, what I liked chiefly about Ruskin, was his fanaticism. It is why I was also mesmerized by Ezra Pound. I was under the growing apprehension that all the great artists were fanatics, of one sort or another, and the poets, too, and of course the “fifth gospel” of J. S. Bach, as it had been called by my saintly Aunt Mildred in Cape Breton, the organist. Perhaps fanaticism runs in my family.

As gentle reader may know, the Unicorn is distinguished by the horn in the middle of his brow. He was apparently first spotted in the Vth century, if one believes in art history. He can be caught and tamed only by virgins, and when his horn is dipped in water, can nullify any poison. The reason for this is perfectly obvious. Consult those pictures in which the Unicorn is resting his head in the lap of Mary.

The Council of Trent prohibited unicorn hunting in 1563.