The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  Sander comments that he finds chastity interesting, that word, interesting. Moedernaakt, waarachtig, met een starende blik op zijn penis.

  I tell him, with coffee after supper on the shingle, the sea changing from its silver and rose of day’s end to the flint and gleaming greys of dusk, about Ludwig Hänsel’s Die Jugend und die leibliche Liebe that Wittgenstein found so strangely moving and Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter. The phrase sexual purity of boys got me a sideways glance of comic surmise. Why don’t they know, he asks, after all this time? Mentioned Marcuse’s perception of tolerance as repression, and bandied ideas about. Thought is enhanced by the tumble of waves, the sound of rain. I remark that so much forbidding sweetened the value of the forbidden. Man has always savored the irony of having to believe an idea and its opposite. All these furry old doctors, Sander says. Even so, I’ve had it with too much.

  Innocence is regenerative, he is teaching me.

  1 FLOREAL

  Window washing, painting the trim outside, a swim, a run in the boat. We become brown.

  Through the chryselectric green with goatstep, ramshorns curled, sharp of eye, satyrs. Their musk precedes them, armpit and honeysuckle, quince flower descant upon a rackle of billy pizzle. Tuscan tan and with the visages of Italic gods, their pentathletic torsos flow with bestial grace into dappled haunches. Stag tails frisking up from the holybone wag above the flat of narrow butts.

  One munches an apple, one buzzes his lips like a hornet, the third twiddles the radical of his stegocephalic posthon. Their knowledge of the gods is intuitive, fretful, dark. Of Zeus they know but the suddenness of the lightning and the thunder’s hackling of its neck, hateful winds, snow, and rain. Artemis they know as the Mother of the Bears. Hera they do not know. Their Lord of the Dance is not Apollo but Pan, whom they call Humper. Asklepios is Snake, Demeter the apple, pear, and plum, Persephatta the poppy and the wren.

  Their language is inhuman. They can chatter with the squirrels, using squirrel words among themselves to bound their peripatesis. For time they use the vocabulary of the grey wolf, for elegy and boast the nicker and whinny of the horse, for familiar discourse a patois of birdsong, fox bark, goat bleat, and the siffle and mump of their cousins the deer.

  Hesiod first mentions them, the race of satyrs about which nothing can be done. In Sicily they are called Tityrs. Silenos the friend of Dionysos was one of them, prophet and drunkard. I see Asia in this detail, a transference onto the leafgod Dushara through whom the dead speak of some shaman whose trance came from wine.

  The true satyrs were shy woods creatures whose only boldness was in mounting hamadryads, fauns, maelids, sheep and their snub-nosed shepherd, goats and their darkeyed goatherd, country girls out berrying, pious wives at the spring, anything with penetrable pterygomata into which their impudent saunia might squeeze, poke, slide, prod, or slurp. Neither voluptuaries nor lovers, they never thought to mention in their talk of weather and time with the wolves that the day had seen them chase and hump a nimble wench and her cow, a brace of oreads whom they found in each other’s arms, a pasture-ful of horses, and an hysterical swan.

  Coffee and notebook on the hearth. A fire of sticks and fircones feels good in the evening. A domestic animal, fire.

  2 FLOREAL

  Writing in our seat on the big rock, the day sweet and gentle, Sander beside me just out of the sea, out of wholly unconscious habit, scritched Sander’s tummy along the mesial, nudged the lens of water from his navel, and was tracing absentminded patterns when he said with singsong parody that Dokter Tomas had vetted me as gentleman, scholar, and man of letters whose beschaafde manieren were supposed to be a model and an inspiration to a teenager with fried nerves and staring at the wall. Three weeks of carpentry had cured that, together with fresh air, the sea, and the company of a philosopher. Niettegenstande dat, he said, see the willful nosecone volunteer to join in.

  3 FLOREAL

  Scumble sienna over bronzen green, the ruddle gold. The wax is vermilion, to pick up the vert Louis XV of the bottle on the other end of the diagonal. With a charcoal stub he put in the lines of the drawing board. Two corners would be out of the picture, as in Degas, as Hokusai would want it, as the perspective frame indicated.

  He will eat the onions, but first he will eat them with his eyes. He put two of them on the white plate, the third beside the plate. Two quick rectangles with the charcoal: letter and book. A fourth onion on the book, on Raspail. Box of matches.

