Da Vinci's Bicycle

by Guy Davenport

  It is now crossing Cassiopeia as it has been since flags floated through the savage smoke at Shiloh and fifty bugles shrill above a roar of drums loosed the red charge at Balaclava, a speck the size of a midge’s eye, a jot of carbon on tar.

  It swings so wide afield and so imperially slow that it has been around the sun but four times since Plato was crowned with wild olive at Olympia. It moves backward around the sun, the tenth of the planets and the largest, forever unseeable.

  You can see what was most brilliant in the genius of the French at the century’s beginning by considering Jacques Henri Lartigue and Louis Blériot as pure examples of its candor and spontaneity. Lartigue made his first photograph when he was six.

  He had an older brother to idolize. His father, a banker who liked automobiles and kites, stereopticons and bicycles, was a splendid father. His mother and grandmother were perfect of their kind. The house swarmed with aunts and uncles and cousins.

  There were female cousins who dashed down steps and spilled off their velocipedes, male cousins who jumped fully clothed into the mill race. Papa drove a car like the one drawn by Toulouse-Lautrec, the sort you steer with a stick and start with a crank.

  XVI

  In goggles and dusters, gauntlets and scarves, they tore over the Seine and Loire, scattering geese, making horses rear. The world children inhabit, floating to the moon in a basket launched from the fig tree, is observation that has become perception.

  Little Lartigue so loved places and moments that he began to stare at them, close his eyes, stare again, and keep this up until he had memorized a scene in every detail. Then he had it forever. He could summon it again with perfect clarity.

  He knew the fly on the windowpane, the mole on a cousin’s neck, the skiff tethered to a poplar on the canal. His father saw him at this memorizing, asked what he was up to, told him about cameras, and bought him one to externalize and share his vision.

  You took a cork out of a hole in the front of the camera to make an exposure. He stood in his father’s joined hands to photograph racing cars zooming by. He followed the racers with a sweep of the camera, getting oval wheels and a forward stretch.

  Blériot wept when he saw Wilbur Wright drone up in his Flyer at Le Mans and buzz through figure eights in the blue French summer sky. Blériot’s wasplike Antoinette CV flew like a moth and Wilbur Wright’s mothlike Flyer No. 4 flew like a wasp.

  The persistence of the Antoinette would eventually combine with the agility of the Flyer to become the Spad that Captain Lartigue flew over the trenches of the Marne. When Blériot flew across the Channel in 1909, a man walking a dog saw him land.

  The man was Henry James. Did he see the Antoinette glide and cough onto English grass and trindle to a halt? He did not bother to say. Birds come before. The soul, if noble, becomes a speckled bird at death, in ancient belief, or dove or raven.

  It rides to the world beyond on the withers of an elk. The pace of this progress is solemn, between red larches and past white water, rocks, wolves in naked light, outposts with lamps and turrets, prophets in booths, structures of the utter continuum.

  The rattling yaffle of the silver-stockinged rainbird in its scarlet mutch, the owl’s idiot eye, the sparrow’s chat and note, the imperial eagle upon its pole: in the ice-age cave in the Lascaux hills there is a bird on a perch to sign a hunter’s death.

  XVII

  Amma the Great Collarbone has put his people the Dogon, their altars, granaries, ancestor tortoises, and trees here in this rocky land so hot, so dry. There are no rivers. For nine months of the year no rain falls. The trees are the baobab and tamarind.

  The trees are kahya, flame-tree, butternut, sa, jujube, and acacia. At first, from the beginning of time, the Dogon lived in the Mande, before Timbuctoo was there. This homeland was called Dyigou. Then came the men with curved knives, on camels, Islam.

  The Dogon brought their altars to Mali. They brought the earth of the first field in baskets and in boats on the Niger. Ogo came with them. That was nine hundred years ago. The earth on which the ark came down they brought to Mali in many baskets.

  The forebrain of wasps is built up of a rich tangle of nerve fibers around two quick cups of denser flesh that are like mushrooms of keen mentality and tenacious memory socketed into tissues of casual liveliness and accurate response astride a fat knot.

