Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  THE BRITISH MUSEUM

  Out of the past, out of Assyria, China, Egypt, the new.

  EPSTEIN, BRANCUSI, MODIGLIANI, ZADKINE

  Out of the new, a past.

  VORTEX

  From Rodin, passion. From John Cournos, courage. From Alfred Wolmark, spontaneity of execution. From Epstein, the stone, direct cutting. From Brancusi, purity of form. From Modigliani, the irony of grace. From Africa, the compression of form into minimal volume. From Lewis, the geometric. From Horace Brodsky, camaraderie de la caserne. From Ezra Pound, archaic China, the medieval, Dante, recognition. From Sophie, love, abrasion, doubt, the sweetness of an hour.

  THE BRONZES OF BENIN

  The Calf Bearer, T’ang sacrificial vessels, the shields of New South Wales, Soninke masks, the Egypt of The Scribe and The Pharaoh Hunting Duck in the Papyrus Marsh, Hokusai, Font de Gaume, Les Combarelles.

  JE REVIENS D’UN ENFER

  The young anthropologist Robert de Launay, the student of mazes whose paper on labyrinths has been accepted for publication, has been shot through the neck outside the Labyrinth at Neuville-St.-Vaast, drowned in his own blood before the medics could see to the wound. Je t’écris, cher Ezra, du fond d’une tranchée que nous avons creusée hier pour se protéger des obus qui nous arrivent sur la tête regulièrement toutes les cinq minutes, je suis ici depuis une semaine et nous couchons en plein air, les nuits sont humides et froides et nous en souffrons beaucoup plus que du feu de l’ennemi nous avons du repos aujourd’hui et ça fait bien plaisir.

  ST.-JEAN DE BRAYE

  In the dry, brown October of 1891 there was born to Joseph Gaudier of St.-Jean de Braye, maker of fine doors and cabinets, descendant of one of the sculptors of Chartres, a son whom he baptized Henri.

  CHARLEVILLE

  Far to the south the one-legged Rimbaud lay dying in Marseilles, which he imagined to be Abyssinia. He was anxious that his caravan of camels laden with rifles and ammo should get off to a start before dawn, for the march was to Aden. Armed with the fierceness of our patience, he once wrote, we shall reach the splendid cities at daybreak.

  TARGU JIU

  In Craiova the fourteen-year-old Constantin Brancusi was learning to carve wood with chisel and maul. He was a peasant from Pestisani Gori across a larch forest from Targu Jiu, which he left when he was eleven, in the manner of the Rumanians, to master a trade. He would enter the national school for sculptors, and then walk from Rumania to Paris.

  L’ENFANT DIFFICILE

  He did not spank well, the child Henri. He doubled his fists, held his breath, and arched his back in an agony of stubbornness, until at an early age his parents began to reason with him before whacking his behind. He reasoned back. As he grew older, he kicked them when he was punished, and they reasoned the harder. A very philosopher, his father said, and his mother put her head to one side, crossed her hands over her apron, and looked at her son with complacent disappointment. The rogue, she said, the darling little rogue. He drew, like all children. His mother taught him to draw rabbits, and to surround them with grass and flowers. With his father’s marking pencil, carefully sharpened for him with a penknife, he drew ships, igloos, medieval trees, the cathedral at Orleans, and American Indians in their eagle-feather bonnets. At six he turned to insects. At first he drew gay fritillaries and gaudy moths. Only flowers had their absolute design and economy of form, which he thought of as sitting right. A roseleaf hopper was tucked into its abrupt parabola as if it were a creature all hat, and yet if you looked it had feet and eyes and chest and belly just like the great dragonflies and damsels of the Loiret, or the mason wasps that built their combs under the eaves of the shed. But it was the grasshoppers and crickets that he drew most. From the forelegs of the grasshopper he learned the stark clarity of a bold design one half of which was mirror image of the other half. The wings of moths were like that, but the principle was different. Wings worked together, the grasshopper’s forelegs worked in opposition to the hindlegs, and yet the effort of the one complemented the effort of the other, like two beings jumping into each other, both going straight up. Earwigs, ants: nothing could be added, nothing subtracted. Who could draw a mosquito? In profile it was an elegance of lines, each at a perfect angle to the others. Bugs, his sisters said. Uncle Pierre gave him a box of colored pencils, and he drew pages of ladybirds and shieldbugs and speckled moths.

  ARTILLERY BARRAGE. THE LABYRINTH. JUNE 1915.

