Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  Any architect reading Fourier, as Sweetbrier observes, sees that he anticipated all our concerns, or what should be our concerns: space as congenial as a grove of trees, the right space for work. Nothing like the department store, hotel, gymnasium, or apartment house had evolved by his time. The private room had to wait for chimney, fireplace, and stove to proliferate from the center of the house, and for glass panes to windows. Fourier would approve of the military encampment, the tent city, becoming the youth hostel of today. He would have liked the bicycle and would have put the bands and hordes on them. But the industrial revolution, which in a sense his phalansteries would have prevented, was the end of his hopes. It was humanity moving into a new serfdom to the machine and to the monotony of treadmill regularity that he was calling to in his books, without knowing what he was warning them away from. He was inviting us back onto the land, bringing the city with us in small neighborhoods, to a future of eccentric, local, imaginative city-farms incapable of warfare and intent on being rich in the necessities, opulently luxurious in the passions, in the arts, in civilization, just when mankind was being drawn into the slums of cities and the hell of factories. The machine, which thrives best on war, claimed them as its vassals. Ned Ludd had been right. Butler had been right.

  The machine cannot produce without overproducing. It gluts its market. To force this excess onto the market, Capitalism began eating itself, like a hyena its own bowels when it is wounded. If the investors in a business think there’s a market for quaggahide, they kill every living quagga. Because (and here is where Fourier began to think) it is not gloves from quaggahide that interest the industrialist, but money. Capitalism recognizes two values only: money, and what can be sold for money.

  12 FRUCTIDOR

  Yellow pear, red apple. Tante Magda wrapped green pears in twists of newspaper and put them in the bottom drawer of her wardrobe until they were mellow. We ate them on autumn evenings.

  The apple is a kind of solid rose.

  Screening of Olaf’s propaganda films at Strodekker’s. Hemeltje. Joris called in the afternoon, asked if I planned to go, and suggested that he drop by after work. Perhaps we could grab a bite of dinner and go out together.

  He turned up in the Lenin cap, black fisherman’s sweater, work trousers, for all of which he apologized (this Radical Socialist), holding up a shopping bag of what he said were his evening duds. Jandorie! he sang of Sander’s painting of Hansje wearing only a bandana around his neck. Mijn petekind, I said. Boffer! As he admired other paintings, books, furniture, I explained the boxes of things, and that I was moving to a whole house which I’d bought, where I’m to live with the painter of Hans’ portrait, and his sister.

  Strodekker, he said, I thought was cultivated, but this! All these books. He admitted to vast curiosity about where I lived, how I lived, chattering and stuttering about everything he saw, darting from one thing to another, running his fingers down the backs of books, reading titles aloud. The more he talked and paced, the more he stuttered. I suggested a drink to calm him down. Doesn’t touch the stuff, but would join me in a sip. Can’t figure you out at all, he said with a big grin. Nor I you, I said with I hope as affable a grin. You came to our committee coffee, he said, the most radical group in Holland, and didn’t bat an eyelash. Talk about cool!

  He began a running self-critique of the kind the selfmade bore you with, but piquant enough. That the NSAP had shuffled his life and reorganized the parts. He felt new, fresh, clear-headed. He was different from his fellow workers at the printshop, not only in lusting for his own gender, but in being a reader and a thinker. He was an optimist. He was well on the way to understanding the finer things. He’d seen an ad in the magazine Zuigen, had written, had been invited to meet Strodekker and his group. Goddank! he said, slapping both thighs. You must realize, he said, looking at me so earnestly that his head turned sideways, the silly wonder of talking for the first time with an educated man about brooddronkenheid, a hankering to hug gossoons, about social justice, boyish charm, biological imperatives, and even the laidback lift of a throbbing good hourlong wank. Strodekker was over Joris’ head in lots of things, but what counted was the man’s plain honesty, his easy friendliness, ja?

  Soup and sandwiches here, a happy idea that pleased Joris immensely. He jumped at the offer of a shower before changing for the films. It is common among the shy to plunge into overconfidence when they’ve overcome reticence, and Joris, toweling, asked me to check out, as he said, his build, which is splendid, and to note, as I already had, that he was hung by Mother Nature when she had cock on her mind. He’s filled out a bit, Joris said, dangling it out of plumb, because he knows we’re going to see towheaded cubs with freckles.

