Da Vinci's Bicycle

by Guy Davenport

  THUNDER underground began to boom at midnight on the ninth of January 1784 like a hundred batteries of cannon beneath the silver city of Guanaxuato in Mexico, continuing like a ripening summer storm, clap and drum roll, like the hoofbeats of Visigoth cavalry under Alaric coming upon Rome when a havoc of light in midday blue had signaled Vortumna and the Arvals that the hill gods were turning their shoulders from Roman flour and Roman flower, an angry, angled slender crack of fire and a sizzling split through the air and Rome was no longer under the ax and stick pack and eagle and wolf but under the Crow, a sound like high promontories breaking away from a headland and falling into a raging sea. Which awful noise lasted until the middle of February. When, after the third day, no earthquake followed the persistent subterranean thunder, el cabildo kept the people inside the city, ringing it with militia, for fear that thieves would come and steal their silver, not an ingot of which shivered in that incongruous stillness and steadfastly detonating tumult.

  Yet it was a land where a tall cathedral might suddenly ring all its bells and sink out of sight into a crevice open so briefly that, having swallowed an orchard, a mule train, the church, a sleeping hog, and the local astrologer, it could close again neatly enough to catch a hen by both feet in the pavement of the Calle San Domingo.

  Der Graf Rufzeichen sat listening to these details from von Humboldt’s Cosmos with glassy eyes.

  — Avenues of trees, I went on, become displaced in an earthquake without being uprooted. Fragments of cultivated ground of very different kinds mutually displace each other.

  — Erstaunlich!

  — A still more remarkable and complicated phenomenon is the discovery of utensils belonging to one house in the ruins of another at a great distance, a circumstance that has given rise to lawsuits.

  — Earthquakes, is it, you’re reading me about? asked the Count. My God. I once came all over dizzy while out riding, for no cause except perhaps the game I’d had at old Fuchtel’s might have been a touch high, and saw two of everything, and keeled over out of the saddle, stars everywhere. Do you think that was earthquake?

  — Did anyone else note a tremor? I asked him.

  — How could they? said the Count with some indignation. They weren’t there.

  — Earthquakes are fairly extensive. They cover quite an area, I believe.

  — Couldn’t have been a small one there under my horse?

  The Count milked his moustache and stared into the corner of the room.

  ONCE UPON A TIME, in a Swiss valley, there was born to an honest couple a baby that had a jack-o’-lantern for a head. The parents were sure their grief and horror were the greatest ever felt, and yet the infant suckled and cried, slept and burbled, like any other. Its eyelets were elfin in outline, the neat small triangular nostrils were not really repulsive, and the round hole of a mouth took in its mother’s milk with a will and let out boisterous cries that for timbre and volume were the equal of any baby in Switzerland.

  For months it was kept hidden. Its parents had come to adore it, as a child sees the greatest winsomeness and charm in a doll that has buttons for eyes, whose mouth is stitched onto cheesecloth, and whose hair is thread. They ventured to show it to its grandparents, who collapsed in fear and loathing, but who eventually were won over, and loved to dandle little Klaus on their knees.

  One by one the neighbors fell down breathless, their eyes rolled back in their heads, at the sight of the little chap and his pumpkin grin, and one by one they got used to him. In no time at all the whole village thought nothing at all of Klaus, and in due course he became a model little boy, quick to learn in school, gratifyingly pious in church, and a fine fellow to all his friends, of whom he had many.

  It was then only the rare tinker or traveler who, passing through, caught sight of him and fell screaming into a fit or froze as still as stone and had to be revived with slaps and brandy.

  Kafka stole his cockroach from that story. He has, I admit, improved upon it, and seen it from a dark angle. I meant that we are all monsters: by fate and by character. Fate and character are bow and string. What happens to us is what our character invites, guides in, challenges. All that ought to matter is that we are alive, which turns out, I’ve found, to be our last consideration. What does a banker care whether he is living or dead, so long as he has a shilling to kiss, a franc to lick?

  And of life we can ask but continuity. That, as I explain to my doctors, is my neurosis. I have been, I am, I shall be, for awhile, but off and on, like a firefly.

  I confuse my doctors. When they say I am mistaken about reality it is they who are mistaken. They say I cannot distinguish, cannot sort fact from fiction.

  How solemnly their empty chairs listened to them, and the portraits of Freud and Jung on the wall! The lamps, and especially the fire in the grate, listened to these strange words with dismay. To think that the custodians of the spirit should have prepared for me a categorical prison.

  — Consider! I said.

  They looked at each other, Doktor Vogel and Doktor Hassenfuss.

  It says in the pages of Mach that the mind is nothing but a continuity of consciousness. It is not itself a thing, it is its contents, like an eye and what it sees, a hand and what it holds. Mach’s continuity, like Heraklit’s river, defines itself by its flow.

  Doktor Vogel looked at Hassenfuss.

  — A charming poetic image, he said.

  — It is so obvious, I persisted, once you have seen it. The mind is what it knows! It is nothing else at all, at all.

