Da Vinci's Bicycle

by Guy Davenport

  The acacia twists in a spiral as it grows. That is its journey. See how its bark is twisted on the bole. See how the branches spiral up. That is the way it spun as it fell in Ogo’s ark, turning and turning, casting out the seeds of all other things.

  Dada the spider was sent by Amma to set Ogo’s chaos in order. Seeing the wild career of Ogo, she decided that he and not Amma would be the landlord of the world. She heard him brag how he had stolen bummo, the plan of all creation from the crabgrass.

  What grows, spins. So Dada began a web in the acacia, around and around, digilio bara vani, weaving a cone with its point toward the earth. She spins to the right, the acacia in its growth spins to the left. Amma’s world is a cone turning opposite a cone.

  She spins Ogo’s word, which is nothing but the word move. The world is atremble, it vibrates, it shifts from one foot to another, it shakes, it dances its dance. It dances Ogo’s dance. Did I say he wears his stringbean hat backwards for sass?

  Ogo talks with his feet, leaving his tracks in the plan of the ark we draw every evening at the edge of the village. The signs he marks with his paws are the signs we must live by that day. For it is Ogo’s gift that he built accident into the world’s structure.

  XXIV

  Mr. Beckett in the Closerie des Lilas lit an Henri Winterman cigar and sipped his Irish whisky. Joyce, he was saying, had first lived somewhere around Les Invalides when he and Nora first came to Paris. They moved, it seemed, every month thereafter.

  This was Nora’s doing. She was trying to find Galway in Paris, I think. A charming smile softened the hawk’s gaze that we knew from photographs. He wore a tweed jacket, old and mended, corduroy trousers, and black turtleneck sweater, and socks.

  The socks, we knew, were unusual. His briefcase on the table bore the initials SB above the clasp. Joyce, he said, liked the epigraph from Leopardi on the title page of his Proust because il mondo could be made to sound like the French immonde.

  É fango il mondo. The sentiment flowed back and forth from Italian to French, declaring that the world is nasty. We had remarked at Les Invalides that here was the Napoleonic museum in the opening of the Wake and the riverain of Napoleon’s will.

  And the concealed Stephen in past Eve and, and he smiled again at God knows what memories of the alert blind face asking the Greek for this and the Gaelic for that, the ringed fingers tip to tip. He’d a letter from Lucia in England that day.

  Jarry with his powdered face had sat in this room, sipping Pernod with the dour Gide. Picasso had sat at these tables drawing caricatures of Balzac and Hokusai. Here Ford and Hemingway corrected the palustral proofs of The Making of Americans.

  You must understand, Becket said, that Joyce came to see that the fall of a leaf is as grievous as the fall of man. I am blind, Ogotemmêli said, opening a blue paper of tobacco with his delicately long wrinkled fingers, his head aloof and listening.

  Tobacco gives good thoughts. We are all blind in relation to Amma. You must go into the caves where the contents of Ogo’s ark are painted in tonu. There are shepherds who will take you. You must see the shepherds when they dance in Ogo’s skirt.

  They wear the masks and bloody skirts and make the drums speak. I shall never see them again, except in my mind. The dancers come from afar. They have been away for days. They enter the bounds wearing the masks of creation. They wear the granary and the ark.

  XXV

  They wear the ark of Ogo and the granary of the world and the skirt of the earth bloody from Ogo’s rape. We fire the Frangi rifles. Our hearts are light, our hearts are gay. It is a funeral and a birth. The eight families of drums begin to beat at dawn.

  The Hogon in his iron shoes is with his smiths. The Lébé serpent is to dance for us again. The sun is bright and hot upon the granaries. The altars run with blood. We cry with joy. The calendars are right, the great calendar of the sun, the yazu star.

  Venus, said Griaule. And, said Ogotemmêli, the calendar of sigi tolo. Sirius. Once Ogo had hastened creation and wrecked it, the world needed uguru. Another ark had to descend from heaven. All had to be reorganized, redone, reset in their ways, made over.

