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Tuesday, Mariana said, and whistled two long notes. I suppose the angels recorded it, they’d have to, blushing. If we came out here to love each other into fits and for you to pull together your crazy thesis, I hope the crazy thesis gets pulled together as well as the loving each other into fits. The angels won’t blush, Hugo said. They probably wrote it out as music, or in annotations of which we know nothing. Or maybe as bald facts. Only hours after making love deep into a summer night, Hugo woke Mariana with his finger, causing her to talk salaciously in her sleep. Birdsong. A skimpy breakfast, after making love, scarcely interrupting renewed affections. Made love all morning. Lunch forgotten. Made love all afternoon. A walk in the meadow, naked as Adam and Eve.
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Well, Pascal said once we were all shipshape with site and tent, as a matter of fact I call Housemaster Sigurjonsson Holger when we’re by ourselves, never any other time. Hugo, Franklin said, is always Hugo. So, hr. Tvemunding, Pascal said, I’ll call you Hugo. Very spadger, his ribs, with something baby bird in the shoulders, something goblinish about the back of the head. There was a tadpole flexibility before this gawkiness. A sturdy symmetry to follow. From Maillol to Soutine to Kisling. Franklin’s stage ahead with his prat pout and flat tummy, foxy eyes with the contour of an almond. Maillol, Hugo answered Mariana’s question. Chloe. You are my goat, Mariana said.
HYACINTHUS INDICUS MINOR
The root of this Iacinth is knobbed, like the root of arum or wakerobin, from whence spring many leaves, lying upon the ground and compassing one another at the bottom, being long and narrow and hollow-guttered at the end, which is small and pointed, no less woolly or full of threads than Hyacinthus Indicus Major. From the middle of these leaves the stalk rises long and slender, three or four foot long, so that without it be propped up, it will bend down and lie upon the ground.
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Their two voices, Pascal’s burgher correctness and school slang, Franklin’s proletarian grittiness and complex grammar, began to swap locations and tones. I adjudicated. I’ll bet you did, Mariana said. Franklin said that I talk all sorts of ways, and that Pascal should hear me talking with my father, whom Franklin identified as a pastor and his personal friend. And that he should hear me talking with you. To barf, he added, immediately bragging about my teaching you English. I’m much more interested, Mariana said, in the Swedish Scouts at the North Pole, as I have a feeling that there was mousing from tent to tent in the night. There was no night, Hugo said. The sun stays up all day, sinking to the horizon and rising up again. The mosquitoes had attacked in rolling singing hungry swarms despite our nimble scramble into the blue river with willows, and we all smelled of witch hazel and iodine. Of course we had to sing folk songs around the campfire, eating ashy sausages. So, Mariana said, you began a life of tents and campfires. Did I? Hugo asked. Does that mean something? Deep in a forest makes for good talk and good fellowship. Objecting I wasn’t, Mariana said.
SILVER DRAGONFLIES
Holger says, Pascal said, we’re all defeated by the inert violence of custom. This with a siffling sigh while Franklin was shedding every stitch. Shirt off, thrown down. A stare from me, a sorry from Franklin, and the shirt got hitched by its collar on the ridge pole. Pascal, imitating Franklin jot and tittle, doffed his togs. Blue Cub Scout short pants, identical as to red Swiss Army pocket knives pendant from belt loops, sheathed camping knives on left hip, canteen right hip, scut packs with nylon impermeables, compasses. Holger had seen to it that Pascal was to have precisely what Franklin was to wear right down to underpants (blushing), off, folded on mesial axis, and stashed in tent corner. It pleased Franklin to stomp around in shoes and socks only. This was when Pascal quoted Sigurjonsson quoting Sartre.
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Perhaps what cannot be said is the ground on which what can be said comes by its meaning.
BOEHME THE COBBLER
In some sense, love is greater than God.
