I’ve had the pleasure of possessing a decent set of brains for some time now, but the best thing they’ve ever done for me was to alert me to the presence of actual genius in others. There have not been too many of them - true geniuses I’ve met - but the handful I’ve encountered have made quite an impact on me. Of these, one man in particular impressed me both as a genius and as an exceptional human being. My dad had prepared me at a tender age for a meeting with him, explaining that this was his best and hardest teacher, who had held one of the most esteemed professorships in Oxford. It was said of him that, though he was seated as Regius Professor of Law, he could have held any number of other top chairs even in non-legal fields, ranging from theology to philosophy to classical literature. David Daube was an intellect who towered in a city of spires.
Dad had said Daube had been his toughest teacher, but was also a warm and profound humanist. Though I cried when I first met him (myself being three years old and somewhat excitable at the time), Daube was kind enough to give me a second chance later on in life. When I was considering attending Berkeley, to which Daube had transferred in the ‘70s, he met with me and showed me such graciousness and warmth that I immediately became one of his legions of fans. Though he passed away in 1999, I still sometimes encounter people - always very smart people - who knew him and had been exposed to his profound gifts. So far as I’m concerned, anyone who professes appreciation of David Daube is a person I’d like to know better.
I learned over the years some details of his biography - his birth in Germany, his academic achievements there at Freiberg and Gottingen, his escape from Nazism to England (where apparently his name was actually on a list that Hitler kept of persons to be executed upon the subjugation of that faire isle), his peregrination from Cambridge to Aberdeen to All Soul’s College, Oxon, which is the intellectual pinnacle of a very fine university town.... his orthodox Judaism, his vegetarianism, his insatiable appetite for learning, life, and love (this latter apparently gratified with any number of very willing women throughout his long life). Genius is all well and good, but David Daube was a man for whom genius was only a part of a personality rich enough to seem almost superhuman.
A few months ago I was on a site visit for work, and had the pleasure of interviewing a board member of a legal services organization who was a long-time member of the faculty of the Berkeley School of Law. After an hour of substantive discussion, I closed the conversation with a few rote wrap-up questions, and then said, “I’ve never asked this in one of these meetings, but given your background, I can’t not ask: Does the name David Daube mean anything to you?”
The other man’s face lit up, and had he the time to regale me with stories, I feel sure I’d have been roundly regaled for hours. However, his time was short, so he asked for my address instead and sent me a copy of a book called The Jottings of David Daube. This book consists of little blurbs, from just a few lines to a few pages in length, on subjects ranging from sociology, to linguistics, to academic politics and strategies, to stories of love won and lost, to offer a scant sampling of the breadth of his work. He dictated these beginning in the early 1970s and kept them going till he was near death from emphysema. In truth, it was tantamount to a blog without the internet - one more example of David Daube’s prescient wisdom.
I have finally finished the book and it’s fascinating. He talks about everything under the sun, and illuminates it all with gentleness and fervor and unadulterated, well, genius. At one point he describes learning from his children about the English nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty, and how he told them that he was sure it couldn’t have been about an egg - maybe a tortoise? His sons told him, “Dad, you always say something different.” Perhaps that is itself the definition of genius. (As it turns out, he did the research and confirmed his original hypothesis, but that’s a story already well-told elsewhere.)
One of the shorter jottings was an idea for a short story, of which Daube said, had he not been so lazy, he’d have written it. “Lazy” is not a word anyone would associate with this man, but I appreciate that busy people cannot always achieve every goal they envision for themselves. I hope he did not too deeply rue his failure to complete this small task. In his honor, and also because I’m on a fiction-writing kick but had to take a break from the “hippodrome” tale I’ve been working on for months now, I offer this version of the story David Daube imagined but did not apparently write. I cannot pretend to anything like his genius, but at least I am sometimes able to say something different, and if that is the gift I can offer on his behalf, I am happy to do so. You may indulge my fancy in the extended entry (said the actress to the bishop).
Over the weekend, I engaged in lots of housework, the most significant piece of which was to switch the entire contents of two closets in different rooms, one of which was once the kids’ room but will soon be my office and yogatorium, and the other of which (reverse prior clauses). The closet materials in the to-be office need to be winnowed, though, so the room stands full of boxes and stacks of papers. One of the boxes is my crate of nostalgic materials - scrapbooks and letters from friends and such. As I was entertaining Jesse this morning I decided to rifle that box and see what I’d chosen to save for myself.