  This was the work of the nummo anagono, the catfish. The nummo were in the placenta that Ogo had not stolen. They were twins. The mud-wiggler catfish, nummo anagono titiyayne, would be the victim, by his own wish, the sacrifice, the redeemer.

  He is the beginning of sacrifice. Our altars are in quincunxes because that is the way his teeth fell when he submitted to disintegration. First he was separated from the umbilical cord by which he was attached to Amma in the collarbone.

  The cord lay across his penis, which was cut away with the cord. It is now in the sky, the star Sirius, spindle of the world, the pole, the hub. The blood from this severing became the stars. Their spiral is the turning of the world. O greater than acacia!

  Greater than Dadayurugugezegezene’s work, greater than Ogo’s work! The sperm spilt from the testicles of the Nummo became the male waters of wells and rivers and springs and the female water of the sea, the great ax of the rain in its season.

  The sperm became the dugoy stones which are the twins of the grains, the cowries, and the catfish anagono sala. These six things are in the crabgrass seed. The Nummo, to organize the world half made and crazy, circumcised Ogo and made the sun.

  The sun is Ogo’s foreskin. That is his female twin whom he can never approach, for the fire of the sun is intolerable to be near. As the sign on earth of the sun, the lizard nay is Ogo’s foreskin. Foreskins are female. It is chaos we slice away in circumcision.

  XXVI

  When we circumcise we take the chaotic element from the male, the female part of the male. We are born into Ogo’s world, and our work is the Nummo’s, to organize. We are nummo in the womb, an unborn child is a catfish, anagono, and when we die.

  We are born crazy, full of mischief, like Ogo. From the woman we take her clitoris, from the man the foreskin. The sun is woman, the moon man. Sirius is the center of the sky, and around him there circles a star you cannot make out with the eye.

  The center of the earth is the crabgrass seed. Balance of quinces, basket of oranges. Alice, tell me, tell me, Alice, how so settled a soul as I can be so giddy about la gloire. About what? says Alice. La gloire. You have it, says Alice, whatever it is.

  Wilbur Wright flying around the Statue of Liberty and then up the Hudson over all those warships and dipping down to receive the hoot of the Lusitania’s whistle, c’est la gloire. Nijinsky up there at the top of his leap looking like the young Gorki.

  You’ve got flying on the brain, says Alice. Besides, Nijinsky has gone crazy. They say he thinks he’s a horse. There is nothing more worthy of admiration to the philosopher’s eye, Dr. Johnson said, says Gertrude, than the structure of animals.

  What a strange thing for Johnson to have said, says Alice. It is of course architecture that is most worthy of admiration and his not saying so is an example of not seeing architecture. People don’t, people who walk take architecture for granted.

  They take it for granted because it is good. When everybody has an automobile as in the United States architecture will go all to hell. Architecture is for people on foot. The Chinese had no architecture, nor the Magyars, until they got down off their horses.

  There is no architecture in America, never will be. A skyscraper is a city street turned on end. But, says Alice, we drove our Ford through the War. We have seen the trenches of the Ardennes. You have lectured at Oxford and you have lectured at Cambridge.

  And at the Wednesday Club in St. Louis. We own Picassos and Cézannes. We have stayed with the Alfred North Whiteheads. Cocteau says he is influenced by you. It is not enough. We have passed Joyce and that Frenchman Fargue on the Victor Hugo.

  XXVII

  The Frenchman raised his hat to us, Joyce did not. He didn’t see us. L’aveugle et le paralytique, the concierges call those two. It is not enough. We saw the victory parade through the Arc, down the Elysées, O grandest of days, exce
pt one other.

  When the nummo circumcised Ogo, Amma said: You should have waited. I could have destroyed him utterly. Now you have mixed his blood with all of creation. So Amma reversed the spiral of the nummo, took the sacrifice, and drenched the world with blood.

  Stars began to turn, grain came up, rain fell, wind blew. The fellow traveler of Sirius is the crabgrass seed above, female twin to the crabgrass seed down here. That little star, which many cannot see, unsuspected by some, we know to be the world’s granary.

