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

upward from its flame, who had been present in Zurich when Lenin with closed eyes and his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat listened to the baritone Gusev singing on his knees Dargomyzhsky’s In Church We Were Not Wed, who had conversed one melancholy afternoon with Manet’s Olympia speaking from a cheap print I’d thumbtacked to the wall between a depraved adolescent girl by Egon Schiele and an oval mezzotint of Novalis, and who, as I had, Robert Walser of Biel in the canton of Bern, seen Professor William James talk so long with his necktie in his soup that it functioned as a wick to soak his collar red and caused a woman at the next table to press her knuckles into her cheeks and scream, a voyage in a hot-air balloon at the mercy of the winds from the lignite-rich hills of Saxony Anhalt to the desolate sands of the Baltic could precipitate no new shiver from my paraphenomenal and kithless epistemology except the vastation of brooding on the sweep of inconcinnity displayed below me like a map and perhaps acrophobia.

The balloon had shot aloft at Bittersfeld while with handsome Corsican flourishes and frisky rat-a-tat on the drum a silver cornet band diminishing below us to a spatter of brass and gold played The Bear Went Over the Mountain.

Cassirer lashed the anchor to the wicker taffrail and cried auf Wiedersehen to the shrinking figures below, ladies in leghorn bonnets, an engineer in a blue smock, an alderman waving his top hat, a Lutheran minister holding his bible like a brick that he had just been tossed, and little boys in caps and knee socks who envied our gauntlets, goggles, plaid mufflers, and telescope with fanatic eyes.

The winds into which we rose were as cold as mountain springs. Tattered wisps of clouds like frozen smoke hung around us. Unless you looked, you could not tell whether you sailed past the clouds or the clouds past you, and even then the Effect of Mach confused the eye, for the earth seemed to flow beneath the still gondola until this illusion could be dispelled, as when you look at a line drawing of a cube and sometimes see its far side as its front, Mach, who leaned over bridges and waited for the flip-flop of reality whereby he knew he was on a swift bridge flying down an immobile river, and none of us knows whether our train or the one beside us is sliding out of the station.

Cassirer turned and shook hands, gauntlet to gauntlet. I returned his toothy, Rooseveltian smile, though butterflies swarmed in my stomach, and a kitten tried to catch its tail.

Cassirer, able soul, adjusted blocks in tackle. Pink and violet clouds sank past us.

The balloon, O gorgeous memory, was as gaily painted as a Greek krater. An equatorial band paraded the signs of the zodiac around it. Red lozenges and green asterisks wreathed the top and neck. Ribbons streamed from the nacelle. The first ballast of sand was pouring down on the earth with the untroubled spill of an hourglass. Our shadow flowed over a red tile roof, a barn, three Holstein cows, a railroad track.

There was a dust of ice in the February wind into which we rose swinging like a pendulum.

When the perspective cube swaps its front plane for its back, have we not seen Einstein’s Relativitätstheorie with our own eyes? Or do we see the cube this way with one skill of the brain and that way with another? The left of the brain, where intuitions leap like lightning, controls the dextrous right hand, logic, speech, our sense of space. The right of the brain, where reason stands alert, controls the awkward left hand, suspicion, primal fear, our sense of time.

— Thus, Cassirer continued with a shout, the animal man is a chiasmus of complementary and contradictory functions.

This conversation had been going on for days. People used to talk to each other, back then, as I now talk to myself. But you are there, ich bitte tausendmal um Verzeihung! Can you hear, in this wind, the F-dur Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft anf den Lande? I can. Cassirer kept up a conversation as it bobbed into his head, while descending from a train, at a urinal, in his hip bath, from outside my bedroom door in the middle of the night.

— Our minds combine the hysteria of a monkey, he said, with the level intellect of an English explorer.

I cupped my ear to hear in the emptiness of the wind.

— Irrational faith, he said while upending a sack of sand, holds faithless reason above the waves.

I looked down at the plats of fields, villages, and roads. I felt the weight of my body drain away. My fingers clutching the wicker of the gondola were as strengthless as worms.

— You are white, he shouted.

— Vertigo, I shouted back.

— Now you are green.

— Das Schwindelgefühl!

— Brandywine? he offered, handing me a chill flask.

Ach, das Jungsein! Now that I have passed through them, I know that there are no middle years. I have gone from adolescence to old age. There is a photograph of me as a goggled aeronaut. I looked like an acrobat from the époque bleue et rose of that charming rascal Picasso. If only der Graf Rufzeichen could have seen me then! It would have been a shock worth arranging to confront the adlig old horse’s behind with his melancholy butler at such an altitude.

Lisa would have screamed, and Herr Benjamenta of the Institute would have frowned his frown, rumpling the wrinkles of a vegetable marrow into his pedagogical brow.

Knolls, canals, fields, farms, slid below us. We were like Zeus in the Ilias when he surveys the earth from the mare’s milk drinkers beyond the Oxus to the convivial herdsmen of Ethiopia.

— Altdorfer! Cassirer shouted. Dürer! Is this not, mein geliebt Walser, the view of beroofed and steepled Northern Europe you see from Brueghel’s Tower of Babel? The splendor of