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Me, I’m simply lucky, Franklin said. Pascal munching a cinnamon bun at breakfast, up to his neck in my nylon parka, Franklin similarly engulfed in my khaki shirt but with his dinky maleness honestly bare, had said how keen it was to sleep in a tent and run naked and eat on a riverbank. Their wearing my parka and shirt referred to Franklin’s saying that when he stayed overnight with us at NFS Grundtvig he wore my undershirt for a gown. Though it is always more probable that the reporter of a miracle has been deceived than that the miracle occurred, this does not obviate the miraculous, and there remains the space where the misunderstood has the force of miracle. There you go, Pascal said, using that word. What’s wrong with it? Franklin asked. It’s vulgar, is what, isn’t it, hr. Tvemunding? Hugo, I mean. It’s vulgar all right, I said, but it’s Franklin’s word. We are our words. We can, however, make the words we use, like poets and philosophers, and people who want to be understood. Most people are parrots, hoping to please by imitation. Squawk! said Franklin, and fell over backwards laughing at his own wit. Pascal waited two seconds before joining the laugh. Language, I persisted, always the explainer, is mostly a matter between friends, and friends can use words they wouldn’t before some people, like parents and in public, on a bus, say. My language in class is impeccable, but gets saltier in the gym, looser at home. Holger, Pascal said, always talks the same. We’re friends. Franklin gave one of his looks. Satiric doubt.
THE MORE ANGELS, THE MORE ROOM
The second afternoon of an outing is when the roundness of it asserts itself. No need to tell me, Mariana said, shuffling into a dance and snapping her fingers. There’s community, rhythm. The outside world has receded out of sight. Out of mind, Mariana said. There are no Kindergartens, no crayons stuck up noses, no peed knickers, no flash cards with Mina Jenssen croodling dog when I show the porcupine and hat for the letter A. The outside world has been replaced by an alternate one of exploring, swimming, botanizing, telling jokes, remembering analogues of each other’s tales. I didn’t think I’d like you at first, Franklin said to Pascal, but now I like you. Pascal thought of no reply, poor fellow. Well, Mariana said, a declaration of love from Franklin is not to be taken lightly. He didn’t like you at first, was jealous, resentful. When the angels were manufacturing Franklin they broke off big blue pieces of heaven and worked them into his soul. Pascal too, Hugo said, but I don’t think heaven has a great interest in mind, which is what the angelic craftsmen paid much attention to in Pascal. I asked myself what cautionary advice he’d had from Holger, who couldn’t very well disapprove of Franklin. Probably some comprehensive warning against nastiness, certainly supererogatory in a school like NFS Grundtvig, but then Holger would have only a vague idea of townsfolk like you and Franklin. Who pinned Pascal’s arms from behind and nuzzled his nape. Pascal froze, wriggled loose, and regarded Franklin with a look that slid to the tail of his eye. Whereupon Franklin, determined to hug somebody, came and hugged me. I was sitting, writing, I hugged back, and got to my knees and rolled him squealing over my head, and grappled him into a rolling hug that toppled us, and we fell knotted together arms and legs, hooting. Pascal, miserable, contracted his shoulders, one foot on top of the other. I swung Franklin loose, carried him by the armpits and stood him nose to nose in front of Pascal. You two, I said, work on your friendship. I’ve got notes to make, water to fetch, wood to gather, thoughts to think.
SWEET YELLOW MOTH MULLEIN
The yellow moth mullein whose flower is sweet has many hard grayish green leaves lying on the ground, somewhat long and broad and pointed at the end: the stalks are two or three foot high, with some leaves on them, and branching out from the middle upwards into many long branches, stored with many small pale yellow flowers of a pretty, sweet scent, stronger than in other sorts, which seldom give seed but abide in the root, living many years.