  His dress clothes were not all that different form his work clothes: soft clean faded snug jeans, plaid cotton shirt, the fisherman’s sweater, the cap. Smile even friendlier.

  The films. Olaf made a stumbling talk about the Cause in Denmark, picking himself out of syntactical wrecks with stunning blushes. Strodekker straightened a phrase or two. First film, Hvalpetid, voice-over in Danish, began with a close-up of a nimflijk girl, thirteenish, a secret in her eyes and lips puckered to tease us with it. I thought of acting lessons and aspiring directors. Then a boy in fuller close-up, snubnose, serious longlashed eyes, lips parted in amused amenability. Camerawork adroitly modern in abrupt transitions and an elliptical grammar of images. Boy and girl in school togs, books overshoulder in satchels, skipping along a path in a park. They stop, look into each other’s eyes, laugh, kiss. Kiss on sunroom wicker chaise longue, well-appointed middle-class household. Kiss on swimmingpool edge, girl topless, breasts in their springtime, her slipje a white triangle held on by a string. The boy’s as cursory. Accelerated sequence of the two undressing fast, fingers scurrying, shirt and blouse tossed aside, shoelaces undone in a flurry of flickers. This intercut with slow motion: as if the afternoon light in which they undressed were as dense as water, a sock drawn off with a dreamy sluggishness, panties languidly hauled down. Close-up of lips nearing to kiss in lyric delay. Exploded by a frantic speeding up in which every stitch is snatched off and they collapse entwined into a bouncing jumble of chintz pillows. Followed by the two playing tennis, bicycling, holding hands in a museum interspersed with shots of his hand on the crotch of her panties, the two reclined nose to nose, his finger quiddling her clitoris, two fingers exploring inside. Her face in the gasp of an orgasm, his eyes closing in pleasure and flying open in delight. The girl snuggled naked in the arms of an older sister (says voice-over), learning things and liking what she hears. The boy and girl suiting up in pyjamas for bed. Then a medley of images, every other one of the boy’s or girl’s face smiling happily, the others of suntanned fingers opening wet labia, a cherubic mouth sliding onto his penis, her back arching into a climax induced by fingers, her behind bucking. The first shot of them at it was so intimate that the eye had to resolve the bulb of flesh in and out of focus, and the shuttling stalk, into fucking seen from a hand’s length away. Next was from the top of their heads, a saucy little butt thumping beyond tumultuary hair. Ended with their walking complacently along the hallway of a very modern house, bejeaned and sweatered, holding hands. Zichzelf verklaren, and a film that hived an agreeable cordiality into me, for all its sentimental didacticism. Glossy magazine sex, Joris commented. Capitalist myth.

