by John Crowley
“Images?”
“Magic pictures he constructs. Power pictures that give him inner strength. Talismans.”
“Huh.”
“You use them to rule the souls of others.” He put out the smoke. “It’s called ‘binding.’ The bonds you forge are called ‘chains,’ vincula.”
“But how do you project them?” she said. She lifted her hands and shot energy through her fingers like a movie sorcerer.
“Well I don’t really know how they did it. But I don’t think it was so different from what we do all the time. We can’t think without images, and images have no power to work in us unless we are moved by them. What moves us most is love. Erotic power, erotic energy, desire. One magician said: Love is magic, magic is love. Giordano Bruno. He believed you gave life and power to the images you cast with love.”
“But by that he didn’t mean.”
“Oh yes. He meant love, love: the same erotic power that binds anybody to anyone, to anything they desire.”
“Love,” she said.
“Makes the world go round,” he said.
“But if we all do it all the time.”
“The difference is that the magician does it consciously. Consciously cultivates in himself the erotic energy to animate the powerful images that will bind others.”
“Cold.”
“Cold love. But hot inside. And dangerous too. The master has to avoid at all costs getting enchained by these hot potent images he has created.”
She was listening intently, but maybe not, he thought, to him.
“All these magicians did it, or tried to do it,” he said. “They made images of the stars, or of the divine intelligences—angels, dæmons—that power the stars; sometimes they cast medallions of the planets, made of the right metal and so on, and contemplated them, to draw astral powers into themselves, make themselves bigger. Or they made them inwardly, by thought. They said: in their hearts.”
She laid her hand on her own breast lightly, as though she tried to imagine this, or feel a workshop there, where things could be made. Pierce too tried to glimpse inside, through the windows of her eyes, inward-turned and open. “So what could I learn to do?” she said. “If I studied. What things?”
“Well how about,” Pierce said, “invisibility?”
He told her how old wonder-workers had been able, knowing the subtle and astral springs or roots of things, to churn out from their potent hearts images that could actually make them invisible. If you knew what plants, animals, stones, colors, times of day were imbued with the powers of which stars and planets, and if, say, you worked in Leo and the Sun at midday, observers would see no robed mage at all but only a golden tabby cat asleep among the dandelions.
“Huh,” she said. “See? Invisible.” She laughed, moved and happy, making a sense out of what he had said that he could only guess at, and held out her glass for wine.
Afterwards they saw a movie, for an entrepreneur had lately taken over the big bleak grange hall in Stonykill and showed foreign films and esoterica on weekend nights. The movie was a weird and fatuous historical import, a vamp on the life of the mystic nun Hildegarde of Bingen. Pierce tried not to laugh aloud, though in fact most of the audience was restless and talkative. Hildegarde gave herself to God: she knelt before the stern yet ember-eyed priest to have her starlet’s golden tresses cut.
“Oh let’s go,” he said.
“Wait,” she said, and he could feel her private urgency. Hildegarde, shorn and humble, held the mass of hair in her hands. In the projector’s light Pierce could see the sheen of Rose’s own hair, loosely braided.
In the Asp, careening down through the mountain road’s dark turns toward Blackbury Jambs, Pierce expatiated on the silliness of what they had seen, about as medieval as, as; and she was silent. Only long after, when in order to save himself he was condemned to repeat in the solitude of his heart all the moments he had spent with her, would he find that film again, that night back before he understood the extent of her wondrous wiring, or what heats she endured; how she could be aroused unrefusably by, but not only by, the cutting of her hair, by sudden loud noises, by certain whispered words, by long kid gloves, by the nearness of fire.
When they sat again at his kitchen table with a glass (soda water only for her, she couldn’t, she said, trust herself further with booze), he let her lead the talk for a while, looping her stories and her hopes and hurts while he listened. Then he stood, and took a flimsy white box from the counter, the sort of box old-fashioned department stores used for their wares.
“Now,” he said, “I have a present for you.”
