Susurrus on Mars
Page 6
To the summer, says Jaq.
To all of them, says Puk.
•
DID HE SAY summer or Sumer? Ampelos breathes out of the flask to ask.
Summer, says Susurrus.
Simmer? says Ampelos. Shimmer?
Summer, says Susurrus. And you heard just fine.
Ampelos snickers and drifts in the godling’s embrace, twirls a little wisp of scent to tickle Puk’s nose.
You don’t remember Sumer, do you? he says to the wind. I remember Sumer. It was very summery, simmery—shimmery too. I was there.
At home in humid forests and at the sides of streams, Mesopotamia wasn’t an ideal climate for him, but he was known, the grape vine, Vitis vinifera, a liana with flaky bark and a sap used in Medieval Europe as ointment for infections of skin and eye. Growing to thirty five metres high, his leaves, arranged alternate, palmately lobed, five to twenty centimetres long and broad, were used to wrap delectable dolma—though that was later, really, more Arabia than Sumer, and—
And in America, says Susurrus, those leaves were mulched to a poultice for haemorrhoids. Does that count as homeopathy? A pain in the arse treated with a pain in the arse?
Ampelos blows a raspberry, doesn’t care. He was there, in the cradle of civilisation. Read the Epic of Gilgamesh if you don’t believe it: oldest story of the fleshlings’ scrivings, and there he is, being poured out by a barmaid called Siduri in a tavern at the end of the world. He always tickled to that tale, saw a seed of himself in furry Enkidu, wild child of the watering hole who tamed a wanton king.
Haemorrhoids, he mumps. It was his grapes the mortals made most use of anyways: unripe for coughs and catarrh; ripe for cancer and cholera; dried to raisins, steeped and puréed, as a tonic for consumption; soured to retorts, spat in spite, as a sauce for petty quarrels. And squished and fermented to wine, of course, above all else, to be tasted in toasts down through the aeons, from a tavern in the neolithic mythscape to this treehouse here on Mars.
Puk raises the flask to his lips, and Ampelos tingles to the kiss, transformed in the touch of a tongue to pepper and vanilla, cloves and smoke.
He was a youth of Thrace once, Ampelos, son of satyr and nymph, beloved of Dionysos. Horned little devil, a beardless boy but hairy-legged and hoofed as Pan, he played Tarzan, d’Artagnan, Alexander on Bucephalus, swinging down from an elm tree to land astraddle a wild bull, to ride it, whooping boasts to the moon cow, Selene: Look at me! Look at me! Her spite sent the sting of a gadfly, and Ampelos was thrown and trampled. Which sucked, needless to say. Being trampled by Dionysus after the metamorphosis, the deity’s pink toes all wriggling in Ampelos’s juices as he taught humans the arts of viticulture and vinification—that wasn’t so bad. Toes are at least sexy, Ampelos reckons. Hoofs not so much.
Jaq kisses him now, and he’s chilli and sarsaparilla, cinnamon and oak—another self on another palate... but then, who isn’t? He lingers a little on the fleshling’s lips, starts a stain that will be there even after the flask is done, there to mingle sarsaparilla and vanilla in the mash of lovers’ lips. He’ll be gone before it gets too steamy he suspects, the last drip licked from the flask’s lip, bouquet stolen away by his own breezy beau, but so it goes, and it’s a sweet goodbye to dissolve into the savour of flesh, of skin and salt. Besides, he’ll only be gone from here, elsewhere his fruits even now ripening towards purply-black with a pale wax bloom, small in his wild species, only six millimetres in diameter or so, much larger in his cultivated species—of the vineyards of Kasei, say—up to three centimetres long, and as often green or red.
Puk takes the proffered flask back, raises it in another toast: To us.
This is my blood of the covenant, a would-be godling of love once said, and generations after fancied that the wine, he meant, had transubstantiated to his holy ichor. Ampelos knows it was the other way around, that Yeshua’s blood became, in that moment, wine, the sacrament a libation sipped through his sad smiling lips, a tipple of sensual pleasure swigged and offered round to sanctify the flesh that had forgotten its divinity. Remember, he was saying, and let every taste be a communion with the holy world of vines and veins, of loaves and lives. And all the follies of his followers were sown in the misunderstanding of that moment.
To us, says Jaq.
