reading

Hermes laid back his jackrabbit ears and looked around at me with his girlish eyes as much as to say that, yes, as long as my playing took us to the patch of nettles and thistles out by the Consular Road I could ride. There, with the evening cool coming on, we could all have a munch, flounce our tails, and bray at the corners of the world. He’d had his sheelings, and wanted a stretch and a hamp of weeds to chew. Those of us with a posthidion no bigger than a puppy’s must do as we would.

He answered the bounce of my heels with a slew of his butt, and off we went, Hermes happy to be shut of his baskets and muzzle. A spadger on his back was of no matter. We were old friends. He knew that my hair’s not good to eat, as he once imagined, and I knew how to knuckle his noggin and make him laugh.

Ahead, along our way between two fields of barley higher than our heads, larks and crickets babbling deep in the dark of the green, ran the Consular Road to Isauria. Here you could see barbarian couriers on long and lean Italian horses. With a leather wallet and a horn on a shoulder strap, a short sword, and a tumpline, they go at a gallop and pass like the wind, Roman riders with their faces shaven by a razor.

A nettle here, a stinkweed there, Hermes has his due, and I egg him on toward the road in between the juicier clumps. Half the road is neatly paved. No one may step here. It is for the Roman administrators alone. On the other half of the road come the caravans and wayfarers on foot. We are in time for the late afternoon rider. You can hear him two stadia away.

Hermes backs, I wave, the courier gives me a salute, a stiff arm straight out to the right. I pull the air, which in the language of their army means to make haste. Some smile, some give the fig, some glance and ride on with no sign. If one were to stop, I was to skidaddle, Hermes and I, as Pappas says they will make love with you and not even know your name.

My reputation in those days was for eating prodigious amounts of grape-hull barley cakes, shooting a strict toy, walking on my hands, dancing the Artemis Free Frolic, imitating a partridge so well I could bring them out of the brake, singing the Linden and the Oak, making a Gongyla face that never failed to frighten Grandmama and make her put her apron over her head, doing everything wrong, on purpose, in the opinion of Nossis my sister, worrying the pee out of my brother Philodemos, and riding Hermes when he was not at his work.

—One is as big a muggins as the other, Pappas says. By the gods, I can scarcely tell them apart. The one with all the ears and the handsome face is the donkey, I do believe. The one with the rusty knees must be our Damis, is that your opinion?

Whereupon Nossis holds her nose and the hem of her peplon in two fingers. So I make horns at her, she squeals, and Hermes brays.

We reached our favorite thistle patch just as the trees were going blue and the day’s light lay level and sweet on the world. We heard the rider down the road. The Emperor of Rome, Pappas says, must hear day by day from all the cities he taxes, whatever news there is to tell him. He knows the weather, the fishing, the hunting, the crops, the breaking of his law, and where his ships are on the sea. All this the riders bring him along roads the Romans have paved from countries in the far north where there are bears and wolves and snow the year round, to deserts in the south of nothing but sand and more sand and never a tree.

But before the rider passed, Romeward bound, Hermes and I saw two men on the unpaved side of the road, merchants as they seemed, coming our way. They walked bravely, with long steps, as if they were walking across the world and meant to make a thorough job of it. I would get a good squinny at them as they trod past, though I hoped they would not ask directions, because if you’re waiting for something, as I for the Roman courier, it is always when you’re seeing what you came to see that a pest arrives and bodgers your pleasure of it.

In the Underworld, Pappas says, he hopes there is a judgment of Uninvited Guests all interrupting each other interrupting each other for all eternity.

A shaft of sparrows from a hedge zipped between me and the strangers, bad luck for them, as they bore down on us, and I gave them no heed until the courier passed. His saddlebags were biggish, lots of reports for the Emperor of Rome. I waved. He gave the salute. Hermes popped a rispy fart and hitched his ears forward, twirling his tail for the sheer fun of it.

