The Jules Verne Steam Balloon Read online

  ANTONIO GRAMSCI IN PRISON

  Milky blue at the horizon, the sky prospered toward a rich and solid azure overhead. Gerrit, a bandana around his forehead, its knot ducktailed out from his nape, stood at attention, pectorals squeezed in tight and flat, butt hard, hands flat on thighs, shoulders squared, the tucked corners of his mouth wry, fighting off hilarity, toes wiggling, tongue in cheek, eyes merry. Nothing, Petra said, think of absolutely nothing. White mind. They’ll pay me to tell this, Cornelius said. It’s worth trying, Petra said, if you want it to go down. I feel like a sexpot with red pouting lips and a raccoon ring of mascara around my eyes, steamy at the crotch, rather than the stickstraight begoggled plain Socialist brainy wonder that I am. This is what happens when you’re the only girl around. Hormones in well-behaved boys know I’m here, nip down to your gonads with chemical messages to trigger spermatogenesis, which has given you satyriasis. Feels good, said Gerrit. You don’t think our kissing for days and days has had anything to do with it? Oh no, said Cornelius, nor the rest of it. Now I’m getting one again.

  WITTGENSTEIN ON A CAISSON

  Humming Beethoven. The sky rotten with a bilge drift of clouds like squid ink coiling in milk. Lice in the seams of tunic and trousers. A red fungus burning between his toes. Death is not an event in life.

  42

  Mullein must have room enough to spread its fine rosette of basal leaves if it is to erect its Jacob’s staff. It cannot be crowded even by grass. It is a biennial, and cannot establish itself in cultivated fields. It is found in meadows and pastures and along fences that are not too much overgrown.

  MEADOW

  Aujourd’hui comme aux temps de Pline et de Columelle la jacinthe se plait dans les Gaules, la pervenche en Illyrie, la marguerite sur les ruines de Numance et pendant qu’autour d’elles les villes ont changé de maîtres et de noms, que plusiers sont entrees dans le neant, que les civilizations se sont choquées et brisées, leurs paisibles generations ont traverse les ages et sont arrivées jusqu’à nous, fraîches et riantes comme aux jours des batailles.

  TWO ACORNS, ONE GINGKO LEAF

  The great things, Gerrit said, hair windsprung and sunny, a rust of sunburn across his nose, are how to get rid of wars, bombs, bankers, prejudice, hunger, meanness, and who was Jesus. When you two are kissing, Cornelius said, at least Gerrit can’t talk. He purrs, Petra said. Erasmus, Gerrit said, woke one morning with an erection hard as a broomstick, complete with balls scrunched up tight, like mine. Like ours, Cornelius said. Hansje was all for hanky-panky, but Erasmus put a damper on that. Poor Hansje, Petra said. But I’m glad there’s somebody who can say what he can’t do. We climbed practically all the trees in the spinney, explored the other spit over the hill there, swam, and generally mucked about, seriously silly, with forays into all those intellectual things Erasmus and Hansje can carry on for days, like making endless lists out of their heads, history and science and films, with Hansje sneaking in the odd naughty bit. So like late in the afternoon, Erasmus said that if he whacked off he’d keep from gunking up the sleeping bag that night, and started in, offhandedly dextrous, so to speak, except that he’s a lefthander. Offhandedly, Petra said. While walking around and talking, gathering sticks for the fire. Hansje’s eyes were a study. Big and round, as if he had more schemes than he could deal with, and needed to hit on the right one first crack out of the box. Erasmus can laugh with his eyes better than anybody, also read minds. So he started this long talk about sheepwalks and Roman roads, and every once in a while he’d close his eyes because his wizzle was feeling so good, and slow his stroke, and gasp. All this to hypnotize Hansje, who was being cool like crazy, fighting off paying the least attention, because those were the rules of the game. Explain it, Petra said, reaching over to give Gerrit’s balls a squeeze. Watch it, he said. Why? said Petra. Rules of the game, said Gerrit. In your story or right now? Cornelius asked. Both, said Petra. I want to hear why. It just was, Gerrit said. We had agreed to prove that we’re the masters of our bodies, and not them of us, I’m quoting Erasmus, who gets all this day in and day out from his composite family, which sometimes seems to be a Roman bathhouse in the last five minutes of the empire, and sometimes a Montessori kindergarten devoted to ethics and hygiene. Suntans of ultimate golden brown, fresh air, exercise, fellowship, life tough and simple, radical sweet innocence: Erasmus kept saying all this, and Hansje and I ate it all in, so that when he himself said he was slaking animal lust that was a natural function of the organism, how could Hansje and I be transparent copycats? Golly, Petra said, the things I don’t know about. Nello, are you understanding this? Sure, said Cornelius, every word. I can finish the story. Erasmus was being a devil lording it over two innocents, for the fun of watching them squirm. You think? Gerrit asked. He said that it was the longest he’d gone without coming in years, and that it was a big thing for him to be in the sleeping bag with us as friends only, and to be barebutt with us all day. Confusing, said Petra, but only a bit strange, you know? Do I? Gerrit asked. I mean, know? Sure, Petra said. So finish the story. Ha, said Gerrit. When Hansje was about to fizz over and invite us all to join him in an orgy, Erasmus quit, shrugged his shoulders, and said maybe he didn’t need to, after all. He really is a devil, Petra said. How long did it take him to drive Hansje and you crazy?

