by John Crowley
“Books,” Rosie said.
They were everywhere, books in tall cases, books piled in corners, on chairs and beside them, open books laid atop other open books; atlases, encyclopedias, brightly covered novels, broad glossy art books. Pierce took the path of least resistance that Kraft had worked out amid the shoals and islands of them, toward a locked glass cabinet that held still more.
He opened it with a key, which was in the lock.
“We should be systematic, I suppose,” he said. “More systematic.”
Several of the items in this case were carefully sealed up in the plastic bags in which rarities are kept; one seemed to contain leaves of a medieval manuscript. The typed label glued to it read PICATRIX.
Pierce shut the door, suddenly shy. A man’s best books.
“So,” Rosie said. Her first apprehension had passed; she was beginning to feel oddly at home here, in this strange man’s house, with this stranger. Watching Pierce touch the books in the cabinet had made her think she had introduced two men who could not help but be friends. “You want to poke around down here? I’m going upstairs.”
“Okay.”
He stood alone for a moment in the sitting room. There were cigarette burns, but why, all along the windowsill by the easy chair. The whole house seemed darkened with smoke, like a Mohawk’s lodge. He turned. The path led that way, through the asymmetrical and eccentric layout that the architect had hoped would be picturesque, and into a small, a surprisingly small room at the back of the house whose use was evident and at whose threshold Pierce paused, even more shy than before.
It was as crowded as a cockpit, and as thoughtfully fitted out. There was just enough room for the desk, not a desk even but just a broad surface built in not particularly well under the mullioned windows; and some tall bookcases fitted in beside the windows; and two gray steel filing cabinets labeled in a way Pierce couldn’t understand. There was an old electric heater, a stand-up hotel-lobby ashtray, an office lamp on an extensible arm that could be pulled out to shine down on that black Remington.
There he would sit; he would look out those windows at the day. He would put on the glasses he was too vain to wear elsewhere, and light the thirteenth cig of the day, and prop it in the ashtray. He would roll into the typewriter a piece of paper … a piece of this paper: here convenient to hand was a ream box of that coarse yellow copy paper he would have used for initial drafts. Sphinx. Pierce opened it; the lid clung to the box beneath with the vacuum its pulling-off created; the box was nearly full of paper, but the paper wasn’t blank.
It was all typed on, pages unnumbered but apparently consecutive, the draft of a novel. With both hands, a cake from the oven or a baby from its pram, Pierce lifted it out, and laid it on the desk before him. Out in the evening, a dog barked: Scotty?
There was no title page, though the top page had what might be an epigraph typed on it.
I learn that I am knight Parsifal.
Parsifal learns that his quest for the Grail is the quest of all men for the Grail.
The Grail is just then coming into being, brought forth by a labor of making in the whole world at once.
With a great groan the world awakes for a moment as from slumber, to pass the Grail like a stone.
It is over; Parsifal forgets what he set out to do, I forget that I am Parsifal, the world turns again and returns to sleep, and I am gone.
This was attributed below (by a quick pencil-dash, as though in an afterthought, or a wild guess) to Novalis. Pierce wondered. He lifted the dry yellow sheet, fragile-seeming, its edges already browning. The second sheet was headed Prologue in Heaven, and its first words were these:
There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, they kept pressing in one by one, always room for one more; they linked arms or clasped their hands behind them and looked out at the two mortals who looked in at them. They were all dressed in green, and wore fillets or wreaths of flowers and green leaves in their loose hair; their eyes were strangely gay, and their names all began with A.
A door thudded closed above his head, and Pierce looked up. Rosie’s feet crossed and then recrossed the floor above. Prying. Pierce riffled a little farther through the soft stack of sheets; he found chapter one. Once, the world was not as it has since become, it had a different history and a different future, and the laws that governed it were different too.
At the bottom of this page was a name and a date he knew.
