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

gloire. Nijinsky up there at the top of his leap looking like the young Gorki.

You’ve got flying on the brain, says Alice. Besides, Nijinsky has gone crazy. They say he thinks he’s a horse. There is nothing more worthy of admiration to the philosopher’s eye, Dr. Johnson said, says Gertrude, than the structure of animals.

What a strange thing for Johnson to have said, says Alice. It is of course architecture that is most worthy of admiration and his not saying so is an example of not seeing architecture. People don’t, people who walk take architecture for granted.

They take it for granted because it is good. When everybody has an automobile as in the United States architecture will go all to hell. Architecture is for people on foot. The Chinese had no architecture, nor the Magyars, until they got down off their horses.

There is no architecture in America, never will be. A skyscraper is a city street turned on end. But, says Alice, we drove our Ford through the War. We have seen the trenches of the Ardennes. You have lectured at Oxford and you have lectured at Cambridge.

And at the Wednesday Club in St. Louis. We own Picassos and Cézannes. We have stayed with the Alfred North Whiteheads. Cocteau says he is influenced by you. It is not enough. We have passed Joyce and that Frenchman Fargue on the Victor Hugo.

XXVII

The Frenchman raised his hat to us, Joyce did not. He didn’t see us. L’aveugle et le paralytique, the concierges call those two. It is not enough. We saw the victory parade through the Arc, down the Elysées, O grandest of days, except one other.

When the nummo circumcised Ogo, Amma said: You should have waited. I could have destroyed him utterly. Now you have mixed his blood with all of creation. So Amma reversed the spiral of the nummo, took the sacrifice, and drenched the world with blood.

Stars began to turn, grain came up, rain fell, wind blew. The fellow traveler of Sirius is the crabgrass seed above, female twin to the crabgrass seed down here. That little star, which many cannot see, unsuspected by some, we know to be the world’s granary.

The day after his sacrifice there sprang from the Nummo’s blood the donu, whose blue wings flash on the Niger in the season of the rains. And the antelope. The Nummo danced as a serpent under our fields. His eyes are red like the first light of the sun.

His skin is green. For legs he has snakes, and his arms are without elbows or wrists. He eats light, and his droppings are copper. But we do not see the Nummo as he is, only his presence in catfish, rain, trees. The Nummo is in the shine of things.

The crabgrass is the granary, the basket the ancestors brought from heaven, the ark of the two hundred and sixty-six things. It is the menstrual blood. You have seen wild rams on the rocks near the village at dusk? You have seen a little of the Nummo.

The light in the fleeces of the wild rams is wonderful. You see the Nummo when rain walks in its season from the east, smelling of the river, of green leaves. You see the white of it under the clouds before the first fat drops fall on our red dust.

That is the Nummo. The rain ram. Split a green stick halfway down. Run your knifeblade up each tine so that it curls. That is his sign. You have seen it above the smith’s door. Even the French must have seen him in the yala of the stars, the Ram.

Between his horns is the sun, the Great Calabash, which is female, the seed basket, the granary, the crabgrass. His horns are testicles, his forehead the moon, his eyes stars, his mouth and his bleat are the wind. His fleece is the earth, the very world.

XXVIII

His fleece is of course copper, which is to say, of water, which is to say, of leaves. When the wind speaks in the leaves and a light like burnished copper dances in the green, and rain falls, that is the presence of the Nummo. His tail is the serpent Lébé.

Lébé danced under our fields when he swallowed his brother ancestor and spat out the dugoy stones, the points and junctures of the world. His front feet are the small animals, his hind feet are the big animals, and his mentula is the rain.

The granary. It turns in the middle of the air. At the zero point of time its four sides faced the Fish of the Twin Nummo, the Nummo, the Woman with the Grains, and the Nummo with the Bow. Now time is out of kilter, askew, but turning again to zero.

The floor of the granary is round, the roof square, so that the walls rise from their foundation as a cone and find in tapering upward the four creases of the roof’s corners. Up each side, in all four directions, there is a long stairway.

The stairway is of ten steps, female on the tread, male on the rise. On the western stairs are the untamed animals, antelopes at the top, and then downward are hyenas, cats, snakes, lizards, apes, gazelles, marmots, lions, and the elephants.

Beside the animals on their steps are the trees in order, from baobab to mimosa, together with all the insects. The tame animals stand on the south steps, chicken, sheep, goats, cattle, horses, dogs, house cats, ancestor tortoise who lives in the yard, mice.

House mice and field mice. On the eastern steps are the birds, hawks, eagles, ospreys and hornbills majestic at the top. Then ostriches and storks. Buzzards and lapwings. Then vultures, chicken hawks, herons, pigeons, doves, ducks, and bustards.

On the northern steps are fish and men. The fish are joined at their navels, like the