The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  Do you see what powers, what speed you have? That is how God must be imagined. All things are contained within God—the universe, himself and all—just as thoughts are contained within a mind. Unless you make yourself like God, though, you cannot understand God, for like is only intelligible to like.

  Therefore make yourself huge, beyond measuring; with one leap free yourself from your body. Lift yourself out of Time and become Eternity: then you will begin to understand God. Believe that for you as for God all things are possible; conceive of yourself as immortal, capable of understanding everything, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Climb higher than the highest height; sink lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself the sensation of all created things, of fire and water, of wet and dry, cold and hot, imagining that you are everywhere on earth and in the sea, in the haunts of the animals, that you aren’t yet born, in your mother’s womb, adolescent, old, dead, past death. If you can embrace in thought all things at once, all times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, then you might understand God.

  All, all contained within the thinking mind, just as all the things Bruno had ever seen or done, all the tools, birds, articles of clothing, pots and pans on the lists of the brothers in Naples, were all contained—separate, findable, distinct—within the circular memory palace of his skull. He knew. He knew.

  Say no longer that God is invisible; never say so, for what is more manifest than God? God has created all so that you may see an All in what he has created; it is the miraculous power of God to show himself in every being. Nothing is invisible, not even bodiless beings. The mind makes itself visible in the act of thinking, just as God makes himself visible in the act of creating.

  Giordano read, his heart beating slow and hard; he read with calm certitude and the deep satisfaction of a child sucking the nourishment it knows it needs. He had been right, right, right all along.

  Hermes, become a priest and a king, taught others what Mind had taught to him. There were dialogues between himself and his son, Tat, and one long one between him and his disciple Asclæpius, instructing him in the now fully formed religion of Ægypt and its cult. God dispenses life to all through the medium of the stars; he has created a second God, the Sun, an intermediary through whom the divine light is spread to all. And next the Horoscopes whom Giordano had read of already, the decans responsible for the persistence, through infinite diversity and constant changefulness, of the Reasons of the World: themselves changing form continuously like the talismanic images of Picatrix, but persisting nonetheless. And the name of the chief god of these gods was Pantomorph, or “omni-form.” Giordano laughed aloud.

  And there are other gods beside, whose powers and operations are distributed through all things that exist. …

  The book of Asclæpius told how the priests of Ægypt were able to draw down dæmons from the stars, and cause them to take up residence in the zoomorphic statues of stone the priests had had made, whence they would speak, prophesy, tell secrets. So well did those priests know how divinity permeated the lower world, which animals and plants were governed by which stars, which odors, stones, music the dæmons could not resist.

  All that knowledge lost now, all that omniform heavens-and-earth, lost; as though that armillary sphere that Pinturrichio had floated above the heads of Hermes and the Ægyptians had been smashed, scattered, the ruins of it only to be come upon now by chance and puzzled over in this latter Age of Brass; surviving only in rumor, debased stories, cantrips, shards. Picatrix.

  But how lost, why, why lost?

  A time will come when it will be seen that the Ægyptians have honored the Divinity in vain. All this holy worship will become ineffectual. The gods will desert the earth, and return to heaven; they will abandon Ægypt; and this land, the home of religion, will be widowed of its gods and left destitute. Strangers will fill this country, and not only will men neglect the worship of the gods, but—still more terrible—so-called laws will be enacted, which shall punish those who do worship them. In that day this most holy land, this land of shrines and temples, will be filled only with tombs, and with the dead. O Ægypt, Ægypt: there will remain of your religion only fabulations, and your own children will not be able to believe them; nothing will survive save glyphs engraved on stone, to tell of your piety!

  He read, and wept to read. He knew how the old religion had come to an end; he knew what strangers had come to supplant their pieties. When all the old gods had run to hide their heads, when the women wept that Pan was dead. When the Christ whose colors Giordano wore, whose soldier he was, had banished them all, all but Himself and His Father and the emanation of the two of them that made three: a tangle of triplex Godhead too jealous to allow any mysteries but the mystery of itself.

