Apples and Pears

And Other Stories

Guy Davenport

Contents

THE BOWMEN OF SHU

FIFTY-SEVEN VIEWS OF FUJIYAMA

THE CHAIR

APPLES AND PEARS:

Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek: Messidor-Vendémiaire 1981

JOOP ZOETEMELK GAGNE LE MAILLOT JAUNE

EREWHONIAN APPLE, NEW HARMONY PEAR

QUAGGA

THE VESTMENTS OF THE BAND

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

27 DECEMBER 1914

Here we are picking the first fern shoots and saying when shall we get back to our country, away from das Trommelfeuer, the gunners spent like winded dogs, white smoke and drizzle of sparks blowing across barbed wire in coils, the stink of cordite. 27 December 1914. Avalanches of shrapnel from field guns firing point-blank with fuses set at zero spray down in gusts, an iron windy rain. Here we are because we have the huns for our foemen. It’s with pleasure, dear Cournos, that I’ve received news from you. We have no comfort because of these Mongols. You must have heard of my whereabouts from Ezra to whom I wrote some time ago. Since then nothing new except that the weather has had a change for the better. We grub the soft fern shoots, the rain has stopped for several days and with it keeping the watch in a foot deep of liquid mud, the crazy duckwalks, hack and spit of point guns.

HOOGE RICHEBOURG GIVENCHY

The smell of the dead out on the wire is all of barbarity in one essence. Also sleeping on sodden ground. The frost having set it, we have the pleasure of a firm if not warm bed, and when you have turned to a warrior you become hardened to many evils. When anyone says return the others are full of sorrow. Anyway we leave the marshes on the fifth January for a rest behind the lines, and we cannot but look forward to the long forgotten luxury of a bundle of straw in a warm barn or loft, also to that of hot food, for we are so near the enemy and they behave so badly with their guns that we dare not light kitchen fire within two or three miles, so that when we get the daily meal at one in the morning it is necessarily cold, but alike the chinese bowmen in Ezra’s poem we had rather eat fern shoots than go back now, and whatever the suffering may be it is soon forgotten and we want the victory.

SCULPTURAL ENERGY IS THE MOUNTAIN

Sculptural feeling is the appreciation of masses in relation. Sculptural ability is the defining of these masses by planes. The Paleolithic Vortex resulted in the decoration of the Dordogne caverns. Early stone-age man disputed the earth with animals.

LES FALLACIEUX DÉTOURS DU LABYRINTHE

The rifles, crack! thuck! whip at the bob of helmets of the boches in the trenches across the desolation of an orchard. If they stir too busily at a point, our mitrailleuses rattle at them, their tracers bright as bees in a garden even in this dead light. With my knife I have carved the stock of a German rifle into a woman with her arms as interlocked rounded triangles over her head, her breasts are triangles, her sex, her thighs. Like the Africans I am constrained by the volume of my material, the figure to be found wholly within a section of trunk. De Launay handles the piece with understanding eyes and hands. He is an anthropologist working on labyrinths, and has a major paper prepared for the Revue Archéologique. I am, I tell him, a sculptor, descended from the masons who built Chartres. We have seen a cathedral burn, its lead roof melting in on its ruin. De Launay sees a pattern in this hell. We are the generation to understand the world, the accelerations of the turn of vortices, how their energy spent itself, all the way back to the Paleolithic (he tells me about Cartailhac and Teilhard and Breuil). But our knowledge, which must come from contemplation and careful inspection, has collided with a storm, a vortex of stupidity and idiocy. His tracing of the labyrinth from prehistory forward has put him in a real labyrinth of trenches, its Minotaur the Germans, that cretinous monster of pedantic dullness. Yet, Henri, he says, we are learning the Paleolithic in a way that was closed to us as savant and sculpteur. His smile is deliciously ironic in a face freckled with mud spatter, his eyes lively under the brim of his helmet.

MAÇON

How veddy interesting, Miss Mansfield said, sipping tea, when I told her I was descended from the craftsmen who carved Chartres. I could have died of shame, Sophie screeched at me as soon as we were outside. These people, she said, will have no respect for you. I am of the Polish gentry, which is hard enough to get them to understand. Very much the pusinka.

SMOKING RIVERS OF MUD

We say will we be let to go back in October. There is no ease in royal affairs. We have no comfort. Our sorrow is bitter. But we would not return to our country. What flower has come into blossom. We have time to busy ourselves with art, reading poems, so that intellectually we are not yet dead nor degenerate. Whose chariot, the General’s horses, his horses even, are tired. They were strong. We have no rest. Three battles a month. By heaven, his horses are tired. The generals are on them, the soldiers are by them. If you can write me all about the Kensington colony, the neo-greeks and neo-chinese. Does the Egoist still appear? What does it contain? My best wishes for a prosperous and happy 1915. Yours Sincerely Henri Gaudierbrzeska.

THE NORTH BORDER. BLUE MOUNTAINS. BARBARIANS.

The horses are well trained. The generals have ivory arrows and quivers ornamented with fishskin. The enemy is swift. We must be careful. When we set out, the willows were drooping with spring. We come back in the snow. We are hungry and thirsty, our mind is full of sorrow. Who will know of our grief? The newspapers say that our trench labyrinths are comfortable, that the British throw grenades with the ease of men accustomed to games of sport from their infancy. Tiger in the bamboo. Thunder from beyond the mountain. How and when we shall survive who knows? Stink of cordite. Rain of ash.

THE IMP

Stands in mischief, knees flexed to scoot.