—The grace of God be with you! the strangers greeted me, lifting their walking sticks.

Would this road, they asked, take them to Lystra proper, the market and the inn? It would, I said. No distance at all. They mopped their brows with their sleeves, thanked me, and off they went.

Hermes and I took the road by the old Temple of the Trees, dark in its grove, the oldest thing in the world except perhaps the dragon houses in the hills, and the sacred trees beside it are older than the temple, the linden and the oak of our rites. Somewhere, nobody knows, is the tree that’s a wife to the god Hermes. I liked to think my donkey knew when he was near his namesake. That, and the quiet of the road, brought us home this way, through crickets loud as a festival and butterflies and shearmice trotting in circles and midges in swarms and early bats.

Something had happened. There’s a way of walking that means gossip’s to be told, and as I rode home I saw women on the trot along every path, news to tell on their faces, elbows out, eyes searching for ears to fill.

I was not one to waste gossip on. I was only an overhearer, so that when I called to Philippos’ aunt as she was clearing a stile as nimbly as a girl, all I got was an arm pointed toward town and the word whoopdedoo.

Farther on I found a bunch of fieldhands leaning on their hoes. It was my two strangers they were talking about, some ruckus they’d caused as soon as they’d got to the market.

—Git up, was all the outlander said, and by Zeus up he got. Walks some, dances some, and is out of his mind wondering over it.

The disturbance, as I pieced it together all the way home, was that the wayfarers were magicians and had healed Polydas the cripple, who was now walking round and round the market for all to see. And I was the first they spoke to. I gave them directions into town. My ears burned, my heart thumped, and Hermes complained because eating weeds had gone clean out of my head.

Everybody was hither and yonder when Hermes and I got home. And they were there, at our place, the strangers. Grandmama had sent Papa to get them once she’d heard the wonder they’d done.

—All over again! she said to me. No mistake about the sign. I’ve had the feeling for days, first in my bones, and then a flutter behind my eyes, like somebody in the room when there was nobody at all. Old Thunderer and the Tree Elf! That’s who they are. Who else could they be?

I could see the strangers in the arbor. They’d had their feet washed and were sipping saucers of wine with Papa and Pappas, the housefolk looking on from behind doors and posts.

Grandmama hugged me to her, said she was too scared to face the strangers, and said I was not to venture near them unless called.

She meant that the grand old story of Baukis and Philemon and the strangers at their table was happening again, now.

How many times I’d heard the tale. She never told it right off, even when she was in a mind to tell the old tales. There was a whistle wetter beforehand. She told tales while she was shelling peas or stitching or plaiting a basket.

—The way you catch an owl, she’d say, is this. You go into the woods with a little drum, the kind you tap with your fingers, and a whistle with three stops, the kind the goatherds play.

—When you come to a likely thicket of tall trees where you think an owl might be, begin the nice little dance children learn for the harvest. Two hops backwards and a curtsey with crossed shins, shuffle to the left and clap your hands. You know the dance, and the tune’s The Partridge Wedding or Hen Cluck, Hen Strut, Peck Your Pick of Corn.

She’d siffle the music, patting her foot, and I’d do enough of the dance to make her cackle.

—An owl, now, hearing and seeing all this, will want to join the dance, and step out lively, grave a fowl as he is, all along his limb, keeping time with his wings, and singing in owl, hoo hoo, hoo hoo, whoodle wee hoo. Then all you have to do is nip up and snatch him. Owl stew.

Then she’d get onto the old temple on the hill, which was to Hermes of the Trees. He mates with saplings and his blood is green. His hair is partly leaves, his knees and elbows are bark. His daimon is the woodpecker, who carries his soul around when he is asleep.

—Ah yes indeed, she’d say while spinning or resewing the quails and mulberries on the hem of my sark.

She’d take it right off my nakedness, the sark, and rummage in her basket for lavender wool, or white, or ruddle.