  Bottle in the lower left corner, both in and out of the frame, something for the eye to move over. A jug of olive oil beyond the drawing board, contrast and balance. Shag tobacco in its paper, open. His pipe.

  The onion on Raspail’s book begins the meaning. Then candle, lit, immediately above. Theo’s letter with a burnt match laid against it. Stilleven met uien, tabak, pijp, kaars, een brief.

  The still life is the painter’s sonnet, the painter’s essay. Did he dare to put in an allusion to Ricord as well? No, for Raspail was Ricord enough.

  He had tried to make himself clear about Ricord in a letter to Theo soon after he cut off his ear, was it two weeks ago already? Three? It was in his reply to the letter with the fifty francs that he was putting in the still life. He had been oblique, comparing Raspail and Ricord. If Theo understood, he did not say. Delacroix and after him Seurat had sorted out the colors into their components, like ancient men sorting out the notes of the scale, the Goncourts were sorting out the emotions, and Ricord had distinguished between the two dread diseases caught through the genitals. One never went away, but moved through the system until it reached the spine and the brain. It caused madness. The other was a disease that could be cured, though never with complete certainty. He did not know which he had. But one could hope.

  And one could make a vow, with the help of the Christus, to remain chaste and pure. The doctor had seemed to think that his madness was dietary, and that Raspail could bring him around to health, of body and mind, again. How the rich doctors and professors tried to suppress the Annuaire de la santé! No country other than France had such a book, a medical guide for the home, with all the science known about disease in clear prose that even the most simple could understand.

  And what had he had for, say, an average meal, the good doctor had asked after he had cauterized and bandaged what was left of his ear? Meal, meal? He did not rightly take meals, he was ashamed to say. He lived off white wine and shag tobacco, with the occasional glass of Pernod. The doctor had buried his face in his hands. And blasphemed. We are commanded not to blaspheme, he had said to the doctor.

  We are also commanded, by Nature, if you will, Monsieur Vincent, to nourish our bodies with food and not with poison. We are also commanded not to mutilate our ears.

  Raspail recommended onions for the poor as the most nourishing of foods for the least sous. And olive oil. He drew onions that were beginning to sprout. Green is the symbol of hope. And the olive jug must be green as well.

  4 FLOREAL

  Sander delights to sit suddenly and inventory his precocious and wicked past, knowing that mine is nothing like, amazed that he is shocked by it and cheerfully shocked by his amazement. Item, his best girl, as was, before she went off with hippy creeps in a tide of macramé, transcendental meditation, and organic meals that tasted like paper, sand, and whey, well he made it with her little sister one afternoon on the sly, scarcely thirteen, eager as a poesje rolling in catnip. Never mind his sister, since they were in rompers practically. He was an accomplished smoocher at ten, a rake at eleven, a Ganymed at twelve, a father, probably, at thirteen, outcoming Don Juan at fourteen. It was lovely, slordig, messy. Item, every girl in his set, too many out of it (what slobs! what smarm!), somebody’s soused mother on a bed at a party, unwashed French sailors in dingy hotels, a divinity student with halitosis and hung like a chihuahua.

  Impressive, I said, suggesting it was kinderspel and the evidence of a warm heart. A sigh and a dirty look. You don’t even think I’m a monster, he said.
Dokter Tomas wanted to hold his nose.

  5 FLOREAL

  That the world is a skin of air around a sphere of rock is so modern an idea that no culture knows it. We mites, the big roaming animals, inhabit this balloon much as microbes swim about in the film of a bubble, which must have its Asias and Alps, just as motes of dust have their moons, seasons, and geology.

  The scale of ubi and quando is, as far as we know, one of the infinitudes so strangely interrelated, so perfectly harmonized, that we shall probably never perceive how time is knit with space, how the pulse of light is also the pulse of time, or how the energy of radiant stars can brake and still itself to become matter.

  The stuff of a world, ant, iron, canteloupe, is light ash accumulated over quadrillions of quadrillions of eons. Finished time, said Samuel Alexander, becomes a place. This is an angel’s sense of things. Our attention is too frail to focus on it, however awful it is to admit that the nature of being is a boring subject.

  6 FLOREAL

  Chastity as contempt of the sensual. The word sensual troubles Sander, makes him wrinkle his nose. Chastity he may well never have heard of, though he keeps to it with a will.