  Does it make you weep, Asclæpius? There is far worse to come. … In that day will men, in boredom, give up thinking the world worth their reverence and adoration—this greatest of all goods, this All that is all the best of past and future. It will be in danger of passing away; men will think it a burden, and despise it, this incomparable work of God, glorious structure, one creation made of an infinite diversity of forms. … Darkness will be preferred then to light, death to life, and none will raise his eyes toward the skies. … So the gods will depart, separating themselves from men—sad!—and only evil angels will remain. … Then the earth will lose its equilibrium, the sea no longer hold up ships, the heavens will not support the stars. … The fruits of the earth will moulder, the soil be fruitless, the air itself thick with sadness. Such will be the old age of the world. …

  Yes. Eyes clouded with tears, his nose running, Giordano brow in hand made out the words. They had not been banished; they had departed of their own free will, disgusted by the upstarts who scorned and hated their knowledge and their powers, free gifts for men, now withdrawn.

  But if by their own free will they had gone away, then, one day, they might return; they might be induced to return. They would return!

  That is what the rebirth of the world will be: a coming-back of all good things, a holy and awesome instauration of the whole wide world imposed by the will of God in the course of time.

  He saw them as he read, returning, the godlike men or manlike gods who are true inheritors of and sharers in God’s restoring power; he saw the turgid air clearing at their passage, the creatures of night fleeing away, dawn bursting.

  And if such a time had been to come all those centuries ago, then why might it not be coming now, right now—now when this old knowledge had come back to man again, and been cast in this type, printed on these pages? Why not now?

  —Now, said a soft voice behind him. The boy who had brought him this book sat down beside him on the bench. Now listen carefully and don’t be alarmed.

  Bruno put his hand on the page to mark his place, to stop the knowledge flowing for a moment.

  —What is it?

  —There is news from Naples. Proceedings have been started against you with the Holy Office. Don’t turn around.

  —How do you know this?

  —You are to be prosecuted for heresy. The Holy Office here has been given notice. A hundred and thirty articles of heresy.

  —Nothing can be proven.

  —Did you, the boy said lightly, ever leave books in the privy?

  Giordano laughed.

  —Writings have been found in the privy, the boy said. Erasmus. The commentaries on Jerome.

  —Erasmus? Nothing more terrible?

  —Listen, the boy said. They have prepared this long and well. It will go hard with you. They have it all arranged, the interrogation, the witnesses, the evidence.

  —They are men, Bruno said. They possess reason. They’ll listen. They must listen.

  —Believe me, Brother. You can never go back.

  There was no one else left in the cool tall room except Bruno and the blond young man, who still smiled, his hands folded loosely in his lap. A fire caught in the dry tinder of Bruno’s heart, and burned hot
and painfully.

  —The Pope, he said. I’ll speak to Him. He said that I, He, He …

  The boy’s face didn’t alter, he only waited for Bruno to quit, to finish in a hopeless stutter. Then he said:

  —Stay here till dark. Then go out by that door, the small door at the far end. Follow the corridor. Go up the stairs. I’ll meet you there.

  He rose.

  —At dark, he said; and he smiled down at Giordano, a smile of complicity, as at a joke both he and Giordano well knew was afoot; only Giordano did not know it, and the small hairs rose on the back of his neck, and his scrotum tightened. The boy turned and went.

  Giordano looked down at the page where his hand lay. Already the long light of afternoon was leaving it.

  In that day the gods who once oversaw the earth will be restored, and will come to settle in a City in the extreme limit of Ægypt, a City founded toward where the sun goes to his setting; a City into which will hasten, by land and by sea, the whole race of mortal men.