—This child needs his hair dressed, she would grumble. He looks like a marsh sprite. And the girls had better look out: his puppy tail looks to me like it’s racing with his hair, which can do the more prominent mischief. Have those knees ever been clean?

And, with a new breath, she’d take on her important voice and begin the grand old story.

—Once the Lord of the World and his handsome son Harmiss, Ziss and Harmiss she always pronounced them and if corrected would allow that people didn’t know how to say words proper any more these days. Well, Ziss and Harmiss gave themselves a shake and became, to look at, a distinguished landowner and a tall and fetching boy, but not too distinguished, you understand, a trifle somebody but not anybody special. They didn’t want to stand out.

She liked me to give a nod that I was following and was eager to hear the tale again.

—They came across Kappadokia, as if on a journey, each with a staff. They were soon as dusty as all travellers, with dirty feet and sweaty around the neck. They stopped at this well and that, expecting a drink, and like as not they had the dogs set on them. Everywhere they met with impudence, with stinginess. Oh yes, people are like that, out in the world. Now round about here, nigh onto Lystra, where the marsh stands beyond the road, the people were uncommon hateful. Outlanders not welcome around here! People should stay where they belong!

—That was their names. They had only the roof over their heads, and a watch goose, and a bean patch out back, cabbages too.

They were not stingy or tacky in their manners. When the strangers came there, old Philemon, with his beard down to here, and old Baukis, who was weaving a basket of wicker, they both said, Do sit for a spell.

—Exactly, Grandmama said. There was cabbage cooked with a ham-bone, and olives, and cherries preserved in wine, and endive and radishes, whey and white honeycomb, and eggs roasted in the shell, and figs and plums and apples. Something even told her that it would be proper to cook the watch goose, but when she went to catch it, she couldn’t, and she had another sign inside her heart, as clear as sunlight on a rock. We do not want you to kill your watch goose. And when she was scouring the table with mint and setting out her best beech goblets coated inside with yellow wax, she began to have her suspicions.

—No sooner had she tipped the gotch to fill their cups than she knew she was eyebitten, rhymed by the glamor of her company. The elder had a kingly eye, like a bull, that found everything familiar, and the younger, so handsome that he took your breath and doubled your heartbeat, had the finest manners in the world and a smile as warm as a summer’s day. And the wine changed as it was poured, from their black, vinegary country wine to a musky rich red wine that a goblin had magicked with a pass of his warty hands.

—And the strangers were Ziss and Harmiss. They drowned all the rest of the valley, that’s why we have a marsh to this day, and gave old Baukis and Philemon their wish to be together forever, oak and linden side by side. Their little house became a temple sacred to trees and birds and hospitality.

The magicians had come to our gate after Papa had sent for them. They were dressed in the colors merchants wear over near the sea, reds and purples and pinks, with too many sashes. The shorter, the one with a beard as black as a crow, was bald when he took off his big round hat. They had stopped at our herm all but hidden under honeysuckle this time of year.

The shorter of the two said his name was Shaul Paulus, from Tarsos over in Kilikia where the school is of philosophers. The other was named Yosef Enlightenment Barnabas, a Kyprian from the sacred island of Aphrodita of the Doves.

They were Jews, people who won’t eat pork or eels, and follow a book that has their laws and history in it, and cruelly cut off the sleeve of their pizzles. They were so respectful of Zeus Thunder Hurler that they say there are no other gods but him.

—Be you then Judaeans? Pappas asked after they had washed their feet and shaken the dust from their clothes.

—We are walking around the world, the one named Shaul said, with good news to tell all mankind.

—What did I tell you? Grandmama said when we listened to their talk, and the Jews explained to Papa and Pappas that the news they had to tell was that their god had taken a man’s form and lived in Judaea until he was grown, and taught his lessons there, and had been understood and followed by many, but not by all. He had been wickedly and falsely accused of sedition against the Romans, was crucified, and had come alive again in his tomb, from which he came out and talked in private to several of his followers, giving them instructions. Then he went away, with a promise to return.

