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

fine lines too hard to make. He turns to something easier to draw, a pizzle.

By putting fowl’s legs to the balls, he achieves an uccello, a bird. He draws another, that smells the rump of the first, as with dogs. He smiles. He laughs. He calls Gian Antonio to come see. Perche l’uccello di Gian Antonio pende a metà agli sui ginocchi.

XII

The Greeks called these winged phalloi that Salai drew by the bicycle pteroi, seeing the word eros in pteros, wing. Such poultry are scrawled everywhere in Mediterranean cities, in the sporting houses of Pompeii, the yellow walls of Naples, on Venetian doors.

You could see the design on Corinthian vases in the time of Paul, on bedside lamps in the days of Jonah, and the Florentines still call their members uccelli. Gian Antonio took the crayon and drew a supercilious, spoiled face on the page.

He added frogs and points to show that he meant Salai, whose jacket was so decorated. Now, he said, there are three pricks on this page. See the real thing, said Salai. Wait till I get the magnifying glass, and what’s this thing with two wheels, pig?

Scrotum of the Pope! Look what you’re drawing on. On the other side of the sheet was a round city with concentric walls, towers, galleries, roofed concourses, the kind of thing the maestro was forever drawing, whatever the eye of a strega they were.

The four pairs of signs which we make in the quarters are the masters of all the others, the Hogon signs. The other signs are of the world. All of this is Amma invisible. The signs are of women and rain and calabashes and antelopes and okra.

They are of things we can see and feel. But inside them all, inside everything, is the great collarbone. Amma is the inside of everything. The world is God’s twin. Amma and his world are twins. Or will be, when there is a stop to the mischief of Ogo.

These signs are bummo. Two of them, masters of all the rest, belong forever to Amma. The other signs are two hundred and sixty-four. By family, twenty-two. There are twenty-two families of things. Here they are. Listen with sharp ears. First there is God.

The ancestors, the serpent Lébé, that’s three, the Binou, speech, the new year at winter solstice, that’s six, reconciliation, springtime, the rainy months, that’s nine, autumn, and the time of the red sun when the earth is parched and cracked.

Hoeing, that’s twelve, the harvest, the smithy, weaving, that’s fifteen, pottery, fire, water, that’s eighteen, air, earth, grass, that’s twenty-one, and the twenty-second is the Nummo, the masters of water with red eyes and no elbows and no knees, like fish.

XIII

Each family has twelve signs, bummo, which we cannot see. They are inside the collarbone, in the crabgrass seed. We can begin to see the signs yala. These are the corners and joints of things, where you can make a point, where lines meet at an angle.

A dot everywhere a dot can be made in the shape of a thing gives us its yala. When you make the yala of a thing it has entered being. Its sign is still in the collarbone but it itself has begun to be here in the world. Four dots can define a field.

The yala are cornerposts, elbows, knees, the point at which a branch grows out from a trunk. Connect the dots of a yala with lines and you have the tonu of a thing. Walls connect cornerposts, shin connects ankle and knee. The tonu are boundaries and structure.

Fill up the yala and tonu with wood, with stone, with flesh, and you have the toy, the thing itself as we know it, as much as Amma means us to know. For Amma a thing is an example of a plan. The bummo is his mind, the toy of that bummo is our world.

As bummo a thing exists as a scratch or wrinkle in the four collarbones rolled into an egg. As yala a thing has come into space. With the tonu it is given its bones and outline. As toy it enters the world, made of Amma’s old squandered God stuff.

What a toy when Amma connects the yala of the stars with tonu! All we can make is what God has thought. Matter is alive, has a soul. In the bummo there already exist the four kikinu, the souls of our bodies, and in them is our life, our nyama.

Nor does the life of things depart, however you change their form. The life of each grain of dust lives on in the mud with which we build a house. The tonu of mud has assumed the toy of house. Still mud, it is also house, bummo, yala, tonu. It is part of God.

For is not a house a still animal, needing a soul? What man touches God has first touched. A man’s seed is yala, the baby in the womb is tonu, the baby is born when it has become toy. So with seed, plant, and fruit. Nit, caterpillar, butterfly.

Only Amma sees the bummo in his four collarbones rolled into a ball, though bummo is written in every seed, finer than any eye could ever see. It is written in every crabgrass seed, it is written in the okra, in the spider’s eye, in the stars.

XIV

To get to Fourier’s grave you go along the avenue Rachel to the Caulaincourt viaduct from which steps lead down to the Cimitière Montmartre. Like Père Lachaise this cemetery is a city of the dead, with tombs for houses along streets with names.

Zola lies here, Eugène Cavaignac, Stendhal, Daniel Osiris, Théophile Gautier, Horace Vernet, Berlioz, Dumas fils, and Boum Boum Medrano, of the circus. The leaf-strewn streets are alive with cats who range the tombs and wash their wrists and yawn.

Ask at the lodge