Da Vinci's Bicycle - Guy Davenport (e novels to read TXT) 📗

To the memory of

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY

1904–1978

Contents

The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag

C. Musonius Rufus

The Wooden Dove of Archytas

John Charles Tapner

Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier

The Haile Selassie Funeral Train

Ithaka

The Invention of Photography in Toledo

The Antiquities of Elis

A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg

The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag

ON THE Great Ten Thousand Li Wall, begun in the wars of the Spring and Autumn to keep the Mongols who had been camping nearer and nearer the Yan border from riding in hordes on their przhevalskis into the cobbled streets and ginger gardens of the Middle Flower Kingdom, Richard Nixon said:

— I think you would have to conclude that this is a great wall.

Invited by Marshal Yeh Chien-ying to inspect a guard tower on the ramparts, he said:

— We will not climb to the top today.

In the limousine returning to the Forbidden City, he said:

— It is worth coming sixteen thousand miles to see the Wall.

Of the tombs of the Ming emperors, he said:

— It is worth coming to see these, too.

— Chairman Mao says, Marshal Yeh ventured, that the past is past.

The translator had trouble with the sentiment, which lost its pungency in English.

— All over? Richard Nixon asked.

— We have poem, Marshal Yeh said, which I recite.

West wind keen,

Up steep sky

Wild geese cry

For dawn moon.

For cold dawn

White with frost,

When horse neigh,

Bugle call.

Boast not now

This hard pass

Was like iron

Underfoot.

At the top

We see hills

And beyond

The red sun.

Richard Nixon leaned with attention, grinning, to hear the translation from the interpreter, Comrade Tang Wen-Sheng, whose English had been learned in Brooklyn, where she spent her childhood.

— That’s got to be a good poem, Richard Nixon said.

— Poem by Chairman Mao, Comrade Tang offered.

— He wrote that? Richard Nixon asked. Made it up?

— At hard pass over Mountain Lu, Marshal Yeh said. Long March. February 1935.

— My! but that’s interesting, Richard Nixon said. Really, really interesting.

The limousine slid past high slanting gray walls of The Forbidden City on which posters as large as tennis courts bore writing Richard Nixon could not read. They proclaimed, poster after poster by which the long limousine moved, Make trouble, fail. Again make trouble, again fail. Imperialist reactionary make trouble and fail until own destruction. Thought of Chairman Mao.

The limousine stopped at The Dragon Palace. Richard Nixon got out. Guards of the Heroic People’s Volunteer Army stood at attention. On a wall inside the courtyard four tall posters caught the eye of Richard Nixon.

— That’s Marx, he said, pointing.

— Marx, repeated Marshal Yeh.

— And that’s Engels.

— Engels.

— And that’s Lenin and that’s Stalin.

— Precisely, Marshal Yeh replied.

Richard Nixon went back to the second poster, pointing to it with his gloved hand.

— That’s Engels?

— Engels, Marshal Yeh said with a worried, excessively polite look in his eyes.

— We don’t see many pictures of Engels in America, Richard Nixon explained.

THAT MAN old Toscanelli put up to sailing to the Japans and Cathay westward out from Portugal, the Genovese Colombo, they have been saying around the Uffizi, has come back across the Atlantic. Una pròva elegantissima! Benedetto Arithmetic would say. The Aristotelians will be scandalized, di quale se fanno beffa. The Platonists will fluff their skirts and freeze the air with their lifted noses. È una stella il mundo! But like the moon, forsooth, round as a melon, plump and green. O, he could see those caravelle butting salt and savage waves, the awful desert of water and desolation of the eye, until the unimaginable shorebirds of Cipongo wheeled around their sails and the red tiles and bamboo pèrgole of Mongol cities came into focus on capes and promontories. Inland, there were roads out to Samarkand, India, Persia, Hungary, Helvetia, and thus back to Tuscany.

He had completed the world journey of the Magi, it occurred to Leonardo as he moved the bucket of grasses which Salai had brought him from Fiesole. They had come from the East, astrologers, and Colombo’s sails in these days of signs wherein every moving thing must declare itself for God or Islam would have worn the cross which the philosophers of the Medes did not wait to learn would be forever until the end of time the hieroglyph of the baby before whom they laid their gifts in the dark stable. The world was knit by prophecy, by light.

Meadow grass from Fiesole, icosahedra, cogs, gears, plaster, maps, lutes, brushes, an adze, magic squares, pigments, a Roman head Brunelleschi and Donatello brought him from their excavations, the skeleton of a bird: how beautifully the Tuscan light gave him his things again every morning, even if the kite had been in his sleep.

Moments, hour, days. Had man done anything at all?

The old woman had brought the wine and the bread, the onions. He and Toscanelli, Pythagoreans, ate no meat.

The machine stood against the worktable, the due rote, unaccountably outrageous in design. Saccapane the smith was making the chain that would span the two rote dentate. You turned the pedals with your feet, which turned the big cog wheel, which pulled the chain forward, cog by cog, causing the smaller wheel to turn the hind rota, thereby propelling the whole machine forward. As long as the machine was in motion, the rider would balance beautifully. The forward motion stole away any tendency to fall right or left, as the flow of a river discouraged a boat from wandering.

If only he knew the languages! He could name his machines as Archimède would have named them, in the ancient words. He called his flying machine the bird, l’uccello. Benedetto said that the Greeks would have called it an ornitottero, the wings of a bird.

Light with extravagance and precision, mirror of itself atomo per atomo from its dash against the abruptness of matter to the jelly of the eye, swarmed from high windows onto the two-wheeled balancing machine. The rider would grasp horns set on the fork in which the front wheel was fixed and thus guide himself with nervous and accurate meticulousness. Suddenly he saw the Sforze going