Apples and Pears - Closing

So Sander does a Wolfgang lying on the floor looking out of the
side of his eyes at Gretje reading, trying to magic her into looking at hiom. A
quick drawing of Wolfje, hands behind head, bored, ankle on knee, beside Sander
fucking Grietje. Laugh, pouts Wolfje, but I won't be bored when the Nipper
comes. He'll be my brother. Don't ever tell him I'm not his brother. I'll talk
with him while Grietje and Sander and Adriaan are busy with their things. We'll
start talking as soon as he's borned.

Apples and Pears - pg. 100

Sweetbrier agrees, wrily, that no phalanstery anything like Fourier's is possible without an Erhonian revolution, canceling machines. To return movement to walking, horseback riding, and the true dance. To return music to the instrument and occasion. To return the casual to the deilberate, the planned, the expected. To return reading to daylight and the lamp. To return love to passion as it arises. To return work to communal duty, to the sense of usefulness. To have the beginning and end of everything kept in sight and in the discourse of the whole phalanstery. To take happiness from money and restore it to the harmony of work and its reward, ambition and its achievement. To put mind and hand in concert. To reorganize society after its disastrous dispersal by train, automobile, airplane.

Apples and Pears - pg. 63

Xronos and Eros, our age and youth, were in their proper paideuma Time and Love. They are both, wavilinear. Love, like time, is a medium, for nothing would be beautiful, no day sweet, or time a gift rather than a burden, without euphoria and benevolence, wavelengths in love's spectrum. Leonardo: the beauty of things lightens our hearts.

Apples and Pears - pg. 33

Nature is the extension of seed generating a membrane of cells whose destiny was to be metamorphic, synergetic, inventive, adaptive. Michelet's symbol for this viscous progress was the copulation of Isis and Osiris in the womb, one organism differentiated into male and female. The same blood pulsed through their embranchments of veins as thin and as blue as the phloem of violet petals. Osiris' ink fingertip, gelatinous palp sheathed in transparent skin around transparent bone, found Isis' clitoral tip pelagic under its pelllicle as fine as a gnat's wing, as rich a nucular perplexity as the bud of his standing met. Their mouths joined, rosepetal tongues twined and rolling. Elf ears. Eyes of gazelle fawns. His finger floats away, her calyx hand guides his peniculus in, and the three-month-long orgasm begins at the meeting of thrust and hunch, a suffusion of light through honey, spreading like music along every course and nest of nerves.

Apples and Pears - pg. 13

Culture makes experience possible. Experience does not deposit culture, its symbols, or its tone. Experience follows culture as an orchestra a score. Culture is tacit, unconsciously learned, invisible to the fish in its water. All events are echoes.

Apples and Pears - Opening

Joop Zoetemelk Gagne
le Maillot Jaune

12 MESSIDOR
The mountain ash, or rowan, Virgil's onus but not Ovid's fraximus, is by family a rose and by ancient rumor a bitch.

• 
  

It all goes back, this complex friendship, to the year Picasso died, while I was finishing De Boventonen van Stilleven and beginning the commentary on Fourier, and to Paris the July Joop Zoetmelk won the Tour de France. Its plangencies cross philosophy at angles one might, with luck, trace. Fourier thought that our dream of a golden age that never was is a vision of his Periode Amphiharmonique. In our time we long not for a lost past but for a lost future.

"The Bowmen of Shu" has been published before in Blast 3 and in a finely printed limited edition by The Grenfell Press; "Fifty-Seven Views of Fujyama" was first published in Granta, in England, and later in the United States by The Hudson Review; parts of "Apples and Pears" have appeared before, in early drafts: "Joop Zoetemelk Gagne le Maillot JAUNE" in Antaeus , and a section provisionally titled "Apples and Pears" in Conjunctions.

Copyright 1984 by Guy Davenport
Printed in the United States of America

The drawings on pp. 8 and 10 are by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; all other drawings by Guy Davenport.

NORTH POINT PRESS . SAN FRANCISCO . 1984

nothing to say...

I took my customary stroll outside at the university main: The Greens, went all the way to check if the library was open by any chance. The lights were on in the glassed stairwells and in a few windows but most of the building was already in the darkness: closed at 5pm. I thought I would get the Apples and Oranges, a novella by Guy Davenport that Nihilo was raving about. It happened to be an early evening en-shadowed by wandering clouds and faint gusts of general wet breeze. Everything was wet, appearing fresh out of the consistent drizzle of the last three days. The fountain at the library corner was on and I had Destroyer on my iPod:

"Some people call me 'Angel' on their deathbed, in a dream.
That's right, the Czar's father thought things could've gone differntly
last night, but they didn't...

And I couldn't bear to follow you there, where trauma exists in the sky.
20th Century Masters welcome these disasters, and so do I.
But, no!
Oh baby, please don't go up into it!"