DAS LABYRINTH

Between Neuville-St.-Vaast to the north and Arras to the south, and Mt. St.-Eloi and Vimy east and west, lay the underground maze of tunnels, mines, fortresses in slant caves, some as deep as fifty feet, which the Germans called The Labyrinth, as insane a nest of armaments and men as military strategy ever conceived. Its approaches were seeded with deathtraps and mine fields. It was invisible to aerial observation. Even its designers had forgotten all the corridors, an Irrgarten lit with pale battery-powered lights. Foch himself came to oversee its siege. The British hacked their way toward Lille, the French toward Lens, past The Labyrinth. The offensive began 9 May 1915. Out from Arras, past Ste.-Catherine, 7^e Compagnie, 129^e Infanterie, III^c Corps, Capitaine Ménager the Commandant, marched on the road to Vimy Ridge, Corporal Henri Gaudier at the head of his squad. Except for mad wildflowers in sudden patches, their tricolor was the only alleviation in the grey desert of craters, burnt farms, a blistered sky.

THE SOLDAT’S REMARK TO GENERAL APPLAUSE

Fuck all starters of wars up the arse with a handspike dipped in tetanus.

BRANCUSI TO GAUDIER

Les hommes nus dans la plastique ne sont pas si beaux que les crapauds.

THE WOLF

Is my brother, the tiger my sister. They think eat, they think grass, bamboo, forest, plain, river. Their regal indifference to my drawing them, on my knees outside their cages, is the indifference of the stars. I feel abased, ashamed, worthless in their presence. But I close, a little, the gap between me and them, in catching some of their grace. And afterwards, they will say, He drew the wolf, the deer, the cat. His sculpture was of stag and birds, of men and women in whom there was animal grace.

THE CATHEDRAL BURNT IN FRONT OF MY EYES

Rheims. My Lieutenant sent me to repair some barbed wire between our trenches and the enemy’s. I went through the mist with two fellows. I was on my back under the wire when zut! out comes the moon. The boches could see me et alors! pan pan pan! Their fire cut through the tangle above me, which came down and snared me. I sawed it with my knife in a dozen places. The detail got back to the trench, said I was done for, and with the lieutenant’s concurrence they blasted away at the boches, who returned the volleys, and then the artillery joined in, with me smack between them. I crawled flat on my stomach back to our trench, and brought the repair coil of barbed wire and my piece with me. The lieutenant could not believe his eyes. When the ruckus quieted down, I went back out, finished the job, and got back at 5 a.m. I have a gash, from the wire, in my right leg, and a bullet nick in my right heel.

LA ROSALIE

The bayonet, so called because we draw it red from the round guts of pig-eyed Germans.

FONT DE GAUME

A hundred and fifty meters of blind cave drilled a million years ago by a river underground into the soft green hills at Les Eyzies de Tayac in the Val Dordogne, in which, some forty thousand years ago, hunters of Magdalenian times painted and engraved the immediate reaches with a grammar of horses and bison, and deeper up the bore, mammoths, reindeer, cougars, human fetuses, human hands, a red rhinoceros, palings of lines recording the recurrence of some event, masks or faces, perhaps of the wind god, the rain god, the god of the wolves, and at the utmost back depth, horse and mountain cat.

NIGHT ATTACK

We crept through a wood as dark as pitch, fixed bayonets, and pushed some 500 yards amid fields until we came to a wood. There we opened fire and in a bound we were along the bank of the road where the Prussians stood. We shot at each other some quarter of an hour at a distance of 12 to 15 yards and the work was deadly. I brought down two great giants who stood against a burning heap of straw.

SOLDAT

I have been fighting for two months and I can now gauge the intensity of life.

DOGFIGHT

Enid Bagnold, horse-necked, square-jawed, nymph-eyed, finally came to sit, after weeks of postponing, Sophie sniffy with jealousy, suspicion, fright. The day was damp and cold. Gaudier lumped the clay on its armature and set to, nimble-fingered, eyes from the Bagnold to the clay. His nose began to bleed. He worked on. The Bagnold said, Your nose is bleeding. I know, said Gaudier. In that sack on the wall behind you there’s something to stop it. She looked in the bag: clothes. Some male and dirty, some female and dirty. Rancid shirts, mildewed stockings. She chose a pair of Sophie’s drawers and tied them around Gaudier’s face, to soak up, at least, some of the blood, which had reddened his neck and smock. Lower, he said, I can’t see. Take your pose again, quickly, quickly. She dared not look at him, wild hair, bright black eyes ajiggle above a ruin of bloody rags. The light was going swiftly, the room dark and cold. He worked on, as if by touch. And then a barrage of roars pierced the air. A dogfight outside. My God, she said. Tilt your chin, he said. Keep your neck tall. She tried the pose, wondering how he could see her in the dark. The dogfight raged the louder. Gaudier went to the window. The streetlamp at that moment came on, and she watched him with the fascination of horror, masked as he was in bloody cloth, staring out at the dogfight. He watched it with dark, interested eyes, his hands white with clay against the dirty window. Monsieur Gaudier! she said, are you quite in command of yourself? You may go, he said.

PARTRIDGES

Horses are worn out in three weeks, die by the roadside. Dogs wander, are destroyed, and others come along. With all the destruction that works around us, nothing is changed, even superficially. Life is the same strength, the moving agent that permits the small individual to assert himself. The bursting shells, the volleys, wire entanglements, projectors, motors, the chaos of battle do not alter in the least the outlines of the hill we are besieging. A company of partridges scuttles along before our very trench.

