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

— I do not.

Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier

I

Here, chittering down the boulevard Raspail in her automobile, is Miss Gertrude Stein of Alleghany, Pennsylvania, a town she has no memory of at all and which no longer exists, and of Oakland, California, where as she will tell you, there is no there there.

She has delivered babies in Baltimore tenements, dissected cadavers at The Johns Hopkins Medical School, and studied philosophy and psychology under William James at Harvard. She has cut her hair short to look like a Roman emperor and to be modern.

She has cut her hair short because behind her back Hemingway talked about her immigrant coiffure and steerage clothes and because Picasso had painted her portrait with her elbows on her knees in allusion to Degas’ Mary Cassatt sitting that way.

And what was there to do after that but to cut one’s hair, to end that chrysalis time. So many beginnings all her life made Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein. She walked from the Luxembourg Gardens to the butte Montmarte to sit for Picasso and to be modern.

She has flown in an airplane since then and with her foot on the gas like Wilbur Wright flying at Le Mans and her Printemps scarf fluttering behind her like Blériot’s crossing the Sleeve, the Friedmann, the Clichy, the Raspail were hers, all hers.

She is driving home from reading The Katzenjammer Kids to Pablo. And The Toonerville Trolley and Krazy Kat. Genius is as wide as from here to yonder. Long ago, William James said in a lecture, the earth was thought to be an animal as yes it is.

Its skin is water, air, and rock. It is the horse, the wheel, and the wagon all in one. A single intelligence permeates its every part, from the waves of the ocean of light to the still hardnesss of coal and diamond deep down in the inmost dark.

In Professor James the nineteenth century had its great whoopee, saw all as the lyric prospect of a curve which we were about to take at full speed, but mistaking the wild synclitic headlong for propinquity to an ideal, we let the fire die in the engine.

And after dinner the Vanderbilts had the servants bring in baskets of Nymphenburg china which they smashed against the wall, cup by beautiful cup, for the fun of it. We let the fire die in the engine. Marguerites the meanwhile bloomed at Les Eyzies de Tayac.

II

And Elizabeth Gourley Flynn in shirtsleeves marched with the striking silk workers in Paterson. Between quiet and glory the usurers gobbling with three chins were spreading their immondices of bank money which is not money, no it is not money.

It is not the sou in the concierge’s fist nor the honest buck in the farmer’s. Between Picasso’s mandolin and pipe and Le Figaro bright on a tabletop they forced their muck of credit and interest, the business of business, not of things.

What could Rockefeller or Morgan care that the only time in history the command Beh-TELLion! Lee ye doon! was given was to the 96th Picton’s Gordon Highlanders at Quatre Bras when Wellington drove a charge of cavalry over their heads.

Alice in her ribbons! Alice in a kilt! C’était magnifique et c’etait la guerre. And down went the bagpipes missing never a skirl, and down went the black banners touching never a blade of Belgian grass and red coats and sabres flew over their heads.

The horses streamed over their heads even though they were advancing with bayonets en frise. Lord, what porridgy comments must have sizzled all burr and crack on what by fook the daff and thringing Sassenach duke thought the hoor’s piss he was doing.

Here she honked her klaxon at a moustached and top-hatted old type crossing the Raspail like a snail on glue, who cried out Espèce de pignouf! Depuis la Révolution les rues sont au peuple! Whereupon she honked back at him Shave and a haircut, two bits.

And Wellington’s cavalry flowed like so many Nijinskys over Wellington’s Highland Infantry and that was the glory that was fading from the world and all for money that is not money and Alice was waiting for her at home on the rue de Fleurus, next left.

Wasps fly backwards in figure eights from their paper nests memorizing with complex eye and simple brain the map of colors and fragrances by which they can know their way home again, in lefthand light that bounces through righthand light, crisscross.

The queen when she has chosen a site for a nest flies in wider eights than the cursory and efficiently warped ovals of scouts out to forage or the wiggly eights of trepidous adolescents on their timid first flight out from their hexagons shy but singing.

III

Ogo in his stringbean bonnet dances under the Sahara moon. That is not a sugarcane whistle we think he is playing. It’s his squeaky little voice so high, so high. He alone of all the creatures God made has no twin, none to trot by, none to nuzzle.

None that he can mount, now that time’s begun. The mud houses of Ogol in the rocky scrub country of the great Niger bend crowd their brown cubes under tall baobabs and cool acacias. Walls facing the trembling light of the Sahara are the color of pale biscuit.

The shadowed walls are the strong bister of red cattle. The square towers of the granaries rise higher than the houses. Ogotemmêli, the Dogon metaphysician, sits in his chicken yard, blind, telling of Ogo and Amma, his hands clasped behind his head.

He wears the oblong tabard of brown burlap which old men might wear in the freedom of the house. His grizzled beard is trimmed neat and close. He is teaching the clever frangi the history of the world, by command of the