by John Crowley
—He errs, said Bruno, to say that the sun is the center of this infinite orb or sphere. A sphere cannot be infinite, it must have a bound. Nor can an infinite sphere have a center.
He moved aside the almanac, gently, his eyes watchful now and his voice low, a hunter in a blind, or hunter’s prey.
—What book is that?
It had been lying on the table with others, it must have been, and yet he had not seen it until this instant, as though it had worked its way to the surface meanwhile. Dicson shrugged, looking down. A small volume. A binding not of English work. He moved to take it up, but Bruno’s hand was on it.
The title page was a pillared temple.
MONAS HIEROGLYPHICA
IOANNIS DEE, LONDINENSIS
AD
MAXIMILIANVM, DEI GRATIÆ
ROMANORVM, BOHEMIÆ ET HVNGARICÆ
REGEM SAPIENTISSIMVM
And inscribed above all, like a finger to the lips:
QVI NON INTELLIGIT, AVT TACEAT, AVT DISCAT
In the center of the page, surrounded by scrolling banners bearing words, by symbols of sun and moon both weeping, by pillars labeled with the names of the four elements, was drawn an egg-shaped cartouche; and in the egg, like the bones of a bird growing in there and not yet ready to be born, was drawn this sign:
For seven years Giordano Bruno of Nola had traveled the world, knocking at the gates of cities, ejected from state after kingdom, at once fleeing and pursuing, not certain what besides peace and a chance to speak he pursued: and it had happened that at certain turnings in his journey, usually just when he was choosing a path or wondering if he should turn back or stay put, someone would appear before him to point a way or open a door or take him in: and would show him, or have in his possession, or appear in conjunction with, this sign, cut on this one’s ring, drawn in the dust of that one’s path, in Venice, in Genoa.
How did it come to be here? Had this English shape-shifter (who did not, it may be, even know he was a shape-shifter) carved it himself, or had someone taught it him?
—A hieroglyph, said Dicson. Hieroglyph of the monad.
The priests of Ægypt had known how to draw down from their proper realms the airy powers, by incising in the Nile mud or cutting in stone the sign of commandment, the word Come in the language that was before the languages of men.
Had this sign brought him out of the South and into this cold island where he would be insulted and scorned?
He asked it: Why have you brought me here?
But it answered only: If you do not understand, be silent, or learn.
—Doctissime, said Adelbert Laski into Doctor Dee’s ear. Is it possible, do you think, that we may have some further congress with. I speak of those, those. Whom you and I and Master, Master …
—Kelley.
—Kelley. Those whom I was privileged to have conversation with when last I came here. Do you think …
—The company is too great, said Doctor Dee in a low voice. We will not have the quiet or the privacy necessary for the work.
—I will send them all away.
When the Polonian prince had first come to Mortlake, accompanied only by a servant and a guard, John Dee had taken him into the far chamber, and Kelley had besought the blessed spirits for some helpful word for the wanderer, and Laski had been troubled and amazed and fired by what he had been told. Secret enemies. Homecoming. Great victories. Blood. A crown. Through the whole tedium of his Oxford journey he had thought of little else.
—And where is Master Kelley?
Doctor Dee pulled at his beard, and looked to the window. Day was late.
—Gone fishing, he said.
For some time he had been watching a frog on a floating log, who was himself patiently angling. His great sightless-seeming eyes were open, though ever and again a kind of curtain slid over them and away again. He fished with a length of tongue as quick as the rest of him was cold and slow: a sort of spasm would shake him, and—though you had not seen it caught—he would be swallowing a long-legged fly. This often took a horrid length of time, the frog impassively ingesting while a beating wing or leg hung still outside the great mouth.
Kelley felt a tug on his line, but when he drew it toward him, it soon slackened. A fish softly broke the water, showing Kelley his backside. Taken his lobworm too.