FRITH STREET

Sat on the floor at Hulme’s widow’s while he talked bolt upright in his North Country farmer’s body and stuttered through his admiration and phlegmatic defense of Epstein’s flenite pieces, so African as to be more Soninke made than Soninke derived, feck undity in all its so to speak milky bovinity (and Marsh clasping his hands, as if in prayer, and giving responses, teddibly vital isn’t it I mean to say and the phallic note, with Ezra cutting his wicked eye at me from his Villon face). Sat with the godlike poet Brooke and the catatonically seriousMiddleton Murray, and the devout, Tancred, Flint, FitzGerald, and the fair-minded skeptics, Wadsworth and Nevinson. The ale was good and Hulme chose his words with booming precision and attack.

RODIN

Conceive form in depth. Under all the planes there is a center in the stone. All things alive swell out from a center. Observe relief, not outline: relief determines the contour. Let emotion stream to your center as water up a root, as sunlight into a leaf. Love, hope, tremble, live.

PARIS 1910

The chisel does not cut the stone, but crushes it. It bites. You brush away, blow away the dust the fine blade has crumbled. The mind drifts free as you work, and memories play at their richest when the attention is engaged with the stone. There was Paris, there was the decision, there was Zosik. England and Germany have nothing like the Parisian cafe where of a spring evening you sit outside making a glass of red wine last and last. It was at the Café Cujas that he met another stranger to the city, a poet, a Czech poet—Hlávaček? Svobodová? Bezruč? Dyk?—who, talking of Neruda, of Rimbaud, sorted out Gaudier’s array of ambitions and focused them upon sculpture. Rodin! Phidias! Michelangelo! It was the one art that involved the heroic, the bringing of a talent to its fullest maturity to do anything at all. It was an art that demanded the flawless hand, a sense of perfection in the whole, a pitiless and totally demanding art. But it had not been to the Czech that he had announced his commitment, but to the woman Sophie, not as an intention or experiment but as a road he was upon, boldly striding out. Moi? Je suis sculpteur. She, for her part, was a writer, a novelist. She had never shown anyone her work, it was too personal, too vulnerable before an unfeeling and uncomprehending world. Night after night he heard her story, not really listening, as it was her face, her eyes, her spirit that he loved, coveting her her maturity—she was thirty-nine, he a green and raw seventeen—and her story was a kind of badly constructed Russian novel. She was a Pole, from near Cracow. Her father threw away a considerable inheritance on gaming and shameless girls. She was the only daughter of nine children, and she was made to feel the disgrace of it, as she was useless as a worker, would have to be provided with a dowry in time. Her brothers called her names, and reproached her with her inferior gender. At sixteen she was put out to work, as her family was tired of supporting her as a burden. They found an old man, a Jew, and offered her to him as a wife. But he, like any other, demanded a dowry with her. This threw Papa Brzesky into a fit. A Jew want a dowry! There were three other attempts to marry her off. Two were likely business for the undertaker. The other was a sensitive young man of broken health whom she loved, the apple of his mother’s eye. He came courting and played cards with Mama Brzeska, who one day accused him of cheating and chased him out of the house. Then her father went bankrupt. Sophie made her way to Cracow, hoping to study at the university, but she was neither qualified to enter it nor able to pay the tuition it asked. She came to Paris, took a nursemaid’s job, and was driven away by the snide remarks of the other servants, who were ill-bred. She went from menial job to menial job until her health, never robust, gave way. Then she was taken on as a nurse to a rich American family about to return to Philadelphia. She was to look after a ten-year-old boy and his sister. The boy died soon after. The sister begged to hear dirty stories, and when Sophie refused to tell her any, complained to her parents that the nurse bored her to tears. Entertain the child, commanded the parents, so Sophie told her dirty stories, and was promptly fired for moral turpitude and kicked out without a reference. She found refuge in an orphanage in New York run by nuns. They farmed her out as a nanny. Fathers made advances to her, which she could have accepted and gotten rich. But all this time she kept her body pure and virgin. What money she could manage to save she sent to her youngest brother in Poland, enabling him to emigrate to America. He came, was disappointed, worked as a garbage boy for a hotel, accused Sophie of having tricked him, and would not speak to her ever afterward. A nursing job came along that took her to Paris again. Here she was destitute, and returned to Poland, where she was taken in by a rich uncle. This uncle was a widower and lived in sin with her cousin, whom he had enticed into his bed by telling her that Sophie had often done so. The shock of this lie unstrung her nerves and made a wreck of her composure for the rest of her life. Her brothers taunted her with having gone to America and failed to come back rich. She took up a life of dissipation. If no one believed in her virtue, why keep it? But dissipation undermined her constitution, and she had to recuperate at Baden, little as she could afford it. She then fell in love with a wealthy manufacturer aged fifty-three. He was witty, bright, kind, and in possession of a keen appreciation of the beauties of Nature. He courted her for a year without asking for her hand. When she tried to bring matters to a head, they had a fight that nearly sent them both to the hospital and thence to their graves. In this fracas he disclosed to her that he loved another, by whom he already had a son, and wished to remain free in case the other ever agreed to be his wife. She felt that her sanity was going. Her rich lover paid for her recuperation at a home in the country. She wrote him daily; he answered none of her letters. She would contemplate for hours the most painless means of doing away with herself. She returned to her family in Poland, where they taunted her with her failure, her age, her pretensions, her ugliness. She made her way to Paris again, and began to observe with fascination the faun-like young man who came every evening to the Bibliothèque Ste.-Geneviève to read books of anatomy. They met on the steps one evening at closing time, and walked along the Seine. She could scarcely believe it when he said he was in love with her.

THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Out of the past, out of Assyria, China, Egypt, the new.

EPSTEIN, BRANCUSI, MODIGLIANI, ZADKINE

Out of the new, a past.

VORTEX

From Rodin, passion. From John Cournos, courage. From Alfred Wolmark, spontaneity of execution. From Epstein, the stone, direct cutting. From Brancusi, purity of form. From Modigliani, the irony of grace. From Africa, the compression of form into minimal volume. From Lewis, the geometric. From Horace Brodsky, camaraderie de la caserne. From Ezra Pound, archaic China, the medieval, Dante, recognition. From Sophie, love, abrasion, doubt, the sweetness of an hour.

THE BRONZES OF BENIN

The Calf Bearer, T’ang sacrificial vessels, the shields of New South Wales, Soninke masks, the Egypt of The Scribe and The Pharaoh Hunting Duck in the Papyrus Marsh, Hokusai, Font de Gaume, Les Combarelles.

JE REVIENS D’UN ENFER

The young anthropologist Robert de Launay, the student of mazes whose paper on labyrinths has been accepted for publication, has been shot through the neck outside the Labyrinth at Neuville-St.-Vaast, drowned in his own blood before the medics could see to the wound. Je t’écris, cher Ezra, du fond d’une tranchée que nous avons creusée hier pour se protéger des obus qui nous arrivent sur la tête regulièrement toutes les cinq minutes, je suis ici depuis une semaine et nous couchons en plein air, les nuits sont humides et froides et nous en souffrons beaucoup plus que du feu de l’ennemi nous avons du repos aujourd’hui et ça fait bien plaisir.

ST.-JEAN DE BRAYE

In the dry, brown October of 1891 there was born to Joseph Gaudier of St.-Jean de Braye, maker of fine doors and cabinets, descendant of one of the sculptors of Chartres, a son whom he baptized Henri.

CHARLEVILLE

Far to the south the one-legged Rimbaud lay dying in Marseilles, which he imagined to be Abyssinia. He was anxious that his caravan of camels laden with rifles and ammo should get off to a start before dawn, for the march was to Aden. Armed with the fierceness of our patience, he once wrote, we shall reach the splendid cities at daybreak.

TARGU JIU

In Craiova the fourteen-year-old Constantin Brancusi was learning to carve wood with chisel and maul. He was a peasant from Pestisani Gori across a larch forest from Targu Jiu, which he left when he was eleven, in the manner of the Rumanians, to master a trade. He would enter the national school for sculptors, and then walk from Rumania to Paris.

L’ENFANT DIFFICILE

He did not spank well, the child Henri. He doubled his fists, held his breath, and arched his back in an agony of stubbornness, until at an early age his parents began to reason with him before whacking his behind. He reasoned back. As he grew older, he kicked them when he was punished, and they reasoned the harder. A very philosopher, his father said, and his mother put her head to one side, crossed her hands over her apron, and looked at her son with complacent disappointment. The rogue, she said, the darling little rogue. He drew, like all children. His mother taught him to draw rabbits, and to surround them with grass and flowers. With his father’s marking pencil, carefully sharpened for him with a penknife, he drew ships, igloos, medieval trees, the cathedral at Orleans, and American Indians in their eagle-feather bonnets. At six he turned to insects. At first he drew gay fritillaries and gaudy moths. Only flowers had their absolute design and economy of form, which he thought of as sitting right. A roseleaf hopper was tucked into its abrupt parabola as if it were a creature all hat, and yet if you looked it had feet and eyes and chest and belly just like the great dragonflies and damsels of the Loiret, or the mason wasps that built their combs under the eaves of the shed. But it was the grasshoppers and crickets that he drew most. From the forelegs of the grasshopper he learned the stark clarity of a bold design one half of which was mirror image of the other half. The wings of moths were like that, but the principle was different. Wings worked together, the grasshopper’s forelegs worked in opposition to the hindlegs, and yet the effort of the one complemented the effort of the other, like two beings jumping into each other, both going straight up. Earwigs, ants: nothing could be added, nothing subtracted. Who could draw a mosquito? In profile it was an elegance of lines, each at a perfect angle to the others. Bugs, his sisters said. Uncle Pierre gave him a box of colored pencils, and he drew pages of ladybirds and shieldbugs and speckled moths.

ARTILLERY BARRAGE. THE LABYRINTH. JUNE 1915.

Smoke boiling black, white underbelly, blooming sulphur, falling dirt and splinters. The daytime moon. Larks.

HENRI LE PETIT

The first day of school, his new oilcloth satchel in his lap, his new pencil box in his hands, he breathed the strange new smell of floor polish and washed slate blackboards in numb expectation. The upper half of the classroom door was glass, through which a bald gentleman in a celluloid collar came and peered from time to time. The teacher was a woman who handled books as he had never seen them handled before, with professional delicacy, grace, smart deliberateness. Down the front of her polka-dot dress she wore a necktie, like a man on Sunday, and a purple ribbon ran from her glasses to her bosom, anchored there by a brooch. The letter A was a moth, B was a butterfly, C was a caterpillar, D was a beetle, E an ant, F a mantis. G and H he knew: he had learned them the other way round, with a dot after each, to indicate who drew his drawings.

RAILWAY ARCH 25

His Font de Gaume. Planes, the surfaces of mass, meet at lines, each tilted at a different angle to light. The mass is energy. The harmony of its surfaces the emotion forever contained and forever released. Here he drank and roared with Brodsky, here he sculpted the phallus, the menhir, the totem called Hieratic Bust of Ezra Pound. It will not look like you, you know. It will look like your energy.