  This central knot seems to be that point around which nature whorls her symmetries. To the right and left of this small brain there stick out like petals the nerves sensitive to light which stream forward and out onto the diamond surfaces of the eyes.

  There is yet a third mass of brain that branches down the chest and belly to order the legs, wings, and sting, and to send back the feel of the wind, the wild sweet of coupling, the juicy pull of apple wine, rotten pear mush, the larkspur’s velvet nap.

  The keenest nerves cluster in the jaws and stomach. The bigger the mushroom cups in the brain, the smarter the insect, for the spies and gatherers among wasps and bees have the deepest cups in their brains of all the foragers, the sharpest eyes.

  They discover all and remember all that’s useful to their lives. Yellow crumbles, soft meal, gum, grains on the grippers, bright. Green is crisp, gives water, ginger mint keen. Yellow is deep, green is long. Green snaps wet, a wax of mealy yellow clings.

  Yellow clings and our jaws crunch green. Crunch curls of dry wood. Cling around green, red shine is the line and red shine is wobble the happy and shimmy the sting. Dance the ripen red, hunch the yellow bounce. Red the speckle, green the ground.

  XVIII

  The red beyond the red is the finest of the dancers and in that tingle shakes a green. Latch green, brush red. She does no spin for she sucks no wine. We dangle when we suck the wine. She is stronger than the brandy. Red then is the green and red the yellow.

  The world in his head, Amma began to make the world. The two hundred and sixty-six bummo were written in the collarbone. From himself he took a pinch of filth, spat on it, kneaded it in his fingers, shaping it well, and made the seed of an acacia.

  That was the first of all things, an acacia seed. Inside it was the world, all the bummo. The filth that Amma brought up from his throat, that is the earth. His spit, that is our water. He breathed hard as he worked, that is fire. He blew on the seed.

  That’s the air. Then he made the acacia tree on which to hang the seed. Amma then took a thorn from the acacia and stood it point up, like the little iron bell called the ganana, the one we ring with a stick, and on this he stuck a lump.

  He stuck on it a little dome of acacia wood, so that altogether the two, thorn and dome, looked like a mushroom. Then he stuck another acacia thorn, point down, into the little dome from above. Here he put the two hundred and sixty-six things.

  The top thorn he called male, the bottom female. When our children spin their tops they repeat the first dance of the world. How busy is a top, and how still! Amma spun the first world between the thorns, and the seeds of everything were inside.

  But — ah! — that little dome, as everybody knows, was Ogo’s paw. This first world failed that Amma made for us. The dome spun but the things inside went wrong. All the water sloshed out. That’s why the acacia tree is both dead and alive, wet and dry.

  That is why the acacia is bigger than a bush and smaller than a tree, neither one nor the other, and yet both. It is Amma’s first being. It is therefore a person. And yet obviously a tree. It is both person and tree and neither. It is God’s failure.

  Amma saw that he could not make a world out of the acacia and destroyed it, saving the seed, which contains the plan of all things. Amma began a second time to make the world. For the new world he invented people but he decided to keep the acacia too.

  XIX

  Miss Stein walked home by Les Editions Budé on the corner of the boulevard Raspail and the rue de Fleurus with its yellow Catulles and Tite Lives in the vitrine that made her think of Marie Laurencin and Apollinaire pink and mauve on the Saint Germain.

&
nbsp; Rousseau whom Berenson took to be the Barbizon painter and William James the philosopher who wore Circassian dress as by the Pantheon painted their double portrait using a tape measure to get a likeness, poet and muse, Apollinaire who knew so much.

  He could see the modern because he loved all that had lasted from before. You see Cézanne by loving Poussin and you see Poussin by loving Pompeii and you see Pompeii by loving Cnossos. What the hell comes before Cnossos if this sentence is to be a long one?

  Alice, what comes before Cnossos, what comes before Cnossos, Pussy? The Musée de l’Homme, says Alice, where Pablo says you can’t get your breath, it inspires asthma. On the wall her portrait by Picasso broods and a portrait of Madame Matisse by Matisse.

