Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  CASTOR AND POLLUX IN TORINO

  De Chirico moved from dreams of Italian plazas at four o’clock in the afternoon with train trestles which are also aqueducts with impost arches to a butterscotch neoclassicism generated by the motif of Castor and Pollux, and painted as if by a blind Raphael. They were there all along, questi eroici fratelli, questi gemelli, invisible among the metaphysical pineapples and shattered Niobes, invisible as stars in daylight. Nietzsche put them there, seeing them athletic and blank of eye beside the black-blinkered smoking carriage and dray horses who spoke to him from time to time, of time, of the eternal return, of character and fate. I know you, Horse, Nietzsche said. You are the floss-silk-maned stallion of Alkman’s dawn dance for girls dressed as doves. I have heard of your rolling eye in Anakreon, the hollow thunder of your hooves in Sophokles, the noble pace of your gait in Homeros. And, replied the horse, Kastor and Polydeukes, tall and square-shouldered as gods, have walked with me in Spartan pastures.

  SPACE

  Joris immensely happy to come with me to the island for the weekend. Says he has too few outings, that Lenin liked outings, that in a people’s republic the outing would be a ritual. He made on over the boat, the crossing, the cabin, the perfect isolation. A philosopher’s place, like Lenin’s quiet place in the Moscow woods, and how easily he could have missed ever seeing one! Particularly taken by the open fire, vistas of trees and sea out the windows. Would I, later on, read him poetry, or some pages of a philosophy book? Asked me to teach him table manners. He has felt lost at Godfried’s, having to learn by looking. Would I help him with grammar in Dutch and in English? Good talk by the fire. Bedtime, a choice of sleeping bag or bed. This confused him. Share the bed! Whyever not? What was the problem? It’s a chilly night. We snuggle under good wool army blankets, and sleep. The bed’s narrow, I admitted, but Sander and I manage to be comfortable in it, and we’ve made do, several times, with Hans and Jan between us. Seems he’d never slept with anyone. That is, not to sleep. Considering his leanings, he’d thought I wouldn’t want to share a bed with him. Godsnaam! We’ll be the snugger and the easier. Wel zo! he said, grinning and blinking, thumbs hitched in the pockets of his narrow jeans with the uitspringend crotch, I’m as clean as a whistle, no crud between the toes, no microbe cultures anywhere, all surfaces and crannies neurotically policed. Us Dutch! He undressed with studied grace, folding socks across parallel sneakers, jeans packed square, shirt rolled, Lenin cap and wristwatch, down to a hard-fitting undershirt and sexy blue briefs. Wry inspection of my flannel pyjamas and a question in his eyes as he peeled down his briefs, pouched his cheeks in doubt, and tugged them back to a neat fit again.

  POLIS KAI EROS

  A dark uneasy sea outside: weather is always part of a conversation. By our kind fire we work on Joris’ brochure for the NSAP. In any consideration of erotic isonomy, Erewhon appears. Joris admits that the spadgers and striplings in Spartansker Yngling open before us in their lean leggy comeliness toasted by August light are the very ones his revolution is to free from the thralldom of capitalist repression. Physique he does not doubt is character. Fourier imagined the phalanx to be a genetic pool, like a people, Chinese or Zulu or Mongol, so that beauty would be in the local idiom. Joris’ theory is that ugly people are unloved, unhappy people. We must, he says, free society from its fear of itself. We must free the troll from his iron burrow, the politician from his lies, the economic system from its dependence on war. They say to Eros, these trolls, you may not, you cannot, you must not.

  FELICITER

  Genoeglijk kan de voorhuid gemakkelijk over de eikel worden teruggeschoven.