—To speak in figure, said the man Shaul, Yeshua the Redeemer sought to have us all die, so to say, to our life of human bondage, to be as dead men to our own selfishness, to lust, gluttony, theft, hatred, anger, jealousy, all the passions that make us blind to our brothers and sisters and to the goodness of the god who made the world.

—A change of heart, the man Barnabas put in, is what we teach. A metamorphosis. But there is no magic to it, no miracle. The resolution to die to the claims of the flesh will release the full life inside. God must have an empty pitcher to fill. We use the sign of water, though the cleansing is of the heart.

He was tall and brown, this man Barnabas, brown haired, brown eyed, his face as honest as a dog’s, an easy man. When Paulus talked (we were to call him that, he said, not Shaul, which in any case we could hardly say, and without Kyrie, as if he were a slave) Barnabas listened more carefully than any of us, as if he wanted to remember every word.

—I am, however, one of my Redeemer’s faithful, filled with hope, and, God give me grace, a striver after charity.

—I was trained to be one, Paulus said, for the law and rhetoric. As with all my people, I also learned a craft, the tailoring of tents. My school of rhetoric goes back in its origins to a Greek named Diogenes, a pagan in the days of Alexander, who had a rough and sturdy virtue I can still admire. Would that I had more of his stalwartness under a shower of rocks, or his indifference to pain. Or his precision in the use of words. He invented the word cosmopolitan to counter Athenian pride. A citizen of the whole world. That’s what Barnabas and I, and others of our witnessing, must learn to be.

The talk was wonderful. Paul said that the divine hand that made the sun and moon and trees and creatures was worthy of worship. Papa and Pappas agreed. They got into an argument about the souls of animals, but did not fall out over their differences.

—The good news we bring, Paulus said, is that there is but one god, not many. When he made the world, long ago, he gave man every blessing. But man in his arrogance and greed threw away the blessing and brought death into the world. But this one god loved mankind still, and became one of us, to show us how to live and how to die.

—You are worshippers of many supposed gods whom you imagine to be pleased by your mysteries and sacrifices of spilt blood and burnt flesh. You worship the created rather than the creator.

He made us sound like foreigners. How had he known about us? Did he know properly about the spirits in the trees and the mountains? About Grandmama’s elves behind the oven with their mushroom hats? The daimons that are sometimes owls, sometimes a hill lion?

—But each people, Papa said, have their own gods. I have heard tell that they are indeed the same gods known by different names, tongues being different. Some gods move about everywhere, some stay in particular places. I cannot think our gods here would like the fish and fields and skies of somewhere else.

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!

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.

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! 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.

—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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, De l’Education d’un homme sauvage, ou des premiers developpemens physiques et moraux du jeune sauvage de l’Aveyron, Vendémiaire an X.

The pathos is one all teachers feel, all parents. Repeated now by the American psychologists training chimpanzees to sign with deaf-and-dumb hand language. Itard’s Victor had had his attention fixed by his own strategies for survival in a forest. So are all attentions fixed. His skills were animal and they were successful. Eat, scutter to safety, hide from enemies, sleep, forage. He was unfamiliar with fire, with warmth, and loved in Paris to roll naked in the snow.

De Gaulle remarked, from under that nose, that we raise our own Vandals. What is the grief I feel when I admit the truth of that? I also deny it.

The feeling again yesterday afternoon that the hour belonged to a previous, perhaps future, time, but was decidedly not now. I was looking out of the window, at afternoon light on bushes, in an elation of melancholy, savoring one truth and another without fear or anxiety, at peace with myself. Then this deliciously strange feeling that time is nothing, or is my friend rather than my enemy.

Long deep rhythms like the turning of the planets and the drift of the stars, the decay of matter, the old-turtle creep of continents around the globe. Evolution. Over which lie the adagio rhythms of history, the play of fire over burning sticks.

