Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  Escaping from Lyon to Besançon, Fourier joined the Eighth Regiment of Cavalry Scouts, under the command of a Colonel Brincourt, who had married a cousin of Fourier’s. Most of the cavalrymen were young, idealistic, and full of a sense of glory. From them he saw how the entire economy of France, and of the world, could be taken from the greed of merchants and the vicious manipulation of the stock market and put into the care of children on ponies.

  The word cell in biology comes from Robert Hooke whose microscope showed him that nature in fine was a honeycomb.

  Back in Lyon Fourier fell in with progressive minds and Corinthian morals. He began to write for the newspapers. On 25 Frimaire XII he wrote that Russia would try to take over the world. The police came to his boarding house (girls being hidden in closets) to arrest him for spying and trading in international intelligence. His friend Ballanche vouched for him at the Gendarmerie. The police in The Harmony would be little girls and sissies on Shetland ponies.

  On 4 Nivôse XII Fourier published his Kafkaesque Letter to a High Judge, outlining the vision of a New Harmony and offering to the First Consul Napoleon the title Emperor of the Earth and to all a permanent frenzy of happiness.

  Desire, insofar as it has reference to the mind, is the very essence of the mind. But the essence of mind consists of knowledge which involves knowledge of God, and without which it cannot exist or be conceived. A man will love the good which he desires for himself and loves, with greater constancy, if he sees that others love it also.

  Citoyen Grand Juge:

  Great good news, if you will allow me a page to extract a universal harmony from a matter that will seem to you trivial. I understand that certain persons have brought my political comments to your attention, on their own and through the police. It is on the advice of the Commissioner that I write you this letter. I have frequently written the Directoire and the Foreign Office, giving them the benefit of my observations. They have always replied courteously, and with gratitude. I am sure that you will receive my criticism in the same spirit, and appreciate its essence if not its style. That my ideas run counter to common opinion is all the more reason for you to pay careful attention to them. The situation is crucial. In a continental war, such as I feel is about to happen, Germany will split in half, and the triumvirate of which I spoke earlier will become a reality. At first it will look like a duumvirate, for Germany, caught between France and Russia, will have to serve one or the other. If Germany chooses Russia, France is indeed in danger of defeat. But this I have already said, and what I write you about now is not the child’s play of power politics as manipulated by various idiots and buffoons, that is to say, politicians and those whose butts they lick, the bankers, but the matter of Universal Social Harmony and the Imminent Downfall of All Societies, Civilized as well as the Barbarian and Primitive. I am the Inventor of the Mathematical Calculus of the Destinies. The celebrated English Savant Lord Isaac Newton had this calculus within his reach without knowing it. It was he, great genius, who discovered the laws of attraction among masses in the material world. I have discovered the laws of passional attraction. No one else has ever even dreamed of such a law. I am the first, O Citizen High Judge. Passional attraction is the matrix in which God has cast all the characteristics of nature, the ordering by divine plan of all action between human beings. As long as we fail to reckon the laws of attraction by analysis and synthesis, our minds step from darkness to darkness, and we have no clue as to the structure of the world we inhabit, the order destined by nature for society, nor the function of the passions in our lives. My theory of the destinies divides into three parts. First, Creation. Which is the shape God has given to matter, everything from the galaxies and the invisible stars to the most exquisite designs in the animals, vegetables, and minerals. I will disclose the plan by which God has distributed passions, abilities, forms, colors, tastes to all the diversity of creation. Second, the societies of man past and future. Third, Immortality, or the destiny of the soul through world after world. You comprehend, Citizen Judge, that a whole exposition of this extensive theory would be too great for me to complete. I have therefore worked out, as yet, only the most necessary calculations, that of the societies of industrial nations. I have drawn the mechanism of a Harmony in finest detail, from its administration at the top down to the home. This Harmony is diametrically the opposite of everything we know in our civilization. I will turn these plans over to the savants, retaining for myself only the eternal honor of the discovery of them. These laws should have been discovered twenty-three hundred years ago. It is due to the pride of metaphysicians, the blindness of moral philosophers, and the stupidity of political scientists that mankind had not, until I came along, discovered the plan and work of God. They should have seen that God’s design for society is implicit, as it is with the stars and the animals, in the natural attractions immutably built into our being. A synthesis of these attractions reveals the code of a new Harmony which will last around sixty thousand years. I would place it longer, except that the cooling of the globe will curtail our sense of pleasure considerably. And pleasure is the pivot of the Harmony.

