Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  These were the hills whose elegiac autumns Ives summons with bronze Brahms as a ground for Lee standing in his stirrups as he crossed the Mason and Dixon Line while a band of Moravian cornets alto, tenor, and baritone, an E-flat helicon bass horn, drums battle and snare, strutted out the cakewalk dash of Dixie. The rebels danced in rank and gave a loud huzzah! These are the everlasting hills that stand from dawn time to red men to French hunter to Calvinist boot to rumors from farm to village that the bands played waltzes and polkas under the guns at Gettysburg when the cannonade was at its fiercest. We trod these hills because we loved them and because we loved each other, and because in them we might feel that consonance of hazard and intent which was the way Ives heard and Cezanne saw, the moiré of sound in the studio at West Redding where a Yale baseball cap sat on a bust of Wagner, the moiré of light in the quarries and pines at Bibémus. What tone of things might we not involve ourselves in the gathering of in these hills? With each step we left one world and walked into another.

  I mounted the farmer’s horse. Sora walked beside us. Two little children ran behind us. One was a girl named Kasane. Sora was delighted with her name, which means many petalled. He wrote: Your name fits you, O Kasane, and fits the double carnation in its richness of petals! When we reached the village, we sent the horse back by itself, with a tip knotted into the saddle sash. My friend the samurai Joboji Takakatsu, the steward of a lord, was surprised to see me, and we renewed our friendship and we could not have enough of each other’s talk. Our happy conversations saw the sun across the country sky and wore the lantern dim way past moonrise. We walked in the outskirts of the town, saw an old academy for dog hunters—that cruel and unseemly sport was of short duration in ancient times—and paid our respects to the tomb of the lady Tamamo, a fox who took human shape. It was on this grave that the samurai archer Yoichi prayed before he shot a fan, at a great distance, from the mast of a drifting boat. Her grave is far out on the moor of grass, and is as lonely a place as you can imagine. The wind traveling through the grass! The silence! It was dark when we returned.

  Leaves not opposite on a stem arrange themselves in two, five, eight, or thirteen rows. If the leaves in order of height up the stem be connected by a thread wound round the stem, then between any two successive leaves in a row the thread winds round the stem once if the leaves are in two or three rows, twice if in five rows, thrice if in eight, five if in thirteen. That is, two successive leaves on the stem will be at such a distance that if there are two rows, the second leaf will be halfway round the stem, if three rows, the second leaf will be one-third of the way around, if five, the second will be two-fifths of the way around; if eight, three-eighths; if thirteen, five-thirteenths. These are Fibonacci progressions in phyllotaxic arrangement. The organic law of vegetable growth is the surd towards which the series one-half, one-third, two-fifths, three-eighths, and so on, approximates. Professor T. C. Hilgard sought for the germ of phyllotaxis in the numerical genesis of cells, the computation of which demonstrates Fibonacci progressions in time.

  The tomb of En-no-Gyoja, founder of the Shugen sect, who nine hundred years ago used to preach everywhere in humble clogs, is in Komyoji Temple. My friend Joboji took me to visit it. In full summer, in the mountains, I bowed before the clog-shod saint’s tall image to be blessed in my travels. Unganji the Zen temple is nearby. Here the hermit Buccho, my old Zen master at Edo, lived out his life in solitude. I remember that he once wrote a poem in pine charcoal on a rock in front of his hut. I would leave this little place, with its five foot of grass this way, five foot of grass that way, except that it keeps me dry when it rains. We were joined by some young worshipers on the way. Their bright chatter made the climb seem no time at all. The temple is in a wood of cedars and pine, and the way there is narrow, mossy, and wet. There is a gate and a bridge. Though it was April, the air was very cold. Buccho’s hut is behind the temple, a small box of a house under a big rock. I sensed the holiness of the place. I might have been at Yuan-miao’s cave or Fa-yun’s cliff. I made up this poem and left it there on a post: Even the woodpeckers have not dared touch this little house.