•
JAQ, PRIMPING IN the mirror, admiring a shiner got from an arsewipe’s fist. Jaq, in Renart’s study before the interview, fingers raised to trace with wonder the laurel wreath awarded to this maestro he so yearns to prentice to. Jaq, slugging back a cup of red wine and rising, in a tabac on Boulevard Hovendaal, to shove an ageling who sneered at stunted dirter Puk. Jaq, lazing on the sofa, gazing off into tumblespace as he waits for bread to bake, relishing the aroma. Jaq, sat at the kitchen table, counting coins to glean if he can afford the vintage doublet yet. Jaq, dribbling honey into Puk’s mouth from the dipper, trickling it in rogueish glee over lips and cheeks, nose and neck, as the Earther flaps enough! enough! Jaq, fumbling a Devonshire Quarrenden out of his satchel, offering it to Puk in outstretched hand, in the treehouse.
Renart sets the stances of Jaq into a Solomon’s Seal down in the courtyard, a framework for his abstractions: magnanimity; esteem; courage; poise; prudence; gusto; ardour. The last sits at the centre.
In the Holy Roman Empire, they sermonised of seven cardinal vices, seven virtues born in the scorn of sin: humility in scorn of pride; kindness in scorn of envy; patience in scorn of wrath; diligence in scorn of sloth; generosity in scorn of greed; temperance in scorn of gluttony; chastity in scorn of lust. Aristotle, with his navigable mean, would say we have only half the story here; we must imagine the starboard shoals if we run too far from sinister larboard, overcorrect in terror of temptation. We must imagine: humility become shame, and kindness condescension; patience become timidity, and diligence zeal; charity become unction, and temperance austerity; chastity become mortification.
Alexander’s tutor might not have called these virtues and vices stance, but he savvied more than any fool Platonist or Pythagorean that it’s all a matter of attitude in action, whether it be to one’s own achievement or another’s, to conflict or impetus, reserve or expense, or appetence. And this is the base of the stance Renart seeks to articulate, which is itself a stance to a stance, a response to the Romans, past, present and future—because if the Geisters carry that scorn of sin into their secular faith, Renart rather doubts it will ever disappear. There is no utopia, not here and now, not ever.
Still, if the Good Christian is set against the Wicked Heathen, whether named as such or not, the Good Heathen may be set against the Wicked Christian, scorning the hamartia from shame to mortification for their antitheses...
Magnanimity, esteem, courage, poise, prudence, gusto, ardour.
And the greatest of these is ardour.
•
WE’VE DECIDED TO become Greeks, says Jaq, erastes and eromenos.
Or philetor and kleinos, says Puk, if we go ancient Cretan.
You’re sure it’s not cretin? says Ana. Do I really want to know what this is about?
Jak twiddled his kinsey to a sixer, says Puk. Just for me.
And my hanker, says Jak, all the way up! We’re synched as Xantheans now.
Homo sapiens sapiens homo, says Puk, both of us through and through.
It’s a proud tradition, says Jaq. Heroic.
Pausanius, says Puk, in the Republic, says the bond of erastes and eromenos is stronger than any despot’s thrall.
Phaedrus, says Jaq, in the Symposium, says with an army made of lovers fighting at each other’s side, even a handful could take on the world.
Plato, says Ana, putting words in their mouths. And to dispute them, as I recall.
Plutarch, says Puk, points to the Sacred Band of Thebes. Tempers the manner and character of the youth, he says.
Hieronymus, says Jaq, claims it was all the rage because such pairings had brought down tyrants in their prime.
Chariton and Melanippus!
Harmodius and Aristogeiton!
Theognis of Megara, proclaims Puk: Happy is the lover who works out naked, and then goes home to sleep all day with a beautiful boy. His beautiful boy going by the name of Kyrnos.
Mine going by the name of Puk. If it’s OK with you?
You’re asking my permission? says Ana.
For the harpagmos, says Jaq. The abduction.
