POEM: after brueghel

after bruegel

at the beginning of it all,

at the clever edge

where sails and paddles,

and hard spinning wheels

drew lines like whipcords

through the air,
and captured wind and water--

seeming almost to yoke

time and space themselves
to artifacts!

thus, it became a kind of project 
or task deftly done,

something  acquired through pride

rather than bequeathed in honour.

and nature—how could such be?—

becomes a means-test,

a gauge rather than a guide.

What shall we call such an age?

THE OTHER DAY, I WAS CONTEMPLATING A PICTURE that's on my living room wall by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) and this poem popped into my head. When you look at the wonderful landscape and the details of village life he captures so well, your eye is drawn to the windmill at the right. it seems to loom over the village. It seems remote and intimidating, like some giant ready to fall upon the villagers at any moment.

In the foreground is a scene of trade and travel, where different social layers are presented. There is a rich nobleman or merchant riding on horseback toward the viewer at the left. He appears to be glancing at the coach of a nobleman who rides in the opposite direction toward town. To the right of the coach is a peasant in a wagon loaded with supplies. Beside him is a woman, with a huge basket balanced on her head. She walks into town with her wares to sell. Perhaps it is market day.( Note: It is the woman who has the greatest burden to carry with no wagon or horse to assist her, suggesting her low social status. She does walk with a proud muscularity, however.)
So here is an early seventeenth century version of a four-lane highway, with traffic flowing in and out of town. There are two or three men crossing the road behind the figures, carrying what look like sacks of grain to the mill. As well, there is what appears to be a group of horses and two or three figures that may be a family in the picture's middle foreground, situated in a gully between the ‘highway’ and the mill. At the mill are figures, one of which appears to be picking up a sack of milled grain. 
The foreground is darker and is shaded by the road-cut to the left. Trees rise above it and extend beyond the picture's frame.

The middle portion of the painting contains the village. It is painted in light tones, with the sun shining there. The scene is perhaps mid-morning. Houses in the village are made of stone or brick; there is a river and a bridge. People are walking around, riding and boating, and going about their daily lives. It's a busy scene, yet calm and peaceful. It is interesting to note in foreground, the earth is raw and torn. The road appears recently excavated. The exposed tree roots hang down almost as if to reach out and snatch the unwary traveler. This setting contrasts with the softly-lit village.

Equally, the land on which the mill sits appears recently worked, and the gully between it and the 'highway' is a scrub land, that may been the bed of an older road. In the picture's middle ground, there is another road that follows the contours of the river through the village.

The foreground reminds me of a raw, industrial site, newly carved out and unpleasant. Because it’s in the foreground, it dominates the village and surrounds it in a kind of 'pincer' grip.

Perhaps Brueghel is suggesting two elements of the modern world in the early Seventeenth Century. On the one hand is the bustle of commerce and trade, where rich and poor use the new highway that will only continue to get busier.

On the other hand, across the gully in which there are people and animals (it's unclear to me what’s going on there), stands The Mill, the technological powerhouse of the age. To be sure, it is a relatively small installation, and Brueghel has painted it in a lighter palette, suggesting, perhaps, that he sees the mill as beneficent, at least more so than the dark highway across the way. Also, the mill does not appear to be particularly busy; it has a human scale and pace, so I may reconsider my original view that it ‘loomed’ over the town. It's not on par with the poet William Blake's “satanic mills”. At least not yet.

Fully half the picture is sky, with blue visible through a haze of clouds. The sky is a soft blanket over the village and surrounding lands, with an interesting detail of the morning sun highlighting, in red and gold, the white body of a  seagull. With such a sky, Brueghel may be suggesting the protective embrace of the divine the village enjoys, and that the mill may as well. But such a covering is less obvious above the shaded highway. I think Brueghel sees more and more people journeying along this commercial path, and because of the way he’s composed his painting, I can’t help but feel he is critical of those who choose this way.

     I am of course talking through my hat about what is going on in this four hundred year old painting! My focus is primarily on the mill and its elevated position with respect to the village, specifically in terms of the mill's technology and its use of wind energy to power the proto-industrial processes of grain milling. Within a hundred years or so, coal will emerge as the new energy source used in conjunction with the emerging technologies of the Eighteenth Century, when the age of fossil fuels begins. In Bruegel’s painting, the mill’s wind-powered engine is still at a human scale, and the nightmarish engines imagined in  William Blake's famous 1804 poem are an additional century and a half further from the painter’s time.

     I won’t talk too much about my poem, other than to say that the groundwork of the industrial revolution and all its mad excesses has been carved out of the raw and torn lands surrounding Bruegel' s mill, and laid along the roadbed of his new highway. 

Cheers, Jake.