  Second film, West German, Wenn Sie Wollen. Fine color tones, silvery highlights. Summer house, lots of glass and natural wood. Pines, a lake, July or August. People at a trellis table, a family eating out of doors. Two boys, a little sister. Cut to boys, fourteen and twelve, in a canoe. Older wears an orange cap with bill, low-waisted slim short pants that come to just above his knees. Younger, blue-and-white-striped sports shirt and slight yellow slipje. Shots of soccer fields, Boy Scout tent encampments, school gymnasium, scads of naked boys running along a beach: voice-over keeps saying comrades, as in all these takes our two exchange winks, beaming glances, shoulder hugs, knowing looks. A bedroom at
the summer house, the two dressing after a swim, no evasion by the camera of the veertienjaaroud’s sparsely bushed, or the twaalfjaaroud’s hairless nakedness. A nimbly-paced sequence of the two hiking through romantic meadows, wrestling on a river beach, bicycling, riding horses naked. The images then begin to find the wellustig with a telling eye, camera moving down from older boy’s fetching grin to the fly of his trousers. In an idyllic view of the older reading a book while scrunched down in a chair boy-fashion, camera noses around to close in on the poke of an erection under compliant cloth. A run of full-screen details in abrupt succession, repeated in different order: longing eyes, a tan nipple, laughing eyes, a boyish penis, succinct briefs plump of pod, flat abdomen with tight navel, adolescent penis with eyelet and disc of glans wet in the foreskin’s ellipse of aperture, a jeans zipper drawn down and parted by spry fingers, younger boy’s nose wrinkling like a rabbit’s, back of boy’s head with long perfect cylinder of neck rising from naked shoulders to a sunny involution of muddled hair, an impudent, lean behind, the dimpled corner of a mouth kissed in friendly salute. Exposition of theme thus developed, film bounds the two upstairs and into a meticulously modern bedroom congenial with northern light. Earnest-eyed, radiant with sincerity, they rub affectionate cheeks while undressing, nudge their cocks together, flop on the bed, and jack each other with practiced skill. They kiss, awkwardly, as if trying to locate something in each other’s mouths. Camera wanders from kiss to rigid cocks to flexing toes to stylish Danish clock on dresser, which advances twenty minutes in a sweep. Camera looks at things in room: shirts, jeans, briefs, and socks on the floor, an Olympic poster of a male swimmer full length, the magazine Emanzipation on a desktop, cover depicting two very healthy boys nose to nose and cock to cock, their arms over each other’s shoulders, eyes keen with exalted aspiration. Back to boys on bed, rocking their hips and shuffling their heels. They sit up, swivel around, and address each other’s crotches in a sprawl of long legs and too many elbows. Close-up of lips sinking onto a cock. Much agitated flopping and arching of backs, fingers closing around a scrotum, heads bobbing between thighs. Final shot is of the boys, dressed and looking smugly pleased, with the family on the lawn around the summery outdoor table (grapes in baskets, bottles of wine, books, a frosted pitcher). Pecked kisses all around, Mama, Papa, und kleine Schwester, and for each other. Fierce idealism in everybody’s eyes.

  Naderhand, Strodekker making notes in a minutebook with a silver pencil, having the air of a man in his element, the dedicated secretary of a committee with a cause. What did I think? What I thought was gunst! Which got me a tolerant, friendly smile. The fucking little rascals, in de fleur van zijner jaren (such phrases, said Strodekker’s look, will get you nowhere at all), Joris said, unsnapping his jeans to resettle his underpants which, he happily explained, had squirmed awry. Olaf said the films were topnotch, from the cinematic point of view. Joris brought up social realism. Strodekker felt that their effectiveness was in educating sensitivities, beguiling away ingrained fears, but not, dear Lord, overnight.

  Some clips from an erotisk instruktionsfilm which Olaf is working on, these sequences of his Spartansker Yngling troop, of which he is scoutmaster. Mig, he said of the sturdily upreared whopper that appeared on the screen, its slathered glossy glans and vascular stalk almost instantly sloshed in a mesh-work of guttering zaad, webbing the fingers of the attending hand. Wel allemachting! Joris said in honest awe, that’s you, yours? Personlig, said Olaf. And in English, jolly good, what? Look at this dazzler: a Ganymedish towhead, around thirteen, who runs his briefs down long tan legs (Bandaid on one knee) with the grace of a deer bending to nibble, shakes his hair back into place with a smile for the camera, tugs on his penis with a doorhandle grasp of the foreskin, and, sitting with spread thighs, gives himself over to the hand of an older boy who’s half-dressed in student cap, open troop shirt with Gemini shoulderpatch, and tall white socks. Continued, camera changing angles, until three milky driblets seeped out, appropriated by a tonguetip. A mere tad of a spadger with big brown eyes and raagbol hair, is the younger brother, Olaf explained, of the fast kid there with the opstopper nose (fast kid wallowing on a cot with two others, a tumble of puppies). Thoroughly and precociously trained at home by Big Brother, he’s one of the yeastiest of the gang, never quite running down.

  Olaf whistled the Padvinder marching hymn he wants to use on the soundtrack, along with some passages from Sibelius.

  13 FRUCTIDOR

  Florishuis, as we name it, is structurally sound. Our brooms and the new vacuum cleaner uncover a beautiful interior that wants paint and spackling and scrubbing only to make it the exact plainness of space and surface we want. Lights and water activated, roof inspected. We’ve set up a camp in the studio, top floor, as HQ from which to work. Pallets to sleep on, a hotplate for coffee.

