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

each other, Doktor Vogel and Doktor Hassenfuss.

It says in the pages of Mach that the mind is nothing but a continuity of consciousness. It is not itself a thing, it is its contents, like an eye and what it sees, a hand and what it holds. Mach’s continuity, like Heraklit’s river, defines itself by its flow.

Doktor Vogel looked at Hassenfuss.

— A charming poetic image, he said.

— It is so obvious, I persisted, once you have seen it. The mind is what it knows! It is nothing else at all, at all.

I RESOLVED to hold fast by a piece of the rock and so to hold my breath, if possible, till the wave went back; now as the waves were not so high as at first, being near land, I held my hold till the wave abated, and then fetched another run, which brought me so near the shore that the next wave, though it went over me, yet did not swallow me up as to carry me away, and the next run I took, I got to the mainland, where, to my great comfort, I clambered up the clifts of the shore and sat me down upon the grass, free from danger, and quite out of the reach of the water.

Commit a word to paper and God knows what you have done. They will read it in Angoulême, in Anchorage, and Hippo. Spiritual crockery for missionary tables in the Cameroons serves quite as well a Mandarin palate. The sheik of Aqbar gathers his twenty sons around him, his five wives and twelve daughters, and reads them the Encyclopedia Britannica, a page where it says that phoronids, which comprise the phylum Phoronida, are little-known marine invertebrate animals characterized by an elongated, nonsegmented body that is topped by a tuft of tentacles. Each adult lives within a membranous tube to which sand particles, shells, and other materials may adhere. A king will read a baker’s proverbs who could not be invited to supper by the meanest file clerk of the Fish and Vegetables Revenue Branch.

The black hunchback Aesop would never be allowed to stump on his crutch into this library, nor shaggy blind barefoot Homer leaning on a boy, nor staggering Li Po in his dragon silks, nor honest Benjamin Franklin could I introduce into this library without getting fired for exposing der Graf to the Gadarene hog. Yet here were their books, bound in red leather.

Weder antik Fisch noch spartanisch Athlet.

— Mad, aren’t they? Herr Rufzeichen asked of the ceiling, blowing loops of cigar smoke upward.

— Mad, your lordship?

— These book writers, Robert, that you read me. They are all peculiar, to you and me I mean, wouldn’t you say?

STEEP WIND at my throat, my gaze on dizzy shires and canals below, I heard with one ear the tympany of our cold oscillation through crowding gusts and with the other the Eroica. You do not, Meng Tse said, climb trees to look for fish. Nor discover weight with a yardstick or length with a scales. Why were Cassirer and I floating across Europe in a balloon?

— Hsing! Cassirer said.

A carp by Hokusai, a spray of maple red as wine, sao shu dropping like wistaria down the print. It is hsing, Cassirer said by the stove, to desire a wife, plum brandy, gingko jam, and water chestnuts. Hsing is internal, justice and mercy external, nei wei.

In China as in Greece the epic known in every house and assembly, he explained, is of Wanderung. The manner of a people’s foraging becomes the Heldenfahrt of the Kollektivunbewusste. A hero without a journey is like a saint without a vision. Tripitaka and Monkey through a persimmon forest under blue humps of mountains. Herakles mothernaked raising his mouseburrow ox arm in grace to a frisking centaur, wolfwary Ulysses offering his lie to the meerstrandbewohnend Phaiakischhof, Cassirer the image peddler and Walser the Nachnietzschischprosaschriftsteller aloft in a balloon drifting to the Baltic sands: heroes in our day must take to the ice wastes of the poles, the depths of the sea, the air. We are not certain whether von Moltke’s heroism is in his railroad tracks, his invention of general orders, or his translating Gibbon.

He talked of Nietzsche and Semmelweis. The one exhorted us to dream of barefoot Greeks dancing in masks before the enigmas of fermentation and electricity, the other taught us to wash our hands when delivering babies.

Here, in the snow, which would I prefer to walk with me, as if I could heed another ghost, or if Seelig, kind Seelig, were not enough? A man’s quality might well be in the sort of misery he has seen with pity. In that case, Semmelweis. Or was it rather Nietzsche? And both were maddened by stupidity. Not I.

I wander out every afternoon, the same way, and have my walk. Every day now for twenty-seven years. Could I once have written books? Once drifted across Europe in a balloon? Once been a butler in Silesia? Was I once a boy?

I watch the linnet, the buck hare, the mountains pink and grey above level mist that lies out from the property wall like a lake of clouds, like the mind’s surface before a warmth of thought, light, melts that haze of ghost wool, incertitude of fear.

I ASK AN ATTENDANT who the man is who dances around the grounds and has such anguish in his eyes. He tells me it is the great Nijinsky, schizophrenic paranoid.

— He thinks he is a horse.

WHY SHOULD THIS wild whirl of snow keep us from our walk? It reminds me of the toys in my father’s shop, pigeon-breasted Switzers with halberds and cockades, milkmaids in porcelain aprons, shepherds with mouse-faced sheep. O ravelment and shindy of snow on the toy shop’s windows! There was an enameled staffetta I coveted with real lust: he had a leather hat, a coat as red as cherries, and saddlebags stamped with the arms of the canton.

A rabbit! See him