It was Doctor Dee who had first urged this angling on his skryer, as a distraction; melancholy needs distraction, seeks it restlessly, never satisfied long with any occupation; melancholy wants at once to be engaged and to be doing nothing. Fishing is both, in some sort. But there was no medicine for his melancholy but one.
Edward Kelley had with him—he slept with it beneath his pillow, it never left his person—a stone jar stoppered with wax, within which was a minute quantity of a reddish powder, which a spirit had given him in exchange for his soul. He had told Doctor Dee that he had found the powder and the book of its use, written in unreadable characters, in a monk’s grave in Glastonbury, and over time he had come to believe it himself: even though a mute dog-faced thing, the demon who had first tempted him with it, who had found the book for him, had accompanied him for years. He sat even now beside Kelley on the bank, bored and restless too. Kelley even knew his name.
He had ceased angling. His eyes were open but he no longer saw. He was the fisher frog; he was the caught fly, too. It often happened that he would sit thus for hours with his pole and creel by a slow backwater, a kind of curtain drawn over and drawn back from his eyes by turns; until evening came, surprising him with its cool darkness, and returning him to the river’s bank.
The young knights (with all due deference) suggested returning to London. Laski bid them adieu: he and his friend had much to say to one another, but the gentlemen should not think they must stay; let them return, he would find his own way back; he would not be swept out to sea, and the Queen hold them responsible for losing him; go, go.
So Sidney bowed deeply, said he would leave his gentleman Alexander Dicson and others behind to see to the Duke; then, pulling on his gloves, he raised his brows in inquiry to the antic Italian: but he seemed to have fallen into a sort of fit, he only peeped out from behind a pile of books, a shy deer surprised, and shook his head.
—Then buona sera, Signor, Sidney said: and at that the strange man returned to himself, and hurried to take the knight’s hand, and stare deeply into his eyes.
Laughing like schoolboys released, the gentlemen told over their adventures in Oxford and Mortlake as they went down to London. They had left behind one painted barge, the grandest; its colors limp in the still air.
The river was still bright at the ninth hour, running through the darkened land to meet the sky in the west; there the evening stars burned whitely, very near. In an upper chamber Master Dicson pushed open the tiny casement and put out his head.
—Does Earth shine then, as they do? he asked. As Mercury, Venus, Mars?
—It must, said Bruno. It is no dark star. Earth’s seas are a mirror, as the seas of those worlds are too. Enlarging, and casting back, the Sun’s rays.
—If we stood on Mercury …
—We would see Earth shine in the, the East. Now. Tonight. As they, there, do see the Earth.
—They?
—The inhabitants.
Dicson turned from the window to see if the Italian was amusing himself. He stood still in the center of the room, hands behind his back, the same pugnacious thoughtful face as ever.
—If, he said, seeing Dicson’s wonderment, if we are as they are, it is the same as to say, they are as we are. There may be ranks and hierarchies in this circling of the sun; maybe the best place is nearest, and maybe not; in any case there is no reason to think that those stars, as alive as ours, as quick as ours, should not be as full of, of every. As we.
—And men too?
—Beings appropriate for those stars, as we are for this one.
He went to the bed, which largely filled the room they had been given, and poked it hard wit
h a finger.
—But but, Dicson said. The influences, the rays of those planets. How they, how they.
He stopped speaking, and stopped moving too. He felt an impulse to take hold of something firm; but, as though the room were the cabin of a ship or the inside of a swaying coach, there was nothing firm. His breast now contained two entire universes, and they kept replacing one another as he said sentences applying to the one then to the other. The old one, great Earth lying under the wheeling heavens, and the planets in their houses (mild or fierce or hot or cold) playing their lamps over her. Then, hoop-la, the other: small quick Earth, bearing all her seas mountains rivers cities states and men, taking her place in the dance amid the other great round beings, who smiled upon her.
—We move among the stars, Giordano Bruno said, and we receive from each in turn its influence. So we are largely earthy, but those influences make us more like the beings of those planets. Read Ficino on drawing their good influences into our natures.