  In this new house my mind balances in an unexpected serenity, as if I had fallen into step with the pace of time. Place has become peace itself. One side of the brain treats space temporally, the other time spatially. In the moment of balance, place achieves a harmony with time, and their two mysteries of infinite extension, omnidirectional for space, a forward direction only for time, become one mystery, for all the directions of space move in the direction of time: upward, downward, out along the radii from all points. Ubi coordinates with quando if the larch has reddened and geese stream overhead, quando with ubi if our train slows.

  An adventure, says Kaatje. Trust you, Adriaan, to make this happen. Sander and Grietje enjoy the illusion that they thought it up and talked you into it. But they did. Caca, she replies.

  Culture, says Lévi-Strauss, is not merely juxtaposed to life nor superimposed upon it, but in one way serves as a substitute for life, and in another, uses it and transforms it, to bring about the synthesis of a new order.

  François Marie Charles Fourier, born at Besançon 7 April 1772, the second birthday of the English philosophical poet William Wordsworth. A six heures du matin. Eighteen years later he would change the spelling of the family name from Fourrier to Fourier, perhaps to claim kin with Jean Pierre Fourier de Mataincourt, who in 1597 founded the School Sisters of Our Lady. A cloth and spice merchant, his father. Three sisters, no brothers. Mother a Muguet, illiterate but devout. Little Charles a serious and scholarly child, with a sensual streak in his gravity. He was passionately fond of sweets, and when he was seven wrote an ode on the delight of eating, read as a funeral oration for a pastry cook. He also loved flowers, geography, and music, so that his room in childhood, as for all of his life, was full of potted plants and maps. Quite early he saw that businessmen and bankers are unprincipled scoundrels, crooks, and jackals.

  The series distributes the harmonies. The attractions are proportionate to our destinies. Character is fate.

  Studied classics at the Collège de Besançon, after which he was placed in a commercial firm at Lyon. Business took him to Paris, where he admired the arcades of the Palais Royale and appropriated them in his imagination for the family houses as large as villages which he called the Phalanx of the Harmony. Business took him to Rouen, where he was disgusted by the mud and traffic, to Marseilles, where he saw a shipload of rice dumped into the sea to keep prices high, to Bordeaux, to Strasbourg, and to The Netherlands, where in the polychrome tulip fields he had a vision of children dressed in the colors of the barbarians riding in hordes and bands on quaggas from phalanx to phalanx in a New Harmony.

  The gospel is advancing

  And freedom is commencing

  With leaping and with dancing

  We’ll hail the Jubilee.

  The fire is increasing,

  The flame is never ceasing.

  I feel I am releasing,

  And now I will be free.

  Now in the strength of union

  Subdue the great Apollyon.

  Believers in communion

  Proclaim the Jubilee.

  And while the trump is sounding

  And Antichrist confounding

 
; Our love and zeal abounding

  Determined to be free.

  With freedom I’m delighted,

  I will not feel affrighted

  Come let us be united

  And sound the Jubilee.

  The bands of sin are breaking,

  The devil’s kingdom shaking,

  And his foundation quaking

  Because we will be free.

  The gospel fire is blazing.

  The world will wonder, gazing.

  They say it is amazing.

  Is this your Jubilee?

  But we will shout like thunder

  And fill the World with wonder.

  We’ll break our bands asunder

  And then we will be free.

  In 1793 Fourier inherited eighty thousand livres, which he converted into merchandise: cotton, rice, sugar, and coffee. The troops of the Convention besieged Lyon, trying to subdue the extremist wing of the Gironde. Fourier’s cotton bales were requisitioned by the city for the defenses, his rice, sugar, and coffee to feed the populace trapped in the walls. So says Pellarin. Hémardinquer says that Fourier’s fortune was lost in a shipwreck in 1799. Like Henri Rousseau, Fourier distributed various versions of his biography. In any case, his trials under the Terror at Lyons left him with a lifelong hatred of violence and of revolution. The wars of The Harmony would be of kindnesses outdoing kindnesses. The besieging armies of the Phalanxes will arrive singing to horns and drums, laden with carts of flowers and pastries. Spermando, standing in the stirrups of his quagga, shouts at the gate that the Grand Horde Jaufre Rudel with all its stormwings and whirlwind attachments has come to love the Phalanx Jules Supervielle into idiocies of ecstasy.

  To breed meanness out of human nature.