Picasso at the last was gazing at the immediate pressures of Renaissance Spain on the France of Georges Pompidou: moth flicker of individual sensibilities around a flame of money, cherished proprieties, romance, a dreaming life with no notion of what it is to be awake, the sleep of reason. He felt the tension between the Netherlands and Madrid, north and south, prudence and passion. Titian and Rembrandt, and yet his heart was with those foragers who suffered the violence of making sense of these extremes, Van Gogh and Rimbaud, Rousseau le Douanier.

His genius was satisfied with two forms only: still life and tableau. He stepped over the moment of Cézanne, Manet, Courbet like a giant negligently striding over a garden whose order and brilliance were none of his concern. All of his tenderness is like a Minotaur gazing at a cow. There was sweetness in the regard, submerged in a primal animality. He was like a grandee from the Spanish courts trying to behave himself among people with polished manners, books, philosophy, graciousness. He played their game, assumed French liberalism, pledged brotherhood with Marxist babblers, commanded charm enough to make friends with civilized people like Gertrude Stein and Cocteau, Apollinaire and Braque. Barcelona stood him in good stead.

Roads, paths, and rivers in XIXth Century painting. And windows. Corridors was their theme, and corridors for the eye. Picasso sidestepped this brilliant understanding of the world, and returned to the theatrical, the Spanish room that is not properly a room but a cell, a dark place. The Spanish have no love for or understanding of roads. They are perilous in Quijote, bandit-ridden in Spanish history. Suspicious stay-at-homes, the Spanish. A public place is still vulgar, one’s dignity can be exposed to the affront of a stare. A morbid pride, which Goya saw as insanity.

How lovely Paris must have seemed to the young Picasso, with its guileless Max Jacob, laughing Apollinaire, rich Americans who were affable, friendly, and intelligent: Miss Stein, Miss Toklas, the sisters Cone, John Quinn, people who knew nothing of the dark anguish of the Spanish mind.

Sander making a list, with characteristics, of our birds. We cannot identify the half of them.

Corelli sarabandes, good talk by the fire, the wind in a huffle after sunset making a humpenscrump of the waves and trees.

De dageraad met rooskleurige vingeren. Coffee, journal in a seat on the rocks, warm enough for shorts and visnet jersey. Fine iodine kelpy green smell of the sea. No fog at all, a sharp sight of all the islands around us. Yachts. The life! crowed Sander naked.

Itard failed with Victor (assuming that Victor was not an idiot, which no evidence indicates) because he was trying to teach him manners.

He should have allowed himself to be taught by Victor, as the cat teaches us the rules of a companionship, as Griaule learned from the Dogon.

Art is bad when it is poor in news, dull, and has no rich uncle to boast of. Culture abhors a plenum and has its finest moments hunting on a lean day.

Philosophy is the husband of art: the civility they beget is not a hostage to fortune but our fortune itself.

Nature has no destiny for us: our boat is upon her ocean and in her winds, but she has expended as much ingenuity designing the flea as she has expended on us, and is perfectly indifferent to Hooke’s conversation at Garroway’s Coffee House. We, however, perish the instant we take our eyes off nature.

One of the things Hooke said at Garroway’s was that he suspected insects of being the husbands of flowers. Fourier was capable of believing that as fact.

Schets: Quaggas at noon under mimosa green and gold, graceful and grey like mules by Gaudier-Brzeska, with boughts of silver silk, stripeless zebras, gazelles with heft.

Does Fourier’s uncluttered imagination belong to philosophy or art? I see him surviving in the verve and color of Roger de la Fresnaye, Delaunay, Lurçat. Was he a philosopher at all? Braque is the better epistemologist.

Something of a serious talk with Sander. I tell him that he can go back to Amsterdam anytime he wants, but to Dokter Tomas. The terms and happenstance of the custody, which is entirely informal and fortuitous.