—De vita coelitus comparanda.
—And the inhabitants of those stars receive a like influence from us. They must. It might be that Earth’s moist influence softens the Martians’ dry choleric rage. Maybe our blue airs gladden Saturn’s black melancholics.
He sat on the bed and pulled off his shoes. Dicson took the wilted ruff from his neck, laughing, giddy. Bruno said:
—These are not novelties, as that gentleman said. Pythagoras knew these things. Palingenius. Ægypt knew this.
Ægypt, Dicson breathed.
Bruno knit his fingers together. A net, he said. All one. E pluribus unum. Ægypt knew.
The two men had undressed to their shirts and hose. With a practiced delicacy that came from being thrown together with strangers in inns from Venice to Paris, Bruno reached beneath his shirt, undid his points, turned his back on Dicson and made water in the chamberpot.
—What will be has been, he said. There is no new thing under the sun.
And he shed his hose, climbing into the bed at the same time. Dicson listened to the mattress crackle. Straw. With inordinate solemnity, to keep from laughing in embarrassment, an odd embarrassment he could not shed, Dicson climbed into bed on the other side.
—There is another thing you will not have thought of, said the Italian.
—Yes?
—If (and he rolled over a little, finding room, the bed was not large) if the stars, I mean the fixed stars, are not stuck on a sphere, but do stand at varying distances from us, out to infinity, as that Englishman’s book did truthfully say, what then?
—What then?
—Well then what of their influences?
Dicson tried to think.
—The signs, Bruno said at last. The twelve.
They went away, even as Bruno said it. Of course: not twelve segments of a sphere, not twelve bands on a belt picked out like an escutcheon with nailheads: the signs were formed of stars that might stand at any distance from earth, some near, some incalculably far.
—Our senses deceive us, Bruno said, pillowing his head on his hands. What we take for pictures in the sky we have ourselves put there. Just as a one-eyed man can see no distance, and sometimes takes distant big things to be close and small.
—No pictures. No signs, Dicson said. No Aries, Taurus, Gemini. But in your book Sigilla sigillorum, the seal of the Chain …
—Those signs I wrote of are real. They are real reasons for things. We know them. It is because we know them to be real that we impose them on the sky.
He did not remark, perhaps it did not seem odd to him, that the man sharing his bed had also read his book.
—We could as well have other signs, Bruno said and yawned. Other pictures in the heavens. I have myself composed a poem of ten thousand lines, in which a congress of the Gods reforms the heavens, expels all the bad old beasts and silly furniture, signs of their own vices, and summons Virtues to rise in their stead.
—I would be very glad to read that poem.
—I have not yet written it down.
He lifted his head, and without asking leave, blew out the candle.
In the darkness the sky shone. The window was still open. Smell of candle-smoke and summer air.
—Sir I wish you a good night’s sleep, Dicson said.
He did not think he would sleep. The house was quiet now, after a period of uninterpretable small noises from room and passage. He listened to the slap of river water against the stair and the barge’s side. He slept.
Giordano Bruno lay still with his hands behind his head, aware of the stirrings in the house, and when they ceased, of the stirrings in the air above the house. Spirits, semhamaphores drawn down or up from their spheres or places, drawn to.
No not drawn to him. Drawn here to this house, but not, this time, to him. He felt them descend past the upper storey in which he lay (the Scotsman snoring softly beside him) and downward to where (he could feel it tug on his own nature like a lodestone) that sign was now uncovered. He would get no sleep here.
At that hour, in the small chamber at the far end of the house, Doctor Dee, Edward Kelley, and Albrecht Laski knelt as though in adoration before a small table on which a globe of clear crystal stood in a frame, reflecting from its surface (and again in its heart) the candles set around it.
