Boys Flying Like Bees: Guy Davenport's Fetish of Precision continued


It's not surprising that we feel some interspecies fetish pressure from this merry description of wasp sex. But a similar feeling is available - to those whom would read this with the attention given to the wasp nasties above - in the following, as well:

        How they learned to make paper nests, neatly roomed with hexagonal cells, we cannot
        begin to know, nor how they invented their government of queen and commoners,         housekeepers, scouts and foragers, nurses and guards at the door of the hive.[12]

The first three clauses of this last sentence, their precise portrait of a presumed ignorance, have a fetishistic air about them because of their precision, but, as it turns out, they are not quite correct. We do - as, I believe, did Davenport - know precise things about the wasps' hive homes. Pappus of Alexandria, a fourth century B.C.E. mathematician, begins one of the volumes of Mathematical Collection with "On the Sagacity of Bees." Here he writes,

        Bees know just this fact which is useful to them, that the hexagon is greater than the
        square and the triangle and will hold more honey for the same expenditure of material
        in constructing each.[13]

It seems likely that Davenport, no mean classical scholar, knew this passage. "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" even includes a wisp of an allusion, when he writes of the wasps:

        They discover all and remember all that's useful to their lives. Yellow crumbles, soft
        meal, gum, grains on the grippers, bright. Green is crisp, gives water, ginger mint keen.
        Yellow is deep, green is long. Green snaps wet, a wax of mealy yellow clings.[14]

The rest of Davenport's "How they learned" sentence, from "nor how" to "hive," through a census of the wasp civil service, shimmers in sympathy with another of the main elements of the fiction, the social/occupational divisions of a Fourierist colony.

Fourier's ideas enjoyed a certain popularity in the US in the 1840s (and elsewhere: Dostoevsky was an enthusiast), but like all utopian schemes, didn't take root on our soil. Davenport makes mention of the last relic of this attempt.

        [T]he last phalanx in the United States . . . had recently been bulldozed, a large
        wooden hexagon of a building beautifully covered with kudzu and still inhabitable. . . .
        No grand orgies of attractions by proportion and destiny were ever holden to music
        in its rooms. . . .[15]

Clearly Davenport admired this ill-fated building, and, in a Fourierist spirit, nearly all of the interiors in his stories are in harmony with the actions of those who gather within them. The right space - long, open rooms, scrubbed clean and without internal barriers - are designed to emulate the hive cell's balance, each human hive an open space, uncluttered, with each object therein having been gathered, and holding meaning for the occupant. Like bees, grains on their grippers, returning to their hexagonal cells, which is like the character's living spaces, which are like their minds. As Davenport writes in his long poem Flowers & Leaves: "love / And the intellect are the one honeycomb."[16]