Da Vinci's Bicycle Page 8

  They are masters of horns and flowers, of printing and dancing, of the cello and cartography, of crystals and snakes, of polyhedral tensegrities and cetacean speech, of history and embroidery. They are companions palatine of the Great Bear of the Dnieper.

  The circle on Fourier’s tomb means friendship, the hyperbola ambition, the ellipse love, the parabola family. The Little Hordes are two thirds boys and one third tomboys, the Little Bands are two thirds girls and one third shy mama’s boys.

  Their mounts are zebras for the Hordes and quaggas for the Bands. The Grand Hordes, of Vestals in rawhide, prancing to trumpets, of naked Spartans with javelins and winebowl hairdos, of the Pioneers Major and Minor, are mounted all on tarpans.

  VII

  It was in Huffman’s Meadow out from Dayton on the way to Xenia that we mastered flying around a honey locust and Mr. Root the editor of Gleanings in Bee Culture saw us. We came through the film first in wild winds over the sands at Kill Devil Hill.

  We came over the sands at Kitty Hawk, our huffer and zinger made of iron with feet that kicked in its heart where lightning burst the blood of blue grandfather scum rotted and gunked from the time of the chicken lizards. Our wings were made of cloth.

  Our wings were made of splinters and knitten flax, our eyes were another’s and nothing was wholly right for shape or go. We could rock in rising and settling like a hornet, ride like a bee, but the figure eight of the wasp, or a clapfling proper, we could not do.

  You cannot forage until you can twist your loop, shimmer of red on the up, shake of green on the down, with wood to chew on every bought, and a pear gone wine beyond the briars, and a liquor of roses sweet as wives drenching all, wind and light combing light.

  Ogotemmêli lifted his head, cupping his hand behind his ear. There was something interesting in the air. Dougodyé, he said. I hear the step of Dougodyé. A young shepherd approached in sunglasses, a French undershirt, and wide baggy Dogan trousers.

  Innekouzou’s cow, he said with a grin, has thrown twin calves. Give me a sou. Amma numo, said Ogotemmêli, vira aduno vo vaniemu! Come, Brother Griollu, lead me to the baobab, where we can drink beer for the blessed ancestors. Twin calves, I’ll be bound!

  We must go honor the sign of twins, a blessing that refreshes me to hear. He went into his house with blind caution and came back in his Phrygian cap, his checkerboard tabard of goat’s wool, and a sou for Dougodyé. The armpit drums and Ogo fife had begun.

  They walked between granaries and houses, by altars, to the great baobab. Everything that reaches up to God must be firmly rooted, Ogotemmêli said, bowing to the bows which he knew were being made to his rank, his blind steps sure. Twin calves!

  A woman with many beads of cowries and beaten gold nummo put a gourd of cool beer into his long fingers. Elders with staves came gravely to the tree, talking of other twins in other days, holding cups to the calabash. This too, said Ogotemmêli, is worship.

  VIII

  Quagga, brother of the Herero and Himba, ran in gray herds silver through the mimosa. The mares pranced out before, smelling for lioness, foals and yearlings swirled girlishly behind, and the stallions, maned and haughty, confidently trotted at the rear.

  Orangutans furiously pulled grass and put it on their heads as the quaggas streamed by. O moon, cried the orangutans, O moon. Elephants rolled their trunks, by which they meant that you never go to the waterhole except to find there a family of nickering quaggas.

  They come to the water as picky as antelopes, their honest eyes looking at everything, their nostrils atick with the dusty smell of elephant, green fragrance of water, blunt odor of rhinoceros, the far stink of panther and the carrion cough of hyena.

  Stepping to trumpet and snare they were to have been the mounts for patrols foraging for virtue from phalanx to phalanx, galloping out under banners citron and blue, captained by ten-year-olds, Bears of Artemis braceleted with silver snakes.

  She rides, this Jeanne or Louise, with the poise of an Iroquois and the hauteur of a Cherokee. She wears, transactu tempore, like her flowery troop, braccae phrygiae, persimmon trousers open on a dapper bias from hip to inner thigh, tucked into canvas boots.

