A Table of Green Fields

by Guy Davenport

  MEADOW

  I remember years ago breaking through a thick oak wood east of the Great Fields and descending into a long, narrow, and winding blueberry swamp which I did not know existed there. A deep, withdrawn meadow sunk low amid the forest, filled with green waving sedge three feet high, and low andromeda, and hardhack, for the most part dry to the feet then, though with a bottom of unfathomed mud, not penetrable except in midsummer or midwinter, and with no print of man or beast in it that I could detect. Over this meadow the marsh-hawk circled undisturbed, and she probably had her nest in it, for flying over the wood she had long since easily discovered it. It was dotted with islands of blueberry bushes and surrounded by a dense hedge of them, mingled with the pannicled andromeda, high chokeberry, wild holly with its beautiful crimson berries, and so on, these being the front rank to a higher wood. Great blueberries, as big as old-fashioned bullets, alternated, or were closely intermingled, with the crimson hollyberries and black chokeberries, in singular contrast yet harmony, and you hardly knew why you selected those only to eat, leaving the others to the birds.

  17

  This text has been written first with a lead pencil (graphite encased in an hexagonal cedar cylinder) invented by Henry David Thoreau. He also invented a way of sounding ponds, a philosophy for being oneself, and raisin bread.

  W.E.B. DUBOIS

  Lions have no historians.

  WITTGENSTEIN

  If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

  20

  Fear not, thou drummer of the night, we shall be there.

  Meleager

  As a little boy will, for no reason known, stand on one leg while swinging the other around and back until his pert behind and heel are in the same cubic foot of space, reaching one arm down, the other up, so Mikkel Andersen, no longer little, took this stance, looking out of the top of his eyes, gaping his mouth, and coming within a hair of losing his balance and that grace for which fifteen-year-olds seem alone to live.

  Sven, his friend and companion for the afternoon, had come to a military halt as soon as they were in Mikkel's room, raised an arm straight out, and prodded Mikkel's shoulder with two fingers.

  Mikkel's eyebrows (umber bronze) lifted a quarter inch.

  Sven's (silver white) scrunched in.

  Mikkel did the little boy on one leg. Upright again, he searched Sven's laughing eyes.

  Each took one step back.

  Mikkel's thick hair tumbled onto and hid his forehead. It spun in a whorl at the top of his head to bunch in feathers over his ears. His eyes were blue in sunlight, grey green in shadow. He wore a soccer jersey (collar white) banded with horizontal mustard and putty green stripes, jeans, stout white socks, and canvas-topped gym shoes.

  In any triangle ABC, all the three angles taken together are equal to two right angles. To prove this, you must produce BC, one of its legs, to any distance, suppose to D; then the external angle ACD is equal to the sum of the two internal opposite ones CAB and ABC; to both add the angle ACB, then the sum of the angles ACD and ACB will be equal to the sum of the angles CAB and CBA and ACB. But the sum of the angles ACD and ACB is equal to two right ones, therefore the sum of the three angles CAB and CBA and ACB is equal to two right angles; that is, the sum of the three angles of any triangle ACB is equal to two right angles.

  Sven's hair was cropped close, as he had become impatient with it out orienteering. With the help of Mikkel and solicitude and finally laughter of their scoutmaster he had scissored it down to stubble. A spray of freckles rode from cheek to cheek across his nose.

  He wore a loose sweat shirt (dove grey) that hung on his shoulders like the blouses of the horsemen on the Parthenon frieze, and frayed denim short pants (once blue, faded to the color of wood ash by the fanatic regularity of his mother's washdays). Barefoot.

  Do what I do, his signing hands said. Mikkel nodded that he understood.

  When one line falls perpendicularly on another, as AB on CD, then the angles are right; and describing a circle on the center B, since the angles ABC ABD are equal, their measures must be so too, id est, the arcs AC AD must be equal; but the whole CAD is a semicircle, since CD, a line passing through the center B, is a diameter; therefore each of the parts AC AD is a quadrant, id est go degrees; so the measure of a right angle is always 90 degrees.

