A Table of Green Fields

by Guy Davenport

—Pull up again, and then down. Not that I believe this.

  —I had this feeling that the lizard had been there a thousand years, since Apta Julia of the Romans. Their bridge is still here, and their walls. French is just old, old Latin, and what if some of their gods that they brought with them are still around? Between the lavender fields and the hills they'd be, left behind.

  —Anne-Marie's gaga, Bernard said, and whimpered. The pastilles are black currant. Pinch one out. Are Anne-Marie and Marc going up their pine?

  —That was because Marc was bashful.

  —Showing off, you mean.

  —We're friends together, aren't we?

  —Friends, said Marc.

  —Friends, said Julie.

  —Friends, said Anne-Marie.

  —Friends, said Bernard.

  Lavender is one of the verticillate plants whose flower consists of one leaf divided into two lips, the upper lip, standing upright, is roundish, and, for the most part, bifid; but the under lip is cut into three segments which are almost equal: these flowers are disposed in whorls, and are collected into a slender spike upon the top of the stalks. The whole lavender plant has a highly aromatic smell and taste, and is famous as a cephalic, nervous, and uterine medicine.

  Theophrastos in his Plants places lavender (Lavandula spica) or, as his Greek is, iphyon, among the summer garland flowers, along with rose campion, the krinon lily, and sweet marjoram from Phrygia. He also mentions it as a flower that must be grown from seed.

  Vergil in the second eclogue of his Bucolics puts lavender along with hyacinth and marigold among the aromatic herbs, and in his Georgies with thyme as forage for bees and a flavor for honey. John Gerard wrote in The Herball or General Historie of Plants (1597) that lavander spike hath many stiffe branches of a wooddy substance, growing up in the manner of a shrub, set with many long hoarie leaves, by couples for the most part, of a strong smell, and yet pleasant enough to such as do love strong savors. The floures grow at the top of the branches, spike fashion, of a blew colour. The distilled water of Lavander smelt unto, or the temples and forehead bathed therewith, is a refreshing to them that have the catalepsy, a light migram, and to them that have the falling sicknesse, and that use to swoune much.

  The floures of Lavander picked from the knaps, I meane the blew part and not the husk, mixed with cinnamon, nutmegs & cloves, made into a pouder, and given to drink in the distilled water thereof, doth helpe the panting and passion of the heart, prevaileth against giddinesse, turning, or swimming of the brain.

  John Parkinson in his A Garden of Pleasant Flowers (1629) says that Lavender groweth in Spain aboundantly, in many places so wilde, and little regarded, that many have gone, and abiden there to distill the oyle thereof whereof great quantity now commeth over from thense unto us: and also in Lanquedocke, and Provence in France.

  The Kitchen Chair

  It was a breathless, gray day, leaving the golden woods of autumn quiet in their own tranquillity, stately and beautiful in their decaying, an afternoon soon after she had moved into a cottage at Grasmere to keep house for her brother William. She had brought a kitchen chair and a milking stool out into the fine weather, to write in her journal. There would be, in time, a garden where she sat, the public road to her left, the yellowing woods to her right. Tucking back a strayed strand of hair around her ear, opening her journal on her lap, she wrote: It is a breathless, grey day, that leaves the golden woods of autumn quiet in their own tranquillity, stately and beautiful in their decaying.

  Johnson preferred gray; William, grey.

  As in Horace, the words are in an order but are free to form associations of their own. Leaves, a verb, easily becomes a noun and takes up with golden, for golden leaves are what she's looking at. Leaves in the underworld are of gold, where the vegetation is all of metal, with mineral and crystal flowers. Autumn is Proserpina's return to the realm of artifice, where lifeless stone and iron pretend to be apple and pear. Autumnal decay is nature's grief over her departure.

  Until she wrote autumn, her sentence was in English. Then Latin began to sift in: quiet and its cousin tranquillity, as if the older language had the power to cast a spell on us when we write. Decaying, she knew, meant falling, and thus she can entwine two roots and tie in the English fall under autumn. She cannot keep decay from meaning rot. Standing lies encoded in stately. The trees stand on their estate. Caesar (she imagines him on a horse) brought bella into Gaul. When the Norse king William brought it to Hastings, it had become beau, and to its noun beaute we English added the full.

  Breathless is an apt word, even though it means both a stillness of wind on such a calm day as this, beautiful and voluptuously calm, and not breathing, as in death. With both meanings was Proserpina familiar.

  Gray is a deathly color, and yet it is clouds, which are water, high and cold, the source of life, that grizzle the sky.

  It is a breathless, gray day, that leaves the golden fall woods unanswering in their own stillness, kingly and comely in their dying.