  14 FRUCTIDOR

  Who could they be, these acrobats?

  Wanderers, lives briefer than ours,

  wrenched by a will since their childhood,

  and, can you tell me, for whose sake?

  A will that twists them, tosses them,

  hurls them, rocks them, spins them upward,

  catches them in uncoiling leaps.

  As if from a silkier air,

  denser than ours, they somersault

  onto their worn old padded mat

  trod thin, laid down as if to dress

  some wound inflicted by the sky.

  All but not there, the letter D

  of Dasein. Presence, being there.

  Picasso’s pensive figures are still as dogs are still, between movements. Seurat’s bathers at Asnières are still with the sense of being where they are on a summer afternoon. They watch, play reveries through their imaginations, feel sun wind and water. They are French, acute, alive. Picasso’s figures in blue and rose come down through time from Rome, from mimes in the Forum, from melancholy village squares in Roman Spain.

  And O around this middle place

  A ghost rose blossoms and closes.

  Around this pestle or pistil,

  snared in its own dust or pollen,

  seeded by its own fruit, boredom,

  the smile for show, the tedium

  of surface without inwardness.

  The defeated lifter of weights,

  who, grown old, only beats the drum,

  whose skin would fit two men his size,

  the other dead, perhaps, buried

  already. This is the widow.

  That young man seems to be the son

  of a neck and a nun, so fine

  a joining he is of muscle

  and virginity.

  Suffering

  just beginning has long delays

  with a kind of playtime in them

  before it grips for good.

  O you

  that drop like green fruit from the tree

  a hundred times a day, a tree

  that knows spring, summer, and autumn

  in one whirl, the tumblers’ tree.

  Paulus Zetmeel the Platonist by to see where I’ve moved, a pleasant enough conversationalist and exponent of beauty hypersensitively grasped. Sander positively growled at the poor soul: I made soothing excuses for him. We’d been lugging boxes of books, outsized canvases, and furniture for hours. Grietje’s girlfriend turned up, more hindrance than help, and the two had gone to bed, I wasn’t certain where. Sluts, said Sander. I was ready to sit for a while, even with Paulus for company. He kept admiring everything, disordered and unpacked and cockahoop as everything was. He approved of what he called the splendid arrangement, the young painter, his sister, was she, to keep house for us, such a modern and sensible ménage, such a scope
for the creative life. What so openly and beautifully you have to give them, Adriaan. For all your notorious reclusiveness, you are, I’ve always insisted, to people who think you standoffish, on the furtive generosity of your concerns. Whereupon, Paulus dithering on, Sander singing sea chanties somewhere above while painting a wall, I having a comforting pipe, up the stairs galloped Jan and Hansje tearing at their zippers. They were well inside the door when, taking in Paulus, they skidded to a halt, one bumping the other from behind, and stood popeyed, pulling their britches back up. Try the floor above, I said, where Sander’s doing walls. That’s him singing. My nephew, I said to his interrogative stare, and his friend Gregorius and Hilda Sinaasappel’s son Jan. Bof! we could hear Sander bellow, grab those brushes. You can suck your thumbs.

  Often, pausing, a tender look

  begins in your eyes, toward her,

  your mother, who’s seldom tender,

  a sweet look that wanders instead

  all over your supple body,

  lost in its ripples.