SOPHIE

All night by her bed, imploring her. It is revolting, unspiritual, she said.

PIK AND ZOSIK

Brother and sister. Even Mr. Pound believed it. Pikus and Zosiulik. The neurotic Pole and her sly fawn of a lover.

MON BON DZIECKO UKOCHANY

According to the little book which I am reading about Dante, the devil lived on very good terms with very few people, because of his terrible tendency to invective and reproach, and his extraordinary gift for irony and irresistible sarcasm—just like my own funny little Sisik. To be quite honest, Sisik, I love you passionately, from the depth of all my being, and I feel instinctively bound to you; what may often make me seem nasty to you is a kind of disagreeable horror that you don’t love me nearly so much as I love you, and that you are always on the point of leaving me.

CAPITAINE MÉNAGER

Nous admirions tous Gaudier, non seulement pour sa bravoure, qui était légendaire, mais aussi et surtout pour sa vive intelligence et la haute idee qu’il avait de ses devoirs. A ma compagnie il était aimé de tous, et je le tenais en particulière estime car à cette époque de guerre de tranchées j’étais certain que—grâce à I’exemple qu’il donnerait à ses camarades—là où était Gaudier les Boches ne passeraient pas.

THE OLD WOMAN TO PASSERSBY

J’ai perdu mon fils. L’avez-vous trouvé? Il s’appelle Henri.

CHARGEZ!

One after another in those weeks of May and early June of 1915, the sugar refinery at Souchez, the cemetery of Ablain, the White Road, and the Labyrinth yielded to the fierce, unremitting blows of the French. The Labyrinth, all but impregnable, was a fortification contrived with tortuous, complicated tunnels, sometimes as deep as fifty feet below the surface, with mines and fortresses, deathtraps, caves and shelters, from which unexpected foes could attack with liquid fire or gas or knives. In the darkness and dampness and foulness of those Stygian vaults where in some places the only guiding gleams were from electric flashlights, men battled for days, for weeks, until June was half spent. What wonder that the Germans could scarcely believe the enemy had made it their own?

CORPORAL HENRI GAUDIER

Mort pour la Patrie. 4 Octobre 1891–5 Juin 1915.

THE RED STONE DANCER

Nos fesses ne sont pas les leurs. Il faut être absolument moderne.

Months, days, eternity’s sojourners. Years that unfold from the cherry in flower to rice thick in the flat fields to the gingko suddenly gold the first day of frost to the red fox across the snow. The sampan pilot from Shiogama to Ishinomaki, the postman galloping from Kyoto to Ogaki, what do they travel but time? Our great journey is through the years, even when we doze by the brazier. Clouds move on the winds. We long to travel with them. For I, Bashō, am a traveler. No sooner, last autumn, did I get home from a fine journey along the coast, take the broom to the cobwebs in my neglected house on the Sumida River, see the New Year in, watch the wolves slinking down from the hills shoulder-deep in white drifts, look in wonder all over again, as every spring, at the mist on the marshes, than I was ready to set out through the gates at Shirakawa. I stitched up the slits and rips in my trousers, hitched a new chinstrap to my hat, rubbed my legs with burnt wormwood leaves (which puts vigor into the muscles), and thought all the while of the moon rising full over Matsushima, what a sight that would be when I got there and could gaze on it.

We set out, she and I, a fine late summer day, happy in the heft and chink of our gear. We had provender for a fortnight in the wilderness along the Vermont Trail, which we took up on a path through an orchard abandoned years ago, where in generous morning light busy with cabbage butterflies and the green blink of grasshoppers an old pear tree still as frisky and crisp as a girl stood with authority among dark unpruned winesaps gone wild, and prodigal sprawling zinnias, sweetpeas, and hollyhocks that had once been some honest farmwife’s flowers and garden grown from seeds that came in Shaker packets from upstate New York or even Ohio, now blooming tall and profuse in sedge and thistle all the way to the tamaracks of the forest edge, all in that elective concert by which the lion’s fellowship makes the mimosa spread. This trail was blazed back in the century’s teens by a knickerbockered and tweed-capped comitatus from Yale, carrying on a tradition from Raphael Pumpelly and Percy Wallace and Steele MacKaye, from Thoreau and Burroughs: a journey with no purpose but to be in the wilderness, to be in its silence, to be together deep among its trees and valleys and heights.

Having, with great luck, sold my house by the river, thereby casting myself adrift, so to speak, from obligations and responsibilities, I moved in for a while with my friend and patron, the merchant Sampu, himself a poet. Bright flash makes me blink: spring field, farmer’s spade. But before I went I brushed a poem for my old doorpost. Others now will sing high in peach blossom time behind this door wild grass blocks. And at dawn I set out, more of night still in the sky than day, as much by moonlight fading as by sunlight arriving, the twenty-seventh of March. I could just make out the dim outline of Fuji and the thin white cherry blossoms of Ueno and Yanaka. Farewell, Fuji! Farewell, cherry blossoms! Friends had got up early to see me off, indeed to go with me for the first leg of the journey by boat, as far as Senju. It was not until they left me that I felt, with a jump of my heart, the three hundred miles I was proposing to go. Water stood in my eyes. I looked at my friends and the neat clusters of houses at Senju as if through rain. Fish and bird regret that springtime is so brief. This was my parting poem. My friends took copies, and watched till I was out of sight.

