The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  In the eternal July of Egypt a scribe once wrote on papyrus she was more comely in her body than all the other women in this world — a FEATHER, ah, and a COIL OF ROPE, oo, she, a SHEPHERD’S CROOK and a LOAF, sett, was, a LUTE, ASP, and MOUTH, nefer, comely, an OWL, m, in, a TWISTED ROPE, LOAF, ARM, SHOULDER, THREE, SEATED WOMAN, SHEPHERD’S CROOK and LOAF, hatset, her body, MOUTH, er, than, BOLT, LOAF, and SEATED WOMAN, khemt, woman, BOWL and LOAF, nebt, any, WATER, LOAF, and DUALITY, enti, who, OWL, m, in, DUCK, pa, the, LAND, ta, world, GRAIL, MOUTH, and ASP, terf, entire.

  He wrote, sighed, and passed the leaf to a binder, who stitched it to the next leaf and rolled it around a stick. An anu read the line various evenings to the dash of a seshsesh and the indolent whine of a sa, and lords listened, their brown hands on their square knees, and ladies listened, a hen of flowers in their hair, and the shadow of Neb whom the children of darkness call the Sphinx slid from west to east three hundred and sixty-five thousand times and again as many, and again, and who then could read the writing of the scribe?

  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 because 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 no 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 him 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 Ruzeichen 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 water 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 Nachnietzchischprosaschriftsteller 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.

  That 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.

  The Death of Picasso

  Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek:

  Germinal, Floréal, Prairial 1973

  12 GERMINAL

  Anderszins 2 april. Fog until almost noon. Wild glare in lakes over the sea. It has been but a month from putting in the eight-by-threes, treated with creosote and laid a foot and a half apart in the long northernish rectangle of our cabin’s base, construction fir let into grey marl on the chine of an island, to the last sheet of shingling on the roof. An island that, as Archilochos said of his Thasos, lies in the sea like the backbone of an ass, Thasos a ridge of primrose marble in the wijndonker Zee, our Snegren a hump of old red sandstone in the cold North Sea. Plain as a shoebox, it is little more than a roof, chimney, and windows. The Eiland Commissaris did not bat an eyelash when I registered it under the name Snegren, grensbewoner being the allusion he supposed. Sander has already coined snegrensbewoner, Erewhonian pioneer. If I had explained that it is nergens reversed, he would have made a joke about so remote and lilliputachtig an island being precisely that, nowhere.

  Parmenides is wrong: the nothing he will not allow to be is time itself. Time is the empty house that being inhabits. It may well be the ghost of something in the beginning, before light became matter. But it went away, so that something could be.

  13 GERMINAL

  Coffee, journal, a swim with Sander, just enough to count as a bath, the water Arctic. We built the Rietveld tensegrity table, razored labels off windowpanes, squared things away so that for the
first time the long room begins to look like home, practised Corelli on our flutes, Telemann and Bach. Baroque progressions, the wind, the waves. Thoreau had a flute at Waldenpoel I think.

  14 GERMINAL

  Vincent’s Stilleven met uien. It is the first painting he did after cutting off part of his ear according to the Sint Mattheus Evangelie. In a rage at Gauguin, a blusterer like Tartarin de Tarascon. They had a kind of marriage, those two, a companionship as chaste as that of the apostles Paulus and Barnabas. All their talk was of color and form, of motif and theme. But Gauguin would talk of the hot girls upstairs over the café and Vincent would stop his ears, and rage, and pray, and resort to Raspail’s camphor treatments to ward off impurity. To talk of the Christus only generated blasphemies in Gauguin. What indulgence in the flesh did to the creative spirit was what syphilis did to the flesh itself; worse, to the mind. And Gauguin only laughed and called him a big Dutch crybaby.

  The painting is a resolution, a charting of the waters after almost foundering. A drawing board in a room at Arles. It is as if we have zoomed in on a table top that had hitherto been a detail in all the scenes of Erasmus writing, of Sint Hieronymus with his books. The two things that are not on the board are a bottle of white wine and a jug of olive oil. The board is a bridge from one to the other.

  The doctor’s diagnosis of Vincent’s hot nerves was based on learning that Vincent’s diet for some weeks had been white wine and his pipe. Malnutrition! Look, mon vieux, anybody who subsists day after day on cheap wine and shag tobacco is going to cut off his ears. Nervous prostration: it is no wonder that you are out of your mind.

  And in Raspail’s Annuaire de la sante, there on the drawing board, the book that broke the doctors’ monopoly and placed a knowledge of medicine in every humble home, it explains the nutritiousness of onions and olives, the efficacy of camphor in preventing wet dreams and lascivious thoughts.