  A handclap

  signals the dive, before your heart

  can feel a throb, there’s the tickle

  in your heels before the bound

  that can start real tears in your eyes

  and, unexpectedly, that smile.

  Find it, Angel, that healing leaf

  and turn a jar to keep it in.

  Shelve it with delights yet to come.

  Let its flowery label read

  Subrisio saltatoris.

  15 FRUCTIDOR

  Open slatwork flooring for the roof garden, or sundeck. Sander has painted the chimney blue and the ship’s vent yellow. Bricks and coping of the parapet scrubbed. Shipshape, boxneat. And private.

  White walls for Sander’s studio, one corner of which is an area with chairs and coffee table. The three of us painting my room (Italian Stone, say the buckets), I tell about going to Strodekker’s, and about Joris and Olaf. Bring them around, says Sander, I want to meet them. I don’t care about their arguments and justifications, Grietje says. It’s what people are that matters. The only thing that matters. The mind is a washout. Only the soul counts. Only feeling.

  Books accurately aligned on my new wealth of bookshelves, floor to ceiling, around two walls and part of the third. Rietveld table in place. Paintings. My spartan bed with its Shaker quilt. Cot for Hans and Jan at the far end.

  Sander, wordless, also britchesless, came and stood until I saw why. Grietje wonderfully gentle and bright about it all. I really can’t go away, Sander said in a voice I’d never heard. Nobody wants you to, Grietje said. So he sat on the floor, his elbows on the bed. Get in there, Nipper! he cheered.

  Godfried Strodekker. The fire beneath his affable and cultivated mask is one of banked coals, deeply stocked. Coffee with him today. Judge all men by the coffee they make: Strodekker gives you a winey black thick sweet espresso, a cup Diderot and Chamfort would have admired. Coffee, not wine, goes with the bonnet rouge. It comes to Paris with the guillotine, with Marat and Fourier. It is in the series with tobacco and honey, with chairs and tables (the French, both aristocrats and peasants, drink wine standing), with good talk among friends. Coffee adds, wine divides. Strodekker did not know about Alan Turing, that tender genius, who had fallen in love with a little boy some weeks before he salted an apple with arsenic and impulsively refused a problem which, unlike the mathematical, cryptological, cybernetic ones his unique genius could solve, he could not live with. I trust the compassion in Strodekker’s eyes.

  In Holland Fourier saw the fields of tulips which the Little Hordes were to resemble.

  Strodekker distrusts sentiment, the invisible tradition of courtly love, and feints and sublimation of all sorts. A matter of camouflage, very complex, he says of all the delusions and fantasies, the erotic daydreams and neurotic searches for one’s own lost childhood, idealistic velleities, every manner of archetypal identification of the child with purity and innocence which the movement must analyze as a study group. He has read widely, thought carefully, but admits with candor that his own emotions blur all but his most lucid ideas. Liberalism itself is its own worst enemy.

  Strodekker, a conscientious notetaker, was writing Montherlant, Plutarch, Herbert List, when from upstairs sauntered Master Tobias in all his amber-brown slenderness and robin’s-egg blue slipje, hair raggedy and eyes lazy from a nap, smooth armpits displayed in his yawning stretch. Hallo, he said, you’re the filosoof was here once before, when Olaf came from Denmark. He gave Strodekker a kiss and came and shook hands with me, grinning at his politeness. He strode out again, returning in a bit with a cup of coffee and a spanking new skateboard for my inspection and approval. Gunst! they’re costly, Strodekker said, and I was able to name the price of Hansje’s, and even to talk ballbearings and kneepads. Hansje? Strodekker asked with amused interest, but Tobias made the question easier to answer with a gruff Who is this Hansje?