  The Concord Sonata

  AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON

  At his small sanded white pine table in his cabin at Walden Pond on which he kept an arrowhead, an oak leaf, and an Iliad in Greek, Henry David Thoreau worked on two books at once. In one, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, he wrote: Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. In the other, Walden, or Life in the Woods, he wrote three such sentences, a paragraph which no intelligence can understand: I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers whom I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

  JOHN BURROUGHS

  Thoreau did not love Nature for her own sake, or the bird and the flower for their own sakes, or with an unmixed and disinterested love, as Gilbert White did, for instance, but for what he could make out of them. He says: The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence which only the most ingenuous worshiper perceives at a reverent distance from its surface even. This fine effluence he was always reaching after, and often grasping or inhaling. This is the mythical hound and horse and turtledove which he says in Walden he long ago lost, and has been on their trail ever since. He never abandons the search, and in every woodchuck hole or muskrat den, in retreat of bird, or squirrel, or mouse, or fox that he pries into, in every walk and expedition to the fields or swamps or to distant woods, in every spring note and call that he listens to so patiently, he hopes to get some clew to his lost treasures, to the effluence that so provokingly eludes him.

  This search of his for the transcendental, the unfindable, the wild that will not be caught, he has set forth in this beautiful parable in Walden.

  GEESE

  Well now, that Henry. Thursday one of the Hosmer boys told him he'd heard geese. He wants to know everything anybody can tell him in the way of a bird or skunk or weed or a new turn to the wind. Well, Henry knew damned good and well that it's no time to be hearing geese. So, always assuming his leg wasn't being pulled, he sat down and thought about it. And after awhile, didn't take him long, he got up and walked to the station. He didn't ask. He told Ned that at half past one on Thursday a train had passed through with a crate of geese in the baggage car. That's a fact, Ned said, but I don't recollect anybody being around here at the time.

  STANLEY CAVELL

  I have no new proposal to offer about the literary or biographical source of these symbols in perhaps his most famously cryptic passage. But the very fact that they are symbols, and function within a little myth, seems to me to tell us what we need to know. The writer comes to us from a sense of loss; the myth does not contain more than symbols because it is no set of desired things he has lost, but a connection with things, the track of desire itself.

  THE JOURNAL: 1
APRIL 1860

  The fruit of a thinker is sentences: statements or opinions. He seeks to affirm something as true. I am surprised that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, not forethought, so that I occasionally wake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I never consciously considered before, and as surprisingly novel and agreeable to me as anything can be.

  6

  And yet we did unbend so far as to let our guns speak for us, when at length we had swept out of sight, and thus left the woods to ring again with their echoes; and it may be many russet-clad children, lurking in those broad meadows with the bittern and the woodcock and the rail, though wholly concealed by brakes and hardhack and meadowsweet, heard our salute that afternoon.

  7

  Solitude, reform, and silence.

  8

  In A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers Thoreau wrote: Mencius says: If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of the heart, he does not know how to seek them again. The duties of all practical philosophy consist only in seeking after the sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all.

  9

  Duke Hsuan of Qi arranged his skirts and assumed a serene face to receive the philosopher Meng Tze, and who knows how many devils had come with him? The magicians had drilled the air around the gates with incessant drumming, and the butlers were burning incense.

  The duke could see wagons of millet on the yellow road. The philosopher had apparently travelled in some humble manner. From the terrace he could see no caravan. There was no commotion among the palace guard.

  Sparrows picked among the rocks below the bamboo grove.

  A merchant was handing in a skip of persimmons and a string of carp at the porter's lodge. The weather was dry.

  The philosopher when he was ushered in was indeed humble. His clothes were coarse but neat, and his sleeves were modest. He wore a scholar's cap with ear flaps.

  They met as gentlemen skilled in deference and courtly manners, bow for bow. The duke soon turned their talk to this feudal baron or that, angling for news. There had for years been one war after another.

  —And yet, Meng Tze said, the benevolent have no enemies.

  Duke Hsuan smiled. Philosophers were always saying idiotic things like this.

  —The grass, Meng Tze continued, stands dry and ungrowing in the seventh month and the eighth. Then clouds darken the sky. Rain falls in torrents. The grass, the millet, the buckwheat, the barley turns green again, and grows anew. Nothing we are capable of can control this process of nature. And yet men who ought to be the caretakers of other men kill them instead. They are pleased to kill. If there were a ruler who did not love war, his people would look at him with longing, loving eyes. It is in nature to love the benevolent.

  So there was to be no gossip about Hwan of Ch'i, or Wan of Tsin. So the duke asked politely:

  —How may a ruler attain and express benevolence?

  —He should regard his people as his charges and not with contempt.

  —Am I one, the duke asked slyly, who might be so benevolent? —Yes.

  —How?

  —Let me tell you about a duke. I had this from Hu Ho. A duke was sitting in his hall when he saw a man leading an ox through the door. The duke asked why, and was told that the ox was to be slaughtered to anoint a ceremonial bell with its blood. Just so, said the duke, but don't do it. I cannot bear the fear of death in its eyes. Kill a sheep instead.

  —This is a thing I did, the duke replied. You have learned of things in my court.

  —Yes, Meng Tze said with a smile. And I see hope for you in it. It was not the ox but your heart you were sparing.

  —The people thought otherwise. They said I begrudged an ox. Qi is but a small dukedom, but I can afford the sacrifice of an ox. It had such innocent eyes and it did not want to die.