On the beach at Sounion. Tar and seaweed shift in the spent collapse and slide of shirred green water just beyond our toes. We had been to see Byron’s name carved with a penknife on a column of Poseidon’s temple. Homer mentions this cape in the Iliad, perhaps all of Attika that he knew. It was here that the redstone kouros was excavated who stands in Athens by the javelin-hurling Zeus. We lie in Greek light. The silence is musical: the restlessness of the Ionian, the click of pebbles pushed by the seawash. There is no other sound. I am Hermes. I stand by the grey sea-shingle and wait in the windy wood where three roads meet. A poem? From the Anthology. Wet eyelashes, lens of water in navel. Another. To Priapos, god of gardens and friend to travelers, Damon the farmer laid on this altar, with a prayer that his trees and body be hale of limb for yet a while, a pomegranate glossy bright, a skippet of figs dried in the sun, a cluster of grapes, half red, half green, a mellow quince, a walnut splitting from its husk, a cucumber wrapped in flowers and leaves, and a jar of olives golden ripe.

All that March day I walked with a wondering sadness. I would see the north, but would I, at my age, ever return? My hair would grow whiter on the long journey. It was already Genroku, the second year thereof, and I would turn forty-five on the way. My shoulders were sore with my pack when I came to Soka, a village, at the end of the day. Travel light! I have always intended to, and my pack with its paper overcoat, cotton bathrobe (neither of which was much in a heavy rain), my notebook, inkblock, and brushes, would have been light enough except for gifts my friends loaded me with at parting, and my own unessential one thing and another which I cannot throw away because my heart is silly. We went, Sora and I, to see the sacred place of Muro-no-Yashima, Ko-no-Hana Sakuya Hime, the goddess of flowering trees. There is another shrine to her on the lower slopes of Fuji. When she was with child, Ninigi-no-Mikoto, her husband, would not believe that she was pregnant by a god. She locked herself into a room, set fire to it, and in the flames gave birth to Hohodemi-no-Mikoto, the fire-born noble. Here poets write of the smoke, and the peasants do not eat a speckled fish called konoshiro.

We set out, she and I, like Bashō on the narrow road to the deep north from his house on the Sumida where he could not stay for thinking of the road, of the red gate at Shirakawa, of the full moon over the islands of Matsushina, he and Kawai Sogoro in their paper coats, journey proud in wabi zumai, thinking of wasps in the cedar close of an inn, chrysanthemums touched by the first mountain frost. A few years before Minoru Hara and I had climbed Chocorua to find a single lady slipper on a carpet of pine needles, to which he bowed, Chocorua that Ezra Pound remembered in the concentration camp at Pisa, fusing it with Tai Shan in his imagination, Chocorua where Jessie Whitehead lived with her pet porcupines and bear, Chocorua where William James died, Thoreau’s Chocorua that he strolled up laughing that people used the word climb of its easy slopes. We set out into the deuteronomical mountains Charles Ives rings against The Rockstrewn Hills Join in the People’s Outdoor Meeting with the chime of iron on iron, sabre, bell, and hammer, bugle and messkit, ramrod and spur, remembering how congenial and incantatory music led the caissons over the Potomac to Shiloh.

I spent the night of March thirtieth at Gozaemon the Honest’s Inn at Nikko Mountain. Such was my landlord’s name, which he made much of, assuring me that I would sleep out of harm’s way on his grass pillows. When a stranger so advertises his honesty, you take more care than ever, but this innkeeper was as good as his name. There was no more guile in him than in Buddha the merciful, and Confucius would have approved of his scrupulousness and manners. Next day, April first, we climbed Nikko, Mountain of the Sun’s Brilliance. The sainted Kobo Daishi named it and built the temple on it a thousand years ago. Its holiness is beyond words. You can see its benevolence in every field round about. In it I wrote: New leaves, with what holy wonder do I watch the sunlight on your green. Through the mist we could just make out Mount Kurokami from the temple on Nikko. The snow on its slopes belies its name, Black-Haired Mountain. Sora wrote: I arrived at Kurokami with my hair shorn, in new clean summer clothes. Sora, whose name is Kawai Sogoro, used to chop wood and draw water for me. We were neighbors. I aroused his curiosity and made him a student of scenery. He too wanted to travel to see Matsushima in its beauty, and serene Kisagata.

Crickets creaking trills so loud we had to raise our voices, even on the beach down from the cycladic wall under the yellow spongy dry scrub with spiky stars of flowers. It is, he said, as if the light were noisy, all of it Heraclitus’ little fine particles cheeping away, madly counting each other. Thotheka! entheka! thekaksi! ikosieksi! khilioi! Ena thio tris tessera! Hair of the family of hay, torso of the family of dog, testicles of the family of Ionian pebbles, glans of the family of plum. Give us another poem, here by the fountain-pen-blue-ink sea. To Apollo of the Lykoreans Evnomos of Lokris gives this cricket of bronze. Know that, matched against Parthis in the finals for the harp, his strings rang keen under the pick until one of them snapped. But the prancing melody missed never a beat: a cricket sprang onto the harp and sounded the missing note in a perfection of harmony. For this sweet miracle, O godly son of Leto, Evnomos places this little singer on your altar. From the Anthology. So it’s Apollo and not Heraclitus running these nattering hoppergrasses and their katydid aunts and crickcrack uncles? And salty-kneed old Poseidon singing along from the sea.

So Sora, to be worthy of the beauty of the world, shaved his head the day we departed, and donned a wandering priest’s black robe, and took yet a third name, Sogo, which means Enlightened, for the road. When he wrote his haiku for Mount Kurokami, he was not merely describing his visit but dedicating himself to the sacredness of perception. We climbed higher above the shrine. We found the waterfall. It is a hundred feet high, splashing into a pool of darkest green. Urami-no-Taki is its name, See from Inside, for you can climb among the rocks and get in behind it. I wrote: From a silent cave I saw the waterfall, summer’s first grand sight for me. I had a friend at Kurobane in Nasu County. To get there you cross a wide grassy moor for many’s the mile, following a path. We kept our eyes on a village in the distance as a landmark, but night came on and rain began to pelt down before we could get there. We spent the night at a farmer’s hut along the way. Next day we saw a farmer with a horse, which we asked the loan of. The paths over the moor, he said, are like a great net. You will soon get lost at the crossroads. But the horse will know the way. Let him decide which path to take.

These were the hills whose elegiac autumns Ives summons with bronze Brahms as a ground for Lee standing in his stirrups as he crossed the Mason and Dixon Line while a band of Moravian cornets alto, tenor, and baritone, an E-flat helicon bass horn, drums battle and snare, strutted out the cakewalk dash of Dixie. The rebels danced in rank and gave a loud huzzah! These are the everlasting hills that stand from dawn time to red men to French hunter to Calvinist boot to rumors from farm to village that the bands played waltzes and polkas under the guns at Gettysburg when the cannonade was at its fiercest. We trod these hills because we loved them and because we loved each other, and because in them we might feel that consonance of hazard and intent which was the way Ives heard and Cezanne saw, the moiré of sound in the studio at West Redding where a Yale baseball cap sat on a bust of Wagner, the moiré of light in the quarries and pines at Bibémus. What tone of things might we not involve ourselves in the gathering of in these hills? With each step we left one world and walked into another.

I mounted the farmer’s horse. Sora walked beside us. Two little children ran behind us. One was a girl named Kasane. Sora was delighted with her name, which means many petalled. He wrote: Your name fits you, O Kasane, and fits the double carnation in its richness of petals! When we reached the village, we sent the horse back by itself, with a tip knotted into the saddle sash. My friend the samurai Joboji Takakatsu, the steward of a lord, was surprised to see me, and we renewed our friendship and we could not have enough of each other’s talk. Our happy conversations saw the sun across the country sky and wore the lantern dim way past moonrise. We walked in the outskirts of the town, saw an old academy for dog hunters—that cruel and unseemly sport was of short duration in ancient times—and paid our respects to the tomb of the lady Tamamo, a fox who took human shape. It was on this grave that the samurai archer Yoichi prayed before he shot a fan, at a great distance, from the mast of a drifting boat. Her grave is far out on the moor of grass, and is as lonely a place as you can imagine. The wind traveling through the grass! The silence! It was dark when we returned.

Leaves not opposite on a stem arrange themselves in two, five, eight, or thirteen rows. If the leaves in order of height up the stem be connected by a thread wound round the stem, then between any two successive leaves in a row the thread winds round the stem once if the leaves are in two or three rows, twice if in five rows, thrice if in eight, five if in thirteen. That is, two successive leaves on the stem will be at such a distance that if there are two rows, the second leaf will be halfway round the stem, if three rows, the second leaf will be one-third of the way around, if five, the second will be two-fifths of the way around; if eight, three-eighths; if thirteen, five-thirteenths. These are Fibonacci progressions in phyllotaxic arrangement. The organic law of vegetable growth is the surd towards which the series one-half, one-third, two-fifths, three-eighths, and so on, approximates. Professor T. C. Hilgard sought for the germ of phyllotaxis in the numerical genesis of cells, the computation of which demonstrates Fibonacci progressions in time.

The tomb of En-no-Gyoja, founder of the Shugen sect, who nine hundred years ago used to preach everywhere in humble clogs, is in Komyoji Temple. My friend Joboji took me to visit it. In full summer, in the mountains, I bowed before the clog-shod saint’s tall image to be blessed in my travels. Unganji the Zen temple is nearby. Here the hermit Buccho, my old Zen master at Edo, lived out his life in solitude. I remember that he once wrote a poem in pine charcoal on a rock in front of his hut. I would leave this little place, with its five foot of grass this way, five foot of grass that way, except that it keeps me dry when it rains. We were joined by some young worshipers on the way. Their bright chatter made the climb seem no time at all. The temple is in a wood of cedars and pine, and the way there is narrow, mossy, and wet. There is a gate and a bridge. Though it was April, the air was very cold. Buccho’s hut is behind the temple, a small box of a house under a big rock. I sensed the holiness of the place. I might have been at Yuan-miao’s cave or Fa-yun’s cliff. I made up this poem and left it there on a post: Even the woodpeckers have not dared touch this little house.

The first thing to go when you walk into the wilderness is time. You eat when you are hungry, rest when you are tired. You fill a moment to its brim. At a ford shoaling over rocks we doffed our packs, took off our boots and jeans, and waded in our shirttails for the childishness of it. Creek-washed feet, she said, as God intended. We dried in the sun on a boulder as warm as a dying stove, and fribbled and monkeyed with each other, priming for later. Jim Dandy! she said, and purred, but we geared up and pushed on, through Winslow Homer glades and dapple and tones that rose as if horn-heralded across sunny fields and greendark woods and tonalities now lost except for the stubborn masks of their autochthony, Ives imitating a trumpet on the piano for Nikolai Slonimsky and hearing at Waterbury gavottes his father had played during the artillery barrage at Chancellorsville, Apollinaire hanging a N’tomo mask of the Bambara on his wall beside Picassos and Laurencins, Gaudier drawing Siberian wolves in the London Zoo, tonalities with lost coordinates, for essences survive by chance allegiances and griefs: the harness chains on the caissons moving toward Seven Pines, dissonance and valence.

