De vlinder en de wesp, or as Sweetbrier shows us, with much guffawing at Jantje’s Babrius out of Greek by way of an English crib, the butterfly and the wops. Ja ja, Jan agrees, Broeder Wops de wesp. Uncle Remus!
Butterfly seed a wops. Hans, not following, cries for help.
O me O my! moan the butterfly, didn’t I used to be a member of Congress could orate like thunder and lightning? Jantje knuckled his hair, turned in his tracks, and came up with Didn’t I in the Ridderzaal talk like a silver waterfall? Hans stared at him in unbelieving admiration.
Good show, said Sweetbrier to a smug Jantje, but too clever, my dear fellow, too clever by half, and it’s not Uncle Remus. A colonel of the regiment with my monument downtown, a man who when he went out, the street raised its hat.
Resigned comic disgust from Hans, chin on fist, out of it altogether. I did it into klomp Dutch for him, and got a golly am I dumb squinch and a grateful kusshandje. Jan thumbed his nose at him.
Now would you look at me, Sweetbrier went on, a bug! But you, Wops, was a mule. Don’t matter what we was, Wops come back with, it’s what we is.
Explain it! Explain it! Hansje wailed, beating Jan on the shoulders with his fists. Sweetbrier had found another, reading with the lens unseated from his broken spectacles.
Crow lit on sheep’s back. Sheep walked on, giving Crow a ride.
Jan translated directly into Hansje’s ear, his arms around his neck. Hateful old bird! Sheep got up the gumption to say. Was I a dog and you lit on my back, I’d snap you into a bunch of feathers and cat’s meat. To which Crow says: If I didn’t know who to pick on, Sheep Old Boy, would I have celebrated my birthday of one hundred years old?
Hans and Jan splashing highkneed from the sea, where Sweetbrier and I had been keeping an eye on them. They have been very good about their konijngetand bevrijding, containing it in the bedroll at night. We have all worn zwembad slipjen on the beach, out of deference to Sweetbrier, God knows why, some Dutch sense of British propriety, and I might have known that Jan’s courageous zeal to be unconventional and revolutionary would move toward its moment. I say! said Sweetbrier, were we supposed to see that? Which was Jan pulling down Hans’ swimslip and kissing his tummy. And Hans pulling down Jans’ swimslip and kissing first his navel and then his smattering of pubic hair. Naked, they whacked water from their slipjen, making glittering arcs, and snapped them at each other until Jan, his shoulder stung, cried quits. I think, I said, we were supposed to see. They’re rather full of themselves. Are they now? It was Hans, when they came and flopped beside us, who said, and in English, sex be wonderful.
Melnikov’s Green City comes from Jules Verne, who was raised on a river island and had the bargeman’s sense of an isolation enviably private but which could nevertheless observe its surroundings. And Melnikov’s childhood was spent in a forest outside Moscow, a deep green silence of a childhood.
In the dissonances and divergent energies disrupting the harmonic dance of the phalanx Fourier finds his sociology, the debate between the ill-fitting shoe and the foot that must wear it. Go barefoot, get a better shoe, abide the discomfort. Sweetbrier opposes the human, which he defines as reciprocated good will, to money, or the systematic exploitation of desire. The great difference of the Harmony will be a substitution of faith in good will for the Capitalist assumption that all exchanges are of something for money. Once people walked in the gardens at Giverny, and around the lily pond, because they were friends of Monet. Now they walk in those gardens by paying a bank, ultimately, for the privilege. In the Harmony, we will walk in those gardens when through good will and love we’ve earned the welcome to walk in those gardens. That is, Sweetbrier sees Harmonian space in a primitive way. Everywhere is sanctum, being there is a rite. What kind of rite? Social courtesy bred from justice and a poetic configuration of the world.
Chinstrap penguin, Jantje hoots at Hans, and reindeer together! South Georgia, says Hans as cool as you please.
Buffon’s gazelle
and the moustac monkey!
Cameroun.
Galago, potto, and colobe d’Oustallet!
Republic Centrafrikaans.
Terriers, thistles, grouse!
Schotland.
Kleuters en kinderen in a wading pool on the roof garden of Corbusier’s Unite in Marseilles naked and skinny except for some in sagging cache-sexes, though there’s one boy with a mist of early pubic hair, easy thicklashed eyes, brown as a brick, his spout straight out. Wholly fourieriste, Corbusier’s Unite, Sweetbrier says. The mode is urban rather than rural. The shops inside, on indoor streets, took awhile to catch on, French businessmen being wary and unimaginative, but they’re working quite well now.
