The Death of Picasso

by Guy Davenport

  THE BOW OF HERAKLES

  Up these outside steps, Franklin said. Hugo lives here. It was the top floor of the stables, way back, now a garage and place where the grounds people keep their things. Somebody, a teacher here, who left, he taught drawing and building houses and things, made the upstairs one big room, but with a bathroom and kitchen and a skylight. When Hugo came here, all he needed was a bed and a chair and a table to make himself a place to live. Pots and pans and things. Hugo says that what you own should be a pair of jeans, shoes, socks, and shirt. One sweater. But he only talks that way. He has lots of things. This, around my neck on this shoelace, is the key. Mariana has one, too. You first. That big picture, it’s a photograph of a statue in Paris Frankrig, where Hugo bought it. He’s been all sorts of places. Greek, Pascal said, a hero from the myths. Yes, said Franklin, you see he was good and strong and he shot bad things with his bow, things that hurt people. He’s naked because the Grækere didn’t wear any clothes most of the time, big balls like Hugo’s, but this picture here, which Hugo painted, of my sister Mariana, is naked because girls are pretty with no clothes on. Hugo can paint real good. He has drawn me all sorts of ways, with color pencils, my pecker on view, chinning a limb down by the river, asleep in that chair. A Muybridge, Pascal said, looking at the photograph in twelve frames of the horse Smith. Brancusi’s Torso d’un jeune homme. Hugo says that has purity, whatever the fuck he means by that. Pascal winced. Now I’ve said something wrong, Franklin said. Let’s have a glass of milk. The Torso is beautiful, Pascal said. It has elemental simplicity. In the archaic Mediterranean period the body was shaped that way in Cycladic and Maltese sculpture. Cycladic, Franklin said, Cycladic. Here, Pascal said, taking down a book and flipping through the pages. There, he said, that’s Cycladic. You knew it was in that book? Franklin asked. No, but by the title there was a good chance. You could have said you knew it was in the book and fooled me. I don’t want to fool you, Pascal said. Good milk. Franklin drank his at a go, and licked the inside of the glass held upside down. As he licked, he squeezed the crotch of his short white pants. Pascal sat in Hugo’s reading chair, feet and all, ankles crossed, and sipped his milk. What I think, Franklin said, unzipping, is that you’re not balls up inside anymore. It didn’t look like it when we were camping with Hugo. You get stiff good. And you say it feels neat to play with it. If it feels half as good as mine, you’re getting there. Why would your housemaster friend Holger say you can whack off in moderation if he doesn’t want you to do it at all, you know? See, one pull back and one pull up, and I’m bonehard and tingling. Pascal spilt a fat dollop of milk on his shirt and pants. Fuck, Franklin said. Don’t get it on the rug. Here, over to the sink. Shirt, britches, rinch ’em in cold water, is what Mariana would do. They’ll be dry again in no time. Underpants, too. Your dick’s half stiff, you know. What, Pascal said, if hr. Tvemunding comes in, or your sister? What nothing, Franklin said. You don’t know those two. They don’t think about anything else. And they don’t snitch. See, pull back, slide up. Everybody at Grundtvig whacks off two or three times a day. I know that, Pascal said. In the showers, in bed, up over the boathouse. Yours has a more mushroomy head than mine. See, I’m getting hair. Hugo’s has big veins all over it, and bumpy ridges. Long as my forearm, and the head’s as big as my fist. See, he said he got it that big by whacking off when he was a boy.

  28

  Do you, Pascal said, know about the nest of crystals in a salmon’s brain by which it steers in a magnetic field? Like a radio, said Franklin.

  29

  The peaches, Mariana said, have been in the spring, in their tin, and so’s the condensed milk, which is why they are so delicious and Hugo is smiling at me with designs in his eyes. One design. All the writing’s to be done by the time papa gets here, so that he can read it through. He’s going to like the hobbyhorse. And the structuralist analysis of clothes. Wheat and figs will be nothing new to him, or Gnostic static.

  THE GREAT APPLE ROSE

  The stock is large, covered with a dark grayish bark except for the younger branches, which are reddish, armed here and there with great and sharp thorns, but nothing so great or plentiful as in the Eglantine, although it be a wild kind: the leaves are whitish green, almost like the first White Rose, and five always together, seldom seven: the flowers are small and single, consisting of five leaves, without any scent, or very little, and a little bigger than those of the Eglantine bush, and of the same deep blush color, every one standing upon a prickly button, bearded in the manner of other roses, which, when the flowers have fallen, grow great, long and round, pear-fashion, bearing beards on their tops and are very red when full ripe.