  Sven gave a nanosecond's glance toward his bare feet. Mikkel sank to one knee and untied the laces of his right shoe. Other knee, left shoe. Placing his shoes neatly side by side, he drew off his socks, folded them square, and put them at the midpoint between himself and Sven, who (from a biography of Kierkegaard) thought of the black tumble of carriage wheels, the nobility of horses, the friendship of dogs, and the meanness of candlelight. Mikkel, knowing that he was to duplicate Sven's imagination, thought of the yellow meadows of Mongolia strewn with blue rocks like huddled saurians.

  Sven pulled his shirt over his head. High definition of pectorals, teats wide apart. Fine down in the mesial groove from thorax to navel. Skin Mohican copper. Mikkel copycatted. Torso the twin of Sven's except for ruddier teats and a damp wisp of axial hair in the deltoid furrows.

  A figure bounded by four sides is called a quadrilateral or quadrangular figure, as ABDC. Quadrilateral figures whose opposite sides are parallel are called parallelograms. Thus in the quadrilateral figure ABDC, if the side AC be parallel to BD which is opposite to it, and AB be parallel to CD, then the figure ABDC is a parallelogram. A parallelogram having all its sides equal and its angles right is a square.

  Sven imagined Erika naked and glossy on the textileless beach, the fuzz, so much darker than her hair, on her plump sex with its covert furrow. Mikkel received this as Professor Pedersen's trendy admonitions, which Erika took off at the polser wagon as Political! Political! clucked the hen, political correctness! And Deconstruction! cawed the crow.

  Sven cupped his hand over his crotch. Mikkel, looking merry, shoved his hand deep between his legs, pulling it up in a slow scoop.

  Red poultry with blue legs at Grandpa Ib's, whose farmhouse had elvishly small rooms, stairs as steep as a ladder, stone floor in the kitchen, flowers all around the house so that you looked out the windows through hollyhocks and larkspur, the old thrown-glass panes putting spirals and cunning warps into the stable's thatch (with gold and green moss), the meadow with cows and one horse, the dirt road to the village hedged high with hawthorn. He and Mikkel had spent weeks there, sleeping in the narrow feather bed in the attic, rolled into each other by the pliant depth of the mattress.

  Mikkel, looking hard into Sven's eyes (while a dog barked down the street and an automobile crunched along the gravel of a drive and killed its motor), decided to confuse the hell out of Sven by stacking images: having a wienerbrad and coffee with Erika in the Arcade (speaking French with, as Erika said, a Swedish accent), Biff in the comicbook the fly of whose jeans bows out in a saddle stain colored yellow, Pastor Tvemunding explaining, with a twinkle in his eye, how Danish liberalism is consonant with the deepest spirit of the church, and how love is always an expression of God's will.

  If to any point in a circumference, videlicet B, there be drawn a diameter FCB, and from the point B, perpendicular to that diameter, there be drawn the line BH; that line is called a tangent to the circle in the point B; which tangent can touch the circle only in one point B, else if it touched it in more, it would go within it, and not be a tangent but a chord.

  The tangent of any arc AB is a right line drawn perpendicular to a diameter through the one end of the arc B, and terminated by a line CAH, drawn from the center through the other end A; thus BH is the tangent of the arc AB.

  Sven (with satiric modesty) slid his zipper open, pushed his pants down and off. Underpants a minislip from Ilium's, size lille, dingy white with an ochre smutch on the pouch. Mikkel shoved down his jeans and with some shuffling and plucking got them off. Minislip Dim (fabriqué en France), Greek blue with a white waistband.

  What an arc wants of a quadrant is called the co
mplement of that arc; thus AE, being what the arc AB wants of the quadrant EB, is called the complement of the arc AB. And what an arc wants of a semicircle is called the supplement of that arc; thus since AF is what the arc AB wants of the semicircle BAF, it is the supplement of the arc AB.

  The sine, tangent, et caetera, of the complement of any arc is called the cosine, cotangent, et caetera of that arc.

