A Table of Green Fields, Guy Davenport [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

Pastilles. Anne-Marie flopped down beside Marc. Grinning stare, eyes laughing.

—Progress, Bernard said, is what we made yesterday. Never look back.

—Zipper's stuck, said Julie, tugging.

Bernard propped on his elbows, watching.

—Pull up again, and then down. Not that I believe this.

—I had this feeling that the lizard had been there a thousand years, since Apta Julia of the Romans. Their bridge is still here, and their walls. French is just old, old Latin, and what if some of their gods that they brought with them are still around? Between the lavender fields and the hills they'd be, left behind.

—Anne-Marie's gaga, Bernard said, and whimpered. The pastilles are black currant. Pinch one out. Are Anne-Marie and Marc going up their pine?

—That was because Marc was bashful.

—Showing off, you mean.

—We're friends together, aren't we?

—Friends, said Marc.

—Friends, said Julie.

—Friends, said Anne-Marie.

—Friends, said Bernard.

Lavender is one of the verticillate plants whose flower consists of one leaf divided into two lips, the upper lip, standing upright, is roundish, and, for the most part, bifid; but the under lip is cut into three segments which are almost equal: these flowers are disposed in whorls, and are collected into a slender spike upon the top of the stalks. The whole lavender plant has a highly aromatic smell and taste, and is famous as a cephalic, nervous, and uterine medicine.

Theophrastos in his Plants places lavender (Lavandula spica) or, as his Greek is, iphyon, among the summer garland flowers, along with rose campion, the krinon lily, and sweet marjoram from Phrygia. He also mentions it as a flower that must be grown from seed.

Vergil in the second eclogue of his Bucolics puts lavender along with hyacinth and marigold among the aromatic herbs, and in his Georgies with thyme as forage for bees and a flavor for honey. John Gerard wrote in The Herball or General Historie of Plants (1597) that lavander spike hath many stiffe branches of a wooddy substance, growing up in the manner of a shrub, set with many long hoarie leaves, by couples for the most part, of a strong smell, and yet pleasant enough to such as do love strong savors. The floures grow at the top of the branches, spike fashion, of a blew colour. The distilled water of Lavander smelt unto, or the temples and forehead bathed therewith, is a refreshing to them that have the catalepsy, a light migram, and to them that have the falling sicknesse, and that use to swoune much.

The floures of Lavander picked from the knaps, I meane the blew part and not the husk, mixed with cinnamon, nutmegs & cloves, made into a pouder, and given to drink in the distilled water thereof, doth helpe the panting and passion of the heart, prevaileth against giddinesse, turning, or swimming of the brain.

John Parkinson in his A Garden of Pleasant Flowers (1629) says that Lavender groweth in Spain aboundantly, in many places so wilde, and little regarded, that many have gone, and abiden there to distill the oyle thereof whereof great quantity now commeth over from thense unto us: and also in Lanquedocke, and Provence in France.

 

 The Kitchen Chair

 

 

It was a breathless, gray day, leaving the golden woods of autumn quiet in their own tranquillity, stately and beautiful in their decaying, an afternoon soon after she had moved into a cottage at Grasmere to keep house for her brother William. She had brought a kitchen chair and a milking stool out into the fine weather, to write in her journal. There would be, in time, a garden where she sat, the public road to her left, the yellowing woods to her right. Tucking back a strayed strand of hair around her ear, opening her journal on her lap, she wrote: It is a breathless, grey day, that leaves the golden woods of autumn quiet in their own tranquillity, stately and beautiful in their decaying.

Johnson preferred gray; William, grey.

As in Horace, the words are in an order but are free to form associations of their own. Leaves, a verb, easily becomes a noun and takes up with golden, for golden leaves are what she's looking at. Leaves in the underworld are of gold, where the vegetation is all of metal, with mineral and crystal flowers. Autumn is Proserpina's return to the realm of artifice, where lifeless stone and iron pretend to be apple and pear. Autumnal decay is nature's grief over her departure.

Until she wrote autumn, her sentence was in English. Then Latin began to sift in: quiet and its cousin tranquillity, as if the older language had the power to cast a spell on us when we write. Decaying, she knew, meant falling, and thus she can entwine two roots and tie in the English fall under autumn. She cannot keep decay from meaning rot. Standing lies encoded in stately. The trees stand on their estate. Caesar (she imagines him on a horse) brought bella into Gaul. When the Norse king William brought it to Hastings, it had become beau, and to its noun beaute we English added the full.

Breathless is an apt word, even though it means both a stillness of wind on such a calm day as this, beautiful and voluptuously calm, and not breathing, as in death. With both meanings was Proserpina familiar.

Gray is a deathly color, and yet it is clouds, which are water, high and cold, the source of life, that grizzle the sky.

It is a breathless, gray day, that leaves the golden fall woods unanswering in their own stillness, kingly and comely in their dying.

 

 The Concord Sonata

 

 

AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON

At his small sanded white pine table in his cabin at Walden Pond on which he kept an arrowhead, an oak leaf, and an Iliad in Greek, Henry David Thoreau worked on two books at once. In one, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, he wrote: Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. In the other, Walden, or Life in the Woods, he wrote three such sentences, a paragraph which no intelligence can understand: I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers whom I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and