  45

  Quark on the telephone in the nacelle of the balloon. Yuss, he said, I know, but I’m more interested in a nest of crystals we found back of the spring in the spinney. The series is in fifths of a rotation, optimal foci of tetrahedra on a very long axis. What? I’m putting Buckeye on the thread. Here he is. Ho! said Buckeye, it’s lovely. They’re asleep now, in a heap, arms and legs every which way. I was too shy to look. Here’s Tumble, whose imagination it all rather caught. Hello hello, said Tumble. Well, nothing that would get into a poem by Catullus, but then they weren’t arctic hares up on their hind legs batting at each other, either. Actually they’re not in a heap, as Buck said. They’re up and have the lantern lit in the tent, and have broken out biscuits and made cocoa, and are laughing and kissing all around. Sabina the wolf is scandalized, and the owl in the sycamore has offered comments also. Band two alpha for that, Ariel by Hizqiyya. They’re talking about hot chocolate in a café in Amsterdam on a cold day, with sleet, Édouard Manet, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Petra’s mother’s fanatic housekeeping, the legs of Joaquin Carvalho Cruz, the failure of Danes to understand any joke whatsoever, bicycles, Mondriaan’s admiration of Mae West, Queen Wilhelmina’s battiness, Daley Thompson, Wittgenstein’s chocolate oatmeal, Erasmus Strodekker’s off eye and membrum virile, Mary Lou Retton, the boulevards of Paris, gosling motilities among the precocious, Petra’s breasts by lantern light, the best ways to ripen pears, Gerrit’s foreskin, the coziness of the tent, friendship’s liberation from reticence, owls, zebras, Mozart, the quiet of the meadow in the middle of the night, why it was nobody’s business if Gerrit kissed Nello, or Nello Petra, tennis racquets, the clarity of the stars seen through the tent flaps, how wide awake they were, and eyes blue with fate.

  Pyrrhon of Elis

  Four years before the birth of Alexandras of Makedonia, Pyrrhon the Skeptic Philosopher was born in Elis, a country town in the northwest of the Peloponnese known throughout the civilized world as the site of the Olympic Games. He was trained as a painter. For some years you could see a mural of his in one of the gymnasia, runners carrying torches. He was educated by Stilpon or Bruson, or by Stilpon’s son Bruson: the life that has come down to us of Pyrrhon is a copy made by a scribe ignorant of Greek.

  He rounded out his education by travelling with Anaxarkhos to India, where he studied with the naked sophists, and to Persia, where he learned from the Magi. He returned to Elis an agnostic who withheld his opinion of every matter. He denied that anything was good or bad, right or wrong. He doubted that anything exists, said that habits and custom dictate our actions, and would not allow that a thing is either more this than that on its own.

  He thus went out of his way for nothing,
leaving all to chance, and was wholly incautious with encounters, whether with carts in the street, cliffs toward which he was walking, or dogs. He said he had no reason to believe that his solicitude for his welfare was wiser than the results of an accident. Antigonos of Karystos tells us that his friends followed him about to keep him from falling into rivers, wells, and ditches. He lived for ninety years.

  He lived apart from the world, having been taught in India that no man could teach the good who was at the beck and call of a patron, or had to toady to a king. He avoided even his relatives.

  He kept his composure at all times. If all of the audience drifted away while he was lecturing, he finished the lecture just as if there were people listening. He liked to fall into conversation with strangers and go with them wherever they were going. For days at a time, none of his pupils or friends knew where he was.