  A LETTER FROM SWEETBRIER

  My dear Quaggamaster! Fondest remembrances to Hans and Jan. Have you read Serres? The genepool is, among other things, a reservoir of differences. Big feet, little feet, big ears, little ears, all the anatomical distinctions catalogued only in ars erotica, Hokusai’s Kinoye no komatsou, and the Dutch Erewhonians: encoded in genes, concentrated or diffused in the gene pool. Difference is potential energy. If we are to believe the second law of thermodynamics, differences in temperature, in electrical charge, in gravitational force are what get dissipated in closed systems. Without differences, everything becomes homogenous mush. Entropy is not chaos but uniformity. Reverberant bounce must be the Harmony’s dance, difference caroming off difference, energy jostling energy. Mathematically, information measures improbability. If one of eight equally probable events happens, it carries more information than an event that’s one of two equally probable states. Diversity, you see, informs. And improbability turns out to be another way of talking about difference, which in turn means information, like energy, which is yet another way of talking about difference. Meaning moves by contrast. In Serre’s essay on Lucretius, he distinguishes between science inspired by Venus (that of Lucretius, and let us add, Fourier) and science inspired by Mars (that of everybody else, to hear him tell it). The science of Mars is obsessed with laws of regularity. Regularity, of course, turns out to be repetition. Thus Serres thinks science is dedicated to abolishing novelty and change. His science of Venus starts with the clinamen of the atomists (the swerve atoms make when they fall), which he identifies as the minimal angle to laminar flow that can initiate a turbulence. Turbulence is Aphrodite’s work, Leonardo’s sinuosities, Pound’s sea-swirl. Turbantibus cequora ventis: pockets of turbulence scattered in air or water, breaking the parallelism of repetitive waves. This is a physics of vortices, of sweetness and smiling voluptuousness, the sea-swept movement of intertwined lovers (one force plunging like waves in tidal wrinkle, the other spiraling like spinning water). Suave ventis vexari voluptas. Lovers, winds, trees, grasses move in the voluptuous roll of the high seas, the turn of the galaxies. Desire is linear, its achievement a convolution. Poincare’s protoform of the earth was pear-shaped, evolving toward apple. The Bands and Hordes swarm. Their passional movement is curvilinear. Eros is design mastering accident. Our point of view, of course. From an angel’s, it’s like what you say about accident and design. Aphrodite’s wild chance, and Ares is symmetry.

  HORDES

  1881, the year Franz Hellen was born, swarms of the red admiral (Vanessa atalanta) encrimsoned Russia.

  RAMS’ HORNS ARE CURLED

  All this sociology and psychology, Godfried says, even with Frits Bernard, all these case histories and cobbled together Greek and Latin medical words, none of these can get anywhere near Eros. Our alienation of the animals is like our alienation of children from the characteristic events of human fate. Both are a gratuitous cruelty, the result of timidity and fear, of smallness. We’ve disguised ignorance as science. Human nature does not change, only humanity. Greek love of children may have been a survival of a common Neolithic sentiment, or it may have been an invention, unlikely, to link the Theban Phalanx into a fence of shields.

  THE CAUSE

  Olaf’s article for Spejderpatrulje a candy box of idealism and Erewhonian logic, Godfried consulting Erasmus while adding Nietzschean tinges, Erasmus vastly pleased to be consulted, his canted eye acquiring a tickle. Knuckles to chin, he agrees and questions, jumping up to dash at Tobias playing spaceship at the windows, who has remarked a dozen times, if only we would look, you can see every star.

  NAZOMER VAN SINT MAARTEN

  Islandbound, we’re to brown Wolfje in the last summer sun. Jan in his butt-cheating nasty pants carrotyellow at the shove of his pecker’s neb in an oval stain, tugs on jersey, socks, and sneakers. He asks the time, says he must nip home and see if he and Jenny can go to the island with us, wat leuk. A ferocious hug for Hansje still poodlenaked, handshake for me, and kiss, een smaakje van eikel. And strode off on slender brown legs with horsy knees, out to the parade ground milling with zebras and quaggas to mount his Strookstreep and prance with the Ned Ludd Spokkelmaandwind. Eskadron! Erewhonian pioneers on patrol! We shall ride along eating strawberries, bred upon Terra by the silver planet Mercurius. We shall ride along singing in Porcupine.

  GIVERNY


  Fourier’s attraction is the dialect of the logos which every individual imagination finds most articulate. Whitman’s grass was such a dialect of the logos, Einstein’s light, Homer’s fire and wheat, Monet’s lilypond, rivers, and fields of haystacks. Monet’s eye kept to the processes of water and light, from water-table to clouds. The haystacks stand in fields reclaimed from the old European marshlands, the draining of which was the basis of culture. The lilypond is a remnant of the marsh restored by Monet. The Japanese footbridge across it spans where he has diverted the Epte to pool in his garden before it flows into the Seine at Vernon, detained for study. Symbol, or focus of attraction, is pivot, generating a series of affinities in a territorial parameter of the functions of the series. The phalanx of attention correlates accident with design.