There, among the goofy notes from college roommates and the invitation to my bar mitzvah, I found a postcard from David Daube himself, written on the occasion of my choosing not to attend Berkeley for my undergraduate education. He cheerfully excoriated me for my choice, but – professing a belief in resurrection – expressed sureness that I’d be back at Berkeley for my graduate degree in poetry, invoking the spirits of Goethe and Donne. Well, that didn’t happen, but I appreciated the vote of confidence. And like a voice risen from the great beyond, David Daube thereby endowed me with the chutzpah I needed to post this story here. If he could have read the hideous tripe I called poetry in high school and still encouraged me to write, then this story could not strike him as anything more than the paean it is.
David, it was good to hear from you. I hope you enjoy the story, however it reaches you, and however you define it.
The Bird on the Left-Hand Side
He’d had all day to anticipate his arrival, but still the experience was was more than he’d expected. The temple sheltered in a deep cleft between spires of golden rock that shimmered in the setting sun as he ascended broad well-worn steps that led to a deeply-eaved portal. Upon entering, he could almost smell the centuries of veneration that hung thick in the air. It had taken him days of arduous travel to reach this destination, but in some ways he felt as he arrived as if a lifetime’s journey was being completed.
He was ushered into the abbot’s office by a sternly supercilious monk, left with a cup of tea amid dozens of classic paintings and calligraphies that decorated the room. Having first succumbed to the glory of the approach to the Temple he now lost himself in the artistry that surrounded him within its precincts. How could black ink on yellow silk appear so alive, so fluid, so colorful? With the twist of a brush 700 years prior, the masters had created complete microcosms to which the scholar gladly relinquished himself. Moving from masterpiece to masterpiece, he breathed deep the extreme ancientness and authenticity of his surroundings. One might be habituated to all of Europe’s most esteemed academies, he considered, and never even imagine that any art could be so sublime, that a space could feel so rich and perfected. He sipped his tea. It burned his tongue.
It was at this moment that the abbot entered, to be greeted by he scholar’s inarticulate howl of pain. The abbot’s eyes crinkled but he kept a dignified silence as his visitor gasped and stammered. Soon enough, the scholar regained his tongue and formally introduced himself. The abbot expressed appreciation for his language skills; the scholar expressed appreciation for the artwork surrounding them. The abbot nodded and embarked on a conversation about the art, piece by piece, drawing comparisons, invoking parallels, demonstrating the motive principals behind individual elements and styles and schools.... His hands caressed the air as he spoke; to the scholar, it looked as though he was re-creating the paintings with his fingers out of the ageless dust that floated in the room.
The effect was so calming that it took a moment for him to register that he’d been asked a question. What had brought him here, from so far away? Of course, naturally - it was because of the art, and the artist Wing Lo. The Golden Temple was known to have retained a trove of irreplaceable art dating back to the Song dynasty, in which era it had been a center of artistic innovation under the initial oversight of Wing Lo, a genius and a formative influence on 500 years of Chinese art. Furthermore, the Golden Temple had never been taken in a battle. As a result, the scholar thought, perhaps among their unplundered collections he might view some seminal works in their intended setting, giving him appreciation of and insight into them that he could never gain from a transplanted example. To see the art where and as the artist himself envisioned it - already that evening, experiences along such lines had profoundly moved him, proving to him the wisdom of having undertaken his journey there.
The abbot smiled at this, and, slowly rotating his teacup, suggested that they retire for supper, devotions, and an evening of rest, and that the next morning the scholar would be given access to the archives of the Golden Temple Academy, for purposes of uplifting his understanding of certain aesthetic principles. The plan was agreeable to the scholar, and they retired from the office for the night.
Both men awoke the next morning refreshed and eager. They breakfasted on tea and apples, offered a brief devotion, and repaired to the archives. These were held in the oldest, deepest rooms of the temple, built of finely worked blocks of the golden stone of the surrounding spires. The main room was massive and filled with light from innumerable slit windows from which monks had repeatedly protected the collection housed there. Long wooden tables, glossy from centuries of use, stood in a line not far from the windows, and just beyond those stood hectares of shelving, all filled with scrolls, tablets and lacquer cases. Each set of shelves receded into obscure murk far back in the inner reaches of the chamber. The scholar was speechless at the richness and depth of this trove. No wonder their catalog had never been fully reported out for the research community. The task was unimaginably huge.
Clearly delighted to be in the archives with him, the abbot asked expansively where he should prefer to begin his studies. And in fact the scholar so well knew the answer to that question, that he was able to articulate it fairly promptly.