Time dissolved? O yes, says Sweetbrier, we’ve done that, too. That’s why I wanted to talk with you. This bloody hateful century. It has made us all mean, vulgar, discontinuous. Nothing can be expected from anything except that some scoundrel will find a way to suck money from it.
Jan, his long maizesilk hair batched out around the high collar of his sweater, talks happily with Sweetbrier about his friendship with Hans. It is very beautiful, he says, and not at all sneaky. He tells of two older boys at his school, popular and good-looking both of them, who are in love with each other. One of them has a girlfriend, and sleeps with her a lots, and sleeps with his friend, too, when he can. It was a talk with these two that emboldened Jan. They showed him how, Hans put in.
6 FRUCTIDOR
Rilkean angels, complex essences in a wind of light, fibrous with articulate memories, accidental events enriched into significance, a cherished smile, a long afternoon, a concupiscent dream, disappointments salvaged by courage, are the quiring that Fourier saw as a destiny of attractions. They are harmonies of essences. They are kin to us. They are messengers in that the composite knows how to appropriate the random, knows what to do with lost time, with the found moment, with a memory of apples on an autumn afternoon, of pears eaten at a kitchen table, longing in our eyes.
Rosa Bonheur’s sister Juliette married Hippolyte Peyrol, their stepmother’s son by her first marriage.
Amsterdam by evening, Sweetbrier seen off, Jan and Hans delivered to Bruno and Kaatje. Jan, tout nu, gave Sweetbrier a hug while he was in his pyjamas our last morning on the island, and Hans kissed him on the nose. Called Sander and Grietje, who asked me over. An enormous painting well underway. I tell them, so as to think no more about it, that I’ll see if we can buy the house. O but we know we can! they say together. We’ve checked it all out. Zo.
Titian’s blond Turin on the brown Po turned into the dream cities of i metafisici before Nietzsche’s eyes. Through the geometric autumnal light of the arcades, citron and blue, he paced in his student overcoat, his every step reported by agents to King Umberto and the Pope. Carmen every night, ice cream and coffee while reading the Journal des Débats long melancholy afternoons. Here Teuton nostalgia for the classical fused with the new century only a decade away. Absence and presence pass through each other here like treble through bass. The agon is between Bizet and Wagner, between the Italian guitar and German horn. The sidewalks, he wrote dear Peter Gast, are serious, and the patrician architecture of such a dignity that no silly suburbs have dared face them with bourgeois impudence. And yet this philosophical city is gaily all yellow and reddish brown. And when Nietzsche strolls into a cafe and takes a chair at a table, someone says, eccolo! that man is a German officer, a professor with a degree. Give him the Journal des Débats to read. His thought is lectured on in Danimarca by Georg Brandes. People stop each other on the streets of New York to discuss his books. The yellowhaired youth of Norway and Sweden have thrown their Bibles away and parade through town with locked arms, shouting Nietzsche! Nietzsche! Nietzsche!
France is my watchlight,
England is my tree,
Spain is my city wall,
My sword is Italy.
Ireland’s my strong arm,
Germany my word,
Ohio is my heart’s love,
Build me a high house,
Angels at the eaves.
Grow me an apple tree
With a thousand silver leaves.
Grow me a pear tree,
A daughter of the sun.
Put yellow pears upon it
And bless them every one.
When we clasp our hands, the Shaker ordinances specify, our right thumbs and fingers should be above our left, as uniformity is comely.
Angel sitting in a Shaker chair. Bovid eyes, bonnet with long ribbons tied under chin, dulcimer with bow, red apron rich in pockets over blue dress, feathers as neat on the wings as scales on a fish. Be certain, it says, of the light.
7 FRUCTIDOR
Letter out of the blue from one Godfried Strodekker, chairman of the Nederlands Student en Arbeiterverbond voor Pedofilie. Admires my work on Fourier, the essays on sensuality, and my critique in general of industrial capitalist society. Hopes I may be in sympathy with what his group feels they have an ethical and moral responsibility to carry out as a social reform. Indeed, an imperative. That children are deprived of erotic affection and a fully sensual life is an injustice too long imposed by puritanical prejudices, ignorance, and the narrowness of bourgeois propriety. Kindred organizations in Denmark, Germany, and Sweden have made fair progress and have aroused great curiosity and interest as well as, needless to say, violent opposition largely hysterical. Invites me to a steering committee coffee on Wednesday next, to meet the leaders of the group, all of whom would feel greatly honored by my attending. Why do I imagine a balding scoutmaster with halitosis and eyes too wide open?