  ACORNS

  Earliest dawn, mist, the shine of dew, a single star still in the sky. Hugo could make out the basket of the Jules Verne in an open place in the pines, its rope ladder down. Quark, he called softly. Quark, again. He heard a voice speaking God knew what language: it was more animal than human, full of chirps and ratchety gutturals. He called again. Ferns parting before him, a boy naked as a newt, wet to the hips, strode out with wide rolling steps, waving his arms in greeting. It’s you, he said. Can we talk? Hugo said. Talk? Quark said. You are Quark? Hugo asked. There were the three of them, ten or eleven in age, Quark, Buckeye, and Tumble, voyagers in a balloon of the last century. We are washing in the dew, Quark said, and drying in the air. It’s wonderfully so me tumenge ’kana rospxenava ada zhivd’ape varikicy romenge, Buckeye! you worthless goosebrained chickenhumper, put me back onto Danish. He fiddles with the adaptors on the thread out of absolute gormless idleness. El ruaus della dumengia damaun fa, stop it! Buckeye’s radiantly grinning handsome face rose over the wicker taffrail of the basket. I was getting us all into lingua loci, Crosspatch, while heating the griddle for pancakes, and reading the newspaper we bought in the village. Hi, Hugo, what brings you out to the ship so early of a morning? Tumble is out milking cows. A little from several: so it won’t be missed. Pancakes, blackberries, and milk. Who are you? Hugo asked. Not to say, said Quark. What language is your name? Quark looked blank, smiling. Buckeye! he called. Ask Hizqiyya Band yot asterisk scanner to give us a printout in Latin letters quote what language is your name close quote, with your referring to Zoon Hex Dyo Hen. Tapped in, Buckeye called down. Green through, red active, here it comes. Here it is. QUARK ULT QUERCUS LATIN OAK EVANGEL DODONA CROSSREF IRISH THEOLOGER JAMES JOYCE CRY OF GULL ARCHETYPE DOVE SIGNUM JONAS ALSO CROSSREF ELEM PARTICLE SYNERGIA MUNDI CROSSREF HARMONY BROTHER BUCKEYE MT OAK GENUS AESCHYLUS OR BUCKEYE TREE ALSO CROSSREF BROTHER TUMBLE FREQ GALLIC TOMBER ENGL TIMBER CROSSREF TREE SYMBOL CONNEC VAR MYTHOLOG DRYAS DAIMONES REQ ROUTES REMIND YOU RESTRICTED EXCEPT DESIGNATE POETS PS HIZQIYYAH TO PATROL WHO WANTS TO KNOW?

  BOULDERS SEAMED WITH GOLDEN SAMPHIRE

  Looking out of the top of his eyes, whistling Mozart, Franklin unlatched the buckle of his Wolf Cub webbing belt, fingered the brass button from its eye, and slid his zipper down. Get chiggers on your behind and balls, Hugo said, if you’re about to do what I think you’re about to do. Which is what? Pascal asked. I can read Franklin’s mind, Hugo said. Several meters back, on the flint path, the Electric Rabbit’s paw was squeezing its crotch, and now its unwrinkled brain slips along an obvious and wholly natural line. That’s not my mind you’re reading, Franklin said. A joke, Pascal said. I’m learning.

  A GARDEN IN POMPEII

  With a stone Hercules in it, Buckeye said. At one end, where the olive a hundred years old was. And at the other, with the seedlings in perforated jars, the bee balm, polpody fern, amaranth and bachelor buttons, was a stone Priapos. Rose, white violet, dogtooth, wallflower, Tumble said, bergamot, thyme, saffron crocus. The Perfumery of Herakles was the sign above the door, across from the shop whose sign was Cash Today Credit Tomorrow. For cool and colors and smell you would have to go to Kyoto or Izmir to find the like. The dog Ferox, remember him? They’d sawn an amphora in half, on the long axis, and one half was his bed, the other, on stacked bricks, his roof. There was ano
ther grand garden at the House of the Ship Europa. A stone Ceres. Demeter of the Campania. And up here, peppergrass, so sour and green.

  ANEMONE

  Wheat figured in gold on the steel blade of his sword, in sudden windflowers that came with the rain, clad in white linen, Hyakinthos.

  BLUE-EYED SUSANS

  To the reedy plangencies of a harmonium from Sheffield (John Robinson, Instruments, 1869) Buckeye sang O lead me onward to the loneliest shade. Sing through your nose, Quark said, with quavers and shakes. That’s the way they do it. By gaslight in the Methodist Chapel. The dearest place, Buckeye obliged, that quiet ever made. Holy milk cow, Tumble called up from the meadow below. Where kingcups grow most beauteous to behold, and shut up green and open into gold.

  EPPING FOREST 1840

  I found the poems in the fields and only wrote them down.

