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

Chairman Mao grinned and leaned back in his comfortable armchair.

— Ah so, he said, the world.

C. Musonius Rufus

IACTURA VIGORIS non fortuita est: agitur semper unum antitetrahedron. This dust of poppy, fitchet, bone is in an exact precession with which the gods are intimate but not our rough minds. Who, seeing a mother on her knees before the mammillaria of Cybebe, the Arvals flouring a calf for the knife, the standards of Quirinus in white mist around the watchfires, could believe that the gods are as indifferent as gravity? I huddle upon the wild rose, wait with the moth upon the wall, still as time.

All at first was the fremitus of things, the jigget of gnats, drum of the blood, fidget of leaves, shiver of light, boom of the wind. The tremor of my cry may have had something to do with choosing this threshold. There are other sills, empty places with intolerable glare, presences, noon quiet, lonely desperate desert wastes. I have died again in them. Those who go to the inhuman to place their hopes upon its alien rhythms, its bitter familiarity with nothing, its constant retreat from all that we can love, are hostages to vastation.

The majesty of the eagles in their gold, the arms raised in salute, the cries of obeisance, praise, and glory, the rise of the horns falling in fioritura: we never ask why the gods do not march in pomps, under arch after arch after arch.

I AM THE EMPEROR Balbinus kept in a jug. Together with Illyrian dust. Some flower petals a congenital mourner threw on the body are also in here along with a dead bee that was by occupation connected with the flowers.

The ghosts of bees I am told by the Consiliarii form a congregation in Cyprus though many are in Elysion itself and others where they sang and foraged in their little lives. Hymettos and Chios and such bright places.

Having been an emperor I am divine. Not the kin of the gods as I had supposed but a god patent and absolute.

Nature is here too. In the first weeks when I was still drunk with death I fretted to be out. An instinct as it were to flow was my initial response to the new state of things. They had come to me, crowding against the outside of the urn, the Consiliarii as they called themselves, and hailed me as a divinity, just as the general, the few senators, and functionaries recently hailed me Imperator, anxiously, with not more than two aves apiece, immediately urging me make haste and flee. A rival faction in Hispania or the Provincia Gallicum had also wrapped an emperor in the purple.

Trumpets, a roll of the drums, a hasty salute, and I was off. We rode toward a forest.

The horror of the knives was soon over, and they talked of other things while they were doing it. I remember squealing like a pig.

Light through matter makes it spin. Knowledge is to the mind what water is to grime and sweat. I was turning in my jug and I wanted to know why. No sooner had I wondered than I knew. A Consiliarius put his face to mine, eye to eye. He turned as I turned. A kind of red music ran in and out of my ears, what used to be my ears.

Was I to spin forever, a turbo from which God himself had whipped the cord? To ponder is to pose, and my answer was that to turn is to exist. The very pollen which a bee has kicked from the nectary of a poppy goes into orbit before it sifts down to turn with the earth itself. A cow munching clover is pitching forward with the large roll of the earth.

As the giddiness became usual, I longed to flock to what I loved. My goats, for instance. My fig tree. My favorite window looking out over the olives. Especially my goats. I saw their oblong eyes and ellipsoid udders and cornered anatomies.

Was memory to bodger or enrich eternity? I remembered barracks, parades, charges, hospitals, speeches, but as a mouse overhears the talk of a room from the rafters, with perfect unconcern.

What is there to shiver so when a flight of sparrows flutters through my middle? I am not flesh. Unbroken habit of flinching where the body used to be will no doubt fade in time. If I am in time. I think I have become a globe, like all things that spin. Light is round. The Consiliarii have taught me that. It goes in all directions at once and thus balloons out from its source. Spirit must be a substance very like light. Old polarity of head and butt no longer maintains. I find that it is sweet to flow through water. Is this thirst?

I say flow and flit and other words of motion without knowing what I mean. For I do not leave my jug. Here in this dark I can still see the pitted terra-cotta interior. The dead bee. Withered flowers. The bee is on its back with its little legs bent at the knees. But I also see an army crossing a ford, a vineyard, and barbarians on mares. Their slant eyes glint like blue steel. Their hair is combed down over their faces and tucked into their belts in front. Gold clasps hold the hair away from their faces. The hair of the head is combed into the hair of the beard. They stink of tallow and horse.

I see flax and roses as if the jelly of the eye were amber honey from Illyria. Whatever I have for an eye it is never closed. Lids are flesh. The eye was spirit all along. Imagine that if you can, whoever beyond the Consiliarii can feel my thoughts. And I can smell. That was spirit too. O, and I can feel. Not surfaces. It takes two for an encounter and I am nothing. But I can pass through. In