  COFFEE, SCHETSBOEK, PIPE

  De Volkskrant and Wolfje’s bright citron underpants with wolfcub pawprint where he left them by Strabo to niddle his dink, sic ait, until every slide was jam. Grietje, reading Columella in her nest of cushions, had lent a hand, Wolfje patient with her good intentions until Sander, sorting out ideas with me about Seurat’s Asnières, noticed his fastidious pout, hooked him across to us with a long reach of foot, laid him on his lap, and took over his advancement into sweet idiocy as absentmindedly as Grietje but with a resourcefulness more to Wolfje’s liking. Nu ja, Grietje said, they’re the same age. What, Adriaan, is your notebook with all the neat writing and collages for? His work it is, said Wolfje. He told me. My work is to help Sander, to learn to read, and to be the house cricket. Also, when the Blue-Eyed Nipper comes, to talk to it and wash it and kiss its bellybutton to make it laugh.

  BODIES AND PLEASURES

  The focus of resistance to sexuality as a deployment of negations ought not to be sexual desire but bodies and pleasures with comprehensive desires in a harmony of attractions synergetic of integrity. Subtitles, please, says Grietje. To assign all knowledge to Homer, Strabo writes, is zeal beyond its limit: as if one hung apples and pears (mela kai ongknas) on an Attic garland of flowers and leaves. Sander! she howls, translate the subtitles. It means, says Sander, that if you’re nibbling peanuts while reading Proust and playing with yourself, you should also grab Wolfgang and kiss him if he’s near. Isn’t that right, Adriaan? Better, I say, a Belgian hare in the cabbages at Angelus. Pears of Anjou, apples of Brittany, a wooden bowl, lace curtains at the rectory windows. Hollyhocks. A family of hedgehogs. That’s what I said, says Sander. Adriaan speaks Adriaan. I speak Sander. Wolfje speaks chocolate from ear to ear, getting the paint on flat, even, and within my lines. He speaks hugged by everybody, peterproud in his spiffy togs. Ideas come from tall trees along a country canal, from cabbage gardens as along the Epte, from swimming, walking, watching the sea from a window of the island cabin, from a sky thick with mares’ tails.

  PROSPECT

  On canvases four meters square Sander sets out to paint us all in Hokusai curvilinear Mondriaan, as Harmonians, to make, he says, brush in teeth, hands in backpockets of his jeans, with a shuffle of feet, the future a little less impossible. Hans and Jan ask to be painted with their arms around each other’s shoulders, dressed in the cavalry outfits of the Little Hordes. Beside Hans, sitting, a fennec. Beside Jan, a silver wolf. Very Pisanello, he specifies. Grietje on a quagga, Wolfgang on a pony. Studies for the big Island, these portraits. Sander’s Grande Jatte.

  SLAAPMAAT

  Phone rang midevening, all of us in the studio, Sander and Wolfgang painting, Sander revising the lines of a quagga, Wolfgang whiting out the ground around a zebra, Grietje and I reading. Hilda Sinaasappel. Jan rather imaginatively and very seriously wants to come over and spend the night with Wolfgang. He put it to us so frightfully honestly. What did I think? Fine by us, I said. Is this something Wolfgang and Jan planned? No no, said La Sinaasappel, I rather suppose Jan thought it up, brooded on it, and sprang it on us. Whistled impoliticly. Why do you whistle? she asked. Just being stodgy, I said. Hans and Jan had spent the large part of the afternoon with their moppy heads stived between each other’s thighs in assuaging and arousing, arousing and assuaging, natural urgencies with abandon and affection. Just who, Hilda Sinaasappel asked, is this young Wolfgang? A stray boy I took in from the streets, adopted freehandedly by Grietje and Sander. At the moment he’s applying flat color to one of Sander’s Hordes on Patrol canvases, apt as any Dutchman with a brush. Jan came on the line, asking to speak to Wolfje. Whose telephone style turns out to be all huh? and I guess so and come on over and yeah, I could want to. Hilda back on: Gregorius will drive Jan over. Wolfgang, hand in pocket feeling himself, returned bowlegged and tiptoed to the painting. Sander, mouth hanging open, looked him over gawking, shook his head. So Grietje and I went downstairs to say hello to Gregorius and take in Jan who, pyjamas and toothbrush in hand, kissed his father goodnight and greeted us with a handsome good-natured smile. Something new, Grietje said just before they arrived. O God, I give Wolfgang his bath, he seems to like it, and tuck him in, though he has yet to stay in, coming to sleep in whoever’s bed he can invade. Do I tuck them both in? Where, in the Badger Sett in your room or in Wolfje’s bed in ours? Sander will put them in bed with us, for the fun of it.

