by John Crowley
Let’s just not be too hasty: that’s all Barr was telling his students, his gray-suited and crew-cut students back at the end of the Age of Reason. Let’s recognize—though it surprises and confuses us, it’s so—that the facts are not finally extricable from the stories. Outside our stories, outside ourselves, is the historyless, inhuman, utterly other physical world; and within our human lives within that world are our stories, our ramparts, without which we would go mad, as a man prevented from dreaming in the end goes mad. Not true, no: only necessary.
But the Age of Reason was a shuttered mansion; what Pierce heard constantly now was how the real world that had seemed so clinker-built to Barr was beginning to come apart under investigation. Relativity. Synchronicity. Uncertainty. Telepathy, clairvoyance, gymnosophists of the East levitating, turning their skins to gold by thought alone. Wishing maybe made it so, for the skilled wisher trained long enough in the right arts, arts so long suppressed by the Holy Office of imperial Reason that they had atrophied, languishing in prison. Strong acids, though, might dissolve those bonds, cleanse the doors of the senses, let the light of far real heavens in. That’s what Pierce heard.
So what if Barr was wrong? What if inside and outside were not such exclusive categories, nor all the truth on one side of the equation? Because Moses did have horns, in some sense; Jesus was a fish; if those were only stories inside, like a dream, still they were outside any individual; nor could dreaming make them match the in-fact behavior of the constellations, which apparently they did. How come? How did that come to be? How for that matter had the centuries come in Pierce’s mind to be colored panels into which everything he learned about could be instantly fitted, and from where came his certainty that the more highly colored and complete his crowded canvases became, the more he grasped history in its fullness? If he really did grasp history in its fullness, then were his colors inside or outside?
What if—made of its stuff after all, made of its not-so-solid atoms and electrons, woven utterly into its space-time continuum, its Ecology (new word found lying on the age’s doorstep to be adopted and brought up)—what if man, and man’s thought, and man’s stories, embodied not only man’s truth but truths about outside too, truths about how not only the human world but the whole great world as well goes on? What if those old, oft-told, eternally returning, so-compelling stories were compelling because they contained a coded secret about how the physical (or “so-called” physical) world operates, how it came to cast up man, and thus thought, and thus meaning, in the first place?
None of them were true, none of those stories! Not a single one of them. All right. But what if they were all true? The universe is a safe, a safe with a combination lock, and the combination of the lock is locked up inside the safe: that chestnut had given him an enormous comfort as an existentialist at Noate, a bitter pleasure. But we are the safe! We are made of dust: all right: then dust can think, dust can know. The combination is, must be, locked inside our hearts, our own pumping blood, our spinning brains and the stories they weave.
Could it be, could it be? How did he know? Almost with disdain, a shrinking as from the touch of something loathly, he had always avoided all systematic knowledge of the physical universe; he had carefully just-barely-not-failed every science course he had been made to take at Noate, and had forgotten their boring and ghastly contents as soon as he closed the last lab door behind him. Astronomy had been one of them. He remembered nothing of it except the fact, congenial to him at the time, that comets (those old omens) were actually nothing but large balls of dirty snow. What he knew of how the investigation into the nature of things was going in his time was confined to what he read in the papers or saw on television; only that, and the notions he was now receiving as though through the charged air, Julie’s rumors of terrific revelations about to break that never quite did. Starships from Elsewhere were landing as the moon drew closer to the earth; powerful mages hidden till now in Tibet were about to announce themselves the true governors of the planet; scientists had fallen through self-made gaps in the fabric of space and time and the matter was being hushed up: Pierce would hear, with a shiver of wonder, news that if true would transform the whole account of time and life forevermore—and in the next moment, laughing with relief, would recognize in the news an old story, a story that had been old at the turn of the last millennium, had perhaps been one of those told around the old original campfire where stories had first been heard in the world.
And from where then had come his shiver of wonder?
He shivered; he opened the window to the night, and rested his elbows on the sill. He put his long chin in the cup of his hands, and stood thus looking out, like a gargoyle.
Did the world have a plot? Did it, after all? He had not ever believed himself to have one, no not even in those days when he had lived within stories; but did the world?
They out there believed it did. His students, hungering for stories as a man deprived of sleep hungers to dream. For sure Julie would look at the same street corner at the same time of day for another five-dollar bill; at the same phase of the moon, perhaps, the same five-dollar-yielding turn of the wheel. Julie believed that Gypsies could tell fortunes.
Did the world have a plot? Had it only seemed to lack one because he had forgotten his own?
