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

tease a casualness into his fear. Don’t move. I can think, as still as he, snow raining upon us both, of a battalion of red soldiers on my father’s shelves, of a mandarin poet rolling along the Great Wall in a cart, of Robinson Crusoe conversing with his parrot. But what moves in his mind, the rabbit? Is the image of me on his retina all that he sees, an old man with a face as wrinkled as a pocket handkerchief used for a month? Can he see cabbages and carrots and blackberries? His doe?

It was a day this cold that I saw a lady with a panache of pheasant and egret jutting from a swirl of scarlet silk around her hat, and felt my little man suffuse with benevolence, grow long and rise. The colors of coats and scarves in shops, of signs and stone, of tramway and light became splendid. It takes the animal in us to lead the spirit a dance.

Schicksal, Zeit, Unfall: the important thing is to tie one’s shoelaces, sew back the parted button, and look the world in the eye.

But the rabbit can think without disregarding all that is characteristic of life, for the infinity of qualifications arising from our thoughts of death is nowhere in his green brain. Yet he is as fearful as if I were a banker, a philanthropist, or a psychiatrist. He lasts, we wear. He leaps, we endure.

The past, I have known for years, is the future. All that has mattered is a few moments, uncongenial while they happened, that turned to gold in the waves of time. February light, that for all its debility might have come from the daytime moon as much as from a red sun beyond a texture of bamboo and chinaberry, fell cold on a wall that bore a French print of a flatfish, a map of the Hebrides, a bust of T. Pomponius Atticus, a Madagascan parrot whose green eye glowed like an opal, and a speckled mirror that reflected on so dull an afternoon nothing except some elemental neutrality of light and dark, vicinity, and patience.

I am most inside outside. Once Olympia said from her repose on the wall that Monsieur Manet was a man women liked. He put them at ease by paying the right kind of attention. He stayed inside himself and looked out. He did not even know how to come outside himself. You could always feel that. It is a comfort to a woman, she said, to see a man so unconsciously himself. A woman knows when to be inside and when to be outside, her mother’s only useful lesson, and of course when to be neither.

The snow is a kind of music. Were I ever to write again, perhaps a poem as deft and transparent as one by a Chinese, I would like to witness to the beauty of the snow.

And their books, these people who keep writing, who reads them? It is now a business like any other. I try not to bore them with an old man’s talk when they come, the few who want to ask me about writing, about the time before both the wars, about Berlin. I do not tell them how much of all that misery was caused by writers, by men who said they were writers. I do not tell them that I quit writing because I had nothing at all, any more, to say.

There are the tracks of the rabbit. I think they said at the table that today is Christmas. I do not know.

But let us desist, lest quite by accident we be so unlucky as to put these things in order.

Acknowledgments

The drawing of Leonardo da Vinci’s bicycle on the title page is derived, with structural reinterpretation in the fork and seat strut, from Antonio Calegari’s model in Augusto Marinoni’s “The Bicycle,” The Unknown Leonardo, edited by Ladislao Reti (McGraw-Hill, 1974), and appears here with the kind permission of the publisher. Professor Calegari’s model is based on the recently discovered drawing by Salai Jacopo dei Caprotti (aet. 11, circa 1493) of a bicycle drawn or perhaps built by Leonardo.

The final paragraphs of “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier,” beginning with “Everybody was on the streets,” are from Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. For the parts about the cosmology of the Dogon I am indebted to Marcel Griaule’s Dieu d’Eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmêli (1948) and his and Germaine Dieterlen’s Le Renard pâle (1965). The drawing of the Wright Flyer No. 1 (Signal Corps Aircraft No. 1) is derived from a drawing by Peter F. Copeland, chief of the Illustration Department, NASM, Smithsonian Institution. The athlete in the collages is from photographs by Erik A. Ruby in his The Human Figure (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1974). The drawing of James Joyce is from a photograph by Gisèle Freund. The drawing of the young Lartigue is from a photograph by his father.

The drawings accompanying “The Invention of Photography in Toledo” are derived from Edward S. Curtis (the Mohave girl), Nadar (Rossini), and a photograph of the young Van Gogh (circa 1866) in the possession of Pastor J. P. Scholte-van Houten, Lochem. For the title of this story I am indebted to the poet Robert Kelly, who read a book so named in a dream.

All but one of these stories have appeared before in journals, and grateful acknowledgment is herewith made to their editors for permission to reprint. “A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenberg,” © 1977 by the University of Georgia, originally appeared in the Spring 1977 issue of The Georgia Review; “Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier,” © 1975 by the University of Georgia, originally appeared in the Winter 1975 issue of The Georgia Review. Both stories are reprinted by permission of The Georgia Review. Permission to reprint was also granted by Parenthèse for “The Invention of Photography in Toledo” and “The Wooden Dove of Archytas,” by The Hawaii Review for “The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag”