Eclogues Read online

  —There is but one sky, Paulus said with absolute conviction.

  —Is there now? Pappas said, and was instantly confused.

  —And one god, who made the one world.

  Their talk went on, prying, poking, colliding. Pappas said that to us folk the Jews are wonderfully strange, so picky about everything.

  —We are freed from all that, Barnabas said. There is now but one law, to love each other as we love ourselves.

  —We will eat pork with you, Paulus put in. We will mix flesh and milk. We will do as you do in these matters, out of friendliness, to have that much in common with you, to be that much your brother. The philosophers of the Greeks say that all things are the same substance in many states: that air and water are the same material. It is the creating hand of God that has knit from one thread the grasshopper and the lightning, a horse and a dandelion. To know that should make us shout with joy. To make a grasshopper is one thing, to make it alive is another, to make it a world to live in is another, and to fit it into the community of all living things is yet another. Let us praise forever the maker of living things!

  —We do, Pappas said. We always have.

  Spot barked, Rover barked, Tanglefoot barked, Silverheels barked, Old Red barked, Sylvia barked, Diana barked, and Hermes tore the air in half with a bray that shook the water in the well and gave the chickens fits.

  I added my whistle to the music when I saw what had come into the yard.

  A white bull wearing flowers on its horns. The archon in his festival dress. The priest. Altar boys in camlets, their hair braided wet and shiny. A priestess in her Thesmophoriazousa embroideries, with baskets of wheat and cornflowers. Drummers. Pipers. And behind them the town, some climbing our wall. Silverheels was cutting backflips. Sylvia was barking so hard her ears were flat along her neck and her tail was whipping like a willow switch. The bull was dropping flop.

  The priest came halfway to our door. He planted his staff. He spread a hand on his chest.

  —Come out, Lord Zeus! he shouted. Come out, Lord Hermes! Thy supplicants beg mercy at your knees. We bring a perfect male beast. We bring our adoring hearts.

  The travellers Paulus and Barnabas huddled behind Papa and Pappas, wonder on their faces.

  No one said a word. Grandmama held me by the shoulders. We backed away from it all together.

  Paulus squared his shoulders and taking Barnabas by the elbow boldly walked outside.

  —Brothers, he said. What means this pageantry?

  The priest and his priestess kneeled.

  —O Lord of the World! they had just enough breath to say.

  Paulus put his hands to his temples. Barnabas wrung his.

  —Brothers! Paulus said. My name is Gaius Julius Paulus, a citizen of Roma, and this is my brother in God, Yosef Enlightenment Barnabas. We are but men, and lowly men at that. We are preachers of the word of the rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef, the very son of God Almighty.

  —Jews? the priest asked, rising from his knees.

  —Jews, Paulus said, and brothers to all men.

  —You are Zeus, O Lord! And him yonder is Hermes. You healed lame Polydas, who had never walked in his life.

  —The living God healed him. I had but the faith that He would do it. So might you, if you will believe.

  The priest had the strangest look on his face that I had ever seen, as if he were awake in a dream, nothing anywhere that he could trust to be what it seemed.

  —These, Papa said to all our surprise, are my guests. I do not know who they are any more than you. Gods or not, they are within my hospitality.

  —We are only men, Barnabas said, like you.

  I did not see the rocks, or the strangers running. Grandmama gathered me into her apron and took me into the house. I heard the angry words, the shouts, the pleading. I got a glimpse of Papa looking terrible.

  Grandmama made me stay with her for the night, claiming she wanted the company of a man. She put together a batch of her favorite drink, grated walnuts and dill and honey in water steaming hot from the kettle. We drank it by the fire and talked about how soon the rains would be coming, and after that, the frost. We did not mention the travellers, who, I learned the next day, had run all the way to the Consular Road, the crowd behind them throwing rocks.

