Harry Mathews
A HOMECOMING
for David Kalstone
on his birthday
" It is in changing that things find repose. "
Forget the inscriptions on papyrus and clay, those marks of
distinction: our first persistent scrawls were smudged with
brown crayons on the green, almost black blotting paper of
Merovingian times. They were times without time, faceless ,
dateless, like a kaleidoscope perhaps, but one with no light
behind it. The blur achieved some definition when , against a
hurricane-light sky,
Charlemagne clumps onto the scene. His horse is caparisoned
with purplish scrolls that tinge a namable century with a
barbaric redolence, although not for long: continental Europe
soon dissolves in new conflicting murks, while we console
ourselves with King Alfred under his comfortable brown
wrapping paper and rainy skies.
Around the year one thousand we move out of childhood.
Things ripen in a warm grayness that grows continuously
brighter, until we enter, as into a walled garden, the twelfth
century's resplendent, blanched neoplatonic light, overcast with
a faint Buckminster Fuller shade of rose. Its candor survives
through subsequent periods-a suffused pearl in the thirteenth
century, in the fourteenth a stealthier, more introspective gray,
and then we are plunged into the fifteenth's