  The first thing to go when you walk into the wilderness is time. You eat when you are hungry, rest when you are tired. You fill a moment to its brim. At a ford shoaling over rocks we doffed our packs, took off our boots and jeans, and waded in our shirttails for the childishness of it. Creek-washed feet, she said, as God intended. We dried in the sun on a boulder as warm as a dying stove, and fribbled and monkeyed with each other, priming for later. Jim Dandy! she said, and purred, but we geared up and pushed on, through Winslow Homer glades and dapple and tones that rose as if horn-heralded across sunny fields and greendark woods and tonalities now lost except for the stubborn masks of their autochthony, Ives imitating a trumpet on the piano for Nikolai Slonimsky and hearing at Waterbury gavottes his father had played during the artillery barrage at Chancellorsville, Apollinaire hanging a N’tomo mask of the Bambara on his wall beside Picassos and Laurencins, Gaudier drawing Siberian wolves in the London Zoo, tonalities with lost coordinates, for essences survive by chance allegiances and griefs: the harness chains on the caissons moving toward Seven Pines, dissonance and valence.

  We ended our visit at Kurobane. I had asked of my host that he show me the way to Sessho-seki, the famous killing stone which slew birds and bugs that lit on it. He lent me a horse and guide. The guide shyly asked me, once we were out on the road, to compose a poem for him, and so delighted was I with the surprise of his request, that I wrote: Let us leave the road and go across the moors, the better to hear that cuckoo. The killing stone was no mystery. It is beside a hot spring that gives off a deadly gas. Around it the ground was covered with dead butterflies and bees. Then I found the very willow about which Saigyo wrote in his Shin Kokin Shu: In the shade of this willow lying kindly on the grass and on the stream as clear as glass, we rest awhile on the way to the far north. The willow is near the village Ashino, where I had been told I would find it, and we too, like Saigyo, rested in its shade. Only when the girls nearby had finished planting rice in a square of their paddy did I leave the famous willow’s shade. Then, after many days of walking without seeing a soul, we reached the Shirakawa boundary gate, the true beginning of the road north. I felt a peace come over me, felt anxiety drop away. I remembered the sweet excitement of travelers before me.

  All of that again, he said, I long to see all of that again, the villages of the Pyrenees, Pau, the roads. O Lord, to smell French coffee again all mixed in with the smell of the earth, brandy, hay. Some of it will have changed, not all. The French peasant goes on forever. I asked if indeed there was any chance, any likelihood, that he could go. His smile was a resigned irony. Who knows, he said, that Saint Anthony didn’t take the streetcar into Alexandria? There hasn’t been a desert father in centuries and centuries, and there’s considerable confusion as to the rules of the game. He indicated a field to our left, beyond the wood of white oak and sweet gum where we were walking, a field of wheat stubble. That’s where I asked Joan Baez to take off her shoes and stockings so that I could see a woman’s feet again. She was so lovely against the spring wheat. Back in the hermitage we ate goat’s cheese and salted peanuts, and sipped whiskey from jelly glasses. On his table lay letters from Nicanor Parrá and Marguerite Yourcenar. He held the whiskey bottle up to the cold bright Kentucky sunlight blazing through the window. And then out to the privy, where he kicked the door with his hobnail boot, to shoo off the black snake who was usually inside. Out! Out! You old son of a bitch! You can come back later.

  The great gate at Shirakawa, where the North begins, is one of the three largest checkpoints in all the kingdom. All poets who have passed through it have made a poem of the event. I approached it along a road overhung with dark trees. It was already autumn here, and winds troubled the branches above me. The unohana were still in bloom beside the road, and their profuse white blossoms met those of the blackberry brambles in the ditch. You would think an early snow h
ad speckled all the underwood. Kiyosuke tells us in the Fukuro Zoshi that in ancient times no one went through this gate except in his finest clothes. Because of this Sora wrote: A garland of white unohana flowers around my head, I passed through Shirakawa Gate, the only finery I could command. We crossed the Abukuma River and walked north with the Aizu cliffs on our right, and villages on our left, Iwaki, Soma, Miharu. Over the mountains beyond them, we knew, were the counties Hitachi and Shimotsuke. We found the Shadow Pond, where all shadows cast on it are exact of outline. The day was overcast, however, and we saw only the grey sky mirrored in it. At Sukagawa I visited the poet Tokyu, who holds a government post there.