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Sunlight, once, on their tousled heads beyond the rocks downriver, their voices from the larchwood. Franklin kneedeep in sedge and wild carrot by a granite rockface spritted with mica and dap
pled with lichen was inviting Pascal to test the rigidity of his penis. O boy, Mariana said, trust my Franklin. I whistled my arrival. Franklin said brightly that they’d seen a badger trot and a grebe. Saw a water rat! Pascal said. The grebe had a golden craw with silver dots. Franklin was full of himself, talking big. I mussed both their heads, remarked that they were in the Serengeti of the saw-toothed chigger, and wanted both of them to soap up at the river, giving particular effort to their legs, and to smear themselves with insect repellent afterwards. Franklin boasted of an infestation of chiggers the summer before. This, he said, is my whatevereth camping trip. He’d been with me and you, and with the Cubs, and once with my troop. I’m the mascot. Sleep in Hugo’s tent, march with him at the head of the column. But I like this better, friends only. Hugo studies God, and is the Greek, Latin, and gym teacher. Thanks, said Pascal, I only go to NFS Grundtvig. I forgot, Franklin said. Holger teaches biology and geography. He’s been to Sicily and Iceland. Frogs and maps, Franklin said. Mitochondria and tectonic plates, said Pascal. Hugo’s twice as old as me plus a year, Franklin said, and has been fucking since fifteen. His dick’s 23 cm. He and my sister Mariana do it every day, because they love each other. Hugo’s papa, he’s a pastor in the Protestant cult, says it’s kin to loving God, who wants us all to love each other. And then Franklin gave papa a grand rating as a very bright old gentleman, pink and scrubbed, nattily dressed, who lives in a big old house with a flower garden all around it, and hundreds and hundreds of books inside, all of which he has read. Wise, generous, and liberal, especially in the matter of boys’ monkeying with their peters, which is nature, and nature has God for its designer. Franklin omitted the detail of our visit when Franklin came down to breakfast britchesless and upstanding, and got a kind lecture on the way back upstairs, led by the hand, on conventions, decency, and several other matters. Ah yes, Mariana said, and that’s when we heard the little twerp saying that you go around your apartment in nothing but an undershirt and me in nothing at all. I loved your father saying, yes but you’ll notice they don’t do that here, and they do it because they’re very much in love with each other. Mercifully we didn’t overhear the rest of the discussion.
CLOVER. BUTTERFLIES.
Not so silly fast, one heard Franklin from the far side of the tent. Like this, if you want it to feel good. At supper they sat shoulder to shoulder, shoving from time to time, with silly smirks. Holger, Pascal said, is shy. He starts to say things, and stops, changing the subject. The water rat was just along the river, where he has a trot like the badger’s. Did you know that spiders rebuild their web every day? They eat it at night. Crazy, Franklin said. I hope we hear the owl again. Over the frogs. Don’t they ever sleep? When Mariana and me are spending the night, Franklin said to me, can Pascal come over? We could make a pallet on the floor. Thing is, he said to Pascal, is not to be in the way, to move with, like a dog, and not against. Then we won’t be underfoot. In wintertime we eat around the fire, like we’re doing now. Fried bananas with brown sugar Mariana makes sometimes for a snack at bedtime. With milk. Did, I asked, Pascal like the idea? If so, I could square it with Holger. Pascal, shy, said nothing. What if Holger says I can’t? he eventually said. But, I said, it was Holger who thought up this outing, after this rascal Franklin batted his eyes at him one day and said God knows what. Did I? Franklin said. Casually, calmly. The kid is on his way to being one of the world’s great actors. O yes, that. I’ll come, Pascal said, looking up brightly.
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But why didn’t you tell me, Mariana asked, about this light? And the moths and butterflies and the meadow over the hill? Privacy to love ourselves into fits, yes, and roughing it on the provisions we bring in, and water from a spring, and a cryptogonadal eleven-year-old with an IQ bigger than yours, and my idiot little brother, when they find us, and your father, in time, but not the magic soft long goldeny light. Which, Hugo said, will eventually last all night. That is, it will be the night. I’m not leaving it, Mariana said. I want to live with it, on it, in it, the rest of my life. I must, Hugo said, take you to the Arctic Circle, and maybe this time I won’t be bitten by mosquitoes all over my virile member. Asgar, too. Which we made worse by whacking off as usual before falling asleep. Though it would have swollen up and turned purple all the same, I suppose. It was brave Asgar who boldly pulled his pants down for the Swedish scoutmistress next morning when she was daubing mosquito bites. Oh dear, she said, oh dear, what a frightfully awkward place to be bitten so cruelly. But she daubed away, with several other wounded, girls too, looking on with curiosity having overcome every scruple.
THE BALLOON
It was over the meadow beyond the birchwood, descending, its gaudy colors, like those of a circus wagon, splendidly strange against the blue haze of the sky and the soft greens stitched with purple and yellow runnels of wildflowers in the meadow. The wooden paddles of the propeller were idling over. The telescope in its sweep flashed a white disc of glare. The Jules Verne was back, here.