  37

  Pascal’s folks, Pastor Tvemunding said, thought it would be best if I came with them, and here we are, ready for anything. Mariana, Hugo said, heard you first and is exchanging Eve’s dress for modester raiment. Well, Pastor Tvemunding said, you were allowed to run naked here as a boy, even after you qualified for the toga virilis. There’s not a soul in miles. How come, Franklin said, after being kissed on the top of the head, forehead, and chin by Hugo, Hugo can be naked and Mariana not? Answer that, Mariana said from somewhere in the cabin, and lots of other answers will follow. Papa Tvemunding, hi! Tailless rats, hi! You’ve all three turned up together, what fun. She’s going to kiss you, Pascal, Franklin said. So kiss back.

  THE TWELVE DAYS

  The kallikantaroi, daimons or perhaps centaurs (the Greeks still believe in them), were loose on middle earth, from underneath, for the twelve midwinter days, playing havoc. If they could be appeased and sent back to the underworld, the new year could begin. They were horses, or halfhorse halfhuman, ithyphallic, unprincipled and raw. The Greeks, even so far back in time, had the sense that life was wild impulse that needed taming, needed synchronicity, regularity, rhythm. Noise must become music, sexuality a longing of affinities, violence government, babble poetry, wild grass wheat, fear of the inexplicable religion, the puzzle of the world philosophy. But the romping centaurs have stayed on, in rituals all over Europe, and the dance of the hobbyhorse is their last vestige. At the beginning they are indistinguishable, let us surmise, with the idea of daimons in general: spirits who possess or guide or tempt. Tell you about the hobbyhorse? Well, it’s man in a horse suit, many variants. He does a dance in which he gets sick and falls down. A lady horse comes and revives him with her attractions. Then something that was wrong has been set right again. Springtime can come. Crazy, said Franklin. Folklore, said Pascal. Neat, said Mariana. I think I see what you mean, said Pastor Tvemunding.

  39

  With a floppy and sidewise gait, goofy of eye and with idiot teeth, an agile cripple, sinking in his pace, the hobbyhorse falls down. Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. Doctors try pills and enemas. The old horse moans, the old horse groans, like to die. This is the one dramatic role rustics up and down the map get to play. They practiced their reins, their careers, their prankers, their ambles, their false trots, and Canterbury paces. They wore horse bells, plumes, and braveries, and bragged in the opening dance to tabors and fifes, bagpipes and clacker sticks, of having a mane new-shorn, and frizzled, and of having a randy wayward giddy leaning toward the tupping of a mare. And dances himself silly. He falls. The women show him eggs. But he is old, he is tired. Hope on High Bomby he is not, nor a coach horse of the Pope, who can mount thirty mares one after the other, whickering and neighing, with his black yard still hard as a hoe handle, his tail waggling, a fine roll to his handsome eye, and his ballocks throbbing with lewdness. Oh no, that’s all past. He’s a sick old horse fallen in the road. But then a young mare is brought for him to see. He looks, he neighs Whee Hee. The mare says Tee Hee.

  40

  The daimons, Papa Tvemunding said, were the agents of Fate. It is my understanding that Yeshua cancelled Fate.

  41

  Oh no! Franklin said. Not Sunday School out here! It’s all a blur, Pascal said. Hugo said, Use your imagination. Olive groves. The olive leaf is dark green on top, light grayish green on its underside. So if there’s a breeze, you see sudden, rolling, tossing changes of color. Like foam on breakers at the shore. I’m seeing it, Franklin said, closing his eyes. Me too, Pascal said. OK then, Hugo went on. Yeshua. Hair probably black, black and shiny with perfumed oil. Sidelocks in curls down by his ears. A hat? Yes, let’s give him a big round straw hat, shallow-crowned, for walking in the broiling sun. A beard. Imagine him as a comely man, wonderfully attractive, big-nosed, very Mediterranean. Tall and sturdy: he was a carpenter. Though God knows, for all we’re told, he could have been chubby and bald. Big floppy trousers, like a Turk, or modern Cretan. Sandals. And a kind of coat: a caftan, I suppose. He would have spoken Aramaic, and probably Greek. That was the common-market language of the Roman empire. He could read Hebrew, which no one any longer spoke: we see him doing it in the synagogue.