  Sven slid his eyes to the right toward the sound of an automobile stopping. Mikkel raised his shoulders a smidgen and showed his palms, either in brave nonchalance or acceptance of the contrariness of fate. They listened for footsteps which they did not hear. Their scoutmaster Stefan Ulfson (from the Fyn, a student in geology) was discussing personal space. Too close, too far. He had asked Mikkel and Sven to stand three meters from each other and start a conversation. You feel awkward at that distance, don't you? Take one step forward and try again. Show us at what distance you feel comfortable and relaxed talking to each other. It was unkind to big Stefan, but they closed the distance between them until they were toe to toe, nose to nose. It was a rabbity scrunch in Sven's nose that made Mikkel certain of the image, and he jounced the neb of his nose in confirmation.

  The sine of the supplement of an arc is the same with the sine of the arc itself; for, drawing them according to the definitions, there results the selfsame line. A right-lined angle is measured by an arc of a circle described upon the angular point as a center, comprehended between the two legs that form the angle; thus the angle ABD is measured by the arc AD of the circle CADE that is described upon the point B as a center; and the angle is said to be of as many degrees as the arc is; so if the arc AD be 45 degrees, then the angle ABD is said to be an angle of 45 degrees. Hence the angles are greater or less, according as the arc described about the angular point and terminated by the two legs contains a greater or less number of degrees.

  The silence between them was fused with the low-angled late afternoon sunlight that gilded their bodies. Their minds were mirrors of each other. Whether they stood for a minute or half an hour breathing evenly, looking into each other's eyes, before Sven lowered his gaze to Mikkel's briefs and bent forward to remove his own, and Mikkel his, neither could say. Sven's penis jutted limber and rising from a clump of ginger hair that tangled down around his plump scrotum. A disc of glans, with eyelet, filled the foreskin's opening. Mikkel's lifted erect, slipping its foreskin as it rose and grew. His pubic hair was reddish and thicker than Sven's.

  From Sven, a simple smile, and sigh, his first sound since they'd come into the room. He tossed his briefs to Mikkel, who drew them on as best he could, considering. Sven waited until he was as erect as Mikkel before pulling on Mikkel's underpants.

  The bil rolling into the drive was the one they had been listening for. They stepped closer and grinned into each other's eyes. They were dressed when there were sounds of Mikkel's mother and grocery bags in the kitchen.

  There is no force however great can stretch a thread however fine into a horizontal line that is absolutely straight.

  Mr. Churchyard and the Troll

  When the chessboard in the coffeehouse seemed an idle ruse to beguile away the hours, and the battlements around Kastellet with their hawthorn and green-shanked moorhens and pacing soldiers ran thin on charm, and his writing balked at being written, and books tasted stale, and his thoughts became a snarl rather than a woven flow, Mr. Churchyard, the philosopher, hired a carriage to the Troll Wood for a long speculative walk.

  The lout on the box was eating peasecods from his hat. —To the Troll Wood, Mr. Churchyard said, tightening the fit of his gloves.

  The sky was Baltic, with North German clouds.

  Copenhagen was a thunder of rolling barrels, squeaking cart wheels, hooting packetboats, Lutheran brass bands, fish hawkers, a racket of bells.

  And impudent imps of boys crying after him Either! Or! while their sisters warned 'E'll turn and gitcha!

  If it were a lucky afternoon, the troll would be in the wood. Mr. Churchyard knew that this troll, so strangely beautiful in a mushroomy sort of way, was a figment entirely in his mind, the creature of overwork, indigestion, or bile, perhaps even original sin, still it was a troll.

  Socrates, that honest man, had his daimon, why not Mr. Churchyard his troll? Its eyes looked at him from among leaves, above. Its hair was Danish, like thistledown, and was neatly cut and finished, the shape of a porridge bowl. He did not come when called. You had to sit on a log, and wait.

  The wood was of mountain ash and beech which had grown thick and dark among flocks of boulders silver with lichen and green with moss. Underfoot, spongy and deep, lay a century's mulch of fallen leaves, through which the odd wild-flower pushed, convolute and colorless of blossom, from the morning of time. We are welcome in meadows, where the carpet is laid down, with grass to eat, if we are cows or field mice, and the yellows and blues are those of the Greek poets and Italian painters.