  The Death of Picasso

  Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek:

  Germinal, Floréal, Prairial 1973

  12 GERMINAL

  Anderszins 2 april. Fog until almost noon. Wild glare in lakes over the sea. It has been but a month from putting in the eight-by-threes, treated with creosote and laid a foot and a half apart in the long northernish rectangle of our cabin’s base, construction fir let into grey marl on the chine of an island, to the last sheet of shingling on the roof. An island that, as Archilochos said of his Thasos, lies in the sea like the backbone of an ass, Thasos a ridge of primrose marble in the wijndonker Zee, our Snegren a hump of old red sandstone in the cold North Sea. Plain as a shoebox, it is little more than a roof, chimney, and windows. The Eiland Commissaris did not bat an eyelash when I registered it under the name Snegren, grensbewoner being the allusion he supposed. Sander has already coined snegrensbewoner, Erewhonian pioneer. If I had explained that it is nergens reversed, he would have made a joke about so remote and lilliputachtig an island being precisely that, nowhere.

  Parmenides is wrong: the nothing he will not allow to be is time itself. Time is the empty house that being inhabits. It may well be the ghost of something in the beginning, before light became matter. But it went away, so that something could be.

  13 GERMINAL

  Coffee, journal, a swim with Sander, just enough to count as a bath, the water Arctic. We built the Rietveld tensegrity table, razored labels off windowpanes, squared things away so that for the first time the long room begins to look like home, practised Corelli on our flutes, Telemann and Bach. Baroque progressions, the wind, the waves. Thoreau had a flute at Waldenpoel I think.

  14 GERMINAL

  Vincent’s Stilleven met uien. It is the first painting he did after cutting off part of his ear according to the Sint Mattheus Evangelie. In a rage at Gauguin, a blusterer like Tartarin de Tarascon. They had a kind of marriage, those two, a companionship as chaste as that of the apostles Paulus and Barnabas. All their talk was of color and form, of motif and theme. But Gauguin would talk of the hot girls upstairs over the café and Vincent would stop his ears, and rage, and pray, and resort to Raspail’s camphor treatments to ward off impurity. To talk of the Christus only generated blasphemies in Gauguin. What indulgence in the flesh did to the creative spirit was what syphilis did to the flesh itself; worse, to the mind. And Gauguin only laughed and called him a big Dutch crybaby.

  The painting is a resolution, a charting of the waters after almost foundering. A drawing board in a room at Arles. It is as if we have zoomed in on a table top that had hitherto been a detail in all the scenes of Erasmus writing, of Sint Hieronymus with his books. The two things that are not on the board are a bottle of white wine and a jug of olive oil. The board is a bridge from one to the other.

  The doctor’s diagnosis of Vincent’s hot nerves was based on learning that Vincent’s diet for some weeks had been white wine and his pipe. Malnutrition! Look, mon vieux, anybody who subsists day after day on cheap wine and shag tobacco is going to cut off his ears. Nervous prostration: it is no wonder that you are out of your mind.

  And in Raspail’s Annuaire de la santé, there on the drawing board, the book that broke the doctors’ monopoly and placed a knowledge of medicine in every humble home, it explains the nutritiousness of onions and olives, the efficacy of camphor in preventing wet dreams and lascivious thoughts.

  The candle is lit: hope. Sealing wax: for letters to Theo. Matches, pipe, wine.

  The letter is from Theo. It is addressed Poste Restante because Theo knew that Vincent had been turned out of his house. The postman, whose portrait Vincent had done, would know where he was. That is the postman’s mark, the numeral 67 in a broken circle. The R in an octagon means that it is a registered letter: it contained a fifty-franc note.

  There are two postage stamps on the letter, one green, one blue. The green one is a twenty-centime stamp of the kind issued between 1877 and 1900. The numeral 20 is in red. The only other French stamp with which Vincent’s block of color might be identified is a straw-colored twenty-five centime one with the numeral 25 in yellow. Since the other stamp on the letter, however, is definitely the fifteen-centime of the same issue and is the only other blue stamp in use at the time, the post office in Paris would have affixed a forty-centime stamp to the letter rather than a fifteen and a twenty-five. There was no thirty-five centime denomination.

  So unless the bureau had run short of the forty-centime denomination and unless petty exactitude is a new thing in French post offices, the stamps are the blue fifteen centimes, and green twenty-centime issues current at the time.

  The design on both, which Vincent made no attempt to indicate, was an ornate one: numeral in an upright tablet before a globe to the left on which stood an allegorical female figure with bay in her hair and bearing an olive branch. To the right, Mercurius in winged hat and sandals, and with the caduceus.

  A harmony in gold and green.