A past moment of his child-being returned to him, when, where, the kind of soft surge of nameless body-memory that can be caused by a smell or a sound. He drew out Fellowes Kraft’s hard chair and sat in it; he put his elbow on the desk and his cheek in his hand, and began to read.
FIVE
Once, the world was not as it has since become.
It once worked in a different way than it does now; it had a different history and a different future. Its very flesh and bones, the physical laws that governed it, were other than the ones we know.
Whenever the world turns from what it has been into what it will be, and thus earns a different past and a different future, there is a brief moment when every possible kind of universe, all possible extensions of Being in space and time, are poised on the threshold of becoming, before all but one pass into nonexistence again; and the world is as it is and not as it was, and everyone in it forgets that it could ever be or has ever been other than the way it is now.
And just as the world is thus turning from the what-has-been into the what-is-to-be, and all possibilities are just for a moment alight and one has not yet been chosen, then all the other similar disjunctures in time (for there have been several) can become visible too: like the switchbacks on a rising mountain road suddenly becoming visible to a climber just at the moment when his car swings far out on the apex of the turn he is taking, and he sees where he has come from: and sees a blue sedan far down there climbing too.
This is the story of one such moment, and about those men and women and others who recognized it. They are all now dead, or asleep, or do not figure in the history that the world has come to have; and their moment appears quite otherwise to us than it did to them. Today I pick up a book, a history of those times, and what it tells me doesn’t surprise me; however these people misconceived their world (and apparently they misconceived it wildly, peopling it with gods and monsters, with nonexistent lands having imaginary histories, with metals and plants and animals ditto, having powers ditto), they really dwelt in the same world I dwell in: it had these animals and plants that I know, this sun and these stars, and not other ones.
And yet, in the interstices of such a history book, between the pages, I discern the shadow of another story and another world, symmetrical to it, and yet as different from it as dream is from waking.
This world; this story.
In the year 1564, a young Neapolitan of the ancient town of Nola, making the great mistake of his life, entered the Dominican monastery of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples. It wasn’t, of course, entirely his decision; his father was a retired soldier, landless and not rich, and the boy was brilliant (so the parish priest said) and a little wild, so there was really nothing for him but the Church. Still, the Dominicans, though the great and powerful order of the Kingdom of Naples, were not the order for this boy. Perhaps, if he had joined some smaller, less potent order, some hardworking Minorite or easygoing Benedictine or even cloistered Capuchin monastery, he might have been left alone to dream his dreams. If he had made his way into the Company of Jesus, they would have found some way to turn his pride and his strange gifts and even his distaste for Christianity to their own ends; the Company was well able to do that.
But the Dominicans: the order of Preacher-Friars, whose self-appointed mission was to keep pure the Church and the Church’s doctrines; the Dominicans, who punningly called themselves Domini canes, the running dogs of the Lord, black-and-white hounds eager to bring down heresy like prey: that was not the order in which to incarcerate young Filippo Brun
o, given the name Giordano when he put on his robe of black and white. The order didn’t encourage independent thinking; it would never forgive the Nolan boy for turning his back on them, and carrying his heresies into the world; and in the end they would have him forever for their own, tied to a stake in Rome.
But there, for the moment, he is, in the monastery of San Domenico, going slowly up the right-hand aisle of the monastery church, avoiding the loiterers and the bravos and interrupting assignations. He stops at each side chapel, each statue niche, each architectural division, and stands before it long in thought before passing on to the next. What is he up to?
He is memorizing the church of San Domenico, piece by piece, for use as an interior storehouse or filing cabinet for remembering other things.
A hundred years before, books had begun to be made by the new ars artificialiter scribendi, the art of writing artificially, printing. Thousands of books have already been printed. But in the great monasteries of the Dominicans the age of the scribe, the age of the manuscript, the age of memory, is not over. Printed handbooks on how to preach sermons are appearing, printed breviaries and books of homilies and Scripture quotations for priests to use, but the order of Preacher-Friars is still inducting its novices into the mysteries of memory arts as old as thought.