  He read until he could no longer make out words. Then he had read all of it that he would ever read, and night had come. He rose. He thought: Tomorrow is the Feast of the Transfiguration, the sixth of August. He crossed the long vaulted room, past the scholar’s tables set beneath the night-blue windows, and opened the small thick door.

  * * *

  In darkness his feet found the steep stairs; he mounted toward the landing where a lamp shone beyond the turning. The fair-haired boy sat there on the stair, waiting for him. He had a bundle in his lap.

  —Get out of that robe, he said softly. And put on these.

  Bruno looked from the boy to the bundle held out to him.

  —What?

  —Quick, the youth said. Be quick.

  For an instant the solid stone beneath his feet seemed to tilt, as though the building were toppling. He pulled off the black-and-white robe and thick underclothes, trembling slightly. The bundle was hose, boots, doublet, shirt, wrapped in a cloak. The boy sat on the step above, chin in his hand, and watched the monk struggle with the unfamiliar garments, trying to tie the points with shaking fingers. The cloak last, long and hooded. And a belt with a purse, and a little dagger. The purse was heavy.

  —Listen, the boy said, standing. Listen now and remember all I tell you.

  He spoke mildly and clearly, sometimes striking one forefinger against the other when he named a name, or raising a forefinger in warning. He set out Giordano’s route, the streets and gates and suburbs, the roads north, the towns and cities. Giordano, clad in someone else’s clothes, heard all and would not forget.

  —A doctor and his family there, the boy said. Ask them. They know. They will help.

  —But how, how …

  The youth smiled and said: They are Giordanisti too. In their way.

  He laughed a small laugh then, at Giordano unfrocked, and tugged the cloak straight; he picked up the lamp, and led the way by its light up the curling stairs to another corridor, a narrow one, and along it to a double door.

  —Now, he said.

  He set down his lamp; he grasped the rings of the door and turned them, and thrust the door open. Giordano Bruno looked out into an empty cobbled square; a fountain gurgled in the center of it; torches were carried away down a far alley, and he heard a shriek of laughter. Night air in his face. Freedom. He stood, looking.

  —Go, said the boy.

  —But. But.

  —Out, said the boy, and he put his soft boot against Bruno’s hose-clad backside, and pitched him out; and the doors clashed shut behind him.

  EIGHT

  It wasn’t a small world: it was immense, made immense by the infinitesimal steps a man on foot could take, or a man on muleback for that matter, or borne in a litter or even astride a fast horse. The long road went ever on, a faint track sometimes and nearly lost in swamp or mountain, but always reappearing eventually. Which way is Viterbo? Siena? Another river to wade, wood to pass through (eyes wide, looking from side to side, knuckles tight on dagger hilt), always another walled town to come to: Siena, Vitello, Cecino, to a weary walker seeming to be only the same town repeated over and over, like the single tiny woodcut that in geographies stands variously for Nuremburg, Wittenberg, Paris, Cologne: a steeple, another steeple, a castle, a plume of smoke, a gate, a little traveler stunned and wondering.

  He went north, at first, like all Italian heretics went north; to the last of his Roman places he attached the first of his Tuscan places, to the last of his Tuscan places the first of his Genoese places. He followed the instructions given him, and was handed over from one household to another, one refuge to the next, never without help, and not marveling particularly at his good fortune either: he hadn’t known what the world beyond Nola and Naples would be like, and was not surprised that it contained the kind helpers that it did.

  For many days he walked, to save his purse, and the new hose he wore chafed his thighs until he nearly wept with pain and irritation. The only thing monks had ever done for the world was to invent a reasonable dress for man, and no one used it but them.

  Not until he reached the new city of Livorno did he dare to take ship, and pass the scrutiny of harbor officials: for Livorno was a free port, and all nations and religions were at liberty there. Giordano went down through the town to the docks, looking side to side, marveling at the painted house-fronts that showed the victories of San Stefano over the Turks, the incidents passing on from one house-front to the next.