CLEMENT TO THEODORE
Add to the evangelium of Marcus: They arrived in Bethany where there was a woman whose younger brother had died. She found Yeshua and lying face down before him said Son of Dawidh take mercy on me. Those who were with Yeshua, his followers, spoke harshly to her, which angered Yeshua, who went with her to her brother’s tomb in her garden. There they heard a loud voice from within the tomb, and Yeshua lifted aside the stone door, and went in, and took the young man in his arms. He sat him on the coffin’s edge and took both his hands in his, and the young man looked at Yeshua and loved him, and begged that he might be with him always. They left the tomb and went into the house of the young man, who was rich. Now six days later Yeshua asked the young man to come to him at night, naked except for a linen cloth. And throughout the night Yeshua explained to him how the world had God for its king, and at morning Yeshua left Bethany and walked to the other side of the Jordan.
MARCUS XIV:51
Adulescens autem quidam sequebatur eum amictus sindone super nudo: et tenuerunt eum: at ille reiecta sindone, nudus profugit ab eis.
SANKT HIERONYMUS WITH OPOSSUM
A sequence of twelve photographs by Muybridge: a dappled horse named Smith with rider, nude. A lithograph of 1887, the flat carbon of its blacks and silvery graphite of its half tones having the authority of both science and art. Smith’s tail has dashed into an upward spray by the sixth photograph. The sequence records a single four-legged step, or, in horseman’s language, stride. Time lapse between exposures: .051 seconds.
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There was a dialogue conducted by the furniture, as in a De Chirico, where Stimmung, or time with the feeling of music, involves one thing with another, Mariana’s flowery scarf, its Indian pinks, mustard browns, and Proustian lilacs, with the feral cunning of the large photograph framed in thin aluminum on the wall of Bourdelle’s Herakles Drawing His Bow, Hugo’s running shoes, their incisive blue stripes slanted like the insignia of a rank coparcenary with the god Hermes, coffee mugs in an event with light, a map of the Faeroes on the wall opposite the Herakles, a blue javelin standing in the northwest corner, a Cub Scout neckerchief, yellow and black, Franklin the Electrical Beavertooth Rabbit’s, a vase of zinnias, a trapezoidal shaft of soft late afternoon from the skylight to the blue rug, the bed made as neatly as one in a barracks.
MARCUS X:46
[They came to Jericho and the sister of the young man whom Yeshua loved and his mother and Salome were there, but Yeshua would not see them.]
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Linen is the clue, Hugo said. Johannes the Dipper wears animal skins: that seems to be very important, and when Yeshua is mocked and tortured he is made to wear a purple emperor’s robe, to satirize what they think are his pretensions to being a ruler. But otherwise he wears linen. Byssos, the garb of Pythagoreans and the Essenes. Angels wear white linen: that’s standard. A pure garment: animals have not been slaughtered to make it. And as the tomb on Easter morning, linen linen linen, flashing white, pure. A daimon would wear l
inen when he is apparent to the eyes of the vulgar in this world, though the structural detail is for the daimon to be naked, like the infant Yeshua, signifying sinlessness. And, Mariana said, her chin on her knees, looking out into the beautiful northern twilight, you think that the gospel writers could not wholly detach themselves from the ancient and pervasive Mediterranean belief in daimons as angelic messengers from heaven to an inspired person, a philosopher or a teacher like Yeshua, and gave him one: he’s the adolescent naked except for a piece of linen in the scene of the arrest, and he’s the younger brother Yeshua revives and talks to all of a night, and he’s the angel at the tomb on Easter. He’s all over the place, Hugo said. The revival in the garden has come down to us folklorishly askew. The chap’s name was El’azar, or Eleazar, or in Latin Lazarus. Check out daimons with names, like angels. The night’s conversation ought to be messages from on high for Yeshua, not Yeshua instructing a rich young man whom he has brought back from the dead. He’s also probably the same as the rich young man Yeshua said should give all he had to the poor. And, Mariana said, these things got scrambled around in the writing. First in the telling, Hugo said. Each early community would have had its own history, and over a hundred years details transmute. I tell you an interesting story, but you don’t quite get the drift of all of it. You then repeat the story, and account for certain details in your own way, or the way you understood them. A hundred years pass. Versions get written down, some of them in languages not one’s native tongue. You see? And the daimon had, in one of the longest traditions we can trace in the Mediterranean, a bird form. A dove. More than any other folktale, Yeshua mentions the sign of Jonas. That is, the sign of the dove. Jonas means dove, Mariana said. I do listen. You’re better at this than I am, Hugo said.
The Death of Picasso Page 47