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

and a comfortable registrar in a blue uniform will want to know if you are kin to this Monsieur Fourier. Not by family connection, no. He died when? October 1837. He finds and takes down a ledger from the time of Balzac.

Here we locate the name in menu calligraphy. Someone has written in later sociologue français. His address in this mortuary town is 37 avenue Samson, 23rd Division, second row. Cornices and grilles, soot and leaves, medallions, crosses, angels, flags.

We find the tomb, the geometrical figures, the strange words. La série distribue les harmonies. Les attractions sont proportionelles aux destinées. He died fallen across his bed, as if he’d knelt to say his prayers before sleep, hands clasped together.

His tribe of cats hissed and slunk away when they smelled death around him. At the funeral there were fellow clerks and neighbors, journalists, economists, sallow revolutionaries and disciples. Charles Gide, weeping, laid late roses on the hands.

Hop, thump, and skitter, little Ogo! The armpit drums talk from beyond the brush. Your big ears are up, capacious as ladles, and you stand on your toes. You are too smart to squeak in your kitten’s voice, whistle keen, that is the despair of God.

You imitate the leopard’s cricket chirr at the back of your throat. You hear the drums, the blood drums, and you cock your tail and frisk, grinning sideways with impudent eyes that roll upward and laugh, and let your docked tongue hang out for fun.

You laugh as the acacia laughs in the first rainfall after drought. You dance the dance of the stars when they jiggle in the sky, and toss your stringbean hat for sheer wickedness. We know you are there, Ogo. We know you are laughing at us all.

XV

You kick like a zebra, bounce like a hare. Amma looks at you with distress and you chitter in his face. The lightning walks like silver shears opening and closing across the black clouds, and thunder drowns out the ancestor nummo drums.

The long wind that burns the desert makes your hair stand backward, but what do you care, Ogo fox, when you can peep with your yellow eyes through the okra and laugh? You break the thread in the shuttle, eclipse the moon, muddy the well.

You clabber the milk, mother the beer, wart the hand, trip the runner, burn the roast, lame the goat, blister the heel, pip the hen, crack the cistern, botch the millet, scald the baby, sour the stew, knock stars from the sky, and all for fun, all for fun.

The darkest and utmost wanderer, five billion six hundred million miles from the sun, the planet Fourier is seven hundred times fainter against the absolute black of infinity than yellow Saturn ringed silver by nine titanic moons, unfindable, unseen.

It is now crossing Cassiopeia as it has been since flags floated through the savage smoke at Shiloh and fifty bugles shrill above a roar of drums loosed the red charge at Balaclava, a speck the size of a midge’s eye, a jot of carbon on tar.

It swings so wide afield and so imperially slow that it has been around the sun but four times since Plato was crowned with wild olive at Olympia. It moves backward around the sun, the tenth of the planets and the largest, forever unseeable.

You can see what was most brilliant in the genius of the French at the century’s beginning by considering Jacques Henri Lartigue and Louis Blériot as pure examples of its candor and spontaneity. Lartigue made his first photograph when he was six.

He had an older brother to idolize. His father, a banker who liked automobiles and kites, stereopticons and bicycles, was a splendid father. His mother and grandmother were perfect of their kind. The house swarmed with aunts and uncles and cousins.

There were female cousins who dashed down steps and spilled off their velocipedes, male cousins who jumped fully clothed into the mill race. Papa drove a car like the one drawn by Toulouse-Lautrec, the sort you steer with a stick and start with a crank.

XVI

In goggles and dusters, gauntlets and scarves, they tore over the Seine and Loire, scattering geese, making horses rear. The world children inhabit, floating to the moon in a basket launched from the fig tree, is observation that has become perception.

Little Lartigue so loved places and moments that he began to stare at them, close his eyes, stare again, and keep this up until he had memorized a scene in every detail. Then he had it forever. He could summon it again with perfect clarity.

He knew the fly on the windowpane, the mole on a cousin’s neck, the skiff tethered to a poplar on the canal. His father saw him at this memorizing, asked what he was up to, told him about cameras, and bought him one to externalize and share his vision.

You took a cork out of a hole in the front of the camera to make an exposure. He stood in his father’s joined hands to photograph racing cars zooming by. He followed the racers with a sweep of the camera, getting oval wheels and a forward stretch.

Blériot wept when he saw Wilbur Wright drone up in his Flyer at Le Mans and buzz through figure eights in the blue French summer sky. Blériot’s wasplike Antoinette CV flew like a moth and Wilbur Wright’s mothlike Flyer No. 4 flew like a wasp.

The persistence of the Antoinette would eventually combine with the agility of the Flyer to become the Spad that Captain Lartigue flew over the trenches of the Marne. When Blériot flew across the Channel in 1909, a man walking a dog saw him land.

The man was Henry James. Did he see the Antoinette glide and cough onto English grass and trindle to a halt? He did not bother to say. Birds come before. The soul, if noble, becomes