Da Vinci's Bicycle, Guy Davenport [best motivational books to read TXT] 📗

He teaches him the structure and meaning of the world. The man Griaule, the frangi, who comes every year in his aliplani, sits before him. He makes marks along thin blue lines on pressed white pulpwood fiber finer than linen, putting a mark for every word.

Ogotemmêli touches the silver stylus with which Griaule makes the marks, runs his fingers over the thin leaves where the marks are put. The Hogon had decided: tell the white man who for fifteen years has come to Ogol asking, asking, tell him everything.

He already knows many things, the rites, the sacrifices, the order of the families, the great days. But never yet have they told him the inmost things, for fear that he would not understand. It was Ogotemmêli at the council who thought that he might understand.

He is like a ten-year-old child, but he is uncommonly bright, he had said to the Hogon. Might he not understand the system and the harmonies if they were explained to him slowly and carefully, as one instructs a boy? Besides, he gives our words to others.

The Hogon spoke with the Hogon of their brother people in the valley, who spoke with Hogons over near the sea, up and down the river, until it was decided that the white man was to know. So Ogotemmêli lights his pipe. Good thoughts come from tobacco.

IV

In the beginning, he said, there existed God and nothing. God, Amma, was rolled up in himself like an egg. He was amma talu gunnu, a tight knot of being. Nothing else was. Only Amma. He was a collarbone made of four collarbones and he was round.

You have heard the Dogon say: the four collarbones of Amma are rolled up together like a ball. Amma is the Hogon of order, the great spendthrift of being. He squanders all, generosity unlimited, and arranges what he squanders into an order, the world.

Amma plus one is fourteen. Say Amma and you have said space. For Amma to squander he needed space. He is space itself and only needed to move himself outward, to swell himself out, like light from the sun, like wind from the mountains, like thunder.

Three days after Picasso learned the word moose he was pronouncing it muse. It has a nose the likes of which you see on critics but the horns they have still verdaduramente the glory of God in them from the week of creation, a beast part hill, part tree.

You love all that’s primeval, Gertrude says, while I love all that’s newer than tomorrow. What is cubism but tilting our vision, ceasing to pretend that we see with our heads in a clamp? Each eye sees, that is Cézanne’s lesson, eyes move in looking, that is yours.

Matisse began to include the edges especially of women as they are seen a little more to the left than you would see if the right is there and a little more to the right than you would see if the left is here, a primitive and intelligent way of looking.

And then with Spanish generosity Pablo gives us more tilt of head everywhere, even in the middle of things, like Mercator’s map. She has told him with an earnestness that makes him whinny that if he were to fly he would see that the world is a cubist painting.

In an aeroplane? Braque and I wanted to build one, can you imagine? But only for a little while. We liked the shape, the circles of the wheels so balanced with the lines of the body. But no, Jertrude old girl, you’ll never get me up in one of those things.

An alcool framboise at the Closerie: the laughter of Apollinaire and Picasso, tears running down their cheeks, and Gertrude’s cackle right along with them, pounding each other’s backs, was there anything like it? One sees a lot of gypsies, the waiter said.

V

Of Diktynna not even the waff of a talus as she slips behind a sycamore, nor the rax of her talbots as they up and pad sprag after the crash of her toggery. Her cats, though, his cats are here, tabby and pied, get of the friends of the enemy of silver.

He lies under a slant stone bearing at its corners parabola, hyperbola, circle, ellipse. Bones, buttons, dust of flesh. High the jugal line would jut, and mortal holes gape where once there had been the iambus of his wink, a dust of flowers sifted through his ribs.

The fluid tongue is now trash. The bones of his thin fingers lie crossed over the immortally integral crocket of pubic hair, inert with silicon, gray and zinziber, mingled now with the rubble and pollen of his landlady’s hydrangeas and Charles Gide’s last roses.

La série distribue les harmonies, the stone reads. Les attractions sont proportionelles aux destinées. Elm leaves lie crisp and stricken upon the lettering. A porcelain wreath of some antiquity shares the moss and lichen that are claiming the slab.

ICI SONT DEPOSES LES RESTES

DE

CHARLES FOURIER

NE A BESANCON LE 7 AVRIL 1772

MORT A PARIS LE 10 OCTOBRE 1837

The series distributes the harmonies. Linnaeus died when he was six, Buffon when he was sixteen, Cuvier was his contemporary. Swedenborg died the week before he was born. All searched out the harmonies, the affinities, the kinship of the orders of nature.

All of nature is series and pivot, like Pythagoras’ numbers, like the transmutations of light. Give me a sparrow, he said, a leaf, a fish, a wasp, an ox, and I will show you the harmony of its place in its chord, the phrase, the movement, the concerto, the all.

The morning before we went to Fourier’s grave we watched President Giscard-d’Estaing walk from his inaugural up the Champs Elysées to the Arc, republican, pedestrian, affable. There was no La Marseillaise, no parade. Hatless he