  Smoke boiling black, white underbelly, blooming sulphur, falling dirt and splinters. The daytime moon. Larks.

  HENRI LE PETIT

  The first day of school, his new oilcloth satchel in his lap, his new pencil box in his hands, he breathed the strange new smell of floor polish and washed slate blackboards in numb expectation. The upper half of the classroom door was glass, through which a bald gentleman in a celluloid collar came and peered from time to time. The teacher was a woman who handled books as he had never seen them handled before, with professional delicacy, grace, smart deliberateness. Down the front of her polka-dot dress she wore a necktie, like a man on Sunday, and a purple ribbon ran from her glasses to her bosom, anchored there by a brooch. The letter A was a moth, B was a butterfly, C was a caterpillar, D was a beetle, E an ant, F a mantis. G and H he knew: he had learned them the other way round, with a dot after each, to indicate who drew his drawings.

  RAILWAY ARCH 25

  His Font de Gaume. Planes, the surfaces of mass, meet at lines, each tilted at a different angle to light. The mass is energy. The harmony of its surfaces the emotion forever contained and forever released. Here he drank and roared with Brodsky, here he sculpted the phallus, the menhir, the totem called Hieratic Bust of Ezra Pound. It will not look like you, you know. It will look like your energy.

  SOPHIE

  All night by her bed, imploring her. It is revolting, unspiritual, she said.

  PIK AND ZOSIK

  Brother and sister. Even Mr. Pound believed it. Pikus and Zosiulik. The neurotic Pole and her sly fawn of a lover.

  MON BON DZIECKO UKOCHANY

  According to the little book which I am reading about Dante, the devil lived on very good terms with very few people, because of his terrible tendency to invective and reproach, and his extraordinary gift for irony and irresistible sarcasm—just like my own funny little Sisik. To be quite honest, Sisik, I love you passionately, from the depth of all my being, and I feel instinctively bound to you; what may often make me seem nasty to you is a kind of disagreeable horror that you don’t love me nearly so much as I love you, and that you are always on the point of leaving me.

  CAPITAINE MÉNAGER

  Nous admirions tous Gaudier, non seulement pour sa bravoure, qui était légendaire, mais aussi et surtout pour sa vive intelligence et la haute idee qu’il avait de ses devoirs. A ma compagnie il était aimé de tous, et je le tenais en particulière estime car à cette époque de guerre de tranchées j’étais certain que—grâce à I’exemple qu’il donnerait à ses camarades—là où était Gaudier les Boches ne passeraient pas.

  THE OLD WOMAN TO PASSERSBY

  J’ai perdu mon fils. L’avez-vous trouvé? Il s’appelle Henri.

  CHARGEZ!

  One after another in those weeks of May and early June of 1915, the sugar refinery at Souchez, the cemetery of Ablain, the White Road, and the Labyrinth yielded to the fierce, unremitting blows of the French. The Labyrinth, all but impregnable, was a fortification contrived with tortuous, complicated tunnels, sometimes as deep as fifty feet below the surface, with mines and fortresses, deathtraps, caves and shelters, from which unexpected foes could attack with liquid fire or gas or knives. In the darkness and dampness and foulness of those Stygian vaults where in some places the only guiding gleams were from electric flashlights, men battled for days, for weeks, until June was half spent. What wonder that the Germans could scarcely believe the enemy had made it their own?

  CORPORAL HENRI GAUDIER

  Mort pour la Patrie. 4 Octobre 1891–5 Juin 1915.

 
THE RED STONE DANCER

  Nos fesses ne sont pas les leurs. Il faut être absolument moderne.

  FIFTY-SEVEN VIEWS OF FUJIYAMA

  Months, days, eternity’s sojourners. Years that unfold from the cherry in flower to rice thick in the flat fields to the gingko suddenly gold the first day of frost to the red fox across the snow. The sampan pilot from Shiogama to Ishinomaki, the postman galloping from Kyoto to Ogaki, what do they travel but time? Our great journey is through the years, even when we doze by the brazier. Clouds move on the winds. We long to travel with them. For I, Bashō, am a traveler. No sooner, last autumn, did I get home from a fine journey along the coast, take the broom to the cobwebs in my neglected house on the Sumida River, see the New Year in, watch the wolves slinking down from the hills shoulder-deep in white drifts, look in wonder all over again, as every spring, at the mist on the marshes, than I was ready to set out through the gates at Shirakawa. I stitched up the slits and rips in my trousers, hitched a new chinstrap to my hat, rubbed my legs with burnt wormwood leaves (which puts vigor into the muscles), and thought all the while of the moon rising full over Matsushima, what a sight that would be when I got there and could gaze on it.