On a crystal May morning, after everyone else seemed to have departed, he and Julie sat opposite each other at the scarred kitchen table, ready to go: between them now stood a tall glass of water and, in a saucer, two blue-stained cubes of sugar that their upstairs neighbor—gentle-eyed, hirsute—had acquired for them, tickets to Elsewhere. In after years he would sometimes wonder if at that moment he did not pass out through a sort of side door of existence, abandoning forever the main course his life would otherwise have taken; but it didn’t matter, for there was to be no going back through to find out, no going back along the unrolling path that soon came to be beneath their feet. Not seemed-to-come-to-be: it was no metaphor, or if it was a metaphor it was one that was so intensely so that the tenor and the vehicle of it, not identical, might just as well have been. In fact it became evident sometime during that endless morning that truth itself was a metaphor, no not even a metaphor, only a direction, a direction toward the most revelatory metaphor of all, never ever to be reached. Life is a journey; it is only one journey; there is along it only one road, one dark wood, one hill, one river to cross, one city to come to; one dawn, one evening. Each is only encountered again and again, apprehended, understood, recounted, forgotten, lost, and found again. And at the same time—Pierce standing gasping in the winds of Time felt it with the shocked conviction of a Bruno discovering Copernicus, of the first man in history to perceive it—the universe extends out infinitely in every direction you can look in or think about, at every instant.
Oh I see, he said, Oh I see, I get it, listening to the falling into place, one by one, of infinite tumblers that were tiny enough to fit inside the turnings of his own minute chemistries. He learned that day where heaven is, and where hell, and where the seven-story mountain; and he laughed aloud to know the simple truth. He learned the answers to a hundred other questions, and then forgot them, and then forgot the questions too: but for some years after—not often but now and then—he would receive, like a wave that reaches far up a dry shingle and then recedes, a dash of that day’s understanding: and for a moment taste its certainty like salt.
SIX
Those were the days when Pierce became a popular teacher at Barnabas; then that he came to seem to his students to have a secret he could impart, a secret that had cost him something in the learning. The stack of books bought, borrowed, and stolen grew tall beside his street-salvaged plush armchair; the exotic goods he plundered there he came freighted with into class, there were not enough minutes in an hour or hours in a semester to unload them all.
Meanwhile the great parade wound on, turning in on itself, darkened by waste and penury; the ones who came irregularly to sit on Pierce’s classroom flo
or and listen to his stories had ever less acquaintance with Western Civilization, they seemed to be beings who had come from far places, who were headed for other far places unimaginable to him, and to be only resting before him momentarily, exhausted and dusty.
Still Pierce worked at his account; while far away in the Midwest, Rosie Rasmussen and her Mike set up housekeeping in a gray Vetville beyond a huge and restless university, and while Spofford sat silent and tense in a Harlem hospital rec room with six others who could not forget a certain far-off beach at dawn, a certain green hill, Pierce read on: he read Barr and he read Vico and he read the Steganography of Lois Rose; he read the stories of Grimm and Frobenius, and the Stories of the Flowers and the High History of the Holy Graal and the History of the Royal Society, by Sprat; he read George Santayana (no, no) and Giorgio di Santillana (yes! yes!) and a dozen texts he might have read at Noate and never had; he read The Golden Bough and The Golden Legend and The Golden Ass of Apuleius. While uptown the fledgling Sphinx, a schoolchild still, went through Effie’s pills looking for something she might take, while Beau Brachman on a Colorado mountaintop awaited starships from Elsewhere to appear and touch down, Pierce stood on his rooftop with an illustrated Hyginus in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and discerned for the first time the moon rise into the polluted sky in a sign, the sign of Pisces, two fishes bow-tied at the tail.
One question, Barr had said; one question leads to another, and that one to another, and that one to others, and so on, unfinishably, a life’s work. Pierce learned where the four corners of the earth are, for they are not the four points of the compass; he learned why there are nine choirs of angels and not ten or eight, and where Jamshyd’s seven-ring’d cup that was lost can every night be found. He didn’t learn why people think that Gypsies can tell fortunes, but he learned why there are twenty-four hours in a day, and twelve signs of the zodiac, and twelve Apostles too. It began to seem that there is not any numbered thing in the human story that has its number by chance; if any band of heroes, or measurements of a ship, or days of a march, or hills a city was built on, did not add up to a satisfying figure, then time and ingenuity and dreaming would eventually wear away or build up the facts, until it too acquired one of the small set of whole numbers and regular geometrical figures that inhabit the human breast, the combination of the safe.
He began to think that even though magic, and science, and religion did not all mean the same thing, they all meant in the same way. In fact perhaps Meaning was purely an ingredient of certain items that the world put forth and not of others, perhaps it arose just in the way flavor arises out of a conjunction of spices and herbs and long cooking and a sensitive palate, and yet is not reducible to any of those things; was a name only for the nameless conjunction, the slight clutch in his throat, the hum in his ears, Oh I see, I get it.