  The day after his sacrifice there sprang from the Nummo’s blood the donu, whose blue wings flash on the Niger in the season of the rains. And the antelope. The Nummo danced as a serpent under our fields. His eyes are red like the first light of the sun.

  His skin is green. For legs he has snakes, and his arms are without elbows or wrists. He eats light, and his droppings are copper. But we do not see the Nummo as he is, only his presence in catfish, rain, trees. The Nummo is in the shine of things.

  The crabgrass is the granary, the basket the ancestors brought from heaven, the ark of the two hundred and sixty-six things. It is the menstrual blood. You have seen wild rams on the rocks near the village at dusk? You have seen a little of the Nummo.

  The light in the fleeces of the wild rams is wonderful. You see the Nummo when rain walks in its season from the east, smelling of the river, of green leaves. You see the white of it under the clouds before the first fat drops fall on our red dust.

  That is the Nummo. The rain ram. Split a green stick halfway down. Run your knifeblade up each tine so that it curls. That is his sign. You have seen it above the smith’s door. Even the French must have seen him in the yala of the stars, the Ram.

  Between his horns is the sun, the Great Calabash, which is female, the seed basket, the granary, the crabgrass. His horns are testicles, his forehead the moon, his eyes stars, his mouth and his bleat are the wind. His fleece is the earth, the very world.

  XXVIII

  His fleece is of course copper, which is to say, of water, which is to say, of leaves. When the wind speaks in the leaves and a light like burnished copper dances in the green, and rain falls, that is the presence of the Nummo. His tail is the serpent Lébé.

  Lébé danced under our fields when he swallowed his brother ancestor and spat out the dugoy stones, the points and junctures of the world. His front feet are the small animals, his hind feet are the big animals, and his mentula is the rain.

  The granary. It turns in the middle of the air. At the zero point of time its four sides faced the Fish of the Twin Nummo, the Nummo, the Woman with the Grains, and the Nummo with the Bow. Now time is out of kilter, askew, but turning again to zero.

  The floor of the granary is round, the roof square, so that the walls rise from their foundation as a cone and find in tapering upward the four creases of the roof’s corners. Up each side, in all four directions, there is a long stairway.

  The stairway is of ten steps, female on the tread, male on the rise. On the western stairs are the untamed animals, antelopes at the top, and then downward are hyenas, cats, snakes, lizards, apes, gazelles, marmots, lions, and the elephants.

  Beside the animals on their steps are the trees in order, from baobab to mimosa, together with all the insects. The tame animals stand on the south steps, chicken, sheep, goats, cattle, horses, dogs, house cats, ancestor tortoise who lives in the yard, mice.

  House mice and field mice. On the eastern steps are the birds, hawks, eagles, ospreys and hornbills majestic at the top. Then ostriches and storks. Buzzards and lapwings. Then vultures, chicken hawks, herons, pigeons, doves, ducks, and bustards.

  On the northern steps are fish and men. The fish are joined at their navels, like the two fish in the stars. There are four kinds of women, pobu, whose wombs are shaped like beans and who have malformed children unfortunate to behold, a grief.

  There are women with a vulva like an antelope’s foot who bear twin boys, women with a double womb who have twins of different sexes, women with wombs like the crabgrass spiral inside its seed who have twin girls. These are all the kinds of women.

  XXIX

  There are three kinds of men, men with a short thick mentula, men with a mentula like a lizard’s head, and men with a fine long mentula. Our fields are our shrouds. We will be catfish when we die and return to Amma. We are silent at night, lest we stink.

  In sixty of Ogo’s burrows are hidden the sixty ways of being. We know twenty-two of these: the world, villages, the house for women during their periods, the house of the Hogon, the granary, sky, earth, wind, and animals who have four feet.

  Birds, trees, people, dancing, funerals, fire, speech, farming, hard work, cowrie shells, journeys, death and peace. The Nummo’s face is leaves and flame. The other thirty-eight ways of being are all that stand between us and Ogo.

  They shall be known in time. They are like the young shepherds who have not been seen for weeks in the village, who have gone away in discipline, and who come all unexpected to dance Ogo’s dance. Long before they come we hear their drums from afar.