He put the box in the middle of the table and waited while she stood up to open it. She unfolded the flanges of the top; the tissue parted, and she drew out the scarves, one, then another, and another. When she had seen them all, she smiled a little, and began to say Well!, but he spoke at the same time, and she stopped still.
He spoke carefully and softly, trying hard not to move, his big hands resting one atop the other on the table. “What I want you to do,” he said, “is to take those in the bedroom. Take off your clothes and wait. I’ll come in a while.”
She didn’t simper, or vamp; she said nothing, only across her features came the abstraction he had seen first in the Donut Hole, when he had told her not to button herself. He didn’t need to say more. She stood motionless for a moment, as though pausing for some internal assent to come, not her own assent but an assent she awaited; then she gathered up the handful of innocent stuff and left the kitchen with her smooth swift tread.
Pierce remained.
He really hadn’t known if that would work: he sat at the kitchen table, his throat thick and his skin burning, trying to gauge what an imperious coldhearted length of time might be, his heartbeats no good for counting. He hadn’t ever done anything like this before; he knew not a practical thing about how to bend a woman’s will, subject it to his own. What he knew about, what he was actually good at, was service: listening for what a woman wanted, and guessing how to supply it, or some part of it, for some length of time.
Well right there it was, too, wasn’t it.
He emptied his glass and rose. At the door of the bedroom he stopped, a sinister silhouette (he perceived) against the lighted kitchen behind him, for she had not dared switch on the lamp beside the bed. She had done as he had told her, and lay darkly alit on the russet bedclothes, still in her girlish knee-socks, her head lifted slightly to watch him enter; alert, expectant, a patient awaiting a novel treatment.
He went in to her, unbuckling his belt, not knowing any more than she did herself what they had embarked on. Embarked: the word had always had for Pierce a shadow of danger and unknowing in it, a picture in his heart of himself in his fragile boat (a bark) setting out in a stiff wind onto a sea of blue-black whitecaps.
She called out his name repeatedly as he worked, her cheek pressed down into the pillow by his hand, her arms and legs bound to the bed by imitation silk and unclosable. Pierce, she cried, Pierce, Pierce: and it might have been an imperative as much as a supplication. Certainly it was not a cry directed at him; it could not be, for she didn’t know him. By his lies and by his histrionics, by taking the part he took with her and playing it, and not here in bed alone either, he would make certain that she couldn’t know him; therefore she couldn’t love him, and so could not cease loving him; and so he would be safe, having risked nothing of himself. It was a sin he had never tried to commit before: and he could have guessed even on that night that he would fail at it too.
She left at first light, unwilling to have her car seen in front of his building by day. At the bottom of the stairs she closed the door behind her, not firmly, for fear of waking sleepers elsewhere in the house; so it opened again in the dawnwind, and cool air tumbled up the stairs, into the bedroom where Pierce smelled in it the coming day.
She climbed into the Asp’s embrace and powered up, feeling the thudding of the drivetrain through her seat as though for
the first time; guilty, sated, at once full and empty. At the streetlight in the center of town she paused for a moment staring at its red. She brushed her mouth with the back of her hand, and then looked at it, as though her lip might have been flecked with blood; then she drove through against the light.
It was going to be a clear day, blue and green and already filling with things, with houses and tall yellow signs and the cars of early risers. She drove out across the bridge and turned up the Shadow River road and into the darkness of the firs.
THREE
The hunter Actæon steps into the forest, unafraid however dark it appears; he sends his sharp-set dogs before him, whippets and greyhounds, far-ranging, keen-nosed, as unafraid as their master of the forest’s depths, the mountain’s height. Soon they recognize their prey nearby, the Stag; they give voice, and make pursuit. A thousand stags before have fallen to them and to the arrows of their Master; what does it matter that this one has led them deeper and farther than any before, they will bring him down.