  We set out, she and I, a fine late summer day, happy in the heft and chink of our gear. We had provender for a fortnight in the wilderness along the Vermont Trail, which we took up on a path through an orchard abandoned years ago, where in generous morning light busy with cabbage butterflies and the green blink of grasshoppers an old pear tree still as frisky and crisp as a girl stood with authority among dark unpruned winesaps gone wild, and prodigal sprawling zinnias, sweetpeas, and hollyhocks that had once been some honest farmwife’s flowers and garden grown from seeds that came in Shaker packets from upstate New York or even Ohio, now blooming tall and profuse in sedge and thistle all the way to the tamaracks of the forest edge, all in that elective concert by which the lion’s fellowship makes the mimosa spread. This trail was blazed back in the century’s teens by a knickerbockered and tweed-capped comitatus from Yale, carrying on a tradition from Raphael Pumpelly and Percy Wallace and Steele MacKaye, from Thoreau and Burroughs: a journey with no purpose but to be in the wilderness, to be in its silence, to be together deep among its trees and valleys and heights.

  Having, with great luck, sold my house by the river, thereby casting myself adrift, so to speak, from obligations and responsibilities, I moved in for a while with my friend and patron, the merchant Sampu, himself a poet. Bright flash makes me blink: spring field, farmer’s spade. But before I went I brushed a poem for my old doorpost. Others now will sing high in peach blossom time behind this door wild grass blocks. And at dawn I set out, more of night still in the sky than day, as much by moonlight fading as by sunlight arriving, the twenty-seventh of March. I could just make out the dim outline of Fuji and the thin white cherry blossoms of Ueno and Yanaka. Farewell, Fuji! Farewell, cherry blossoms! Friends had got up early to see me off, indeed to go with me for the first leg of the journey by boat, as far as Senju. It was not until they left me that I felt, with a jump of my heart, the three hundred miles I was proposing to go. Water stood in my eyes. I looked at my friends and the neat clusters of houses at Senju as if through rain. Fish and bird regret that springtime is so brief. This was my parting poem. My friends took copies, and watched till I was out of sight.

  On the beach at Sounion. Tar and seaweed shift in the spent collapse and slide of shirred green water just beyond our toes. We had been to see Byron’s name carved with a penknife on a column of Poseidon’s temple. Homer mentions this cape in the Iliad, perhaps all of Attika that he knew. It was here that the redstone kouros was excavated who stands in Athens by the javelin-hurling Zeus. We lie in Greek light. The silence is musical: the restlessness of the Ionian, the click of pebbles pushed by the seawash. There is no other sound. I am Hermes. I stand by the grey sea-shingle and wait in the windy wood where three roads meet. A poem? From the Anthology. Wet eyelashes, lens of water in navel. Another. To Priapos, god of gardens and friend to travelers, Damon the farmer laid on this altar, with a prayer that his trees and body be hale of limb for yet a while, a pomegranate glossy bright, a skippet of figs dried in the sun, a cluster of grapes, half red, half green, a mellow quince, a walnut splitting from its husk, a cucumber wrapped in flowers and leaves, and a jar of olives golden ripe.

  All that March day I walked with a wondering sadness. I would see the north, but would I, at my age, ever return? My hair would grow whiter on the long journey. It was already Genroku, the second year thereof, and I would turn forty-five on the way. My shoulders were sore with my pack when I came to Soka, a village, at the end of the day. Travel light! I have always intended to, and my pack with its paper overcoat, cotton bathrobe (neither of which was much in a heavy rain), my notebook, inkblock, and brushes, would have been light enough except for gifts my friends loaded me with at parting, and my own unessential one thing and another which I cannot throw away because my heart is silly. We went, Sora and I, to see the sacred place of Muro-no-Yashima, Ko-no-Hana Sakuya Hime, the goddess of flowering trees. There is another shrine to her on the lower slopes of Fuji. When she was with child, Ninigi-no-Mikoto, her husband, would not believe that she was pregnant by a god. She locked herself into a room, set fire to it, and in the flames gave birth to Hohodemi-no-Mikoto, the fire-born noble. Here poets write of the smoke, and the peasants do not eat a speckled fish called konoshiro.