  Value as the judgment of a discerning mind, not as agreeing to the crowd’s approval. Sander nods his seeing. Later: that things are what you are capable of making them. No cheating allowed.

  7 FLOREAL

  Shopping on shore. Our supplies over a choppy sea coming back. Sander took in a movie while I called friends: Keirinckx is doing some topnotch work he wants me to see soon. Bruno and Kaatje splendidly happy (Hans and Saartje crowed over the phone), but didn’t believe the USA where they’re just back from. Paulus says the summer students are duller than ever before.

  Sander’s film was a skinflick, French, in which mother and daughter seduce each other’s boyfriends: too gooey, his verdict, but with lots of girl on show, some grunty bedwork, make believe in his expert opinion, and lots of neat cars. Had I ever been to Paris? Tried to give him some idea of how beautiful it is, how congenial, how orderly. He said his friends told him it was a cruddy place where you had to beg in the underground. Impulsively said I would take him to see it. When? he replied.

  A place is defined anew even when returning to it after a few hours. My island, my cabin, my books, my sea.

  See how the book of essays will fit together. What the pastoral does in Picasso, what a still life is, how the erotic, like wild ginger in the Seychelles, thrives domestically in a cultivated ecology. Goya and Theokritos, Jarry and Virgil converge in Picasso’s last etchings. Cézanne comes from Virgil. Picasso takes up the Classical just when it was most anaemic, academic, and bleached of its eroticism.

  8 FLOREAL

  Finish painting the composition-board inner walls. Their white takes the sun beautifully. Pictures up, finally. The Marc Bauhaus calendar, several early Kandinskys thumbtacked up, arrangements of postcards.

  Whitecaps, a warmish wind from the east. A storm brewing far out, could move in.

  9 FLOREAL

  A gale drenching the windows: can scarcely see out. Began in the night. We feel wonderfully isolated. The Island of Snegren, Sander says in a radio voice, completely cut off by North Sea storm from Europe and all the continents. The population of two, Professor van Hovendaal the noted philosopher, and Alexander Brouwer, the schaamteloos tiener, asked for a statement by the press, replied that they couldn’t care less.

  We go out and secure the boat, leaning into the wind and getting drenched. Toweled down, Sander wears a denim jacket only. So dark we need lamps: a comforting and congenial light.

  Reading awhile, drawing awhile, Sander’s up every five minutes or so to peer out the windows, out the door, getting dashed with rain. As often, he pokes his scrotum, which seems swollen, unsettles his foreskin, and counts the days of his resolute chastity. Something short of two months, he figures out loud, not counting a wet dream a month back.

  Thought of Itard’s Victor, who needed to escape from time to time to bat the water of the stream and howl at the moon.

  Traverse Picasso with two vectors: the long tradition of the still life (eating, manners, ritual, household) and the pastoral (herds, pasturage, horse, cavalier, campsite).

  10 FLOREAL

  Strangeness and charm. After a convivial meal laid out in front of the fire late yesterday, the dark squall continuing, I had suggested that I read us a ghost story as befitting such a night. Suddenly, a slam of the door, and no Sander. Stood only half surprised, as I assumed he was making a dash for the outhouse. Half an hour, and no Sander. Either he was ill, or had not gone to the outhouse. Or was ending his chaste fast, more than likely. He would return spent and relaxed.

  An hour. I dressed for the solid rain and slashing wind. Rapped on the outhouse door: no reply. Inside, no Sander. Called. Walked and called. Back to the cabin to see if he’d returned. No. An uneasy dread. One side of the island under an assault of champing, raging waves, the other awash. Walked and called.

  Was sick with anxiety when I found him at the far end, standing braced against a tree, his face streaming in the beam of my flashlight. His eyes were closed, his mouth open. One hand kneaded his testicles, the other was satisfying his body’s demand with profligate frenzy. I clicked off the flashlight as soon as I saw. See you when you get back, I said as cheerfully and as normally as I could.

  Itard’s Victor, I said all the way to the cabin, Itard’s Victor, slipped loose into the elements, gone wild. Broke up two crates for the fire, got out a bathrobe and towels. It was another hour before he returned.

  Dried him before the fire while he shivered, hair, body, sex, which stood, his streaming eyes, tears as I discovered. His teeth chattered. Wrapped him in the bathrobe and a blanket. Put him in my bed and held him until he was asleep.

