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

been younger, I would have found great significance in their beauty, and shared their innocent knowledge of their own glory. But I took too much pleasure in the health of my middle years, thanks be to a generous fate and the kindly gods, to envy these striplings their brief splendor at the games, and found myself wishing for them the easy stamina to walk, when they are my age, across the world, and a soul to take it in.

The rich valley plains between Elis and Kyllene, now the color of stone in the late summer drought, bear the flax and hemp which the Eleans weave with every degree of fineness. Indeed, their linen is almost as fine as silk, which is not, as Pyttalos supposed, made from bark.

Silk, I explained, the manufacture of which is much misunderstood and practically a secret in the western world, is made by an insect from the land of the Seres; hence the Greek ser. This Serian insect, twice the size of our dung beetle, spins a web like the tree spider, which it also resembles in having eight feet. The Seres keep these insects in houses, safe from the weather, regulating the temperature for them according to the season. These creatures weave a fine thread, making a ball of it with their feet. For four years they are fed on millet, but in the fifth year, when their life span is almost over, they are fed with the tender leaves of the reed, their favorite food, which they eat until they burst, and more thread is found inside them. This is then woven into the finest of cloth.

When Pyttalos discovered that I had not been to the land of the Seres, he lost interest in my discourse.

Dust whitened us, got into our eyes and mouths, until we looked like millers. I reflected that men are what they eat, and that the Greek eats a lot of rock, and perhaps a lot of metal that is within rock, lime and iron. It is no wonder that the Greek picture of the world is wrought in rock and metal. He drinks rock in his mineral springs, breaths rock dust, and comes in time to look like rock, as Pyttalos does.

I shook dust in clouds from my tunic.

— We are approaching the sea, I said to Pyttalos, and one might reasonably expect to see a cloud or feel a breeze and, here I pointed to the bone-dry bed of a stream, perhaps rain. I was being city-bred and sardonic, and I detected the accusation in my idle remark that Pyttalos and his countrymen somehow loved, and even asked the gods, for an utter drought all summer long.

— Your swallow leaves in Metageitnion, he replied. After that we get new weather. The rain comes in Boedromion, and the wind. On the fourth day after the Scorpion rises, the Pleiades set at dawn. Then you get frost. The leaves are all down by then. My rheumatism goes into my fingers and knees. On the thirteenth, Lyra rises at dawn. Winter is here.

— And you sit by the fire eating roasted chickpeas, I said, and talk of the Medes and Persians.

He looked at me and sighed.

— I was quoting an old poem, I said.

We came to a field where women were winnowing beside a white house, their blue shirts stippled with chaff. Whether they were working or dancing was a pretty question, for they dipped the grain with their long baskets to a busy music which a bearded fellow played on the bouzouki, a peasant lyre with four sets of double strings. He could have been forty or a hundred years old. Greeks go from youth to old age with no apparent transition. He could have been Orpheus himself, older than the blue mountains beyond the fields. As we came abreast of them, we could make out the song.

White was the moon

And the stars in the river.

O Anaktoria,

Do you dream of Lysander?

The dill was all yellow

And gone was the clover,

The mouse and the wheat-ear,

The last of the summer.

To our surprise, Lykas began to sing in his high sweet voice, not yet that of a man.

White was the robe

She spread for her lover,

White was the robe

And embroidered the cover.

But whiter by far

Was the snow he lies under,

And whiter the stars

Where the hill foxes wander.

And then Pyttalos joined his grizzled voice, for the ballad was endless, and we walked on singing, toward Kyllene.

First there was the wrinkling glare of the sky to show us that we were not far from the coast, then that faint bitterness in our nostrils, the smell of all ports, and then, as we came to the top of a hill, the sea itself.

Below us lay Kyllene with her ships and warehouses, sunny streets and taverns.

Here, in some days, I was to sail to Italy. After dining on octopus, which the Kyllenians serve raw in a sauce of olive oil and herbs, we set out as diligently as ever to record the port’s antiquities. There is a temple of Asklepios here, as well as a sanctuary to Aphrodita.

But the most imposing of their temples is to Hermes, protector of the city and its trade. The temple is old indeed, an archaic building with old-fashioned columns which would seem to owe their inspiration to the Phoenicians. Inside, upright on a round millstone, is a blackened shaft topped by what appeared at first to be a great acorn. Except for the dolmens of Sicily or perhaps the wild tall rocks of the Calabrian coast, I had never seen any stone so primeval in its import, nor so direct a symbol. It is, I should think, older than the idols of the Cyclades.

— But, I said, it is nothing more than a stone phallos.

— Yes, Pyttalos said, it is Hermes.

A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg

FOR A MAN who had seen a candle serenely burning inside a beaker filled with water, a fine spawn of bubbles streaming