  We hear the smith’s drum and the armpit drum. The drums speak to the Nummo, for the Nummo. We will have been hearing the drums a long while before we see the young men in their bloody skirts leaping in the first light, wearing Ogo’s bonnet.

  They wear Ogo’s bonnet and pipe in his thin voice. The unshown things will be revealed to us slowly at first, and dimly, as in a mist at dawn, an awakening and a coming, but suddenly and swiftly at the last, like a loud stormwind and rain.

  Everybody was on the streets, men, women, children, soldiers, priests, nuns, we saw two nuns being helped into a tree from which they would be able to see. And we ourselves were admirably placed and we saw perfectly. We saw it all.

  We saw first the few wounded from the Invalides in their wheeling chairs wheeling themselves. It is an old french custom that a military procession should always be preceded by veterans from the Invalides. They all marched past through the Arc.

  They all marched past through the Arc de Triomphe. Gertrude Stein remembered that when as a child she used to swing on the chains that were around the Arc de Triomphe her governess had told her that no one must walk underneath.

  XXX

  Her governess had told her that no one must walk underneath since the german armies had marched under it after 1870. And now everyone except the germans were passing through. All the nations marched differently, some slowly, some quickly.

  The french carry their flag best of all, Pershing and his officer carrying the flag behind him were perhaps the most perfectly spaced.

  The Haile Selassie Funeral Train

  THE HAILE SELASSIE Funeral Train pulled out of Deauville at 1500 hours sharp, so slowly that we glided in silence past the platform on which gentlemen in Prince Alberts stood mute under their umbrellas, ladies in picture hats held handkerchiefs to their mouths, and porters in blue smocks stood at attention. A brass band played Stanford in A.

  We picked up speed at the gasworks and the conductor and the guards began to work their way down the car, punching tickets and looking at passports. Most of us sat with our hands folded in our laps. I thought of the cool fig trees of Addis Ababa and of the policemen with white spats painted on their bare feet, of the belled camel that had brought the sunburnt and turbaned Rimbaud across the Danakil.

  We passed neat farms and pig sties, olive groves and vineyards. Once the conductor and guards were in the next car, we began to make ourselves comfortable and to talk.

  — Has slept with his eyes open for forty years! a woman behind me said to her companion, who replied that it runs in the family.

  — The Jews, a fat man said to the car at large.

  Years later, when I was telling James Johnson Sweeney of this solemn ride on the Haile Selassie Funeral Train, he was astonished that I had been aboard.

  — My God, what a train! he exclaimed. What a time! It is incredible now to remember the people who were on that train. James Joyce was there
, I was there, ambassadors, professors from the Sorbonne and Oxford, at least one Chinese field marshal, and the entire staff of La Prensa.

  James Joyce, and I had not seen him! The world in 1936 was quite different from what it is now. I knew that Apollinaire was on board. I had seen him in his crumpled lieutenant’s uniform, his head wrapped in a gauze bandage, his small Croix de Guerre caught under his Sam Brown belt. He sat bolt upright, his wide hands on his knees, his chin lifted and proud.

  A bearded little man in pince-nez must have seen with what awe I was watching Apollinaire, for he got out of his seat and came and put his hand on my arm.

  — Don’t go near that man, he said softly in my ear, he says that he is the Kaiser.

  The compassion I felt for the wounded poet seemed to be reflected in the somber little farms we passed. We saw cows goaded home from the pasture, gypsies squatting around their evening fire, soldiers marching behind a flag and a drummer with his mouth open.

  Once we heard a melody played on a harmonica but could see only the great wheel of a colliery.

  Apollinaire could look so German from time to time that you could see the pickelhaube on his bandaged head, the swallow-wing moustache, the glint of disciplinary idiocy in his sweet eyes. He was Guillaume, Wilhelm. Forms deteriorate, transformation is not always growth, there is a hostage light in shadows, vagrom shadow in desert noon, burgundy in the green of a vine, green in the reddest wine.