Take a large and complex public space—a church, for instance—and commit it to memory, every side altar, chapel, statue niche, and arch. Mark every fifth such space, in your imagination, with a hand; mark every tenth space with an X. Now your memory house is prepared. To use it, say to remember the contents of a sermon you are to give, or a manuscript of canon law, or a confessor’s manual of sins and their appropriate penances, you must cast vivid images in your imagination to represent the different ideas you wish to remember. Aristotle says clearly, and St. Thomas follows him, that corporeal similitudes excite the memory more easily than the naked notions themselves. If your sermon then is the Seven Deadly Sins, cast them as evil ugly characters, displaying appropriate signs of their qualities (from Envy’s mouth a loathsome viper protrudes instead of a tongue; Anger’s eyes flame red and he is brutally armed). Then have your characters stand in their places in order around the church or city square or palace you have in memory, and as you speak each one in turn will prompt you, Now speak of me, Now speak of me.
This was how the Scholastics had expanded and elaborated a rhetorician’s trick mentioned briefly by Cicero and Quintillian; and by the time Brother Giordano was committing the church of San Domenico to memory not even its endlessly exfoliating spaces were sufficient to hold what he was given to remember. Patristics, moral theology, summulœ logicales, hagiography, the contents of compendia, encyclopædias and bestiaries, the same tale in a thousand guises—the monkish passion for collection, dissection, division, and multiplication of notions filled the cathedrals of memory to overflowing just as those of stone were filled with gargoyles, saints of glass, passions, fonts, tombs, and judgments.
And as the amount to be remembered grew, so the means to remember it by expanded, divided, multiplied. Brother Giordano committed endless new rules of memory to memory. He memorized a system for remembering, not just notions and ideas, but the very words of the text, by substituting other words for them: so that the mental image of a city (Roma) reminds the speaker to speak next of love (amor). More: there were rules for remembering, not the words, but the letters of the words, an image for each, some corporeal similitude, so that the word Nola was formed in the Nolan’s mind by an arch, a millstone, a hoe, and a pair of compasses, and the word indivisibilitate by a whole atticful of junk. Giordano found he could do such tricks with ease; he composed a bird alphabet of his own, anser the goose for A, bubo the owl for B, and so on, and practiced with it until he could make In principio erat Verbum flutter and settle on his shoulders like a flock. The only difficulty he had was in expelling what he had once put in place, and ridding the church of San Domenico Maggiore of its birds, hoes, shovels, ladders, allegorical figures with snakes for tongues, gesturing captains, anchors, swords, saints, and beasts.
—Is it lawful then, when you have no more places left to fill, to make in imagination further places attached to those places?
—It is, Frater Jordanus, if you do it correctly. You must imagine a line running from west to east, upon which you are to place imaginary towers to use as memory places. The towers are multiplied, as many as you like, by being changed, turned this way and that way through their faces, per sursum, deorsum, anteorsum, dextrorsum, sinistrorsum. … The brother instructor’s hands turned and twisted an imaginary tower.
—Yes, said Giordano. Yes.
—Now, said the brother instructor, raising a finger: you are only to use such towers to exercise and strengthen the memory. Do you hear? Not to use in remembering. Do you hear, Frater Jordanus?
But a line of imaginary towers had already begun to spring up, stretching west from the door of San Domenico: towers very much like the ones that Brother Giordano remembered from his Nolan childhood. Every year in Nola, to honor the city’s patron St. Paulinus on his feast day, the various guilds of the town built and displayed tall towers made of wood and lathe and canvas, called guglie: multistoried constructions balconied and steepled, pierced with windows and openings large and small displaying scenes out of the saint’s life, or of the Passion, or scenes out of romances or the life of the Virgin. Inside and out they were painted, encrusted with cherubs, roses, stars, zodiacs, emblems, exhortations, crosses and rosaries, dogs and cats. On St. Paulinus’s day the guglie were revealed to the town, and then—most marvelous of all—each guglia was lifted up by thirty strong young men, and not only carried through the thronged and decorated streets, but, in the square before the church, was made to dance. The boys who carried them, grunting and crying encouragement to each other, made them bow, tilt, turn round and round to music: dancing with each other amid the people who danced around them, their crazy contents appearing in window and door and disappearing again as the towers turned and twirled, left, right, bowing, tilting, per sursum, deorsum, dextrorsum, sinistrorsum.