We ended our visit at Kurobane. I had asked of my host that he show me the way to Sessho-seki, the famous killing stone which slew birds and bugs that lit on it. He lent me a horse and guide. The guide shyly asked me, once we were out on the road, to compose a poem for him, and so delighted was I with the surprise of his request, that I wrote: Let us leave the road and go across the moors, the better to hear that cuckoo. The killing stone was no mystery. It is beside a hot spring that gives off a deadly gas. Around it the ground was covered with dead butterflies and bees. Then I found the very willow about which Saigyo wrote in his Shin Kokin Shu: In the shade of this willow lying kindly on the grass and on the stream as clear as glass, we rest awhile on the way to the far north. The willow is near the village Ashino, where I had been told I would find it, and we too, like Saigyo, rested in its shade. Only when the girls nearby had finished planting rice in a square of their paddy did I leave the famous willow’s shade. Then, after many days of walking without seeing a soul, we reached the Shirakawa boundary gate, the true beginning of the road north. I felt a peace come over me, felt anxiety drop away. I remembered the sweet excitement of travelers before me.

All of that again, he said, I long to see all of that again, the villages of the Pyrenees, Pau, the roads. O Lord, to smell French coffee again all mixed in with the smell of the earth, brandy, hay. Some of it will have changed, not all. The French peasant goes on forever. I asked if indeed there was any chance, any likelihood, that he could go. His smile was a resigned irony. Who knows, he said, that Saint Anthony didn’t take the streetcar into Alexandria? There hasn’t been a desert father in centuries and centuries, and there’s considerable confusion as to the rules of the game. He indicated a field to our left, beyond the wood of white oak and sweet gum where we were walking, a field of wheat stubble. That’s where I asked Joan Baez to take off her shoes and stockings so that I could see a woman’s feet again. She was so lovely against the spring wheat. Back in the hermitage we ate goat’s cheese and salted peanuts, and sipped whiskey from jelly glasses. On his table lay letters from Nicanor Parrá and Marguerite Yourcenar. He held the whiskey bottle up to the cold bright Kentucky sunlight blazing through the window. And then out to the privy, where he kicked the door with his hobnail boot, to shoo off the black snake who was usually inside. Out! Out! You old son of a bitch! You can come back later.

The great gate at Shirakawa, where the North begins, is one of the three largest checkpoints in all the kingdom. All poets who have passed through it have made a poem of the event. I approached it along a road overhung with dark trees. It was already autumn here, and winds troubled the branches above me. The unohana were still in bloom beside the road, and their profuse white blossoms met those of the blackberry brambles in the ditch. You would think an early snow had speckled all the underwood. Kiyosuke tells us in the Fukuro Zoshi that in ancient times no one went through this gate except in his finest clothes. Because of this Sora wrote: A garland of white unohana flowers around my head, I passed through Shirakawa Gate, the only finery I could command. We crossed the Abukuma River and walked north with the Aizu cliffs on our right, and villages on our left, Iwaki, Soma, Miharu. Over the mountains beyond them, we knew, were the counties Hitachi and Shimotsuke. We found the Shadow Pond, where all shadows cast on it are exact of outline. The day was overcast, however, and we saw only the grey sky mirrored in it. At Sukagawa I visited the poet Tokyu, who holds a government post there.

Dissonance chiming with order, strict physical law in its dance with hazard, valences as weightless as light bonding an aperitif à la gentiane Suze, a newspaper, carafe, ace of clubs, stummel. And in a shatter and jig of scialytic prism-fall quiet women, Hortense Cézanne among her geraniums, Gertrude Stein resting her elbows on her knees like a washerwoman, Madame Ginoux, of Aries, reader of novels, sitting in a black dress against a yellow wall, a portrait painted by Vincent in three quarters of an hour, quiet women at the centers of houses, and by the pipe, carafe, and newspaper on the tabletop men with a new inwardness of mind, an inwardness for listening to green silence, to watch tones and brilliances and subtleties of light, dawn, noon, and dusk, Etienne Louis Malus walking at sunset in the gardens of the Palais du Luxembourg, seeing how twice refracted level light was polarized by the palace windows, alert to remember what we would see and hold and share. From fields of yellow sedge to undergrowth of wild ferns tall as our shoulders, from slippery paths Indian file through trees to bear walks along black beaver ponds we set out to see the great rocks rolled into Vermont by glaciers ten thousand years ago.

Tokyu, once we were at the tea bowl, asked with what emotion I had passed through the great gate at Shirakawa. So taken had I been by the landscape, I admitted, and with memories of former poets and their emotions, that I composed few haiku of my own. The only one I would keep was: The first poetry I found in the far north was the worksongs of the rice farmers. We made three books of linked haiku beginning with this poem. Outside this provincial town on the post road there was a venerable chestnut tree under which a priest lived. In the presence of that tree I could feel that I was in the mountain forests where the poet Saigyo gathered nuts. I wrote these words then and there: O holy chestnut tree, the Chinese write your name with the character for tree below that of west, the direction of all things holy. Gyoki the priest of the common people in the Nara period had a chestnut walking stick, and the ridgepole of his house was chestnut. And I wrote this haiku: Worldly men pass by the chestnut in bloom by the roof. We ended our visit with Tokyu. We came to the renowned Asaka Hills and their many lakes. The katsumi iris, I knew, would be in bloom, and we left the high road to go see them.