  I RESOLVED to hold fast by a piece of the rock and so to hold my breath, if possible, till the wave went back; now as the waves were not so high as at first, being near land, I held my hold till the wave abated, and then fetched another run, which brought me so near the shore that the next wave, though it went over me, yet did not swallow me up as to carry me away, and the next run I took, I got to the mainland, where, to my great comfort, I clambered up the clifts of the shore and sat me down upon the grass, free from danger, and quite out of the reach of the water.

  Commit a word to paper and God knows what you have done. They will read it in Angoulême, in Anchorage, and Hippo. Spiritual crockery for missionary tables in the Cameroons serves quite as well a Mandarin palate. The sheik of Aqbar gathers his twenty sons around him, his five wives and twelve daughters, and reads them the Encyclopedia Britannica, a page where it says that phoronids, which comprise the phylum Phoronida, are little-known marine invertebrate animals characterized by an elongated, nonsegmented body that is topped by a tuft of tentacles. Each adult lives within a membranous tube to which sand particles, shells, and other materials may adhere. A king will read a baker’s proverbs who could not be invited to supper by the meanest file clerk of the Fish and Vegetables Revenue Branch.

  The black hunchback Aesop would never be allowed to stump on his crutch into this library, nor shaggy blind barefoot Homer leaning on a boy, nor staggering Li Po in his dragon silks, nor honest Benjamin Franklin could I introduce into this library without getting fired for exposing der Graf to the Gadarene hog. Yet here were their books, bound in red leather.

  Weder antik Fisch noch spartanisch Athlet.

  — Mad, aren’t they? Herr Rufzeichen asked of the ceiling, blowing loops of cigar smoke upward.

  — Mad, your lordship?

  — These book writers, Robert, that you read me. They are all peculiar, to you and me I mean, wouldn’t you say?

  STEEP WIND at my throat, my gaze on dizzy shires and canals below, I heard with one ear the tympany of our cold oscillation through crowding gusts and with the other the Eroica. You do not, Meng Tse said, climb trees to look for fish. Nor discover weight with a yardstick or length with a scales. Why were Cassirer and I floating across Europe in a balloon?

  — Hsing! Cassirer said.

  A carp by Hokusai, a spray of maple red as wine, sao shu dropping like wistaria down the print. It is hsing, Cassirer said by the stove, to desire a wife, plum brandy, gingko jam, and wat
er chestnuts. Hsing is internal, justice and mercy external, nei wei.

  In China as in Greece the epic known in every house and assembly, he explained, is of Wanderung. The manner of a people’s foraging becomes the Heldenfahrt of the Kollektivunbewusste. A hero without a journey is like a saint without a vision. Tripitaka and Monkey through a persimmon forest under blue humps of mountains. Herakles mothernaked raising his mouseburrow ox arm in grace to a frisking centaur, wolfwary Ulysses offering his lie to the meerstrandbewohnend Phaiakischhof, Cassirer the image peddler and Walser the Nachnietzschischprosaschriftsteller aloft in a balloon drifting to the Baltic sands: heroes in our day must take to the ice wastes of the poles, the depths of the sea, the air. We are not certain whether von Moltke’s heroism is in his railroad tracks, his invention of general orders, or his translating Gibbon.

  He talked of Nietzsche and Semmelweis. The one exhorted us to dream of barefoot Greeks dancing in masks before the enigmas of fermentation and electricity, the other taught us to wash our hands when delivering babies.

  Here, in the snow, which would I prefer to walk with me, as if I could heed another ghost, or if Seelig, kind Seelig, were not enough? A man’s quality might well be in the sort of misery he has seen with pity. In that case, Semmelweis. Or was it rather Nietzsche? And both were maddened by stupidity. Not I.

  I wander out every afternoon, the same way, and have my walk. Every day now for twenty-seven years. Could I once have written books? Once drifted across Europe in a balloon? Once been a butler in Silesia? Was I once a boy?

  I watch the linnet, the buck hare, the mountains pink and grey above level mist that lies out from the property wall like a lake of clouds, like the mind’s surface before a warmth of thought, light, melts that haze of ghost wool, incertitude of fear.

  I ASK AN ATTENDANT who the man is who dances around the grounds and has such anguish in his eyes. He tells me it is the great Nijinsky, schizophrenic paranoid.

  — He thinks he is a horse.

  WHY SHOULD THIS wild whirl of snow keep us from our walk? It reminds me of the toys in my father’s shop, pigeon-breasted Switzers with halberds and cockades, milkmaids in porcelain aprons, shepherds with mouse-faced sheep. O ravelment and shindy of snow on the toy shop’s windows! There was an enameled staffetta I coveted with real lust: he had a leather hat, a coat as red as cherries, and saddlebags stamped with the arms of the canton.

  A rabbit! See him tease a casualness into his fear. Don’t move. I can think, as still as he, snow raining upon us both, of a battalion of red soldiers on my father’s shelves, of a mandarin poet rolling along the Great Wall in a cart, of Robinson Crusoe conversing with his parrot. But what moves in his mind, the rabbit? Is the image of me on his retina all that he sees, an old man with a face as wrinkled as a pocket handkerchief used for a month? Can he see cabbages and carrots and blackberries? His doe?