  But here, in the wood, we intrude. Across the sound, in Sweden, there are forests with tall cone-bearing trees, and wolves. Nature has her orders. A wood is as different from a forest as a meadow from a marsh. Owls and trolls live here. And philosophers.

  In Plato's grove you heard the snick of shears all morning long, and rakes combing gravel. Epicurus spoke of necessity and fate while watching his grass lawn being rolled smooth. Aristotle and Theophrastos picked flowers in Mytilenian meadows, under parasols. And there was the Swede Linnaeus, as he called himself, who studied nature in Dutch gardens, yawned at by fat English cats.

  The troll was somewhere over there, where the leaves shifted.

  If Nikolai Grundtvig were here, or Mr. Churchyard's brother, Peter, the bishop, they would invite the troll to join them in a jolly folk dance.

  Was that a foot in the ferns, with cunning toes? If there was one troll, there were two. It would have a wife. Nature would have it so. And young. Why should one doubt trolls when the god has kept himself hidden all this time?

  When Amos talked with the god, was Amos talking to himself? For the god is hidden in light, in full view, and we cannot see him.

  Curled, small fingers in the beech leaves. Fate must drop like a ripe apple. He was not especially eager to see the troll. He was not, despairingly, eager to see the god, even if he could. He had, twice now, seen the troll. It was its singularity that was important. Beyond that he could not think. There was the pure goodness of the god, all but unimaginable, and there was the pure sensuality of Don Giovanni, imaginable with the cooperation of the flesh, and there was the pure intellect of Socrates, easily imaginable, as the mind, that trollish ganglion, like Don Giovanni's mutinous testicles, was a gift from the god.

  Hegel's brain in a jar of formaldehyde on the moon.

  The troll was another purity, that much was certain, but of what? Your coachman, Mr. Churchyard, is sitting out there, beyond the copse, picking his nose and waiting.

  The troll had said its name was Hitch. Was it of an order, upward from the mushroom (which, he could now see, it was munching) as angels are an order downward from the god? He did not see it as one finds Napoleon in the drawing of two trees, where you find his figure delineated by the branches, but as an image soaking through the fabric of vision, leaf-and-berry eyes, peanut toes, sapling legs. An acorn for sex.

  —There are interstices, Mr. Churchyard said, taking off his tall hat and setting it on the log, through which things fall. In one of the spurious gospels, for instance, there is Jesus choosing Simon from among the fishers drawing up their net. And with Jesus is his dog. Or a dog.

  —Yes, Lord, Simon says, coming willingly.

  —And when he calls you again, says the dog, you are to answer to the name Peter.

  This has been edited out of the gospels as we have them, by some high-minded copyist who did not notice that an animal whose whole soul is composed of loyalty and whose faith in his master cannot be shaken by any force, neither by death nor by distance, is given a voice, like Balaam's ass centuries before, to remind us that o
ur perception of the otherworldly is blind.

  And then in a fanciful Acts of the Apostles there's a talking lion who works as a pitch for Paul and Barnabas.

  —Hello folks! Though I am only a numble beast, and have no theology, I'm here to get your attention and invite you to rally around and listen to my dear friends C. Paulus, a Roman citizen, and Joseph Consolation Barnabas, who have a message for you.

  A blue-eyed lion, washed and fluffed for his public appearance, paws as big as plates.

  Was that the troll, there, peeping from behind a tree?

  —We met last autumn, Mr. Churchyard said in a voice he used for children, when the sky was packed with clouds like hills of dirty wool, and a mist smoked along the ground. You would not, you know, tell me your name, and so I named you Hitch, by your leave, taking silence for assent. How have you fared since then?

  There was a flicker of leaves, a deepening of the wood's silence.

  —You are not afraid, are you, of my walking stick leaning here against the log? It is just a length of wood with a silver knob which gentlemen in Copenhagen carry about with them. It goes with my hat here, and my gloves. They make a set of things to indicate to the world that we have money and that we pretend to morals approved of by the police and the clergy. Come out into the open.