Whatever it was, he had acquired a taste for it. To the matched set of Barr’s speculations and the weirdly compelling tales out of his childhood and the little life of Bruno were added books on celestial mechanics and the workings of the senses and the insides of the atom; on the history of Christian iconography and witchcraft and on the learning processes of children. A lane had opened up within these books, a path glimpsed within their bibliographies, and Pierce, though darkling at times, bored and repelled sometimes, was led on, from footnote to text, from glossy paperback filled with notions to shabby leatherback filled only with print, pausing only to gather courage to go on, to shade his eyes and see, if he could see, what pioneers had been before him along this way, if any had; and picking up as he went the oddest facts and bright bits of this and that.
And then, all unexpectedly, he took a turning he recognized; on a certain day he topped a certain sudden hill and, astonished, raised his eyes to a view he was familiar with, the frontiers of a country he knew.
A country he knew; a country he had once known a lot about, though he hadn’t thought of it in years. A country on whose frontiers he had at one time seemed often to stand, through long summer evenings when the false geography of Kentucky’s northern hills, to which he had been unaccountably exiled, would melt, and that more real country come to be, not a long walk away; the country to which he truly belonged.
Spring had come to the city, the new world’s first, and summer was returning the nomads to the streets—until it was stolen, Pierce had watched on his TV the masses of them, the children’s crusade strung out through the streets of cities, or pressing up against the obdurate front of some public building; watched them ridden over as by a car of Kali wreathed in skulls and tear-gas smoke.
Little Barnabas, in spite of or perhaps because of its trimming, had been marched over as by an Asian migration or Iberian transhumance, almost without resistance, and now Pierce was spending the hottest day of summer session locked in his office while the children laughed and sang and painted the halls, clamoring for peace. He listened for the sounds of breaking glass and sirens and ate Saltine crackers, a box of which he had found in a desk drawer; he read Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages, which he thought he had been assigned to read once at Noate, had even once passed a test on, but did not remember having actually read:
The people force their way in at daybreak into the great Hall where the feast was to take place, “some to look on, others to regale themselves, others to pilfer or to steal victuals or other things.” The members of Parlement and of the University, the provost of the merchants and the aldermen, after having succeeded with great difficulty in entering the hall, find the tables assigned to them occupied by all sorts of artisans. An attempt is made to remove them, “but when they had succeeded in driving away one or two, six or eight sat down on the other side.”
There it was, sirens, both the moaning kind and the imperative Klaxon. The kids within began to break the windows, and the kids without, barricading the steps, cheered exultantly, defiantly: Pierce could hear them, though he could see nothing through the blind window of his office, which faced onto an airshaft. He flipped the pages of the little book.
… many an expelled prince, roaming from court to court, without means, but full of projects and still decked with the splendour of the marvellous East whence he had fled—the king of Armenia, the king of Cyprus, before long the emperor of Constantinople. It is not surprising that the people of Paris should have believed in the tale of the Gipsies, who presented themselves in 1427, “a duke and a count and ten men, all on horseback,” while others, to the number 120, had to stay outside the town. They came from Egypt, they said; the Pope had ordered them, by way of penance for their apostasy, to wander about for seven years, without sleeping in a bed; there had been 1,200 of them, but their king, their queen, and all the others had died on the way; as a mitigation, the Pope had ordered that every bishop and abbot was to give them ten pounds tournois. The people of Paris came in great numbers to see them, and have their fortunes told by women who eased them of their money “by magic arts or in other ways.”
Louder just for an instant than the clamor of the New Age around him, Pierce felt the sensation of an answer, so suddenly that it took him a moment to think just what question it was the answer to. He searched the passage again:
They came from Egypt, they said
Oh. Oh yes: oh yes of course. Egypt.
A simple answer; Barr had said it was. A simple answer, one he had even sort of known in fact, only he hadn’t known this one essential piece of information, but now he had it, now he knew.
How do you like that.
Egypt: but the country they had brought their magic arts from would probably not have been Egypt, would it, no it would not have been, not in the story Pierce had once known. It would have been a country like Egypt, a country near Egypt perhaps, but not Egypt at all.
How do you like that: now how do you like that.
The pages of the little book fluttered closed in Pierce’s hands; the high-pitched chanting of the students was being drowned out by insistent bullhorn commands. Then there came a mingled
groan and wail of horror, and the thud thud of tear-gas canisters fired. Pierce was to be liberated.
Elsewhere, ahold of a simple answer, before the bitter fumes reached his hall, Pierce only sat and stared, thinking: Now how do you like that.
Pierce had been an only child, nine years old, when his mother had left his father forever in Brooklyn (for reasons that became obvious to Pierce over the years but that had not been clear to him then at all) and brought him to Kentucky to live with her brother Sam, whose wife had died, and Sam’s four children, in a ramshackle compound aloof above the single brief street of a mining town. Sam was a doctor down in town, at a little Catholic mission hospital that treated the miners’ lungs, and couched their child-brides, and wormed their children. Sam’s own children—and that would include Pierce—didn’t attend the squalid local school; they were given lessons at home in the morning by the priest’s sister and housekeeper, Miss Martha.