  It was a day this cold that I saw a lady with a panache of pheasant and egret jutting from a swirl of scarlet silk around her hat, and felt my little man suffuse with benevolence, grow long and rise. The colors of coats and scarves in shops, of signs and stone, of tramway and light became splendid. It takes the animal in us to lead the spirit a dance.

  Schicksal, Zeit, Unfall: the important thing is to tie one’s shoelaces, sew back the parted button, and look the world in the eye.

  But the rabbit can think without disregarding all that is characteristic of life, for the infinity of qualifications arising from our thoughts of death is nowhere in his green brain. Yet he is as fearful as if I were a banker, a philanthropist, or a psychiatrist. He lasts, we wear. He leaps, we endure.

  The past, I have known for years, is the future. All that has mattered is a few moments, uncongenial while they happened, that turned to gold in the waves of time. February light, that for all its debility might have come from the daytime moon as much as from a red sun beyond a texture of bamboo and chinaberry, fell cold on a wall that bore a French print of a flatfish, a map of the Hebrides, a bust of T. Pomponius Atticus, a Madagascan parrot whose green eye glowed like an opal, and a speckled mirror that reflected on so dull an afternoon nothing except some elemental neutrality of light and dark, vicinity, and patience.

  I am most inside outside. Once Olympia said from her repose on the wall that Monsieur Manet was a man women liked. He put them at ease by paying the right kind of attention. He stayed inside himself and looked out. He did not even know how to come outside himself. You could always feel that. It is a comfort to a woman, she said, to see a man so unconsciously himself. A woman knows when to be inside and when to be outside, her mother’s only useful lesson, and of course when to be neither.

  The snow is a kind of music. Were I ever to write again, perhaps a poem as deft and transparent as one by a Chinese, I would like to witness to the beauty of the snow.

  And their books, these people who keep writing, who reads them? It is now a business like any other. I try not to bore them with an old man’s talk when they come, the few who want to ask me about writing, about the time before both the wars, about Berlin. I do not tell them how much of all that misery was caused by writers, by men who said they were writers. I do not tell them that I quit writing because I had nothing at all, any more, to say.

  There are the tracks of the rabbit. I think they said at the table that today is Christmas. I do not know.

  But let us desist, lest quite by accident we be so unlucky as to put these things in order.

  Acknowledgments

  The drawing of Leonardo da Vinci’s bicycle on the title page is derived, with structural reinterpretation in the fork and seat strut, from Antonio Calegari’s model in Augusto Marinoni’s “The Bicycle,” The Unknown Leonardo, edited by Ladislao Reti (McGraw-Hill, 1974), and appears here with the kind permission of the publisher. Professor Calegari’s model is based on the recently discovered drawing by Salai Jacopo dei Caprotti (aet. 11, circa 1493) of a bicycle drawn or perhaps built by Leonardo.

  The final paragraphs of “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier,” beginning with “Everybody was on the streets,” are from Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. For the parts about the cosmology of the Dogon I am indebted to Marcel Griaule’s Dieu d’Eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmêli (1948) and his and Germaine Dieterlen’s Le Renard pâle (1965). The drawing of the Wright Flyer No. 1 (Signal Corps Aircraft No. 1) is derived from a drawing by Peter F. Copeland, chief of the Illustration Department, NASM, Smithsonian Institution. The athlete in the collages is from photographs by Erik A. Ruby in his The Human Figure (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1974). The drawing of James Joyce is from a photograph by Gisèle Freund. The drawing of the young Lartigue is from a photograph by his father.

  The drawings accompanying “The Invention of Photography in Toledo” are derived from Edward S. Curtis (the Mohave girl), Nadar (Rossini), and a photograph of the young Van Gogh (circa 1866) in the possession of Pastor J. P. Scholte-van Houten, Lochem. For the title of this story I am indebted to the poet Robert Kelly, who read a book so named in a dream.

  All but one of these stories have appeared before in journals, and grateful acknowledgment is herewith made to their editors for permission to reprint. “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg,” © 1977 by the University of Georgia, originally appeared in the Spring 1977 issue of The Georgia Review; “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier,” © 1975 by the University of Georgia, originally appeared in the Winter 1975 issue of The Georgia Review. Both stories are reprinted by permission of The Georgia Review. Permission to reprint was also granted by Parenthèse for “The Invention of Photography in Toledo” and “The Wooden Dove of Archytas,” by The Hawaii Review for “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag” (also published in Prize Stories 1976: The O. Henry Awards, edited by William Abrahams [Doubleday & Co., 1976]), by Mulch for “The Haile Selassie Funeral Train,” by The Hudson Review for “C. Musonius Rufus” and “The Antiquities of Elis,” and by The Kenyon Review for “John Charles Tapner.”

  Copyright © 1979 by The J
ohns Hopkins University Press.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Author’s acknowledgments appear here.

  First published in 1979 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Republished in 1997 as a New Directions Classic.

  eISBN 9780811227445

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