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the tissue of simile that passes for linguistics, learn enough Flemish figures, of speech to pore over obscure, outdated books: waste, in short, whatever gifts I might otherwise have staked against the ascendancy of nonsense.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.