But see where his pursuit has led Actæon: in the heart of the heart of the forest darkness, a brilliant lucent pool reflects the blue and gold of Apollo and the sky; and in the pool—surrounded by her chaste nymphs, white as cloud, clear as day, naked as a needle, alabaster and purple—Diana bathes.
Look away, Mortal! No human eye can look upon that terrible chastity. The hounds recoil in fear and confusion, and Actæon falls to his knees: but he will not look away. The Stag he pursued has escaped, it is of no consequence, there is only one thing he has ever pursued in his incessant hunting, and it is this sight: he did not know it and he knows it now. She who is both Goddess of the hunt and its object. He will not look away.
O pitiless chaste eyes regarding him, she whom no god has touched. Actæon senses the soul within him, satisfied and ravenous at once, leap from his own eyes to dissolve in hers, even as her gaze pierces him. He has already lost his own form, unwanted anyway, and grown another. He feels the heavy horns like a crown spring from his fortunate brow. And the hounds that once coursed for him turn on him, knowing their duty, and set upon him to rend him. For Actæon has become what he pursued.
Cast an emblem, or a seal; carve a statue, paint a picture, and mount it in the central chamber, the inmost circle of the maze of Memory: Actæon, the Philosopher, sending his sharp-set Thoughts in pursuit of swift-flying Truth, comes at last on Beauty bare: the untouched unknown flame of intelligential fire burning at the center of the dark world of material shadows. And on seeing it the Philosopher becomes what he pursued: dies to himself, and lives in Her.
Trembling slightly, for no reason he recognized, Giordano Bruno Nolano stood awaiting the return of Diana from her park.
The huntsmen came first, with the stag she has shot trundled on a leafy branch between them. Light applause and murmurs of approval came from the guests and the courtiers. The deer’s tongue lolled from its fallen head, and its bright blood, bluer than Bruno’s own, dripped thickly on the dewy grass. Next the handmaidens, all in white as they always were, he had never bothered to distinguish among them or give them names.
Last, she came out from the park on her foot-cloth horse, led by the Earl of Leicester, who carried her little crossbow too. Not naked, no, encased even for the hunt in all her manifold coverings, her redingote, forepart, cloak; petticoat, round gown, slashed sleeves; ruff, gloves, hose, and boots.
Within, though, within, past the white smallclothes, she was naked, and untouched. They have all thought it.
She dismounted. His sponsors brought the Nolan forward—they were Sir Walter Raleigh and Edward Dyer, poets, devotees of Diana. She offered him her hand in its figured glove (black kid, worked with small flowers: strawberry, pansy, violet, almost too small to see, only when her hand was kissed did the eye come close enough to perceive the gilded fly, pismire, polished beetle in amid the thicket, where the jewels of her rings were cast away). He did not touch his lips to her person. Once he had kissed the Pope’s ring so, warned not to touch it, osculation would wear it away in a thousand years.
—The gentleman wishes to offer Your Majesty a work of his own composition.
—The gentleman pays to your Majesty and her realm and people many sincere and well-wrought compliments in it.
Her smile was instant and genuine, enlisting him at once and forever in a gay army, hers. He permitted it. There was enough of himself; he could give her much, as much as she would take.
—Well let us see, she said. She took the book he proffered, and lifted him up. What is your subject?
—My subject is Love, he said in Italian. She answered him in the same language:
—Do you praise him?
—I must. There is no force on earth found greater than Love.
She laughed, as at an extravagance that pleased her, and her eye regarded him more critically. He would not look away abashed; his spirit rose to his eyes to meet hers looking in, though it was confusing to look at her in the midst of the thousand potent jewels that surrounded and protected her, cold milky pearls, hot rubies, liquid emeralds, gold, silver, adamant.
—Eroici furores, she said. Do you mean the frenzy of lovers? Men say they are slain by their love’s eyes, that they die of love. Do you feign that? In our country we say: men may die, and worms may eat them, but not of love.