  —And yet you sent for a sheep. You knew the pity you felt for the ox. How was the sheep different?

  —You make a point, the duke said. You show me that I scarcely know my own mind.

  —The minds of others, rather.

  —Yes. You are searching for compassion in me, aren't you? In The Book of the Odes it is written the minds of others I am able by reflection to measure. You have seen why I spared the ox and was indifferent to the misery of the sheep. 1 did not know my own mind.

  —If, Meng Tze said with great politeness, you will allow me to play that lute there by the bronze and jade vessels, I will sing one of the most archaic of the odes, as part of our discourse.

  The duke with correct deference asked him by all means to sing it.

  Meng Tze, finding the pitch, sang:

  The world's order is in the stars.

  We are its children, its orphans.

  Cicadas shrill in the willows.

  It is not fault, it is not guilt

  that has brought us to this. It is

  disorder. We were not born to it.

  The autumn moon is round and red.

  I have not troubled the order,

  yet I am no longer in it.

  In the first waywardness we could

  have gone back. In the second we

  began to confuse lost and found.

  Had we been angry to be lost,

  would we have taken disorder

  for order, if any had cared?

  Cicadas shrill in the willows.

  There was a time we had neighbors.

  The autumn moon is round and red.

  Men without character took us

  into the marshes, neither land

  nor river, where we cannot build.

  Order is harmony.

  It is innovation in tradition.

  The autumn moon is round and red.

  Elastic words beguiled our ears.

  What is the courage worth of fools?

  Cicadas shrill in the willows.

  Fat faces and slick tongues sold

  us disorder for real estate.

  The autumn moon is round and red.

  The young lord's trees are tender green.

  Saplings grow to be useful wood.

  Hollow words are the wind blowing.

  Cicadas shrill in the willows.

  There was a time we had neighbors.

  The autumn moon is round and red.

  10

  The dove is over water in Scripture: over the flood with an olive twig in its beak, the rainbow above; over the Jordan with Jesus and John in it, upon the sea as Jonah (which name signifieth dove), up out of the sea as Aphrodite (whose totem animal it was). It was the family name of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

  The horse is the body, its stamina, health, and skills. The hound is faith and loyalty. But symbols are not sense but signs.

  Mencius's Chinese cock (tail the color of persimmons, breast the color of the beech in autumn, legs blue) and unimaginable Chinese dog have become under Concord skies a biblical dove, a Rover, and a bay horse. The one is a pet, one is a friend, one is a fellow worker.

  We lose not our innocence or our youth or opportunity but our nature itself, atom by atom, helplessly, unless we are kept in possession of it by the spirit of a culture passed down the generations as tradition, the great hearsay of the past.

  11

  Thoreau was most himself when he was Diogenes.

  12

  One ship speaks another when they pass on the high seas. There is a naval metaphor in the paragraph (misprinted as spoken to in modern ignorance). Thoreau and his brother John had sailed around the world in August of 1839, all on the Concord and Merrimac, and you could see him in his sailboat on the Concord with a crew of boys, or the smiling Mr. Hawthorne, or the prim Mr. Emerson.

  CONVERSATION

  The mouse, who left abruptly if Thoreau changed from one tune to another on his flute, was a good listener.

  —A man who is moral and chaste, Mr. Thoreau said to the mouse, does not pry into the affairs of others, which may be very different from h
is own, and which he may not understand. —O yes! said the mouse. But the affairs of others are interesting. You can learn all sorts of things.

  —The housekeeping of my soul may seem a madman's to a Presbyterian or a bear.

  The mouse twitched his whiskers. Offered a crumb of hoe-cake, he took it, sitting on Mr. Thoreau's sleeve, sniffed it, and began a diligent chewing.

  The mouse knew all about the lead pencils and their inedible shavings, the surveyor's chain, the Anakreon in Greek (edible), the journal with pressed leaves between the pages, the fire (dangerous), the spider family in the corner (none of his business), but it was the flute and the cornmeal that bound him to Mr. Thoreau. And the friendliness.

  14

  The man under the enormous umbrella out in the snow storm is Mr. Thoreau. Inspecting, as he says. Looking for his dove, his hound, his horse.

  15

  Diogenes was an experimental moralist. He found wealth in owning nothing. He found freedom in being a servant. He discovered that owning was being owned. He discovered that frankness was sharper than a sword. If we act by design, by principle, we need designers. Designers need to search. Mr. Thoreau discovered that the dove is fiercer than a lion when he sat in the Concord jail, like Diogenes. Why should a government come to him to finance its war in Mexico and pay a clergy he could not listen to? Let them find their own money. Let them write laws an honest man can obey. He would write his sentences. That was his genius. Others might find them as useful as he found Diogenes's. The world is far from being over. When Mr. Emerson came to the jail and said, Henry, what are you doing in here? and he replied, Rafe, what are you doing out there? the words slipped loose like a dove into the spring sky, and were remembered in a London jail by Emmeline Pankhurst, in a South African jail by Mohandas Gandhi, in a Birmingham jail by Martin Luther King, and cannot be forgotten.