•
AN EREHWYNAN GREETING: left hand on shoulder, right hand on hip; kiss on the left cheek, kiss on the right. This the fourth in immediate sequence for Puk, and wholly extraneous, a consequence of being dropped from Ana’s skimpod outside Maman and Papa Cartier’s townhouse to knock nervy, be answered with doggy lavishings of Jaq’s attention, whirled in through two previous such salutations with the Cartier parentals and more rousy ramstouger ranniganting hello hello hellos on the floor with old Diogenes who clearly didn’t believe in age at all, and who was clearly a core influence in Jaq’s stancings of welcome, or perhaps vice versa, and then with barely an It was nice to finally meet you huchled out and down along flagstoned streets busy with skimpods, skirting the Old Town, to the summer-crowded esplanade, to the docks specifically where Jaq first clocked and queried the newly-sprung Earther, in honour of their three week and two day anniversary, to meet the mates for something, Jaq slyly evaded, special, and there they were, Joi, Shim and Don, so it was Erehwynan greetings again all round, three for Jaq and three for Puq, formal with Joi, friendly with Don, frolicsome with Shim who smackered his cheeks and slipped hand up from hip to kittle his ribs, whispering she was so glad for Jaq’s lucky score, fluttering Puk so that afore he even knew it he was turning arms out to greet Jaq too, doh, but Jaq just shrugged and laughed and drew him into a superfluous embrace, because why not?
And now Puk, thinking of kissing contests at the tomb of Diocles, catches Jaq’s arms before he breaks the embrace, gets a quizzical face in return. He slides the wrist of the hand on his shoulder up, to his neck, to a caress of cheek, of jaw, that becomes a tuck of chin, a search for meaning: what are you up to? He peels Jaq’s other hand from his hip and brings it—Jaq glances down, then back to his gaze, with a bat of blinkers—round to the front, sets it to cup his tackle, which he feels scrinch itself in anticipation.
It is a scene from classical terracotta, Athenian ochre enacted in flesh, one of three set postures that were used to paint the course of a relationship. It is the courtship of erastes and eromenos; the erastes stands, one hand fondling the youth’s genitals, the other cradling chin to look him in the eye.
Except Jaq’s gaze slips away and past him now, over Puk’s shoulder.
Now, says he.
•
REALLY? HE SAYS.
Renart strumps about from room to room, mumping and mulligrumphing, thrunched by the right moger of the place to a crunkle of brow and a clamp on the jut of his chaft, thumb under chin, forefinger curling up under pursed lips. Over the weeks of merry visits from Ana, it seemed, primarily to gab in billows of blue smoke over red wine and only secondarily to salve her sisterly fret that Puk—ensconced in the treehouse with Jaq but making regular barbarian raids on civilisation for the sake of grub or ablution—was not hassling Renart to distraction, I hope, curious prodding finally won from her, yesterday evening, an admission that all Renart’s return jaunts into Erehwyna have indeed been diverted to work, café, park, restaurant, tavern, tabac, in short any elsewhere than the Massinger home, because in all the stint they’ve been here she still hasn’t sorted it to presentable.
Presentable? Renart says, having coaxed acceptance of a pataphysician’s eye and hand, it being, after all, his art to hone a life’s ergonomics to healthy set of attitude, flesh and environs. Presentable? he says, having followed dinted directions, turned down into the culvert off Rue Stroedeker and arrived on the doorstep at the crack of noon, to stroll in, smiling assurances—It can’t be that bad—and scope the full horror of misplaced furniture and furnishings, boxes and crates, cases and contents that he might describe as half-stacked and half-strewn were it not for the implication of balance in those halves. Ana, how is this even habitable?
He weaves the chaos, room to room, wireframing the small ground floor apartment, square hall with pisser and scrubber on the left on entry, back suite and study beside, kitchen-cum-salon and master suite to the right, looking out on Stroedeker and sunshine. Cosy but ceilinged high, with fine pine parquet underfoot throughout. Light grey though, on the walls, a bachelor’s fashion of two decades ago, grim style of some strutter stancing dull machismo which, Ana explains, she didn’t have the tick to update. And as for the rest... she just didn’t glean a start for it.
He studies her for a tick, and the clutter of her attributes around.
Not a shock, he says. There is no start from here.
It’s not her, he means, the shade, so implacably not her that she’s surely sensed the futility of trying to crunk her life into this drabness; but so blandly shamming functionality that, like as not, it sold her on a lie of being passable, an unassuming blankness offering itself as plain backdrop for anyone and everyone: one shade fits all. As if everyone and anyone worked like that.
What you have here, he says, is a quiddity trap.
Quiddity, the whatness of an object, is the essential, the nature of a thing as an instance of its class. Haccaeity, the thisness of an object, is the existential, the nature of a thing as construct of quirks defying reduction to quiddity. In the era of Davenport, the deluge of machined objects made for an angst of drowning. Without the notion of projectivity, where was the haccaeity of factoried chow and togs, flatpack fittings and gimcrack commodities? Where even the thisness in a pleasure become parlance, formulated for replication as geekware loaded in the meat machines? In the Society of the Spectacle, as she herself has lived the fallout of, post-modernity, post-singularity, even a human seemed all quiddity, quirks merely the unique settings of shared attributes. Skinsacks with a tuple of signifiers inside that could be scanned into a simulacrum—geist as soul, Ana would say, for those who scorned superstition but could not surrender it.