  Once, when his master Anaxarkhos had fallen into a ditch full of mud up to his neck and could not get out, Pyrrhon chanced to pass by. He noticed Anaxarkhos but paid him no heed. He was much censured by the unenlightened for this indifference, but Anaxarkhos praised his disciplined apathy and courageous suppression of affection.

  He often talked to himself. When questioned about this, he replied that he was teaching himself how to be good. He was a formidable debater, sharp at cross-examination and skilled in logic. The philosopher Epikouros, an admirer from a distance, was always curious to know the latest doings and sayings of Pyrrhon. As for the Eleans, they were so proud of Pyrrhon that they elected him arkhiereos for festivals and sacrifices, and remitted his, and all other philosophers’, taxes.

  He was made an honorary citizen of Athens. He lived with his sister, who was a midwife. He was not above taking produce to market, and could be seen at the stalls selling poultry, garlic, and honey. He was known to dust the house and sweep the floors for his sister, and was once seen washing the pig.

  Once he came to his sister Philista’s defense in an argument among the neighbors. This seemed inconsistent with his doctrine of apathy, no matter what the disturbance, but he replied that a noble mind always came to the defense of a helpless woman. And once, when he showed alarm at a dog that was biting him on the leg, he replied that it is impossible to refine away all human responses to the world.

  His great teaching was that we should resist reality with all our might, denying it in actions where possible, with words, where not.

  It is told that when he had an abscess that had to be treated with stinging ointments, and eventually cauterized with a white-hot poker, he neither winced nor frowned.

  Philon the Athenian, a friend, records that of thinkers he was most admiring of Demokritos the Atomist, and that his favorite line of poetry was Homer’s

  As are the generations of leaves so are the generations of men.

  He approved of Homer’s comparing men to wasps, flies, and birds. When a storm came up, and the ship in which he was making a voyage was in danger, all the passengers were terrified except Pyrrhon, who pointed to a sow in a crate, calmly eating. He once dismissed a student who flew into a fury and chased the cook into the street with his spit, the roast still on it. As he would never tell his students what he was thinking, or answer a question, they were always in a quandary, and never knew what they were supposed to know. He said he was like Homer in holding different opinions at different times. He approved of the sayings

  Nothing too much.

  A promise is a curse standing at your elbow.

  He liked the poetry of Arkhilokhos, because it emphasizes our being at the mercy of God and the tragic brevity of life. His heritage includes Euripides’ pessimism, Xenophanes’ agnosticism, Zeno’s denial of motion, and Demokritos’ dismissal of the witness of the senses to reality. His followers agree with Demokritos that we know nothing, for truth is down a well.

  His pupils were taught to doubt and deny everything, even that they were doubting and denying everything. Not more so than not! they replied to all, even that honey is sweeter than grapes, or that virtue is less harmful than vice. There is nothing true that is not probably as untrue as it is true.

  Of perplexities arising from the teachings of Pyrrhon there are ten, and here is the way out of each of them:

  I. That there are things useful or harmful to our lives. But every creature finds different things harmful or useful. The quail fattens on hemlock, which is deadly to man.

  II. That nature is a continuum through all creatures. But Demophon, the butler to Alexandros the Great, warmed himself in the shade and shook with cold in the sun. Aristotle tells us that Andron of Argos crossed the Libyan desert without water.

  III. That perception is whole. But we see the yellow of an apple, smell its fragrance, taste its sweetness, feel its smoothness, hold its weight.

  IV. That life is even and the world always the same. But the world of a sick man is a different one from that of the hale man. We are different of mind asleep than when awake. Joy and grief change everything for us. The young man moves in a world different from that of the old. Courage knows a road that timidity cannot guess. The hungry see a world unknown to the fed. Perikles had a slave who walked on the rooftop in his sleep never falling off. In what world live the mad, the stingy, the spiteful?

  V. That there is a reality beyond custom, law, religion, and philosophy. But each set of beliefs and attitudes regards the same innocent things with widely differing eyes. A Persian can with propriety marry his daughter, the Greek considers this a crime without equal. The Massagetai have their own women in common. The Egyptians preserve their dead in spices and tar, the Romans burn theirs, the Greeks bury theirs.

  VI. That things have identities in themselves. But everything varies from context to context. Purple is a different color near red than near green, in a room or in full sunlight. A rock is lighter in water than out of it. And most things are mixtures, the components of which we would not recognize in themselves.

