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

daylong twilight under constant clouds and eternal thunder.

How they learned to make paper nests, neatly roomed with hexagonal cells, we cannot begin to know, nor how they invented their government of queen and commoners, housekeepers, scouts and foragers, nurses and guards at the door of the hive.

Ogo. The white fox of the brush, Griaule said. He was to have been one of the spirits of time and matter, a nummo like his brothers and sisters. In the collarbone, among the thoughts of Amma, he was greedy. He misbehaved in the crabgrass bummo.

He bit the placenta of all things. He was looking for his twin before Amma was ready to give him his twin. And then, by nobody’s leave, he went on a journey, to see creation. Creation, you understand, was still at this time inside Amma’s collarbones.

Space and time were still the same thing, unsorted. So before God extended time or space from his mind, Ogo began to create the world. His steps became time, his steps measured off space. You can see the road he took in the rainbow. To see creation!

XXII

Amma, Amma! little Ogo squeaked. I have been to see creation! Before I have created sun and shadow, Amma cried in fury and despair. Chaos, chaos. Mischief. Oh, but Ogo also stole the nerves inside the egg of Amma and made himself a hat to wear.

Ogo’s bonnet. They were the nerves with which Amma was planning to make the stringbean. The stringbean is Ogo’s bonnet. Not only that, and worse, but he put the bonnet on backwards, for impudence. For hatefulness. To add fun to his Ogo sass.

Amma cut off part of Ogo’s tongue for that foolishness. That is why Ogo barks hoarse and high. His pranks nevertheless went on full career. He stole part of the world’s placenta, made an ark, and came down to the unfinished world way before he was welcome.

He played God, and havoc. He made things out of the piece of placenta he stole. Look at the plants he made, all in Ogo style: sticktight, mimosa, thorny acacia, dolumgonolo, hyena jujube, Senegal jujube, whitethorn, pogo, redtooth, balakoro, and bombax.

He made crabgrass, indigo, atay, cockleburr, arrowwort, brush okra, broomsedge, tenu, toadstools, gala. And look at them, all, all inedible. He made insects, waterbugs with one side of the placenta, grasshoppers with the other. He made ticks.

He made aphids. He made all these as he was falling through the air, figure eights all the way down. Amma turned the placenta into our earth, and tried to do what he could with the things Ogo created, so that they would fit together somehow, some way.

But the way Ogo made the world was not the way Amma would have made the world. And then there’s Dadayurugugezegezene. Spider. She’s the old bandylegs who tends to Ogo’s spinning, what a pair, and she lives in the branches of the acacia tree.

When Acacia reached the earth in Ogo’s ark, it took root, and ended the disorder of the descent, spiraling like a falling leaf, down the birth of space and time. Amma came behind, putting things in place. Acacia is Ogo’s world. It is his sign.

Its thorns are his claws, its fruit the pads of his little feet. Like Ogo, the acacia is incompletely made. Like him it searches for its twin. It searches in sunlight the completion of its being. It must search forever, never finding, like Ogo.

XXIII

Leaves fell on Fourier’s grave and we thought of the Hordes moving from phalanx to phalanx like fields of tulips. That morning we talked with Fourier’s publisher on the rue Racine. We talked about the attempts to build phalanxes in Europe and America.

We told him how the last phalanx in the United States, outside Red Bank, New Jersey, had recently been bulldozed, a large wooden hexagon of a building beautifully covered with kudzu and still inhabitable. The owner bulldozed it rather than sell it.

He would not sell it when he learned that the damned place had been built by Communists. No grand orgies of attractions by proportion and destiny were ever holden to music in its rooms, no quadrilles danced at noon or at midnight there.

No Hordes of children ever set out on quaggas from its gates. About the time this New Jersey phalanstery was sinking into transcendent boredom, having misfollowed Fourier, not quite believing him, German hunters in Africa shot the last quaggas.

The acacia twists in a spiral as it grows. That is its journey. See how its bark is twisted on the bole. See how the branches spiral up. That is the way it spun as it fell in Ogo’s ark, turning and turning, casting out the seeds of all other things.

Dada the spider was sent by Amma to set Ogo’s chaos in order. Seeing the wild career of Ogo, she decided that he and not Amma would be the landlord of the world. She heard him brag how he had stolen bummo, the plan of all creation from the crabgrass.

What grows, spins. So Dada began a web in the acacia, around and around, digilio bara vani, weaving a cone with its point toward the earth. She spins to the right, the acacia in its growth spins to the left. Amma’s world is a cone turning opposite a cone.

She spins Ogo’s word, which is nothing but the word move. The world is atremble, it vibrates, it shifts from one foot to another, it shakes, it dances its dance. It dances Ogo’s dance. Did I say he wears his stringbean hat backwards for sass?

Ogo talks with his feet, leaving his tracks in the plan of the ark we draw every evening at the edge of the village. The signs he marks with his paws are the signs we must live by that day. For it is Ogo’s gift that he built accident into the world’s