And yet: he would think—looking out the narrow window of his cell at a pale strip of evening, one star alight—that even an infinite line of guglie running east to west and changed every which way would not be enough to hold all that he had seen and thought of in his short life, which to him seemed so endlessly long as to be without a beginning at all. Not every leaf whose shadow had crossed him, not every grape that he had crushed against his palate; not every stone, every voice, star, dog, rose. Only by committing to memory the entire universe, and casting on it a universe of images, could all the things in the universe be remembered.
—Is it lawful to use the spaces of the heavens, I mean the zodiac and its houses, the mansions of the moon, for the purposes of remembering? And the images of the stars for images to remember things by?
—It is not lawful, Frater Jordanus.
—But Cicero in his Second Rhetoric says that in ancient times …
—It is not lawful, Frater Jordanus. To stretch and exercise the memory by artifice is a good work; to seek for aid in the stars is not for the likes of you. You understand neither Cicero nor the stars. And for that but you will be a long time on your knees.
As well as learning to write inwardly with images in the way the Dominicans were famous for, Brother Giordano also learned to write with pen and ink; to write in a thick quick secretary hand a monkish Latin untouched by umanismo, a Latin learned from the books he was given to read. He read Albertus Magnus and he read St. Thomas, the great learned doctors of his order; he overlaid his own inward cathedral with the cathedral, divided into apse nave and choir, parts and parts of parts, of Thomas’s Summa theologica. Through Thomas he came to him whom Thomas had called simply the Philosopher, Aristotle. Aristotle: a mass of manuscripts greasy from use, copied and recopied, glossed and interpolated, grown blurred from the accretion of tiny errors.
All things seek their proper spheres. What is hea
vy, as stones and earth, seeks the center of the universe, which is heaviest; lighter things, as air and fire, leap upward to their spheres, which are lighter.
The inmost heaviest sphere is earth, and next to it the sphere of water, ascending as dew, descending as rain. The spheres of air and fire are next, and then the sphere of the moon. All change, all decay and corruption, all birth and death, occur in the spheres of the elements, below the sphere of the moon; beyond the moon are the changeless regions. That which suffers no change is more perfect than that which is subject to change; the planets are perfect matter, unlike any we know, attached to perfect crystal spheres, which, turning, mark time. These seven spheres are contained within an eighth, the crystal sphere wherein the stars are set. And that is contained within the utmost sphere of all, the sphere that, turning, turns all the others: the Primum Mobile, itself turned by the finger of God. For nothing moves except what is moved by a mover.
Cheek in hand, amid the nodding brothers in the library, Brother Giordano assembled within himself Aristotle’s heavens and earth, like a man building a ship in a bottle. Time is thought to be movement of the Sphere viz. because the movements are measured by this, and time by this movement. What? The brothers around him muttered aloud reading their books, a dozen voices reading a dozen texts, buzzing like stupid wasps. This also explains the common saying that human affairs form a circle, and that there is a circle in all other things that have a natural movement and coming into being and passing away.
He sighed, an ashen taste in his mind like the burnt summer day’s. Why is changelessness better than change? Life is change, and life is better than death. This world of perfect spheres was like the world that painters show, where they pretend that some few leagues above the mountains a moon like a melon and stars like sparks go by, and just above them God bends down across the spheres to peek inside. It was a universe too small, made of too little; an empty trunk, bound in iron straps.