  A ROW OF ZINNIAS

  Listen to the ringdove, Pastor Tvemunding said. It’s the angle of light in its retina, Hugo said. They’d brought a table out on the meadow where it flows into the cabin’s grounds. Wonderful that you brought tea, Mariana said. Hugo never thinks to. These intellectuals assume everybody likes coffee. What a glorious, sweet afternoon. I hear more than ringdoves, I hear unchanged voices over in the larchwood. Happy voices, Pastor Tvemunding said. Hugo, I’ve read far enough into your thesis to see that the faculty is going to adjust its glasses page after page, wondering if it’s reading what it’s reading. But I imagine they’ll kick through with a degree. I like it. It stands to reason that something so universal in Mediterranean belief as daimons would get into the gospels, and be removed, except for the traces you indicate, by scribes who didn’t understand what they were excising. There was the worship of angels at Kolossai. Your theology is going to be carped at. You require an organism for spirit, allowing for no occurrence of mind except in something, even if it be an organization of matter still unrecognized by science. And you allow for no knowledge of the future in the mind of God, as the future hasn’t yet happened, and is not something of which there can be any knowledge. That’s good logic, isn’t it? Hugo asked. Yes, his father said. Sounds absolutely useless to me, Mariana said. Hugo, what are you looking at? The light, he said. He was looking at Quark in a French sailor’s suit, standing behind his father. He gave Hugo a wink, which meant: Nobody but you can see me. He mouthed light frequency. He sniffed the teapot, and signalled for Tumble, whose slender honeybrown body was clad only in briefs which Hugo had last seen on Franklin. Buckeye was probably on the roof of the cabin: he dared not look. The whole crunch of theology, he said, is to what extent do people imagine that creatures of another realm, higher or lower, or invisibly within ours, interact with our lives?

  GUYOT, 1900

  It is not enough to describe, without rising to the causes, or descending to the consequences. A complete account of vision would contain far more than a description of the sequence of chemical reactions that begins when a rhodopsin molecule absorbs a photon.

  SCALIGER ON ACTS XVII:18

  Ethnici non credebant diabolum esse; Socratis daemonium vel deum vel genium esse credebant.

  45

  Steam seeping from the brass throttle, the red lantern glowing brighter as the dusk thickened to dark, the balloon eased to fifty meters above the larchwood, most of which was already in deep green night, with some clearings and tall trees still suffused with the last thin pink of sunset. Buckeye, pushing back his Norwegian forager’s cap on his curls, tried another sip of coffee. They drink it, he said. It’s a bean, Tumble explained, from a beautifully slender tree in the Indian Ocean islands. It came up here over long trade routes years and years ago. The bean’s roasted and then ground, sometimes powdered. Hot water makes it into a tisane. Add granulated cane sugar, and it’s a drink. Tastes more than a little of lion p
iss, wouldn’t you say? Ah, but the bouquet, the aroma, Quark said, rolling himself into his blanket for the night. Hugo the theologer likes it, and his da. Mariana pretends to like it. Tumble pretends to like it. I do like it, Tumble protested. HQ, you know, isn’t really interested in this bunch. A cute old man, his tall randy son who can’t keep his generator in his pants, one sprightly girl and her little brother, and his friend. So Hugo is writing some gibberish, and teaches the old languages, which he mispronounces, and has a loving heart, what’s the bother? Pass the molasses cookies. Maybe it’s all for Pascal, Buckeye said. He’s the deep one.

  A GARDEN IN POMPEII

  Hello, Quark said. He was behind a beech, looking around. Hugo saw a portion of blue student cap, an eye, a quiff of hair. Where is the balloon? Hugo asked, and then in a temper, why do you bother with it? Asking questions won’t do, Quark said, trying to be very serious. Be silent, be bold, be of great heart: that’s the message. But the other morning, Hugo said, you talked to me about Pompeii, the old olive, the dog. You cannot imagine what curiosity you excite. We can’t read minds, Quark said. We got an admonitum on the thread for talking too much, and for borrowing Franklin’s underpants. From whom? Hugo asked. What’s on the other end of the thread? The Consiliarii. Hugo looked more puzzled than ever. We have only heard their voices, Quark said. They give us messages to deliver, charges to look after, things like that. Where are you when you aren’t here? Hi! said Tumble, looking around the other side of the beech. Where are we when we aren’t here? I wonder if we know. It is left to us to rig out our expeditions. We got the balloon out of a book of pictures, and we get our clothes where we can, and our food, as when we’re inside a system we have to live in its structure. Are you always ten-year-old boys! Oh no, Tumble said. We have been wolf puppies when a mother lost hers. Dolphins. Magi from Persia. Watch it, Quark said. We don’t remember all of our assignments. And once they’re done, it wasn’t us, somehow, who did them, you know? Actually, Tumble said, they keep things from us, practically everything I sometimes think. Pompeii, Hugo said, to hold onto that, because you remember it. Do you know what happened to it? Happened to it? Quark asked. Our information, like yours, as best we can tell, is not magic, as your language has that word. Did something happen to Pompeii? Have you no way, Hugo asked, of finding out?