  15 GERMINAL

  The Vincent Onions is the center of a triptych I think I have discovered. Vincent’s chair, with pipe, is the right-hand piece, Gauguin’s empty chair, the left-hand.

  Sun burned through the fog quite early, and we rowed around the island in a wide loop, Sander stark naked. I had better sense: he was splotched with strawberry stains under the remnant of last year’s tan, goose bumps all over. He stuck it out, though, rowing with a will. In a blanket before a fire the rest of the morning.

  16 GERMINAL

  Warmer, and with an earlier lifting of fog. Even so, Sander turned out in jeans and sweater, sneezing. Vrijdagheid als kameraadschap maar dubbelzinnig genoeg: men moet een gegeven knaap niet in het hart zien. Caesar and Pompey look very much alike, especially Pompey. Sint Hieronymus with lion, breath like bee balm. Grocery lists, supplies. Reading Simenon: the perfect page for the fireside. Maigret is comfortable in a constant discomfort, wrapped in his coat, cosseted by food and his pipe.

  In the post that old Hans had for us: Manfredo’s Progetto e Utopia, with a note to say it will for the most play into my hands but has vulnerabilities (he means Marxist rhetoric) that I will go for with, as he says, my Dutch housekeeping mind. And Michel’s Cosmologie de Giordano Bruno. Sander remarks that Italian looks like Latin respelled by an English tourist. Letters from Petrus and Sylvie, wondrous dull. Clerical humor, but it’s worth knowing that Bergson went around calling the American pragmatist William Jones.

  17 GERMINAL

  Schubert’s second quartet on the radio, fine against the mewing of gulls and the somber wash of the sea. A Soviet trawler in the channel.

  Worked all day, off and on, at the iconographica. Neumann on Greek gesture, Marcel Jousse, Birdwhistell. Painter feels the body of the sitter as he works, two mimeses. Open hand in David, beauty of legs in Goya. Watch contours and see what else they bound other than the image we see: thus Freud found the scavenger bird. Philosophical rigor of moralists: Goya, Daumier, van Gogh. It has taken a century for drama to catch up with the painters. A line through Molière, Callot, Jarry, Ionesco. Themes refine, become subtle and articulate from age to age: children who will become artists brood in window seats on art they absorb into the deep grain of their sensibilities: Mr. Punch and Pinocchio in the lap of Klee become metaphysical puppets in a series of caprichos to Mozart rather than the Spanish guitar.

  Sander maps the island with compass and sighting sticks, reinventing geography and surveying.

  18 GERMINAL

  We hear on the radio that Picasso is dead. He was ninety-two.

  19 GERMINAL

  Sander in Padvinder boondoggle and Bike skridtbind rings the island double time. At the outcrop on the promontory he must scuttle up and spring down. The rest of his circumference is shore, shale, pebble, sand, his pace lyric and sweet. Ah! he gasps at the end of it, down on elbows and knees, panting like a dog. Ah is an undictionaried word implying joy, rich fatigue, accomplishment, fulfillment. How many such words are missing from the lexicon: the gasp after quenched thirst, the moo at finding food good, bleats and drones of sexual delirium, clucks, smacks, whistles, mungencies, whoops, burbles.

  I ask why the boondoggle, out of waggish curiosity. I get a gape and stare and something like a bark. Patches of the young mind remain animal and inarticulate, not to be inspected by sophistication, such as a grave study of toes, heroic stretches on waking, the choice of clothes, the pleased mischief, lips pursed, eyebrows raised, of padding about in the torn and laundry-battered blue shirt only, tumescens lascive mentula praeputio demiretracto.