Davenport broached a new paradigm in abolition of quiddity, his supposition: that in every corral of objects abstractable to a class by common attributes and behaviours, every object in that corral is not merely distinct in its unique mix of attribute settings but cannot be fully described without recourse to attributes inapplicable to all others of its class.
Not only is this electron not equal to that electron, but it is not equivalent.
This, Renart says, is a shade for everyone and therefore no one.
So. Arms folded, Renart stands in the master bedsuite, brooding on a wall, glancing now and then at Ana, at the scatterings of jumble. The haccaeity of this canny scientist sprawling out around her in a humidor of Kaseians on the mantlepiece, a sim syrinx propped upright in a corner, the sleeves cut off her Geister jerkin, actually, he thinks, this shouldn’t be so gnarly. He’s rather savvy of Ana’s haccaeity by now, and fond of it.
•
RESOUNDING THE CLOMP of fleshling feet and shifting furniture upon her patchwork panels, bouncing back their voices in the emptying room she floors, Pitys can’t help but think back fondly on the old days of Arcadia, of mountain heights, ravines, and shepherds calling out to hear their echoes in the hills she cloaked as the pine tree, Pinus pinea, or sturdier still in her Stone Pine form, and tall and proud, growing some twelve to twenty metres high, and even over twenty-five sometimes.
The shifts of life, she thinks. She’s sure of all her kind she senses shift most keenly. Senses? Undergoes more like. She lives shift, not as sharply as the fleshlings tromping in and out the master bedsuite of the Massinger abode, shuffling with weights between them, dropping a clatter or thump of something now and then, and cursing or being cursed for it—Rot and bones, Puk! Give that here!—no, not that sharply, but more keen than many a tree. She displays it as she grows.
In youth? Ah, in youth she is a bushy globe and,
for her first five to ten years, bears leaves that mark her juvenile, growing as little singletons, blue-green and glaucous, a mere snip of two to four centimetres long, quite different from the adult leaves that start to sprout amidst these from the fourth or fifth year on, five times the length—sometimes as much as thirty centimetres long, indeed, albeit those are quite exceptional—mid-green and growing bundled into twos. By her tenth year, roughly speaking, though she might still sprout some juvenile leaves in regrowth after injury, a broken shoot or whatnot, just to show that she still can, those mature leaves have usurped the juvenile entirely, and she’ll spread a wide umbrella canopy from her thick trunk with its thick bark, red-brown, carved by deep fissures into broad vertical plates. In full maturity she sports a broad and flat crown forty to sixty metres wide.
She doesn’t rush all shifts, of course. It takes three years, a longer stint than any other pine requires, for her broad ovoid cones to reach maturity at eight to fifteen centimetres long. Within these cones, pine nuts or piñones, pinhões or pinoli, her seeds are large, two centimetres long, pale brown beneath the powdery black coat that rubs off to a gentle thumb. The crude four to eight millimetre wing on each is like to fall off on its own, but then it’s largely ineffective for dispersal by Susurrus anyway, so her seeds are animal-dispersed—mainly by the azure-winged magpie once upon a time, but these days mostly by the fleshlings who, it seems, find her a useful wood for furniture or floors. Like the floor of this townhouse apartment, which is bare now, bedsuite hollowed by the fleshlings, one of whom crouches to stroke her, bless him, calls a question that soon gets its answer in a fumbling of armfuls in through the doorway, followed shortly by grand flappings that spread out the dustsheets, lay them softly down now, to protect her.
It’s not the reverence of antiquity, but she can’t help but be reminded of it. On Mount Mainalos, there were pine groves sacred to the god Pan, who had loved her as an Oread nymph, never forsook his love, for all that she fled and took this form in her escape to thwart his hanker. It’s not the reverence of antiquity, but it does seem... an echo of it, down the ages. Sacred to Dionysus, the Aleppo pine was still an inspiration aeons later, for Paul Cézanne, moved by his garden in Aix-en-Provence, to put brush to canvas and articulate his ardour in Les Grands Arbres. And still, even now, more aeons and a world away, the echoes still resound.