  16 FRUCTIDOR

  Een schittering! Een glans! De Schudders marching to God! Lineaments by Mondriaan, Fuller, Rietveldt: our house unclutters area by area. Grietje has the kitchen functional. Beds are still hard to get at over heaps of impedimenta, except for the narrow daybed for Hansje and Jan, with a plaid blanket for cover, a plain russet rug alongside, and a brazen poster from the Jeugd en Jongerencentrum of a large photograph in glossy color of two boys undressing (a nubble of onderbroekje pouch pokes from the unzipped fly of one) with the vertical caption between them: Alle dagen!

  Adnotatio libidinosa: Olaf vel masturbator vel paiderastos mentulas mutuo sugens quinquiensve septiens per diem ejaculatur. Ipse dixit sponte. Appetans manet. Copiose fundet relatione amanter Marci, abunde pocillum coffeae replere, gloriose et ridens impudenter.

  RB Fuller: From here on we have learned that it is success for all or for none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that unity is plural and at minimum two—the complementary but mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complementary.

  A kladschrift of a letter from Tobias and Nils to Olaf, to help me understand, as Strodekker says. Kameraad Olafje! Come visit Amsterdam and us as soon as you can the color pictures you took of us all stripped down O wow flinkgebouwd en broodmager in english good built body and lean how could you stand us we would love to be wolfcubs in your pack are we soft headed for you who do not have you said a favorite in your pack but love them all but we hope you do and love him Papa says hallo and love you made a big hit with Joris do come back kameraadschappelijk Welp Toby en Welp Nils.

  It eventually received punctuation and was signed with the outlines of their virile members made with a magic marker, traces of which are still on them, nontoxic it is to be hoped. Olaf and Joris are the best outlook for the movement, being young, attractive, dedicated, idealistic. Olaf a commercial artist and designer, of sorts, working in advertising on commissions, but most seriously interested in making films. His afternoons and weekends go to the kønsligfrihed clubhouse, study groups, showing films.

  Postcard from Olaf (two Danish boys naked in a rowboat): Hallo Nils! Hallo Toby! When your handsome papa invites me is when I’ll visit again. Drink your buttermilk and try to behave. Hopeless, I know, but then you don’t know how lucky you are. A hundred kisses, fifty each. Big Olaf.

  Joris when he was a schoolboy of fifteen living with his Tante Mathilde and Ome Hendrick wrote a very plain letter to the Nederlandse Vereniging van Homofielen Cultuur en Ontspannings Centrum on the Frederiksplein, hoping for great things. He had a cache of magazines, some stolen, some bought, to supplement his even more graphic fantasies, and in several of them he had found the center’s address and offer of ministrations. He got back a note with an appointment at the Jeugd en Jongerencentrum Ruimte for the following Tuesday. Oof! he says with jiggling eyes and fine smile, you can’t know what it meant, that card! Nice people, and they were gentle with me. After a prissy and superior secretarial type who asked some arch questions and read from some statutes, and blithered about moral r
esponsibilities, choices in a free society, and ideals, which withered Joris’ hopes and peter together, he was put in a room to wait, together as he remembers with a pitifully scared man biting his nails, until a university student named Martijn turned up grinning affably (tight jeans, cadet cap, wool pullover with high collar) and asking for the melkbaard communist. Decent and even likable chap, Martijn, well-off, middle-class, a keen enthusiast. They had but the one thing in common, but after a walk, all their conversation overhoop, they went to Martijn’s room.

  Briefkaart from Joris, Tuke’s August Blue: Do you know, Kameraad Adriaan, that Coubertin wanted jochen in de olympische spelen, and as naked as newts? In de open lucht he called it, about the time of these English scamps, ja? Uw liefhebbende! J.

  Een ander, a Georges Minne knaap:—Alors, dit-il, je saurai nager—toi, tu sais—et nous irons loin dans la mer. Puis, nous resterons longtemps allonges sur le sable, au soleil.—Oui, dit Alexandre d’une voix étrange. Et nous échangerons nos maillots. Snoezig, hej! J.