  Een herinnering: Bruno at Sounion. August. Columns of the Poseidonos Tempel sublime and Ciceronian, purest blue the sky, indigo charged with lilac the sea, a brightness over all, light as clean as rain, every texture, stone, cicada, thorn, shards, pebbles, exact and clear. Vile Germans leaving as we arrived, laughing over some rudeness to a family of kind Americans. Two ironic French adolescents, boy and girl, playing at being amused by their own boredom. They shambled away. Another batch arriving, we could see, at the awful restaurant down the hill, adjusting cameras and sunglasses for the climb. Bruno set the reading on our camera and handed it to me. Pulled his jersey, then, over his head, schadelijk, bent and unlaced his sneakers, peeled off his socks, stepped out of his jeans, doffed his briefs, unbuckled his wristwatch. There are tourists coming, I said. One, he said, arms folded and legs spread. Two: at easy attention by a pillar. Three: sitting, elbows on knees, a frank and engaging look into the lens. Om godswil! I cried. O antiek wellustigheid! he sang back. Four: profile, hands against a column. Er vlug mee zijn! Golden smile, glans roused and uncupped, left hand toying with pubic clump, right fist on hip. People, Japanese and British, Toyota executives and bottlers of marmalade, rounded the corner of the temple. Bruno into jeans as an eel under a rock, into shirt, buttoning up cool as you please as the first foreign eyes found him. Into socks and sneakers as they passed. British lady stared at his briefs lying on brown stone in brilliant light, their crop dented, convex, feral, male. Reached them over, slapped them against his thigh, and stuffed them in his pocket. And what in the name of God was all that? Grieks, he said.

  20 GERMINAL

  His 75 years of meditation on a still life: this is like a sonnet cycle, the progression of Montaigne’s essays, Rembrandt’s and Van Gogh’s self-portraits. A natural rhythm, as all the variations of fish and leaf make a coherent harmony. A fish is a leaf.

  Wine, bread, table: his Catholic childhood. Perhaps his Catholic life. Lute, guitar, mandolin: the Spanish ear, which abides life as a terrible dream made tolerable by music.

  Spain and Holland. Felipe’s expulsion of farmers and bankers, whom he saw with fanatic eyes as Muslims and Jews, shifted the counting houses to Holland. Spain dreamed on in its pageant of men dressed in black and women in shawls, surrounded by agonies they kept as symbols to validate, as ritual, the cruelty they claimed as their piety: the lynching of ecstatics, heretics, and humanists, the slaughtering of bulls, the sending of navies and armies against all other cultures of the Mediterranean.

  Silver to the east, pepper to the west, silver and pepper, wool and cloves, gold and wheat, cannon and Titians. And on this theme the old man ended, with a vision of sworded gallants idiotic in the cruelty of their pride, women as a separate species, available by property deeds, a blade through a gut, a trunk of coins, a point of honor precluding reason or forgiveness.

  His study of Velazquez parallels the researches of Braudel; his intuition of a deeper past rivals the century’s classical studies, the prehistorians, the anthropologists.

  21 GERMINAL

  Een herinnering: Paris 1947. A glimpse, a mere passing sight of Picasso inside the Deux Magots, before a bottle of Perrier at a table, his hair combed across his bald head in a last desperate coiffure, already grey. But there he was. Bruno has seen Max Ernst walking his poodle on the Avenue Foch.

  Sander begins a notebook of our island’s natural history, climbs trees to include our neighbor islands in his map, exercises like an acrobat. How smoothly he is beginning to forget I dare not guess.

  22 GERMINAL

  We row over for newspapers and mail, a cold and blustery voyage, and wet. Water and wind are a havoc of power. We are colonists who can make an excursion back to Europe, shopping list in hand.

  A blind old Minotaur pulls his household goods along in a cart, washpot, skillet, quilts, mangle, bust of Lillie Langtry, framed lithograph of Napoleon, rotary eggbeater, bread board, Raspail’s Home Medical Practitioner, a felt hat from Milan, a map of Corsica, a sack of roasted chicory, the key to a barn, tongs, a reading lamp mounted on a porcelain parrot, bulbs of garlic, a tobacco tin containing fishhooks, brass centimes from the Occupation, buttons, a bullet, a feather from the tail of an owl.

  Sander says he discovers that shopping can be fun, and I try to penetrate his meaning. Is it that the ordinary becomes known only as the unusual? It is the convenient we are giving up, what he agreed to, with diffidence, when I offered him the stint on the island.

  23 GERMINAL

  O well, says Sander, O well. He organizes himself at various times of day by turning in circles, batting the air with his hands. An inventory of energies. He glances at the pages of this journal, briefly, as if to register that writing is a thing I do, like reading, walking. I keep thinking that he is a median between Bruno and Itard’s Victor, between urban sophistication and benign savagery. He has a penchant for botany and zoology. That is, those subjects caught his fancy. Spells badly. Found all the sociological courses meaningless and history is still so much hash.