  A free port. Free. Jews did business in the shops and chandleries without any yellow badge; at noon from a tiny minaret a man in a turban leaned out and crowed a long unintelligible prayer: for even the Turks were allowed to have a mosque for their people. But in the market the shipmen of many nations gathered to argue over the galley slaves for sale there, for Livorno was also the great slave market of the Christian world, and Moors, Turks, Greeks, a wild confusion of humanity, some sleeping, some weeping in their chains, were being bought and sold as Bruno passed. Following the inward map the blond boy of the Vatican had given him, he found the dock he needed, spoke the right name, and, almost unable not to cry aloud in astonishment, glee, and fear, was handed down into a long and narrow felucca just putting out to sea: Avanti signor. Avanti.

  The felucca fled up the coast, putting in often to take on and to offload an endless variety of wares, casks of oils and wine, furniture, bales of cloth, packets of letters, passengers, a cage of cooing doves. (Years later, in prison, he would sometimes pass the time trying to reconstruct the list of them, the casks, the boxes, the people, the ports.) The grunting oarsmen seemed stupefied by their own rhythm, blind with sun; at noon the craft put in at some nameless harbor, and the oarsmen slept where they sat, under the shade of the lateen sails; their bodies, of several colors, shone with sweat.

  Giordano Bruno, Nolan, lay on his satchel and did not sleep.

  Genoa, a city of palaces and churches, orgulous and gay. He went up from the harbor along avenues of palaces, palaces half-built or half-rebuilt; every one different. He took the lefts and rights he had in memory; he found an archway into the gardens of a palazzo, he crossed a geometric pleasure-ground, he walked between ranks of dark topiary beasts (centaur, sphinx) down to a grotto where water dropped musically: there he found the man he had been sent to, master of these gardens, who was supervising the installation of a waterwork within the grotto.

  To this man he spoke the phrase he had committed to memory, a meaningless but odd little compliment. The man’s face did not change, but he held out his hand to Bruno.

  —Yes, he said. Yes, I see. Welcome.

  He drew Bruno within the clammy cool shell of the grotto, stuck full of glittering stones, bits of mirror, shells, crystal. A leaden statue had been set up above the marble pool; workmen fussed with the pipes that led in and out of it, but the god took no notice of them, he looked down at Giordano, arched brows witty and wise, goat’s feet crossed.

  —Pan, the gardener said.

  —Yes.
<
br />   —And with the water, brought up from below by these pipes, and circulating here, and then here, Pan will play his pipes. Syrinx.

  He looked deeply into Bruno with ash-colored eyes, light in his garden-brown face.

  —Magia naturalis, he said, smiling like his Pan.

  —Yes, said Bruno.

  The workmen opened their pipes; a spectral hooting sounded within the grotto. Bruno shivered. The aquatect took his wrist, and Giordano saw that he wore a gold seal-ring on his strong brown hand, a seal-ring carved with a curious figure.

  —Now come, he said. Come to my lodge, and tell me what you need.

  He was fed and bedded in Genoa for a few days; then he was handed on to the family of a doctor in the Genoese town of Noli, and a place was found for him in the shabby little accademia, lecturing to whoever wished to listen on the Sphere of Sacrobosco.

  —You have traveled much? the doctor who had taken him in asked at dinner.

  —No.

  —Ah.

  The doctor passed him wine.

  —I should say yes, said Giordano. I have traveled infinitely. In my mind.

  —Aha, said the doctor, without a smile. In your mind.

  His lectures on astronomy began simply enough, spherical geometry, the colures and equators, Giordano was not particularly easy with this; then he began to draw on Cecco, and attendance improved. His fame spread. Only a few months had passed when the doctor came to him in his little room and said that it would be best if he moved on now.

  —Why?

  —Travel broadens, said the doctor. Travel not only in the mind.

  —But.

  —You have been noticed, the doctor said. Our little town is not often in the eye of the Holy Office. But you have been noticed.