  Madame Matisse in a hat and Madame Cézanne in a conservatory and by Picasso a naked girl holding a basket of roses so glum in her inwardness as to be pouting perhaps for having to pose for Picasso’s eating eyes and her bewildering beauty is in her feet.

  The little boy Lartigue was just another French scamp to Wilbur Wright if ever they passed on the Haussmann and Wright was but a lean Anglais to Lartigue. She picked up a notebook and wrote: fact in Cézanne is essence. Sunlight is always correct.

  Wilbur Wright was Ohio and Ohio is flat and monotonous, green and quiet. And so was he, a splendidly tedious man. You cannot be a mechanic and not be tedious, nor the first man to fly and not be green as Ohio is green, nor a hero and not be quiet.

  After he flew at Le Mans in figure eights Blériot wanted to kiss him on both cheeks in the French way and the aviators wanted to take him on their shoulders to a banquet but he said that he was too busy and had to make adjustments on his machine.

  Wasps in an Ohio orchard, fat black bees in an English garden, butterflies at Fiesole. Wasps drunk on nectar grabble into a yellow umble licorice and lavender, bourrée and gigue. Ant tells the poppy when to bloom, and sleeping lions make mimosa spread.

  XX

  Picasso’s little girl with a basket of roses has a tender button you can believe and has thrummed it with her grubby finger. She has a good French notion of why big girls whisper and why women sigh. She knows perfectly well why little boys are impudent.

  Little boys with their silly spouts and bubbles. She knows why roses ripple round like cabbages and why her name is Rose. Her name is Rose. Fat and intelligent, she sat with her notebooks and pictures around her, brooding and writing and seeing.

  Alice was mincing a duck. Outside, to the left, was the Raspail, to the right, the Luxembourg where a captain of artillery first noticed the polarization of light, windows reflecting windows reflecting the level late brilliant winter sun.

  On the Raspail she had seen Wilbur Wright looking like a U.S. Cavalry Scout as lean as whang leather. In his keen and merry eyes Paris might have been a country fair, a dream, a postcard from an old trunk. People in Paris are all somehow somebody for sure.

  People in Pittsburgh on the other hand are always nobody. But the people in Pittsburgh know who’s who. In Paris you don’t ever. Sir Walter Scott on the stairs of a hotel asked James Fenimore Cooper if he knew how to find James Fenimore Cooper.

  For years she didn’t see that and didn’t like the painting, it had charm but not the charm of a painting. At Deauville every white and blue building of which is by Boudin you rarely see a barefoot girl except the feet of the Gypsy children naked and brown.

  Gypsy children with long innocent brown feet and in the Bois you can see little boys who have terrified their bonnes by shedding their shoes but little boys’ feet are square and with a knarl of ankle and curled toes but Picasso stops at nothing at all.

  There are lovely little girls’ feet in Mary Cassatt who came to 27 rue de Fleurus and said I’ve never seen so many ugly people in all my life, or so many ugly pictures, take me home away from all these Jews, and lovely feet in Degas and yes Murillo.

  But they, Degas and Cassatt, were inside painters and kept to the pretense like Henry James that art was art and life was life. Picasso sees all and will paint all in time, even the inaccrochable, wait and see, that was next you could be sure.

  XXI

  Amma began the second world by making the smallest of the grains, the crabgrass seed, in which he put the two hundred and sixty-six things. A yala, the corners and turn of things by dots. They are there, in a spiral. Sixty-six of the yala are the cereals.

  The next four are calabash and okra. The next hundred and twenty-eight are The Great Calabash Round. The last sixty-four are the seed itself, the four collarbones rolled into a perfect roundness. The first six yala are male, like the crabgrass.

  Three is a male number, penis and testicles. Twin males begin the series. Even Ogo once had a twin. The acacia belongs among the cereals, first of the sixty-six yala. But, having nyama, a human soul, it is also a person. It is Amma’s tree and Ogo’s paw.

  Wasps in the Baltic amber of the Eocene ran afoul of that pellucid gum eighty million years ago, grave queens eating all of an autumn day against the winter’s sleep, fatherless males out foraging in the half light of swamps, worker daughters looking to the young.