  Voor Joris: Der Männerbadeanzug war schon um 1900 aus Baumwolltrikot, meist blau und weiss oder rot und weiss quergestrieft; ausserdem trug man damals die knappe kleine Badehose in Dreiecksform aus rotem Kattun, die Vorläuferin der heutigen kleinen Wooltrikothose. Ruth Klein, Lexikon der Mode.

  Briefkaart, Eugène Janssons Badtavla, 1908: Ten naked Swedish boys in their teens and twenties against a background of boys and sailors in uniform at a swimming club. O jee! Adriaan, lieve hemel! Who is this Janssons and where can I see more of his work? Were the Swedes as dull as bordenwasser in 1908? What happened? Makkerlijk, Joris.

  17 FRUCTIDOR

  There came in from the garden at Strodekker’s a boy the left of whose handsome eyes is a minim out of line, slightly inward, intent on some fixed concern while its twin follows the affairs of the world with an interested open gaze. Fifteen. Face northernly dolicocefaal, yet the cordovan brown of his longish hair and the ruddy evenness of his tan argue a Spanish grandmother who cooked everything with garlic and olives. White denim short pants, a light blue pullover, an easy smile, bare feet. Erasmus, said Godfried, meet the philosopher Adriaan van Hovendaal. Erasmus Verlangerspruit. Surely not, I said before I’d thought. Well, said Godfried with an expansive swing of his arm, try Prinsprong or even Peereboompje. Strodekker, when we get the adoption through. Ha! said Erasmus, the adoption. Nils has described you, he said shaking my hand. He said you are an old man of forty or so, well-preserved in your decrepitude, talk like a book, look at everything, missing nothing, are kind and polite, and sport British pulletjes. The little bugger, Godfried said. Tobias saw more of you. He said simply that you’re brainy and wear brown ties with blue shirts. All of this took Erasmus as a wonderful joke, over which he batted his eyes and limberly dealt with an itch inside his left thigh with his right toes, and with zest, no tilt of poise. Godfried pinched thumb and forefinger in a short downward drop of a gesture toward Erasmus, who obeyed, unzipped his pants, plucked off his pullover, and stood naked, lips pursed in an irony of understanding and comic compliance. The proportions, Godfried said, putting a hand to his brow, the harmony. Big cock, too, said Erasmus. And Godfried thinks the cast in my eye is sexy. Then, straddling Godfried, chair and all, in a lyric leap, legs wide, like a gymnast on the parallel bars, diving over his head into a somersault, out of which he uncoiled with a bounding spring, Erasmus came and sat at my feet, his chin on my knee, pleased with himself and with the moment. What, he said, do you do? Write books and essays. What about? How things mean: words, statements, art, history, manners, philosophy. Godfried teaches history and geography. He’s a good teacher, too. You’re his student? O ja! I get bad grades, because Godfried expects twice as much from me, and doesn’t want the class to hate me as the teacher’s pet. It’s awful. He’s going to adopt me, if the judge, who’s a woman, can get away with it. She thinks she can. My folks are split, the old man going off to the USA with his secretary, and my mummy has gone bats on Theosophy and is holed up in their lamasery, in touch with forces emanating from a second moon that’s always aligned straight behind the moon. Only initiates know it’s there. Anyway, I’m sane. I like books and music and swimming and hiking and camping and sex, lots of it. How Godfried knew this, I’ll never figure out. Saw it in your magic eye, said Godfried. It’s not as if, Erasmus liefje, you don’t sit in class hugging your crotch with your hand, or grubble in your swimsuit at the pool, or wear jeans that fit like the skin on a sausage. Erasmus has this zwemslipje that weighs half a handkerchief and is sheer, despite being Norway blue, except a white smitch of liner in the pouch. As soon as he’s out of the pool he shoves it down, jostles his balls, and tugs at his peter. Then he strides around a lot with everything hanging out and bouncing prettily. Well, said Erasmus, a jigget in his off eye, here I am.