  THE STAR MILL

  At Time Zero where the equinoctial hinges of the sky were Gemini and Sagittarius with the Milky Way arched between them, both signs made of two bodies, like the Fish and the Virgin with her wheat ear at the two other corners, the road was open for gods and men to come and go into each others’ realms, wisdom seeking the ears of the perplexed, loving arms coming upon beauty, odd dancing with even, and will again, when the wheel of time has rounded its turn.

  WHITE LIGHT

  Asémanthropos the Electron Man has clicked on the lights of his eyes. Too bright. The wall cracks, the air smokes, shadows go red, charts scorch, time melts. He dims down the scale: sunlight on polished steel, anti-aircraft search lights, firetruck headlamps, Hegel’s brain after a bait of phosphorus, Roman candles, sixty-watt bulb, nightlight.

  MORNING LIGHT

  Sander in, bawdily curious, bringing me coffee, a cunning hilarity to his stare at both boys in my bed, asleep not quite so much in each other’s arms as in each other’s legs. Cozy, said Sander. Very, I said. Do they stink? Anything that looks that much like two della Robbia choirboys collapsed in bliss must have something to make them human. Human! First, when I finally got to sleep, here was Wolfje helping himself to my bed. And after some conversation I won’t shock you with, he scampered out and came back with Jan. Between them they have sixteen elbows, thirty-two knees, at least four heads, and enough damp penises to wreck Comrade Joris’ composure for a week. All this around 2:30. If, said Sander, you don’t tell me that conversation I’ll pour this coffee over all of you. Well, translated from the demotic, they had sustained, by mutual excitement, a hyper-sensitive euphoria in the neural ganglia of their weewees for some unconscionable time, expressing their pleasure therein with whimpers, yelps, and whispered salacities long on expressiveness if short on polish, then they had swiveled and swapped spermatozoa, this reciprocal affection and piggish rootling being replayed five times, if I could have heard correctly, after which their central nervous and cardiovascular systems shut down intercommunications for the night, and Comrade Wolfgang began to nod off, but had the energy to nip over to me and curl himself into my hairy bosom. I asked him, kindly enough, if something had gone wrong that he had left Jan. Left Jan? They had, he said, done all they could do. Yes, but Jan came to spend the night with you, and you’ve left him. He’ll be hurt. Do you think so? I know so. His heart will be broken. Silence from Wolfje. Then he went away and came back with Jan. And here we are. I think it’s rather much that both the little buggers have erections. You too, said Sander. Bladder, I said. They have erections because they’re both sloshing about in wet dreams about spaceship commanders, soccer teams, Saartje and Jenny, and probably you. Naw, said Sander, I’m big brother to Wolfgang and grownfolks to Jan.

  GAMME

>   Avant garde. Selfless friendship (Damon & Pythias, Hans & Jan)

  Aileron ascendant. Friend through admiration, attraction, delight.

  Aile ascendante. Friend through common views, hobbies.

  Pivot. Love (Jonathan and David, finding oneself in another)

  Aile descendante. A friend abided.

  Aileron descendant. A friend for company.

  Arrière garde. Selfish, with ulterior motives.

  FLORISHUIS

  The Shaker Submarine, Grietje calls it. Shipshape, whistle clean, as sharp as Dutch Calvinist Platonism can make it. Sander grins. But it is a house of houses: Adriaan has scads more room than in his old apartment. He has us in his hair all the time. We have a flow of space top to bottom, side to side, for visual generosity and agrophilia. We redefine privacy.

  PARTITA

  Przewalski gingko Sander grass

  Tarpan hornbeam Grietje Val Dordogne

  Jack Russel sweetgum Wolfgang parkwalk

  Brown bear beech Bruno forest

  Dikdik mimosa Saartje savanna

  Shetland pony laurel Hansje tulipfield

  Springbok olive Kaatje meadow

  FUGUE

  Reason, but people are irrational. Honesty, but people are hypocrites. Decency, but people are mean, jealous, and spiteful. Candor, but people are cowards and liars. Irony, but people are stupid. Stoic forthrightness, but people are lazy, careless, and selfish. Satire, but people are humorless and their minds without dimensions. Example, but people are witless. Admonition, but people are sheep. What then, O Diogenes?