Each leg of the table stood upon a seal of virgin wax, and a larger seal, the sigilla Æmeth, as the angels called it, was placed atop it: this showed a multiple cross and the letters AGAL engraved on its underside, and above, seven unsayable unreadable names of God, which had the power to bring forth the seven governors of the seven heavens above the earth: and every letter of the seven names brought forth seven daughters, every daughter another daughter, and every daughter’s daughter a son, who brought forth another son.
They were not different from the names that together they composed; and out of their combination and recombination the universe was named, and so made; and by them it continues to be maintained.
Was she one of them? Youngest daughter of the powers, she would not keep to her place in the crossrow, she would be out and about, to play and tease.
—Who is it in the house? she said urgently and without preamble.
—Here is the noble lord Laski whom you have said you might …
—Not he. The other. The great dœmon. The one I warned you of. Is he not in this house this night?
—Was it you? Kelley said, remembering. A night that spring, the ship seen in the stone, and the man in the ship: St. Elmo’s fire burning on the masts and spires.
—It was I, said Madimi. You heard my voice and felt my touch and never saw me.
—What does she speak of? Laski whispered in Latin.
—Hush, said Doctor Dee.
—He is the traitor that turns the coat, he is the young king’s usher, who is called Phoenix. He is the favorite son of the trickster God, and he will do thee mischief.
—Those gods are false, said Kelley.
—Blaspheme not. Know you not those great spirits who live in the stars, by whose measure all things are made? I will name them to you in Greek, Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares …
—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Kelley said. These we know. Do you instruct us in the stars?
—You may know, and you may not.
Doctor Dee said:
—Why should we fear him?
—Look to your house, look to your books. He has designs to steal your stone, I tell you that.
Doctor Dee flung down the pen he wrote with, picked up a new one, dipped it, and wrote.
—What stone is it that I have?
—I mean your picture, your letter. Old man, do you write not. Pen, mark not. Ink, be water. I will prophesy; write what I say inwardly, on your hearts.
John Dee reluctantly laid down the pen. Duke Laski bent closer to the stone.
—Listen, she said. There will come two winds. There will come the first wind, and then the second. The first wind bears in the time, and the second wind bears it away again. Noah saw water, Ægyp
t saw earth. Wind is as great as those.
—Fire, said Doctor Dee.
—Fire is not yet. Mark what I say to thee. A first wind. It will shake down towers, shake down palaces. It will shake crowns from heads. And heads too from shoulders.
—What shall we do?
—You were best to fly with this man. He will see to you. He will protect you.
For a moment Doctor Dee puzzled. Were they to fly with the Italian? Then he saw that Laski was meant. Laski had invited them to return to his own country with him, where they would find honor they would not find here.
—Can we fly the wind? he said softly. Madam, if the time is come …
—You are a wise old man, she said. His palace will not be proof against it. If it blow down in the first wind, I will rebuild it for him. If it blow down in the second wind, let him look to it himself; I will not be there.
Now through the old house they could hear the knocks and groans that often came with the spirits, airs racing from storey to storey, putting out candles, lifting rugs along the floors; the maid weeping in the garret, head under the covers, the cat run to hide in the chimney-corner.
—The wind bloweth as it listeth, said Duke Laski beneath his breath; and he crossed himself, and kissed the nail of his thumb.
FOUR
September: represent Pomona in your mind, her fruits; but blush her cheek with a chill wind, and toss her hair. The wind was sharp along the Thames.
—Mercurius, said Alexander Dicson. Theutates, who has invented letters, an art of reminding. Socrates. I make him a cackler and a pedant. Those are my speakers.
Giordano Bruno laughed. He liked to put a pedant in his own dialogues, someone who would make fatuous claims, someone to rebut.
The dialogue on Memory which Alexander Dicson was composing was based very largely on one of Bruno’s own, one he had published in Paris, a titanic work of wilful and obdurate complexity which almost no one but its author could be expected to grasp in its entirety. He had given Dicson a copy, and written loving compliments in it for him.