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

great can stretch a thread however fine into a horizontal line that is absolutely straight.

 

 Mr. Churchyard and the Troll

 

 

When the chessboard in the coffeehouse seemed an idle ruse to beguile away the hours, and the battlements around Kastellet with their hawthorn and green-shanked moorhens and pacing soldiers ran thin on charm, and his writing balked at being written, and books tasted stale, and his thoughts became a snarl rather than a woven flow, Mr. Churchyard, the philosopher, hired a carriage to the Troll Wood for a long speculative walk.

The lout on the box was eating peasecods from his hat. —To the Troll Wood, Mr. Churchyard said, tightening the fit of his gloves.

The sky was Baltic, with North German clouds.

Copenhagen was a thunder of rolling barrels, squeaking cart wheels, hooting packetboats, Lutheran brass bands, fish hawkers, a racket of bells.

And impudent imps of boys crying after him Either! Or! while their sisters warned 'E'll turn and gitcha!

If it were a lucky afternoon, the troll would be in the wood. Mr. Churchyard knew that this troll, so strangely beautiful in a mushroomy sort of way, was a figment entirely in his mind, the creature of overwork, indigestion, or bile, perhaps even original sin, still it was a troll.

Socrates, that honest man, had his daimon, why not Mr. Churchyard his troll? Its eyes looked at him from among leaves, above. Its hair was Danish, like thistledown, and was neatly cut and finished, the shape of a porridge bowl. He did not come when called. You had to sit on a log, and wait.

The wood was of mountain ash and beech which had grown thick and dark among flocks of boulders silver with lichen and green with moss. Underfoot, spongy and deep, lay a century's mulch of fallen leaves, through which the odd wild-flower pushed, convolute and colorless of blossom, from the morning of time. We are welcome in meadows, where the carpet is laid down, with grass to eat, if we are cows or field mice, and the yellows and blues are those of the Greek poets and Italian painters.

But here, in the wood, we intrude. Across the sound, in Sweden, there are forests with tall cone-bearing trees, and wolves. Nature has her orders. A wood is as different from a forest as a meadow from a marsh. Owls and trolls live here. And philosophers.

In Plato's grove you heard the snick of shears all morning long, and rakes combing gravel. Epicurus spoke of necessity and fate while watching his grass lawn being rolled smooth. Aristotle and Theophrastos picked flowers in Mytilenian meadows, under parasols. And there was the Swede Linnaeus, as he called himself, who studied nature in Dutch gardens, yawned at by fat English cats.

The troll was somewhere over there, where the leaves shifted.

If Nikolai Grundtvig were here, or Mr. Churchyard's brother, Peter, the bishop, they would invite the troll to join them in a jolly folk dance.

Was that a foot in the ferns, with cunning toes? If there was one troll, there were two. It would have a wife. Nature would have it so. And young. Why should one doubt trolls when the god has kept himself hidden all this time?

When Amos talked with the god, was Amos talking to himself? For the god is hidden in light, in full view, and we cannot see him.

Curled, small fingers in the beech leaves. Fate must drop like a ripe apple. He was not especially eager to see the troll. He was not, despairingly, eager to see the god, even if he could. He had, twice now, seen the troll. It was its singularity that was important. Beyond that he could not think. There was the pure goodness of the god, all but unimaginable, and there was the pure sensuality of Don Giovanni, imaginable with the cooperation of the flesh, and there was the pure intellect of Socrates, easily imaginable, as the mind, that trollish ganglion, like Don Giovanni's mutinous testicles, was a gift from the god.

Hegel's brain in a jar of formaldehyde on the moon.

The troll was another purity, that much was certain, but of what? Your coachman, Mr. Churchyard, is sitting out there, beyond the copse, picking his nose and waiting.

The troll had said its name was Hitch. Was it of an order, upward from the mushroom (which, he could now see, it was munching) as angels are an order downward from the god? He did not see it as one finds Napoleon in the drawing of two trees, where you find his figure delineated by the branches, but as an image soaking through the fabric of vision, leaf-and-berry eyes, peanut toes, sapling legs. An acorn for sex.

—There are interstices, Mr. Churchyard said, taking off his tall hat and setting it on the log, through which things fall. In one of the spurious gospels, for instance, there is Jesus choosing Simon from among the fishers drawing up their net. And with Jesus is his dog. Or a dog.

—Yes, Lord, Simon says, coming willingly.

—And when he calls you again, says the dog, you are to answer to the name Peter.

This has been edited out of the gospels as we have them, by some high-minded copyist who did not notice that an animal whose whole soul is composed of loyalty and whose faith in his master cannot be shaken by any force, neither by death nor by distance, is given a voice, like Balaam's ass centuries before, to remind us that our perception of the otherworldly is blind.

And then in a fanciful Acts of the Apostles there's a talking lion who works as a pitch for Paul and Barnabas.

—Hello folks! Though I am only a numble beast, and have no theology, I'm here to get your attention and invite you to rally around and listen to my dear friends C. Paulus, a Roman citizen, and Joseph Consolation Barnabas, who have a message for you.

A blue-eyed lion, washed and fluffed for his public appearance, paws as big as plates.

Was that the troll, there, peeping from behind a tree?

—We met last autumn, Mr. Churchyard said in a voice he used for children, when the sky was packed with clouds like hills of dirty wool, and a mist smoked along the ground. You would not, you know, tell me your name,