  Dissonance chiming with order, strict physical law in its dance with hazard, valences as weightless as light bonding an aperitif à la gentiane Suze, a newspaper, carafe, ace of clubs, stummel. And in a shatter and jig of scialytic prism-fall quiet women, Hortense Cézanne among her geraniums, Gertrude Stein resting her elbows on her knees like a washerwoman, Madame Ginoux, of Aries, reader of novels, sitting in a black dress against a yellow wall, a portrait painted by Vincent in three quarters of an hour, quiet women at the centers of houses, and by the pipe, carafe, and newspaper on the tabletop men with a new inwardness of mind, an inwardness for listening to green silence, to watch tones and brilliances and subtleties of light, dawn, noon, and dusk, Etienne Louis Malus walking at sunset in the gardens of the Palais du Luxembourg, seeing how twice refracted level light was polarized by the palace windows, alert to remember what we would see and hold and share. From fields of yellow sedge to undergrowth of wild ferns tall as our shoulders, from slippery paths Indian file through trees to bear walks along black beaver ponds we set out to see the great rocks rolled into Vermont by glaciers ten thousand years ago.

  Tokyu, once we were at the tea bowl, asked with what emotion I had passed through the great gate at Shirakawa. So taken had I been by the landscape, I admitted, and with memories of former poets and their emotions, that I composed few haiku of my own. The only one I would keep was: The first poetry I found in the far north was the worksongs of the rice farmers. We made three books of linked haiku beginning with this poem. Outside this provincial town on the post road there was a venerable chestnut tree under which a priest lived. In the presence of that tree I could feel that I was in the mountain forests where the poet Saigyo gathered nuts. I wrote these words then and there: O holy chestnut tree, the Chinese write your name with the character for tree below that of west, the direction of all things holy. Gyoki the priest of the common people in the Nara period had a chestnut walking stick, and the ridgepole of his house was chestnut. And I wrote this haiku: Worldly men pass by the chestnut in bloom by the roof. We ended our visit with Tokyu. We came to the renowned Asaka Hills and their many lakes. The katsumi iris, I knew, would be in bloom, and we left the high road to go see them.

  Sequoia Langsdorfii is found in the Cretaceous of both British Columbia and Greenland, and Gingko polymorpha in the former of these localities. Cinnamomum Scheuchzeri occurs in the Dakota group of Western Kansas as well as at Fort Ellis. Sir William Dawson detects in strata regarded as Laramie by Professor G. M. Dawson, of the Geological Survey of Canada, a form which he considers to be allied to Quercus antiqua, Newby., from Rio Dolores, Utah, in strata positively declared to be the equivalent of the Dakota group. Besides these cases there are several in which the same species occurs in the Eocene and the Cretaceous, though wanting in the Laramie. Cinnamomum Sezannense, of the Paleocene of Sezanne and Gelinden, was found by Heer, not only in the upper Cretaceous of Patoot, but in the Cenomanian of Atane, in Greenland. Myrtophyllum cryptoneuron is common to the Paleocene of Gelinden and the Senonian of Westphalia, and the same is true of Dewalquea Gelindensis. Sterculia variabilis is another case of a Sezannè species occurring in the upper Cretaceous of Greenland, and Heer rediscovers in this same Senonian bed the Eocene plant Sapotacites reticulatus, which he described in the Sachs-Thüringen lignite beds.

  But not a single katsumi iris could we find. No one we asked, moreover, had ever heard of them. Night was coming on, and we made haste to have a quick look at the urozuka cave by taking a shortcut at Nihonmatsu. We spent the night at Fukushima. Next day I stopped at Shinobu village to see the stone where shinobu-zuri cloth used to be dyed. It is a composite stone with an amazing facet smooth as glass of many different minerals and quartz. The stone used to be far up the mountain, I was told by a child, but the many tourists who came to see it trampled the crops on the way, so the villagers brought it down to the square. I wrote: Now only the nimble hands of girls planting rice give us an idea of the ancient dyers at their work. We crossed by ferry at Tsuki-no-wa—Ring around the Moon!—and came to Se-no-ue, a post town. There is a field nearby, with a hill named Maruyama in it: on this hill are the ruins of the warrior Sato’s house. I wept to see the broken gate at the foot of the hill. A temple stands in the neighborhood with the graves of the Sato family in its grounds. I felt that I was in China at the tombstone of Yang Hu, which no person of cultivation has ever visited without weeping.