  The structure of their society in the Eocene is unknown. They enter creation with flowers, and their sharp eyes would have seen the five-toed horse, the great lizards, forests of ferns, daylong twilight under constant clouds and eternal thunder.

  How they learned to make paper nests, neatly roomed with hexagonal cells, we cannot begin to know, nor how they invented their government of queen and commoners, housekeepers, scouts and foragers, nurses and guards at the door of the hive.

  Ogo. The white fox of the brush, Griaule said. He was to have been one of the spirits of time and matter, a nummo like his brothers and sisters. In the collarbone, among the thoughts of Amma, he was greedy. He misbehaved in the crabgrass bummo.

  He bit the placenta of all things. He was looking for his twin before Amma was ready to give him his twin. And then, by nobody’s leave, he went on a journey, to see creation. Creation, you understand, was still at this time inside Amma’s collarbones.

  Space and time were still the same thing, unsorted. So before God extended time or space from his mind, Ogo began to create the world. His steps became time, his steps measured off space. You can see the road he took in the rainbow. To see creation!

  XXII

  Amma, Amma! little Ogo squeaked. I have been to see creation! Before I have created sun and shadow, Amma cried in fury and despair. Chaos, chaos. Mischief. Oh, but Ogo also stole the nerves inside the egg of Amma and made himself a hat to wear.

  Ogo’s bonnet. They were the nerves with which Amma was planning to make the stringbean. The stringbean is Ogo’s bonnet. Not only that, and worse, but he put the bonnet on backwards, for impudence. For hatefulness. To add fun to his Ogo sass.

  Amma cut off part of Ogo’s tongue for that foolishness. That is why Ogo barks hoarse and high. His pranks nevertheless went on full career. He stole part of the world’s placenta, made an ark, and came down to the unfinished world way before he was welcome.

  He played God, and havoc. He made things out of the piece of placenta he stole. Look at the plants he made, all in Ogo style: sticktight, mimosa, thorny acacia, dolumgonolo, hyena jujube, Senegal jujube, whitethorn, pogo, redtooth, balakoro, and bombax.

  He made crabgrass, indigo, atay, cockleburr, arrowwort, brush okra, broomsedge, tenu, toadstools, gala. And look at them, all, all inedible. He made insects, waterbugs with one side of the placenta, grasshoppers with the other. He made ticks.

  He made aphids. He made all these as he was falling through the air, figure eights all the way down. Amma turned the placenta into our earth, and tried to do what he could with the things Ogo created, so that they would fit together somehow, some way.

  But the way Ogo made the world was not the way Amma would have made the world. And then there’s Dadayurugugezegezene. Spider. She’s the old bandylegs who tends to Ogo’s spinning, what a pair, and she lives in the branches of the acacia tree.

  When A
cacia reached the earth in Ogo’s ark, it took root, and ended the disorder of the descent, spiraling like a falling leaf, down the birth of space and time. Amma came behind, putting things in place. Acacia is Ogo’s world. It is his sign.

  Its thorns are his claws, its fruit the pads of his little feet. Like Ogo, the acacia is incompletely made. Like him it searches for its twin. It searches in sunlight the completion of its being. It must search forever, never finding, like Ogo.

  XXIII

  Leaves fell on Fourier’s grave and we thought of the Hordes moving from phalanx to phalanx like fields of tulips. That morning we talked with Fourier’s publisher on the rue Racine. We talked about the attempts to build phalanxes in Europe and America.

  We told him how the last phalanx in the United States, outside Red Bank, New Jersey, had recently been bulldozed, a large wooden hexagon of a building beautifully covered with kudzu and still inhabitable. The owner bulldozed it rather than sell it.

  He would not sell it when he learned that the damned place had been built by Communists. No grand orgies of attractions by proportion and destiny were ever holden to music in its rooms, no quadrilles danced at noon or at midnight there.

  No Hordes of children ever set out on quaggas from its gates. About the time this New Jersey phalanstery was sinking into transcendent boredom, having misfollowed Fourier, not quite believing him, German hunters in Africa shot the last quaggas.