  VII. That objects in space are evident as to position and distance. But the sun, large enough a fire to warm all the earth, is small because of its distance. A circle seen at an angle seems to be oval, on end, a line. Harsh, gray mountains seem from far away to be blue and smooth. The just risen moon is much larger than the moon high in the sky, yet its size has not changed. A fox in a brake looks quite different from a fox in a field. Who can decide what’s the shape of a dove’s neck? Everything is known as a figure in a ground, or not at all.

  VIII. That quantity and quality have knowable properties. But a little wine strengthens, a lot weakens. Swiftness is relative to other speeds. Heat and cold are known only by comparison.

  IX. That there are strange and rare things. But earthquakes are common in parts of the world, rain rare in others.

  X. That relations among things can be stated. But right to left, before and behind, up and down, depend on infinite variables, and it is the nature of the world that everything is always changing about. A brother to a sister is not the same relation as a brother to a brother. What is a day? So many hours? So much sunlight? The time between midnights?

  Agrippa says that these perplexities can be reduced to five. Reality will always admit of disagreement among its observers. As every proposition can serve as the basis for another, you can never complete a picture of reality. A thing can be known in relation to something else, therefore nothing can be known in itself. All hypotheses must be built up from basic particulars which we must take for granted, but to take them for granted is not thinking but supposing. To confirm one thing by another, as we always must, is to move in a futile circle.

  Demonstration is therefore impossible, as are certainty, significance, cause, motion, knowing, becoming, and evaluation. Pyrrhon wrote nothing, but his disciples Timon, Ainesidemos, Noumenios, and Nausiphanes have left us many scrolls discussing the hopelessness of knowing anything at all, or of having any certainty that we or anything else exists, or can exist. Assailed by logic and by realists, they have all admitted that they are by no means certain of their
uncertainty. We will admit apparent fact, they say, but will not admit that what we think we seem to see is what it actually is. We see that fire burns, or seems to, but cannot go beyond that to say that all fire burns, or that God intended fire to burn. Honey has, on the limited occasions we have tasted it, been sweet, but whether it is sweet we do not know. We certainly do not know if it is the nature of honey to be sweet, or if it is sweet to other tongues.

  So for ninety years Pyrrhon, the son of Pleistarkhos, lived (except for his travels to India and Persia) in the charming town of Elis, with its horse-breeding citizens; and Olympic coaches and umpires; its swarm of splendid athletes and spectators every four years; its shady streets with sleeping hogs and their nursing litters; yellow dogs running in packs; choruses of Spartan trumpeters; fleets of Corinthian girl companions with raccoon eyes, pink frills, and Asiatic embroidery from shoulder to heel and gaits as if to the flutes of Lydia; goats in a mist of flies; eloquent sculptors talking style in the wine-shops; long-haired painters jibbering over onion stew in the ordinaries; mathematicians playing chess under the chinaberry trees; children tossing knucklebones in the parks under the gaze of Gorgon nannies; ladies of the Sodality of Hera rolling through the avenues in donkey carts, demure under parasols; grizzled philosophers and their raunchy boyfriends tumbling naked in the palaistra as recreation from the Pythagorean numbers and the metaphysics of Aristoteles (which had a brief vogue during the Alexandrian Epoch); garlicky Italians studying virtue and manners under the sophists; rich Lakedaimonian military strategists who wore undyed and goatish smocks and lived off porridge and river water; potters; farmers; cabinet makers; poultry dealers; saddlers; hostlers; poets; cooks; musicians; the Little Bears of Artemis dancing The Elean Shoe and The Solstice Hop under the strict eye of a priestess; little boys with hair like mops playing hopscotch in the magistrate’s yard; pious blacksmiths; Roman lawyers and their fat wives; sportswriters who concocted epigrams for Olympic victors’ statues; a sad Gaul who was writing a book about the moon; acrobats; priests of every mystery you could think of, Eleusinian, Delian, Sabazian, Dodonian, what have you, even a brown Egyptian who ran a temple of Isis and Osiris down near the tanning yard (much heckled by the stable boys); in short, a fine round world of people and things, seasons and years and rumors of other worlds as far away as the Indus and the Nile, the Thames forever hidden by fog and the Danube said to be as blue as a Doric eye; but was honestly uncertain that he did, and would never admit to any of it.