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

He became popular in a way that usually worked with the Athenians. He wore nothing under his cloak, and one windy day when he was walking with his adolescent followers to some rite on the Acropolis a gust opened his clothes. The streets were full of people who applauded his handsome body and talked about it for days. Thereafter he was treated with deference and respect.

Still, he was the butt of Zeno’s collegium, the ass who chose the hardest work, a man proud of his poverty. He said that he would rather dig rock than have to amuse himself. Meaning the rich. Accused of being afraid to botch a task, he replied that this was why he always did things right.

Sositheos included a joke about Cleanthes in a mimiambus at the theater, and Cleanthes did not so much as bat an eye at the insult. The audience of course looked at him as much as at the actor Sositheos. No rage, no blush. Seeing nothing but nobility, they rose in their seats and clapped for Cleanthes. Then they threw cucumbers and sandals at Sositheos until he fled the stage.

I ROLL INTO a hawthorn all white and green, around which I fit like a bubble. A sparrow and my knee occupy the same fragrant space wreathed with blossoms, a bee and my right eye. The ground beneath is so intimate, so congenial, that I consider staying here for the life of the bush, to feel rain, wind, snow. Part of me go off to be honey, part wither and fall. In my shoulder the sparrow would weave her nest, feed her young, straddle them with stretched wings atremble in rain, cry other birds away.

The Consiliarii came to me through a light busy with points of fire.

— Accident, they said, is design.

I turned in my jug like the slow spin of milk in a churn.

— Here, they said, the bobbin is unwound, the engines of futility dismantled and laid out, so that one could see what rain on a Tuesday had to do with the nightmare of a Spanish cook, how a lie told in the reign of Antoninus caused a Scot to lead a life of total illusion.

WE SPREAD OUT in a line, defined by our chains, and dig. The line behind us gathers the rubble of our digging into baskets. Between the lines the sergeants move with their whips. The senate drones on, the armies at the borders of the empire stick the Celts and Huns like so many wild boars, and in the Circus hungry lions claw the bowels out of screaming Iudaei while the Emperor God picks his nose.

Once you have muscles in the shoulders and arms, the pick work is not so murderous. And good thick calluses.

Brother, I say to the Sicilian they have chained to my right leg, what brings you to the inferi before your time?

Quidnam, ha! Quoquo, ha!

Tears welled up in his eyes.

— Uxorem necatu’ misellam. He sank the pickaxe so deep into the rock that he had to fight it out again.

— Puggiunculo!

Vae! All the crimes of these wretches look like mine, and all their faces are mirrors. I almost said to him that I too had killed my wife, though I have yet to learn whether I have or not. It little matters whether we cut the fool as a hissing miser, farting tyrant, slave, usurer, madman, whore, or pigherd. By playing the philosopher I have given a good woman more grief than any simple soul ought to face.

I taught her to read and write, true, and showed her how the philosophical mind has other pleasures and pains than the blind herd and the dreaming rich. I freed her from superstition until she could hear the raven caw and laugh at it as of no matter. We even kept a pet owl to show that we were immune from the paralysis of ignorant fear. She made herself pet it, though it looked as malevolent as a baby gorgon, and in the night she cried out Surely we shall all die!

But I must live with the look on her face the first time they took me away.

The first arrest and sentence, from which I came back. I came back. That is the reason I can endure this shit. Not the hope that some sane man will slit the rotten old Catmit’s wezand from ear to ear, or that an honest praetor will lower his hemorrhoids onto a bench free of the fingersnap of a politician, or that Iustitia will flounce down from the clouds swinging her ensis and libra, but the fact that I have been to the bottom and walked up again keeps me swinging my pick.

We go down into the earth as we dig, and the sky becomes a bay of blue above us. I read the symbol, I take the measure of the calamity.

IN SPILLWAYS of light through leaves I see boys playing with staves. A black bird with Scythian beak blocks my view. But I see that I can see through that fowl, see sunlight in its bones, the sky through its feathers, see boys through boys, trees through a wall, and on and on until what I see is a trash of color, beautiful rubble.

There are days when I see only white everywhere.

Days when I can hear nothing, see nothing, feel nothing. I am loneliest then, and fearful. I have learned to search the white for a yellow dot, which grows if I stare at it, until a gnat-swarm of bilious specks gathers around it and becomes a detail: a horse’s eye, a jug of olive oil, a whetstone.

Once the yellow spot became a fire, thorns cracking under a pot, which emerged from the white after a long wait. I looked, for patience is sometimes all I have, until there were barbarians sitting around the pot. Their eyes were handsome, strange, intelligent. Their women suckled infants at fine