  Through forests of sweet gum and hickory rising to larch, meadows of fern and thistle, we came toward the end of a day to an old mill of the kind I had known at Price’s Shoals in South Carolina, wagons and mules under its elms, dogs asleep in the shade beneath the wagons, chickens and ducks maundering about. This New England country mill was, however, of brick, with tall windows, but with the same wide doors and ample loading platforms. It was a day in which we had lost time. I interrupted our singing along a logging road to say that my watch had stopped. So had hers, she said, or the map was cockeyed, or night comes earlier in this part of New Hampshire than anywhere else in the Republic. Clouds and a long rain had kept most of the day in twilight. A new rain was setting in for the night. But there was the mill, and we were saved from another night of wet such as we had endured the second night out. Tentless, we had slept in our bedrolls zipped together into one on a slope of deep ferns and waked to find ourselves as wet as if we had slept in a creek. The map showed shelter ahead, which we had expected to reach. But there had been the strange advancement of the day in defiance of my watch, which had stopped hours ago and started up again. What luck, to chance on this old mill.

  In the temple I saw, after tea with the priests, the sword of Yoshitsune and the haversack of his loyal servant Benkei. It was the Feast Day of Boys and the Iris. Show with pride, I wrote of the arms in the temple, the warrior’s sword, his companion’s pack on the first of May. We went on and spent the night at Iisuka, having had a bath in a hot spring beforehand. Our inn was dirty, lampless, and the beds were pallets of straw on an earthen floor. There were fleas in the pallets, mosquitoes in the room. A fierce storm came up in the night. The roof leaked. All of this brought on an attack of fever and chills, and I was miserable and afraid of dying next day. I rode awhile and walked awhile, weak and in pain. We got as far as the gate into County Okido. I passed the castles at Abumizuri and Shiroishi. I’d wanted to see the tomb of Sanekata, one of the Fujiwara, a poet and exile, but the road there was all mud after the rains, and the tomb was overgrown with grass, I was told, and hard to find. We spent the night at Iwanuma. How far to Kasajima and is this river of mud the road to take?

  Our packs off, the sleeping bags laid out and zipped together, supper in the pan, we could listen to the rain in that windy old mill, hugging our luck and each other. Packrats in little white pants, and spiders, and lizards, no doubt, I said, and we will make friends with them all. Her hair had lost the spring of its curls and stuck rakishly to her forehead and cheeks, the way I had first seen it as she climbed from a swimming pool in the Poconos. What are you talking about? she asked. She searched my eyes with a smiling and questioning look. I thought by such comic inquisitiveness that our luck was hard to believe. The mill there, Sweetheart, I repeated, pointing. A grand old New England water mill, dry as a chip and as substantial as Calvin’s Institutes. She looked at the mill, at me again, and her mouth fell open. The stone step
s to the door rose from a thicket of bramble we would have to climb across with care. There was something of the Florentine in all these old brick mills. Their Tuscan flavor came from architectural manuals issued by Scotch engineering firms that had listened to Ruskin and believed him when he said there was truth in Italian proportions and justice in Italian windows.

  With what joy I found the Takekuma pine, double-trunked, just as the olden poets said. When Noin made his second visit to this tree, it had been cut down for bridge pilings by some upstart of a government official. It has been replanted over the years, it always grows back the same, always the most beautiful of pines. I was seeing it in its thousandth year. When I set out on my journey the poet Kyohaku had written: Do not neglect to see the pine at Takekuma amid late spring cherry blossoms in the far north. And for him, as an answer, I wrote: We saw cherry blossoms together, you and I, three months ago. Now I have come to the double pine in all its grandeur. On the fourth of May we arrived at Sendai across the Natori River, the day one throws iris leaves on the roof for good health. We put up at an inn. I sought out the painter Kaemon, who showed me the clover fields of Miyagino, the hills of Tamada, Yokono, and Tsutsuji-ga-oka, all white with rhododendron in bloom, the pine wood of Konoshita, where at noon it seems to be night, and where it is so damp you feel the need of an umbrella. He also showed me the shrines of Yakushido and Tenjin. A painter is the best of guides.