Wing Lo’s masterwork, the culmination of his career and the stroke of genius from which arose his famous academy and style, was The Bird on the Left Hand Side. The piece was a landscape, exquisite as was all of Wing’s work, but distinguished in particular by an ethereal presence - a bird, caught at the moment of alighting on - or from - a hydrangea branch. Amid the riotous exuberance of that efflorescent twig, Wing Lo had caught the bird at a fugue moment as it moved from one state of being to another, a blur of activity that took innumerable forms at once as the eye played over it, just as a bird in flight is seen in innumerable postures almost simultaneously. As he portrayed it, the image was as much an objectification of motive principals as a depiction of any particular animal. From this perfect depiction of action in stillness, was the reputation of Wing Lo then established, and the historical reverberation of his inventiveness and mastery echoed sufficiently even nine centuries later to have brought the scholar here from another world altogether.
Because of its antiquity and extraordinary importance, the original of this piece had not been displayed publicly for many years. The academy’s students and masters took it as the crowning achievement of their discipline to re-create The Bird on the Left-Hand Side upon a blank silk, seeking to accomplish something akin to the same juxtaposition of energy and substance as their first master had demonstrated. His most stellar pupil’s copy had been put on display in place of the original many hundreds of years ago, and this copy was then replaced by successive iterations of unusual fealty over the course of centuries. And in fact it had come to pass that the original masterwork went somehow missing after so many years undisturbed in the bowels of the archives of the Golden Temple. No one remembered where exactly to find it again. In a way, the evanescence of this original was taken as tantamount to confirmation of its having captured something essentially ineffable - the painting itself seemed to have fluttered out of existence altogether.
When scholars sought deeper appreciation of the Bird on the Left Hand Side, the received legacy of reiterations was always the primary avenue of study. Each successive copy was examined, with every subtle variation contrasted and mapped out. Each master who had made a primary copy was duly studied. The pedagogy surrounding this particular painting and its transgenerational ingeminations had achieved the status of a primary academic canon. How was the bird visualized? How had it been reduced to a concrete form? What was the significance of its placement, neither center nor right, but just so to the left? The painting’s progeny, in arts and in letters of artistic history and criticism, continued to render it an almost inexhaustible font of scholarship. It was for just these reasons that this scholar yearned to begin his studies that day.
Where might he start? With the student files of Chung, Wing Lo’s star pupil who nigh outshone his teacher, the creator of the first displayed copy of The Bird on the Left-Hand Side. The scholar sought to gain insight into Chung’s own development as an artist, what skills had brought him to the academy in the first place, and which were selected for refinement or for disencouragement. He wanted to follow Chung’s river and map all its tributaries, both those that reached famous destinations and those that petered blindly out.
It was not typical for a scholar to seek to dig back so far into Chung’s career, but such was this scholar’s interest and so the abbot was pleased to try to meet his request; off he trundled with a sandalwood-scented swish to search for Chung’s student notebooks.
Time passed slowly. The scholar, left to his own devices, first peered out the slit windows into the depths of the valley laid out before him; then he began randomly to look at some of the shelves of the archives, wondering at their logical structure. He walked several dozen meters to a set of shelves with a label, “Resources related to Secondary Studies.” Not what he’d sought, but provocative; the scholar strolled down into the stacks, casually browsing tabs and tags and the spines of bound volumes. The materials seemed to date mostly from the Tang dynasty, 400 years prior. Then something caught his eye:
On a top shelf, a significantly older lacquer box. He recognized its style as dating from the earliest days of the academy, somewhat overwrought and precious. It didn’t belong where it was, whatever it contained. He pulled the chest down and carried it back to his table. The abbot arrived back at the same time, with a similar box, and regarded the scholar’s find with perplexion. “What is that you’ve found?,” he asked, looking closely at the dusty old box.
“I went down an aisle of secondary studies materials and found this amid some materials from the Tang dynasty, the 1600s,” the scholar told him. Comparing this box to the one brought back by the abbot, they seemed to be of an age - and the abbot’s went back to the 12th century.
“Doesn’t look like it belongs there,” the abbot mumbled. “Let’s see what’s in it.”
The scholar pulled the ivory pin from the latch, briefly wiped down the exterior of the box with his handkerchief, and lifted off the lid. The air inside the box smelled stale but not musty, and the scroll within it appeared to be in good condition. The scholar was about to withdraw it when the abbot stopped him. “The lid,” he said, pointing to some inscriptions. “What is that writing?”
They looked at it together: it appeared to be a list of names, each written in a different hand, each with a date. The names, six altogether, meant nothing to either of the men. The dates began in the 13th century and continued to the 18th. The scholar and the abbot exchanged a guarded look under furrowed brows, and then the scholar removed the scroll and gently teased open the loosely-knotted silk that bound it up. With teamwork borne of common purpose and practice, the two virtual strangers unfurled the scroll to examine its contents.