  She wears, like the boys, a buttonless vest embroidered with frets and florets, a neckerchief as yellow as the Icelandic buttercup, and a tam sporting the gray and white ribbons of the Phalanx Jules Laforgue, Escadrille Orage XI, Grammarian First Class.

  They are off, quaggas, girls, boys, and a shuffle of forty raccoons kept in pod by Weimaraner corporals. Of going a progress the raccoons understand nothing, but Weimaraners trained to shepherd raccoons on marches between phalanxes they understand.

  The Weimaraners understand the Little Hordes, Quagga masters and spadgers after Harmonian honor, gosling cadets in the affinities, the gammes, who are out to gather optima, centibonum by centibonum, pips and stars and blue ribbons and duck feathers.

  For getting the raccoons from phalanx to phalanx hale and chipper, five centibona. For taking over the chores of the local goslings, fifteen. For general good nature, judged by the Police of Tone and Manners, twenty. For coining a new word, twenty-five.

  IX

  For spending the day with an elder and looking intelligently at everything shown and listening with full attention to everything told, ten centibona. And then there were the decorations differing from phalanx to phalanx given for the fun of distinctions.

  These were in millicupidon points convertible through Common Measure into centibona, called mush in Horde argot, for freckles, bluest eyes, messiest hair, dirtiest feet, mentula longissima, silliest giggle, slyest wink, grubbiest fingernails, charm.

  Goldenest smile, earliest pubic hair, nautch in the innominata, largest number of warts, longest period between the frumps, slickest kiss, keenest whistle, worst joke, roundest behind, highest pisser, brightest glow from a dandelion under the chin.

  A wark in the gaster, a curr in the jaws, and she flies in a figure eight. She bounces in the air, trig of girth and smelling of ginger-flower wax, of apples, of vespa. She thirls her wings, clapfling and brake flip, shimmering her neb. She dips.

  He zips in for a squinny, mucin in his ringent jaws, buzzing. She hums. He rimples his golden crissum, sprag for a hump. He brushes her antennae with his forelegs, she his. They dance, a jig, insect of ictus, in linked orbits, more wiggle than step.

  Zizz! She pounces, lifts him with all her legs, and flies up. He dangles, wings closed over feet. Over the rose she carries him, through the liliodendron, between the zinnias and sage, peonies, hollyhocks and comfrey, color milling in a quick of sugar.

  Amma drew a plan of the world before he created it. He drew the world in water upon the emptiness of space. To draw the egg of Amma you draw a long table of signs and you call this the stomach of all that is. Put a navel at the center. One dot starts all.

  Divide the table into quarters, north east south west. Divide each quarter into sixty-four parts. Count them: you have two hundred and fifty-six parts. Add two numbers for each crossline that first divided the table into quarters, and two for the navel.

  These are the two hundred and sixty-six things out of which Amma made the world. The quarters are earth, fire, water, air. The crosslines are the bummo giri, the eye lines. Four pairs of signs in the quarters are masters of all the other signs of Amma.

  X

  What works in the angle succeeds in the arc and holds in the chord.

  XI

  At the Casa da Vinci you could see an owl from Germany, a book of drawings showing the inside of the body, bowels, lungs, a baby in the womb, muscles knit around joints and stretched from bone to bone, a bat, thunderstones, and an egg of the ostrich bird.

  You could see the imp Salai, so accomplished a rogue at ten that you could picture his neck in a noose by twenty. Marco had gone at him with a knife and had been thrashed for it by Ser Leonardo himself, who rarely lifted an angry hand. But for Salai, O già.

  Salai was beautiful. Ser Leonardo was said to be the handsomest man
in all Tuscany. Sono belli tutti i bastardi! Gian Antonio, as good-natured as a puppy, had been the favorite before Salai, and therefore undertook to deprave him properly and for good.

  To discover that he himself was not half as depraved as he thought he was. Human nature, Leonardo said, spreading his hands, is varied. Talents are to be nurtured. Genius in the young is as yet mere energy. Gluttony matures into taste, lust into love.

