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

Rousseau whom Berenson took to be the Barbizon painter and William James the philosopher who wore Circassian dress as by the Pantheon painted their double portrait using a tape measure to get a likeness, poet and muse, Apollinaire who knew so much.

He could see the modern because he loved all that had lasted from before. You see Cézanne by loving Poussin and you see Poussin by loving Pompeii and you see Pompeii by loving Cnossos. What the hell comes before Cnossos if this sentence is to be a long one?

Alice, what comes before Cnossos, what comes before Cnossos, Pussy? The Musée de l’Homme, says Alice, where Pablo says you can’t get your breath, it inspires asthma. On the wall her portrait by Picasso broods and a portrait of Madame Matisse by Matisse.

Madame Matisse in a hat and Madame Cézanne in a conservatory and by Picasso a naked girl holding a basket of roses so glum in her inwardness as to be pouting perhaps for having to pose for Picasso’s eating eyes and her bewildering beauty is in her feet.

The little boy Lartigue was just another French scamp to Wilbur Wright if ever they passed on the Haussmann and Wright was but a lean Anglais to Lartigue. She picked up a notebook and wrote: fact in Cézanne is essence. Sunlight is always correct.

Wilbur Wright was Ohio and Ohio is flat and monotonous, green and quiet. And so was he, a splendidly tedious man. You cannot be a mechanic and not be tedious, nor the first man to fly and not be green as Ohio is green, nor a hero and not be quiet.

After he flew at Le Mans in figure eights Blériot wanted to kiss him on both cheeks in the French way and the aviators wanted to take him on their shoulders to a banquet but he said that he was too busy and had to make adjustments on his machine.

Wasps in an Ohio orchard, fat black bees in an English garden, butterflies at Fiesole. Wasps drunk on nectar grabble into a yellow umble licorice and lavender, bourrée and gigue. Ant tells the poppy when to bloom, and sleeping lions make mimosa spread.

XX

Picasso’s little girl with a basket of roses has a tender button you can believe and has thrummed it with her grubby finger. She has a good French notion of why big girls whisper and why women sigh. She knows perfectly well why little boys are impudent.

Little boys with their silly spouts and bubbles. She knows why roses ripple round like cabbages and why her name is Rose. Her name is Rose. Fat and intelligent, she sat with her notebooks and pictures around her, brooding and writing and seeing.

Alice was mincing a duck. Outside, to the left, was the Raspail, to the right, the Luxembourg where a captain of artillery first noticed the polarization of light, windows reflecting windows reflecting the level late brilliant winter sun.

On the Raspail she had seen Wilbur Wright looking like a U.S. Cavalry Scout as lean as whang leather. In his keen and merry eyes Paris might have been a country fair, a dream, a postcard from an old trunk. People in Paris are all somehow somebody for sure.

People in Pittsburgh on the other hand are always nobody. But the people in Pittsburgh know who’s who. In Paris you don’t ever. Sir Walter Scott on the stairs of a hotel asked James Fenimore Cooper if he knew how to find James Fenimore Cooper.

For years she didn’t see that and didn’t like the painting, it had charm but not the charm of a painting. At Deauville every white and blue building of which is by Boudin you rarely see a barefoot girl except the feet of the Gypsy children naked and brown.

Gypsy children with long innocent brown feet and in the Bois you can see little boys who have terrified their bonnes by shedding their shoes but little boys’ feet are square and with a knarl of ankle and curled toes but Picasso stops at nothing at all.

There are lovely little girls’ feet in Mary Cassatt who came to 27 rue de Fleurus and said I’ve never seen so many ugly people in all my life, or so many ugly pictures, take me home away from all these Jews, and lovely feet in Degas and yes Murillo.

But they, Degas and Cassatt, were inside painters and kept to the pretense like Henry James that art was art and life was life. Picasso sees all and will paint all in time, even the inaccrochable, wait and see, that was next you could be sure.

XXI

Amma began the second world by making the smallest of the grains, the crabgrass seed, in which he put the two hundred and sixty-six things. A yala, the corners and turn of things by dots. They are there, in a spiral. Sixty-six of the yala are the cereals.

The next four are calabash and okra. The next hundred and twenty-eight are The Great Calabash Round. The last sixty-four are the seed itself, the four collarbones rolled into a perfect roundness. The first six yala are male, like the crabgrass.

Three is a male number, penis and testicles. Twin males begin the series. Even Ogo once had a twin. The acacia belongs among the cereals, first of the sixty-six yala. But, having nyama, a human soul, it is also a person. It is Amma’s tree and Ogo’s paw.

Wasps in the Baltic amber of the Eocene ran afoul of that pellucid gum eighty million years ago, grave queens eating all of an autumn day against the winter’s sleep, fatherless males out foraging in the half light of swamps, worker daughters looking to the young.

The structure of their society in the Eocene is unknown. They enter creation with flowers, and their sharp eyes would have seen the five-toed horse, the great lizards, forests of ferns,