Within the protective outer cloth of the scroll was a piece of very finely decorated silk, upon which had been set a strip of ivory-colored silk depicting a charming mountain scene - the setting of the Golden Temple itself. As they rolled it open, the Temple itself came to light, but a much smaller, simpler prior version of it. The abbot sighed, “The original Temple, buried now deep within its current form. This is in fact the room in which we now stand.” It was rendered with clarity and precision, and both men wondered if it could be an undiscovered work by Wing Lo himself. The chop signature ultimately exposed at the bottom of the scroll removed all doubt: Wing’s symbol was crisply marked and clearly original. The men beamed at each other. This was a most exciting discovery for them both.
The abbot’s fingers traced the edge of the silk as his eyes scanned the robust rendering of a setting he knew better than any other. But when he reached the bottom of the scroll, this fingers paused. He tapped the edge of the white silk lightly, then trailed a fingertip across the bottom. He asked the scholar, “What do you think?”
The scholar caressed the edges of the inner silk for a few moments as both men held the scroll stretched open. “I think something’s in there,” the scholar eventually said, his voice carefully even.
“I think so too,” said the abbot. “Let’s see what it is.” From his robes he pulled a fine dagger, with which he carefully traced the edge of the inner silk. When he reached the bottom corner the silk almost sighed as it lifted up from the base to which it had apparently been attached for hundreds of years. What was revealed beneath it was, first, Wing Lo’s chop signature again, but beyond that both men immediately recognized what they were seeing as the first graceful twigs and shimmering ponds were revealed. “It’s the Bird!,” they both said at once. And it was clear to each of them from the other’s voice that they both knew that this was not a copy. In this obscure box, accidentally unearthed, two men whose lives had been devoted to the heritage of a single magnificent piece of art found themselves in its presence, perhaps as the first to view it in a thousand years.
The scholar’s hands operated automatically, gently teasing up the overlaid painting, treating it with all the respect and appreciation that such an newly-discovered masterpiece demanded, even as he slavered to view the rediscovered masterpiece beneath it. He re-furled the painting of the ancient academy slowly, revealing beneath it the hydrangea blossoms he had studied so carefully for so many years, the upreaching twig. Both men knew that the bird on the left-hand side, the most famous brushstrokes in the history of Chinese art, was about to be divulged to them. And then, the top scroll stuck and stopped re-rolling. Four hands held fast, knowing better than to force the revelation. The abbot brought back his dagger and with a surgeon’s skill he separated the two lengths of silk. As the upper resumed its coiling, the cause of the adhesion was immediately clear to them both, with a clarity that seemed to remove all the air from the spacious room. The bird on the left-hand side was not a bird at all.
Viewed in the morning’s pure light, on a silk that had been preserved with all the care an artistic empire could muster, above the hydrangea branch was something that was not ink. All the other brushwork was done in the customary black, but the thing on the left-hand side was brown. The scholar peered at it from an oblique angle; whatever it was, it had not penetrated the silk like paint but lay atop it with a desiccated crust. The abbot leaned over and sniffed at it. “Smells like peaches,” he whispered. “Wing Lo did not paint these marks. He dropped his lunch on his work.”
The men stared at the long silk, finally fully revealed from beneath the masking work. Every detail was as clearly envisioned and executed as the copies had ever implied of the original, except for the peach-stains, which seemed to grow more garish and out-of-place as they stared at it. After a few minutes, the scholar turned to the abbot and asked, “Now what?” Wordlessly, the abbot picked up the lid of the lacquer box, pulled a pen from his robes, and handed them to the scholar.
“I can’t sign this,” he admitted; “it would be a renunciation of the academy to which my life has been and will continue to be devoted. But you can, and you should.” The scholar carefully wrote his name, in his native language, followed by the year. He paused to look again at the seven names that he now understood as the keepers, through the centuries, of the secret of the Bird on the Left-Hand Side. Then he re-rolled the two scrolls together, retied them, and replaced them in the small wrought case. “Put these away somewhere,” he asked the abbot. The abbot took the box and assured him, “It will not be found anytime soon. And when it is found, as it inevitably will be, let us hope that the finder will continue to appreciate what has sprung up from this painting, enough to persuade him to perpetuate the illusion of the Bird on the Left Hand Side for a little longer still.”
The next morning the scholar left the temple, barely able to look back at it. But he did know that it was there, and that knowledge left him feeling distinctly disconnected. He now possessed a secret that could destroy a thousand years worth of scholarship and artistry. This power sat uneasily with him. He decided to ignore it, knowing that it would never go away, but hoping that he might. The journey back for him would be long, but he feared that it might not in fact be long enough.
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