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

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       III Fire

      Antwerp and Rotterdam (6.316%)

      ‘The air still moves, and by its moving cleareth, The fire up ascends, and planets feedeth.’

      Fulke Greville, Caelica

      Months pass, and I wage a phoney war against the looming Bruegel Object, pick off a panel here or there, drag myself like a forlorn expedition over the still-featureless map of all Bruegel. Finding landmarks.

      The cities I visit are cities named in a dream of Europe. Rotterdam. Antwerp. Places you might struggle to put a pin in, but which underlie your notion of European. Once I have visited them, I hardly know that I have been there: waystages on a cosmic map.

      Rotterdam, for instance. Rotterdam is a station, roadworks, new buildings, a long straight walk to the museum along a windy street. It is a museum built in the 1970s, an empty café with coloured chairs.

      That is Rotterdam. Have I been there? Barely.

      *

      I am in Rotterdam with a friend, a painter called Anna Keen. Sister of Zabdi, my paragliding instructor. In Rome in the 1990s we were a couple. We lived behind the Colosseum on top of the Domus Aurea, Nero’s cavernous, mouldy, buried golden palace, with its revolving dining room and its obscene frescos.

      Now Anna lives in Amsterdam, in a shed near the water, and I am paying a visit. In a couple of days my brother will join us.

      The shed is part of a complex of work units – next door, for example, is a builder of speedboats, or racing yachts, I do not remember which. I only remember looking down the length of streamlined hulls, bright paintwork, varnish. Rigging? I don’t recall.

      Anna’s shed is also her home and a source of income – she sublets parts of it as studio and living space to art students. Her brother Nick, a carpenter, has come over for a few days and built partition walls. Anna lives upstairs in the low-ceilinged loft that runs the length of the shed. You have to stoop as you walk along it. You ascend by a ladder between two antique electrostatic speakers into her wonky space of two thousand books and paint-stained electronics – laptop, router, amplifier, speakers – and naked plasterboard. A padded silver pipe runs up through the floor. Plastic flapping windows give on to the main space, where Anna has her own wooden boat propped up and her immense easel, and endless red-and-white packets of a line of budget food called Euro Shopper which for some reason she cannot stop buying, and presumably consuming, and wants to paint. On each packet is a schematic drawing indicating the packet’s contents – a red-and-white cow (milk), a red-and-white peanut (peanut butter), a red-and-white gravy boat (brown sauce), a red-and-white whisk (whipping cream, UHT). They are everywhere. A ready-made Warholian homogenization of all food and all household goods, in this most dehomogenized of spaces.

      Anna has installed a large wood-burning stove in her kitchen, and it directs heat around the shed complex along silver-insulated pipes. It is February, the stove is working full time, and everything you touch is either scalding hot or icy. The inhabitants of the shed (three, four art students, Anna, Anna’s brother, Anna’s brother’s girlfriend, my brother, and me) shuffle around wrapped in scarfs and old jumpers, clutching mugs of tea, seeing how close we can get to the fiery stove without singeing our flesh. Whatever the stove radiates seems to dissipate within an inch or two of its cast iron: the zone of warmth is perilous and narrow.

      I persuade Anna to come to Rotterdam and look at the Bruegel.

      Rotterdam. To recapitulate: a station, a street, a museum, the wind, and The Tower of Babel.

      Museums are for the most part horizontal structures. I do not know many properly vertical museums. But the Rotterdam museum contains one of the great essays in verticality. It is the smaller of Bruegel’s two Babel panels – the other hangs in Vienna – but the larger of the two towers. The compositions are similar. The Vienna tower is built around a cankerous rock and in the foreground, receiving obeisance from his stonemasons, there is a king (Flavius Josephus ascribed the building of the tower to Nimrod); the ships are much larger than those in the Rotterdam panel, the horizon subtly higher; in Rotterdam we are higher, therefore, and see further.