  13 FLOREAL

  Sander still feverish but, I think, in the clear. The gale left our island tangled with detritus, the staves of somebody’s dory, shells, limbs, tackle, nameless trash. Sea still high and boisterous, clouds scudding in glare.

  14 FLOREAL

  Calm. Sander for a walk with me to inspect the island. Though warm, and clearing steadily, insisted on jeans, sneakers, shirt and sweater. Has slept in bed with me since the wild night, sexless and cuddly as a puppy. Temperature normal. Will I tell Dokter Tomas? he asks. What’s to tell? I say.

  15 FLOREAL

  Fine weather again. Sander sets to cleaning up. A storm, he says, is to provide firewood for islanders. I get back to writing. Sander in jeans, as if the nudity he loved so much were ruined.

  16 FLOREAL

  We study phyllotaxis, diagramming arrangements of leaves on stems, using a string to plot the Fibonacci proportions. Sander’s good at this.

  Each species of animal lives in its own world. Each being lives in its own world.

  In Virgil the shrill cicada’s cry is the symbol of appetence. It is the edge of desire that gives the pastoral its identity. The erotic moves along fine gradations and differences, Daphnis and Chloe discovering each other’s bodies, the opposition of sheep and goats, sun and shade, summer and winter, grassland and rock, field and wood. Leporello’s classification of charms begins in the Anthology: I kissed, says Artemon, Erkhedemos twelve, when he was peeping around a door, and then I dreamed that he wore a quiver, was winged, spry, and beautiful, and that he brought me a brace of bantams, awful omen, and smiled at me and frowned. I have walked into bees swarming. Twelve! Thirteen is the age preferred by adepts, fourteen is Eros in full blossom, fifteen sweeter still, none sweeter than. Sixteen is for the gods to love, seventeen, bearding out and well hung, is for Zeus alone. At twenty they go for each other.

  17 FLOREAL

  Euphoria. Sander’s blue disc of eye is again calm, and he has returned to wearing water only. His chest runches out from chinning, heaping niftily where it reefs underarm at the nipples.

  We row in great sweeps around the island, brown as Choctaws. Sander refuses a haircut and begins to look like Victor when Itard first saw hi
m.

  You know, he says, I’ve never really looked at things before, or tried to get alongside them in the right way. Selfish pig, he calls himself.

  18 FLOREAL

  The six essays are beginning to fit together just as I want them to. Find I can work on them all at once. I begin to find everything in Picasso in the Mediterranean past, of which he is the great custodian in our time.

  Sander, sprag imp and stinker, turns up glossy with sweat from running, unties his sneakers on the edge of my worktable, and says with bright sincerity, you can have my body if you want it. A scrunch in my scrotum, but I’m speechless. Don’t look so hacked, he says. I am the new Sander. I don’t take, I give. I’ve figured it out: give me credit for being smart. I’ll stay horny in my head, ready anytime, for whatever.

  But I love you just so, liefje Sander, charmingly naked and good natured. You keep my imagination alive. You’ve helped me write my book, you have beguiled all our time here into a kind of ancient ambiance, Damon the old shepherd I, Mopsus the young shepherd you, full of piss and vinegar.

  I can always go jump in the sea, he says. You aren’t old.

  What if I wanted you, what would you want me to want?

  Grown people are Martians, he says. They don’t know nothing from nothing, but I mean nothing!

  20 FLOREAL

  Coffee and journal on the rock. Sander brings out second mugs of coffee. Iets reusachtigs! he says, adding a whistle and a shake of his ankle. Crouches on my knees and we sip our coffee. We could row over to the mainland and brag, he says, I mean just by walking around and laughing with our eyes.

  22 FLOREAL

  The dedication, I dared, of the essays might be Péoi Aléxandros Pentekaidekaétes.

  30 FLOREAL

  Crushed green smell of fir needles, sweetgrass, bee balm in salty hair, tang of creosote at the roots, earwax faintly acrid, sweat licked from the upper lip, axial sweat the odor of hay and urine, olive and soda the pileum, celery and ginger the sac. You, Sander says, giving me look for look, bright as a wolf, smell like billy goat, tobacco, onions, zaad, Aqua Velva, licorice, and wet dog. Doesn’t all that hair tickle?