  We set out, she and I, like Bashō on the narrow road to the deep north from his house on the Sumida where he could not stay for thinking of the road, of the red gate at Shirakawa, of the full moon over the islands of Matsushina, he and Kawai Sogoro in their paper coats, journey proud in wabi zumai, thinking of wasps in the cedar close of an inn, chrysanthemums touched by the first mountain frost. A few years before Minoru Hara and I had climbed Chocorua to find a single lady slipper on a carpet of pine needles, to which he bowed, Chocorua that Ezra Pound remembered in the concentration camp at Pisa, fusing it with Tai Shan in his imagination, Chocorua where Jessie Whitehead lived with her pet porcupines and bear, Chocorua where William James died, Thoreau’s Chocorua that he strolled up laughing that people used the word climb of its easy slopes. We set out into the deuteronomical mountains Charles Ives rings against The Rockstrewn Hills Join in the People’s Outdoor Meeting with the chime of iron on iron, sabre, bell, and hammer, bugle and messkit, ramrod and spur, remembering how congenial and incantatory music led the caissons over the Potomac to Shiloh.

  I spent the night of March thirtieth at Gozaemon the Honest’s Inn at Nikko Mountain. Such was my landlord’s name, which he made much of, assuring me that I would sleep out of harm’s way on his grass pillows. When a stranger so advertises his honesty, you take more care than ever, but this innkeeper was as good as his name. There was no more guile in him than in Buddha the merciful, and Confucius would have approved of his scrupulousness and manners. Next day, April first, we climbed Nikko, Mountain of the Sun’s Brilliance. The sainted Kobo Daishi named it and built the temple on it a thousand years ago. Its holiness is beyond words. You can see its benevolence in every field round about. In it I wrote: New leaves, with what holy wonder do I watch the sunlight on your green. Through the mist we could just make out Mount Kurokami from the temple on Nikko. The snow on its slopes belies its name, Black-Haired Mountain. Sora wrote: I arrived at Kurokami with my hair shorn, in new clean summer clothes. Sora, whose name is Kawai Sogoro, used to chop wood and draw water for me. We were neighbors. I aroused his curiosity and made him a student of scenery. He too wanted to travel to see Matsushima in its beauty, and serene Kisagata.

  Crickets creaking trills so loud we had to raise our voices, even on the beach down from the cycladic wall under the yellow spongy dry scrub with spiky stars of flowers. It is, he said, as if the light were noisy, all of it Heraclitus’ little fine particles cheeping away, madly counting each other. Thotheka! entheka! thekaksi! ikosieksi! khilioi! Ena thio tris tessera! Hair of the family of hay, torso of th
e family of dog, testicles of the family of Ionian pebbles, glans of the family of plum. Give us another poem, here by the fountain-pen-blue-ink sea. To Apollo of the Lykoreans Evnomos of Lokris gives this cricket of bronze. Know that, matched against Parthis in the finals for the harp, his strings rang keen under the pick until one of them snapped. But the prancing melody missed never a beat: a cricket sprang onto the harp and sounded the missing note in a perfection of harmony. For this sweet miracle, O godly son of Leto, Evnomos places this little singer on your altar. From the Anthology. So it’s Apollo and not Heraclitus running these nattering hoppergrasses and their katydid aunts and crickcrack uncles? And salty-kneed old Poseidon singing along from the sea.

  So Sora, to be worthy of the beauty of the world, shaved his head the day we departed, and donned a wandering priest’s black robe, and took yet a third name, Sogo, which means Enlightened, for the road. When he wrote his haiku for Mount Kurokami, he was not merely describing his visit but dedicating himself to the sacredness of perception. We climbed higher above the shrine. We found the waterfall. It is a hundred feet high, splashing into a pool of darkest green. Urami-no-Taki is its name, See from Inside, for you can climb among the rocks and get in behind it. I wrote: From a silent cave I saw the waterfall, summer’s first grand sight for me. I had a friend at Kurobane in Nasu County. To get there you cross a wide grassy moor for many’s the mile, following a path. We kept our eyes on a village in the distance as a landmark, but night came on and rain began to pelt down before we could get there. We spent the night at a farmer’s hut along the way. Next day we saw a farmer with a horse, which we asked the loan of. The paths over the moor, he said, are like a great net. You will soon get lost at the crossroads. But the horse will know the way. Let him decide which path to take.