  The pinnace of the Santa Maria bore upon Guanahanì on the other side of the world, its banner of Leon and Castille and standard of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea moving in a tossing majesty through strange, crying, wheeling seabirds, fowl of Cathay.

  Trumpets, drums, fifes, tabors and pipes sounded a music appropriate to an arrival in China from all the way around the world, a pomp for the procession of dukes toward the queen. The cross was held high on the prow, in triumph, before the scarlet flags.

  A little boy the meanwhile in Firenze was drawing a bicycle. He begins with the wheels, turning a compass inexpertly: they are not quite round. Then, with a brown crayon, he draws the spokes, frame, handlebars, seat, sprocket, chain, pedals.

  The chain is exactly the same kind as we use now, but Salai does not understand in the drawing he is copying how it is to work. Ser Leonardo’s drawing has hachures and fine lines too hard to make. He turns to something easier to draw, a pizzle.

  By putting fowl’s legs to the balls, he achieves an uccello, a bird. He draws another, that smells the rump of the first, as with dogs. He smiles. He laughs. He calls Gian Antonio to come see. Perche l’uccello di Gian Antonio pende a metà agli sui ginocchi.

  XII

  The Greeks called these winged phalloi that Salai drew by the bicycle pteroi, seeing the word eros in pteros, wing. Such poultry are scrawled everywhere in Mediterranean cities, in the sporting houses of Pompeii, the yellow walls of Naples, on Venetian doors.

  You could see the design on Corinthian vases in the time of Paul, on bedside lamps in the days of Jonah, and the Florentines still call their members uccelli. Gian Antonio took the crayon and drew a supercilious, spoiled face on the page.

  He added frogs and points to show that he meant Salai, whose jacket was so decorated. Now, he said, there are three pricks on this page. See the real thing, said Salai. Wait till I get the magnifying glass, and what’s this thing with two wheels, pig?

  Scrotum of the Pope! Look what you’re drawing on. On the other side of the sheet was a round city with concentric walls, towers, galleries, roofed concourses, the kind of thing the maestro was forever drawing, whatever the eye of a strega they were.

  The four pairs of signs which we make in the quarters are the masters of all the others, the Hogon signs. The other signs are of the world. All of this is Amma invisible. The signs are of women and rain and calabashes and antelopes and okra.

  They are of things we can see and feel. But inside them all, inside everything, is the great collarbone. Amma is the inside of everything. The world is God’s twin. Amma and his world are twins. Or will be, when there is a stop to the mischief of Ogo.

  These signs are bummo. Two of them, masters of all the rest, belong forever to Amma. The other signs are two hundred and sixty-four. By family, twenty-two. There are twenty-two families of things. Here they are. Listen with sharp ears. First there is God.

  The ancestors, the serpent Lébé, that’s three, the Binou, speech, the new year at winter solstice, that’s six, reconciliation, springtime, the rainy months, that’s nine, autumn, and the time of the red sun when the earth is parched and cracked.

  Hoeing, that’s twelve, the harvest, the smithy, weaving, that’s fifteen, pottery, fire, water, that’s eighteen, air, earth, grass, that’s twenty-one, and the twenty-second is the Nummo, the masters of water with red eyes and no elbows and no knees, like fish.

  XIII

  Each family has twelve signs, bummo, which we cannot see. They are inside the collarbone, in the crabgrass seed. We can begin to see the signs yala. These are the corners and joints of things, where you can make a point, where lines meet at an angle.

  A dot everywhere a dot can be made in the shape of a thing gives us its yala. When you make the yala of a thing it has entered being. Its sign is still in the collarbone but it itself has begun to be here in the world. Four dots can define a field.

  The yala are cornerposts, elbows, knees, the point at which a branch grows out from a trunk. Connect the dots of a yala with lines and you have the tonu of a thing. Walls connect cornerposts, shin connects ankle and knee. The tonu are boundaries and structure.

  Fill up the yala and tonu with wood, with stone, with flesh, and you have the toy, the thing itself as we know it, as much as Amma means us to know. For Amma a thing is an example of a plan. The bummo is his mind, the toy of that bummo is our world.