Pinecone, drachma, snailshell. My Rietveld table, my Spartan bed, my books and notebooks, clothes. Moving into Florishuis, as Grietje has named it already, will be simplicity itself. Not quite three trips of a wheelbarrow through Amsterdam streets, but close enough. Aside from paintings and the easel, Sander can carry all his possessions in one armload. Grietje, two suitcases.
Kaatje, of Hansje’s friend Jan Sinaasappel. He is impossibly heerlijk. He seems to know everything about animals and botany, postage stamps, the solar system, and God weet wat. He sits and discusses continental drift with Bruno, who says that for two cents he would steal him from the Sinaasappelen. Kaatje protests that she would die rather than snoop in Hansje’s or Saartje’s room, but when things are left in full view, they’re there, ja? Well, suddenly there are fisiek and erotisch magazines in several languages, with photographs and drawings of a very advanced kind. They’re Jan’s, else Hansje has snitched them from newsstands, which she rules out. But she has met Hilda and Gregorius Sinaasappel and all is as clear as daylight. Gregorius, a good sort if chuckleheaded, is some kind of museum curator, philologist, and scholar, and Hilda is a warmly messy tweedy toothy woman into charities, flowers, ecology, sociology, and what not. She said right off that her Jan and my Hansje seem to have bonded in a charming friendship. She and Gregorius had allowed Jan and Jenny to explore each other’s sexuality rather early on. Jan was now going through a phase of erotic imaginativeness which she and Gregorius were allowing to develop as it would. At home things were little short of incestuous, and she gathered that Jan and Hansje were cultivating a nicely sensual intimacy. She said all of this with lots of overlapping teeth and flashing intellectual glasses. So Kaatje feels the challenge to be equally liberal.
The animal that persists so stubbornly in portraits and family groups, genre scenes and townscapes as an accent or punctuation, descends from Jerome’s lion, itself a continuation of Orpheus with animals. Orion and his dog would be a beginning, or any animal bonded loyally to a human master. The interesting thing is that thereafter the portraitist feels the structural need to include a casual animal: it is part of the syntax. The animal is always low in the picture space, an iota subscript, usually minding its own business. Jerome’s lion sleeps. This symbol of tame domesticity, as taken for granted as the artist’s signature or traditional props (classical column, drapery, a glimpse of landscape) sometimes enters the painter’s alertness, as in Velazquez’s Las Meninas, where the dog is being prodded by a playful child. Picasso, in his variations, kept putting his dachshund Lump in place of the royal hound. What does it mean when the animal isn’t there?
The figures in Seurat’s Bathers, Asnières might be characters in a Maupassant novel. The Grande Jatte, Proust.
8 FRUCTIDOR
Modern karakter en openhartigheid. With Bruno and Hans in the park, a splendid afternoon, rows of sunbathers, an arterial flow of tourists, the benches occupied by nurses, regulars from the neighborhood gossiping, and those types you only see in parks who seem to range from well-appointed businessmen looking over the top of newspapers to frayed old parties having a social hour alone in the public cordiality of civic leisure. Dame Partlet and her boon-sister sandbagged in on their bench by outsized purses and Bijenkorf sacks just ahead of us were busily ignoring the teenagers not three meters away naked, enlaced, and kissing as if they never meant to quit. That’s fun, Hans remarked. You don’t know the half of it, Bruno said. Some of it, Hans said.
Darwin’s Notebook N. As forms change, so must idea of beauty. Surely we have taste naturally: all has not been acquired by education. Pleasure in the beautiful, distinct from sexual beauty, is acquired taste.
Quoi de plus moral que les hollandais, dans leurs pays? The question is Fourier’s (v.iv), probably without a smile.