—Madam, he said. The love of which I have written is not the common love of men and women. Not even that more noble love your courtiers and servants—of whom I name myself one—bear your Majesty’s sacred person.
—No?
—No. I have written, under the figures of Actæon and Diana, Phyllis and Clorinda, he and she, eyes and stars and darts and hearts, of another love than these.
—Ah, said the Queen. Does it become our servant to tell us he has another love?
For a moment Bruno (caught in a sort of stoop, so as to keep his head lower than the Queen’s) felt checked. The skirt of her gown, he observed (his eyes being pointed that way) was a sea: rocks, ships, great fish coming forth, seed-pearl foam on satin waves, drowned men, treasure, pearls cast up on golden sands.
—For your sake, Madam, he said, a servant might with a flaming heart pursue Truth. Knowledge. Love himself. To bring him finally to bend the knee before Your Majesty.
Cautiously she smiled. Her forepart was worked with a forest, fountains, stubs of dead trees, moss of deep velvet pile; a forest fire too, astonishing, animals fleeing it, ermine, squirrel, fox and hart. Water earth air and fire.
—Your master, the Ambassador, returns to France soon, she said to him. Will you go with him?
—Sadly. Unwillingly.
—In other of your books, we are told, you speak highly of our cousin of France. Henri. You promise him service, and wish more crowns for him. Is it so?
—His Majesty has favored me. I do what I can. What little.
—Yet you would serve us.
She smiled, and laid her gloved hand lightly on his wrist.
—Be our servant still when you return. Speak well of us to our cousin there. Tell him we desire his friendship against all intolerant and unjust powers whatever. Tell him that.
He could only bow. She granted him a last long entangling look, and glanced again at his book as she turned away.
—Love, she said. Love.
Love is the cause of life; no power on Earth is found stronger than love. Eros is the Great Dæmon, the little lord of this world; the strongest bond of the will is Venus’s loose girdle.
Even in the Animal Kingdom Eros rules: no male will tolerate a rival, no female either; the lowliest beast will forgo food, drink, and every other pleasure, even risk life itself, for love, how often we see.
Love drives old and young; it drives hot youths into one another’s arms against every prohibition of priests and elders, kings and kin, drives them into love-sickness, madness, even death. Love surprises grave senators and abbesses, tormenting their old flesh with young heats, making them dance and caper to his tune.
Gig
antic love turns the Earth in her socket; love for the Sun’s beauty constrains her to circle forever around that lamp like a deathless moth; self-love alone, and the desire to prolong pleasure forever, keeps Earth from plunging into the beloved body and being lost in it; and even so, with every century she grows a measure closer to her love.
Love in God is endless fecundity, the continual, generous, unstinting production of things; love in Man is the endless hunger for the products of Infinity, never satisfied.
Love is magic: able to fascinate and capture the unwary, able to make a man or a woman see what is not there and fail to see what everyone else sees, able to transform the stunted and beetle-browed swain to Hermes, the cowpoxed maid to Phyllis.
Magic is love: nothing but the power of love in the heart of the operator can move the souls of others; nothing but love can command the intelligences of the air. Without love even the simplest Art of Memory could not operate; without attraction and revulsion, what attaches the soul to images?
Poor Dicson: his little book on Memory had been fallen upon by the pedant doctors, just as he had feared it would be, i Puritani as he called them; one of them had issued a pamphlet showing how Dicson’s Art of Memory was not only useless, it was impious, too. Just as Dicson had said: because it set up false gods within, Statues, Images. This pamphleteer (he was a fellow of the other College, not the one Bruno had been evicted from) advocated instead the memory methods of Peter Ramus, arch-pedant of France, which used a schoolboy system of Specials and Generals set out on a written page, numbered and lettered.
And not only that: this ass of Cambridge had caught Dicson advising that, since the images used in memory must be of a kind to excite the feelings, the image of a beautiful woman would be very effective if established in a Memory House. Outrage and pious horror: there it was, the only sin more horrifying to those strange half-men than idolatry.