  As bummo a thing exists as a scratch or wrinkle in the four collarbones rolled into an egg. As yala a thing has come into space. With the tonu it is given its bones and outline. As toy it enters the world, made of Amma’s old squandered God stuff.

  What a toy when Amma connects the yala of the stars with tonu! All we can make is what God has thought. Matter is alive, has a soul. In the bummo there already exist the four kikinu, the souls of our bodies, and in them is our life, our nyama.

  Nor does the life of things depart, however you change their form. The life of each grain of dust lives on in the mud with which we build a house. The tonu of mud has assumed the toy of house. Still mud, it is also house, bummo, yala, tonu. It is part of God.

  For is not a house a still animal, needing a soul? What man touches God has first touched. A man’s seed is yala, the baby in the womb is tonu, the baby is born when it has become toy. So with seed, plant, and fruit. Nit, caterpillar, butterfly.

  Only Amma sees the bummo in his four collarbones rolled into a ball, though bummo is written in every seed, finer than any eye could ever see. It is written in every crabgrass seed, it is written in the okra, in the spider’s eye, in the stars.

  XIV

  To get to Fourier’s grave you go along the avenue Rachel to the Caulaincourt viaduct from which steps lead down to the Cimitière Montmartre. Like Père Lachaise this cemetery is a city of the dead, with tombs for houses along streets with names.

  Zola lies here, Eugène Cavaignac, Stendhal, Daniel Osiris, Théophile Gautier, Horace Vernet, Berlioz, Dumas fils, and Boum Boum Medrano, of the circus. The leaf-strewn streets are alive with cats who range the tombs and wash their wrists and yawn.

  Ask at the lodge and a comfortable registrar in a blue uniform will want to know if you are kin to this Monsieur Fourier. Not by family connection, no. He died when? October 1837. He finds and takes down a ledger from the time of Balzac.

  Here we locate the name in menu calligraphy. Someone has written in later sociologue français. His address in this mortuary town is 37 avenue Samson, 23rd Division, second row. Cornices and grilles, soot and leaves, medallions, crosses, angels, flags.

  We find the tomb, the geometrical figures, the strange words. La série distribue les harmonies. Les attractions sont proportionelles aux destinées. He died fallen across his bed, as if he’d knelt to say his prayers before sleep, hands clasped together.

  His tribe of cats hissed and slunk away when they smelled death around him. At the funeral there were fellow clerks and neighbors, journalists, economists, sallow revolutionaries and disciples. Charles Gide, weeping, laid late roses on the hands.

  Hop, thump, and skitter, little Ogo! The armpit drums talk from beyond the brush. Your big ears are up, capacious as ladles, and you stand on your toes. You are too smart to squeak in your kitten’s voice, whistle keen, that is the despair of God.

  You imitate the leopard’s cricket chirr at the back of your throat. You hear the drums, the blood drums, and you cock your tail and frisk, grinning sideways with impudent eyes that roll upward and laugh, and let your docked tongue hang out for fun.

  You laugh as the acacia laughs in the first rainfall after drought. You dance the d
ance of the stars when they jiggle in the sky, and toss your stringbean hat for sheer wickedness. We know you are there, Ogo. We know you are laughing at us all.

  XV

  You kick like a zebra, bounce like a hare. Amma looks at you with distress and you chitter in his face. The lightning walks like silver shears opening and closing across the black clouds, and thunder drowns out the ancestor nummo drums.

  The long wind that burns the desert makes your hair stand backward, but what do you care, Ogo fox, when you can peep with your yellow eyes through the okra and laugh? You break the thread in the shuttle, eclipse the moon, muddy the well.

  You clabber the milk, mother the beer, wart the hand, trip the runner, burn the roast, lame the goat, blister the heel, pip the hen, crack the cistern, botch the millet, scald the baby, sour the stew, knock stars from the sky, and all for fun, all for fun.

  The darkest and utmost wanderer, five billion six hundred million miles from the sun, the planet Fourier is seven hundred times fainter against the absolute black of infinity than yellow Saturn ringed silver by nine titanic moons, unfindable, unseen.