We agree to a community of shared work to ensure that work which only each of us can do will be done in peace. We will all be each other’s servants, as needed. The important thing, says Grietje, is that we love each other. She and Sander love each other in defiance of custom, law, and biology. Because, she says, Sander is retarded in all the social graces, and is moreover about ten years old. His painting is a miraculous reversion to childhood, just when he was about to grow up. Saved in time! And with it, the passion for drawing. Perhaps, she reconsiders, not a reversion at all, but being fixed in midchildhood. A triumphant return to where he was before he got lost trying to grow up. He will never massacre innocent people or starve the hardworking. He will simply paint pictures and raise idiot sons and daughters. We’ll fuck ourselves into idiocy, so’s to be like the children. We will love Adriaan however he wants to be loved. He won’t tell us, Sander says. He likes me, he likes you. He likes Kaatje and Bruno. He made Hansje on Kaatje, and Bruno hugs him as lovingly as I do. But he and Bruno can talk, O how they talk, geometry and philosophy. Me, I don’t have any way to express how I like people except with my body. Sex, says Grietje, is everything, or it is nothing.
Of the Schröder-Schrâderhuis Grietje says there are no sides to the sides of things. In Florishuis the mad Theosophical designs of Malevich and the red squares and blue slats and white boxes quit tumbling about, as they do in a Kandinsky. In the art books a De Stijl room smells of fresh paint, sawn wood, and glue, but our rooms must smell of coffee, washed boys, Adriaan’s pipe, toast, linseed oil, turps, and potato soup.
Gossie mijne! said Hansje at the door, peeping around, his hair tussled into a jumble. It’s Ome Adriaan, he said for someone behind him to hear. Gode zij dank, came Saartje’s voice. And Jan’s Ha die Adriaan! Hansje in full view wore a recklessly assumed pair of underpants with Sinaasappel J Kastje 27 stencilled along the waistband and an inconvenient salience inside. Hoisted him and smooched his navel, getting a rib-squeezing hug of legs around my thorax. I’ll go away, I said, hiding my face in his midriff, I won’t even look, if I’ve trod on a scandalous romp. But Bruno did invite me over, and I’m not early. Whereupon a stitchless Saartje climbed my right elbow, lightly as a monkey, and holding onto my and Hansje’s necks, straddled my shoulder. Ho! whooped Jan, climbing the other side. They squealed, I groaned. With a confident wiggle Jan got astride my left shoulder and kissed Saartje crisply. By turning my head in the crush I could kiss three tummies, as I did, getting a hei! from Jan, oof! from Hans, and fijn! from Saartje. Again! said Hans. O ja! said Saartje, we all like it. Unbesp
adgered—they all jumped down backwards on the chanted count of three—I sprawled crumpled on the couch. They sat leaning against each other on the floor at my feet. Jan had pulled on short but unzipped pants. We were experimenting, he said brightly. Mijnheer Keirinckx told Hansje that his technique in jacking off is greeny, too quick, and altogether incompetent. He said, Hansje chimed in with a matey grin, that I do it like an urchin whipping off in an alley. He says I ought to take my time, get it feeling good, and keep it feeling good for as long as I can before skeeting. Girls, Saartje said, can go on and on. Jan stuck out his tongue at her. This generation! I sighed, for their amusement. They like to be reminded of their privileged modernity.
Ongelofelijk, said Bruno, but this afternoon I saw a tiener and his girl doing it in the park, all their clothes enlisted as a cushion for her behind. Several of their pals were telling a policeman not to have an evil mind, and not to suppress joie de vivre with tiresome statutes written by Calvinistischen in the days of Rembrandt. Jan had a why not? look on his face, Saartje and Hans grins that they meant to be knowing. Adriaan and I, Bruno said, remember when it was the last word in daring to be bare-assed on the beach. Hansje had something to say about this, but swallowed it. Jan, who had listened with concerned eyes when Bruno told about the lovers in the park, was not to be deterred. How long, he asked, is long? His dubious upper lip arched over chisely teeth. You’re going to say it depends. Ask for information and you always get it depends for an answer. Saartje called him impolite and a grump. I complained that I wasn’t being given a chance to answer. So how long? Hansje asked. Sander Floris, I said (and Bruno looked relieved), for whom you’ve modeled, was an adolescent when I took him under my wing. Still is, said Bruno. He’d had a disturbed childhood and was in and out of considerable trouble before he discovered that he was an artist of great talent. In getting turned around right, he backtracked, so to speak, through a misspent adolescence, and lived it over again, his mind a veritable sun of alpha waves. I gave statistics for Sander’s stamina. Jan whistled. Bruno looked smug. Hans said, O wow.
Apples and Pears Page 19
