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

a speckled bird at death, in ancient belief, or dove or raven.

It rides to the world beyond on the withers of an elk. The pace of this progress is solemn, between red larches and past white water, rocks, wolves in naked light, outposts with lamps and turrets, prophets in booths, structures of the utter continuum.

The rattling yaffle of the silver-stockinged rainbird in its scarlet mutch, the owl’s idiot eye, the sparrow’s chat and note, the imperial eagle upon its pole: in the ice-age cave in the Lascaux hills there is a bird on a perch to sign a hunter’s death.

XVII

Amma the Great Collarbone has put his people the Dogon, their altars, granaries, ancestor tortoises, and trees here in this rocky land so hot, so dry. There are no rivers. For nine months of the year no rain falls. The trees are the baobab and tamarind.

The trees are kahya, flame-tree, butternut, sa, jujube, and acacia. At first, from the beginning of time, the Dogon lived in the Mande, before Timbuctoo was there. This homeland was called Dyigou. Then came the men with curved knives, on camels, Islam.

The Dogon brought their altars to Mali. They brought the earth of the first field in baskets and in boats on the Niger. Ogo came with them. That was nine hundred years ago. The earth on which the ark came down they brought to Mali in many baskets.

The forebrain of wasps is built up of a rich tangle of nerve fibers around two quick cups of denser flesh that are like mushrooms of keen mentality and tenacious memory socketed into tissues of casual liveliness and accurate response astride a fat knot.

This central knot seems to be that point around which nature whorls her symmetries. To the right and left of this small brain there stick out like petals the nerves sensitive to light which stream forward and out onto the diamond surfaces of the eyes.

There is yet a third mass of brain that branches down the chest and belly to order the legs, wings, and sting, and to send back the feel of the wind, the wild sweet of coupling, the juicy pull of apple wine, rotten pear mush, the larkspur’s velvet nap.

The keenest nerves cluster in the jaws and stomach. The bigger the mushroom cups in the brain, the smarter the insect, for the spies and gatherers among wasps and bees have the deepest cups in their brains of all the foragers, the sharpest eyes.

They discover all and remember all that’s useful to their lives. Yellow crumbles, soft meal, gum, grains on the grippers, bright. Green is crisp, gives water, ginger mint keen. Yellow is deep, green is long. Green snaps wet, a wax of mealy yellow clings.

Yellow clings and our jaws crunch green. Crunch curls of dry wood. Cling around green, red shine is the line and red shine is wobble the happy and shimmy the sting. Dance the ripen red, hunch the yellow bounce. Red the speckle, green the ground.

XVIII

The red beyond the red is the finest of the dancers and in that tingle shakes a green. Latch green, brush red. She does no spin for she sucks no wine. We dangle when we suck the wine. She is stronger than the brandy. Red then is the green and red the yellow.

The world in his head, Amma began to make the world. The two hundred and sixty-six bummo were written in the collarbone. From himself he took a pinch of filth, spat on it, kneaded it in his fingers, shaping it well, and made the seed of an acacia.

That was the first of all things, an acacia seed. Inside it was the world, all the bummo. The filth that Amma brought up from his throat, that is the earth. His spit, that is our water. He breathed hard as he worked, that is fire. He blew on the seed.

That’s the air. Then he made the acacia tree on which to hang the seed. Amma then took a thorn from the acacia and stood it point up, like the little iron bell called the ganana, the one we ring with a stick, and on this he stuck a lump.

He stuck on it a little dome of acacia wood, so that altogether the two, thorn and dome, looked like a mushroom. Then he stuck another acacia thorn, point down, into the little dome from above. Here he put the two hundred and sixty-six things.

The top thorn he called male, the bottom female. When our children spin their tops they repeat the first dance of the world. How busy is a top, and how still! Amma spun the first world between the thorns, and the seeds of everything were inside.

But — ah! — that little dome, as everybody knows, was Ogo’s paw. This first world failed that Amma made for us. The dome spun but the things inside went wrong. All the water sloshed out. That’s why the acacia tree is both dead and alive, wet and dry.

That is why the acacia is bigger than a bush and smaller than a tree, neither one nor the other, and yet both. It is Amma’s first being. It is therefore a person. And yet obviously a tree. It is both person and tree and neither. It is God’s failure.

Amma saw that he could not make a world out of the acacia and destroyed it, saving the seed, which contains the plan of all things. Amma began a second time to make the world. For the new world he invented people but he decided to keep the acacia too.

XIX

Miss Stein walked home by Les Editions Budé on the corner of the boulevard Raspail and the rue de Fleurus with its yellow Catulles and Tite Lives in the vitrine that made her think of Marie Laurencin and Apollinaire pink and mauve on the Saint Germain.