I am the only one
Lives in the Sun
Shagbarks assemble
For only the Free:
God, and Germanus,
And Gabriel, and Me.
Unwritten poems of Hans Schultz
Hans left home for his Wanderjahr when he was fourteen. He left to see the world and to acquire an education with an old friend of his father, Professor Kirol von Weinsberg Valeni who was the smartest man in the world.
The professor was, in fact, the last man who knew everything. There can never be another one, as knowledge has so constantly multiplied that it is no longer possible for one man to know it all. It is necessary that there be a new sort of man who is satisfied with knowing only a part of it. It is necessary, but the Professor wouldn't be so satisfied, and neither would Hans.
In his tide years, when he was at his crest, the Professor had really known it all, before the divergent sciences overwhelmed him with their sheer bulk.
The Professor was born in about 1860 in Bavaria, or possibly in a slightly different place and time. Now it was early spring of 1930 and he should have been about seventy years old, give or take a decade. John William had one traveled with the Professor, and now he wished his son to do likewise. And there is hardly any boy who is not eager for his Wanderjahr to begin.
Only Irene the mother was a little dubious of Professor Kirol, for she had also known him many years before. Both she and John William had first come to America at the expense of the Professor, though separately, and from different countries. This was before they were married and when they were still quite young people.
“Do you know when I first heard the word ‘phoney’, John?” his mother Irene asked him. “It was from the Professor and applied to himself. This was before I knew American much and before America knew ‘phoney’. This is not English, no more than it is German; it is Yiddish. It had a different meaning then, more of the humorous and less of the shoddy. Our professor is a phoney of the old school. He is nobler than the current phonies, but he is tarred with the same brush. He helped make the brush.”
“Then his isn't the greatest intellect extant?”
“Possibly it is, John. That is the tragedy. You may say (no, you would not say it, but the world might say) ‘What is the smartest man in the world doing wandering about like a tinker?’ That's what he does, but he says that dignity belongs to middling minds. What if he's right? Who can say?”
Hans said goodbye and went with the Professor.
There was a truck that looked like an old medicine-show wagon, and they drove it the eighty miles to Wisconsin Rapids where they were to meet the rest of the party. The Professor talked of many things on the way, and another boy might have been bowled over with the rapidity of them. The Professor was a rapid calculator and he taught Hans some of it and talked to him about it.
“This is Cerebral Athleticism, not to be confused with Thought; this, and the bulky additions and squarings and extractings. I will teach you how to do them all, but I will also teach you not to confuse them with more important things.
“Prodigious memory is also Cerebral Athleticism, and yet a man of thought who has not developed a prodigious memory is a fool. It is a handy tool and should be used, and anyone can learn to handle it. I myself have the most prodigious memory in the world.
“There are dull trades in the world, Hans, thousands of dull trades. Someone has to do them, but woe to him who does them from choice. Your Maker will hold you accountable on that last day for any dull thing you do: it's the unforgivable sin of which we hear. The same things are not dull to all, but anyone who tolerates dullness commits a crime.
“There is a Sabbath of the mind also. We are not allowed to become so absorbed with the furniture of the world as to have no time for thought. We have to realize where we are: always at the beginning, for all that it seems we begin in the middle. Humanity is no more than morning dew on the grass. But we are also manna. We are but a contingent species at the beginning of a conditional life. That we be ever realized (made real) is a distant hope, and yet that hope has been implanted in us for a reason.”
The professor talked to Hans about the Tree. “The trees were not all forbidden. Only one tree was forbidden, the pseudodendron of false knowledge and the crooked way. And all the trees were trees of knowledge: knowledge of love and realization, or achievement and arriving and awakening and growing: of expanding and seeing and unfolding. We are caterpillars who will later turn into butterflies, who will later turn into stars. And then, who knows? Heaven is not a static state. It is the eternal explosive growth and development. The Redwood seed, which is smaller than the Mustard, grows into the giant of the earth. Christ must have regretted that He could not use the Redwood in his parables but His listeners would not have comprehended.”
And later, during the same ride in the truck that looked like a medicine-show wagon, the Professor talked to Hans about the Tree of Language, a favorite of his.
“I am possibly the only eminent philologist who believes literally in the story of the Tower of Babel, Hans. Know you that a scientist can be the most narrow-minded man in the world? Do you know that I was expelled from a dozen academies and learned societies in Christian lands for maintaining the Babel theory of the divergence of tongues?
“But it happened, and it happened at Babel and in historical times. Draw any map of the divergence and you will always come back to that valley as its center and to that time as its time. I've always thought of it as a catastrophic umlaut shift accompanied by much vowel breaking and a shattering of sonants as the dialects were born.”
The Professor had all the tongues of Europe and of the Levant, and all the important tongues of the world. “It takes at least a month to learn a language properly even if you have all the proper facilities. Do not try it at all unless you have them, except for amusement. There must first be a native speaker with whom you can live day and night. In the Carnival business you can nearly always secure a performer of almost any race on earth for this purpose. Then you must have the best books. But first you must have the prodigious memory. It takes twenty thousand words and logoforms to get soundly into a language. This means that you must learn six hundred new words a day, learn them completely, and learn them for life. If, by the third week of study, you find that you still do not dream in the language, then you must awaken yourself immediately and find out what you are doing wrong. It is an interesting field, but a hundred tongues should hold a man unless he has a special interest in language.”
One forte of the Professor was rapid astronomic calculation. He could give the right ascension of any star on any day of any year, past or future. And, in a number of weeks, Hans would also be able to do this with the stars most likely to be asked, Alpha Centauri and Procyon, CC624 and Kapteyn's Star, Rigel and Vega and Betelgeuse. He learned their comings and goings, and also learned that this is the mere childhood of astronomy.
But it was the theories that the Professor loved; and it was on the theories that he quarreled with the professors (as though he were not the greatest of professors). “Now, this is how it is out there,” the Professor told Hans. “It is the tapestry of Heaven, the real Heaven of the Beatific Vision where we go when we die, and also where we already are now. The Infinity of Space is not made for a game: it is the real infinity rolling in the real eternity. But we see this tapestry now only from the reverse side. We see only the tangled threads behind: we have not the vision of the face of the picture itself.
“There are multitudinous emanations, and sight is only one of them which is given us here in the childhood of the soul. But it is all out there, Hell and Purgatory and Heaven, all there; or here, for we also are in the middle of Out There. And there is a time before time, and a time after time; a space beyond space, and a space inside space. They talk now of re-entrant space which is an attempt to see infinity. I talk also of re-entrant time which is the attempt to see eternity. Do you understand what I am saying, Hans?”
“N
ot entirely. But what I don't understand I will remember.”
“I am saying that it is not two things but one thing. There is not a spiritual universe beyond the material universe we are in now; it is the spiritual universe where we are. We are already in the middle of Heaven; we are already in the middle of Eternity. But we cannot know it yet.
“We are the seed which must explode into the new body and then continue to grow. A giant red star may be an aspect of an Archangel, or it may be the corollary to a statement of love. The physical and the spiritual are not two different things; they are two of the many different aspects of one thing. And Space and Time may be only two of many phases of the whole. The noon-day devil is walking among the Cepheids, and Lucifer who fell like lightning is still falling. At the same time Christ has not been born, and the time is today, and the world has already ended and exploded into something bigger. We are all of us contemporaries for we all live in eternity. Belloc wrote that it is good not to have to return to the Church. But the smartest man in the world (we both smile, Hans, for we know that I am a charlatan) left the Church, and so had to return. In the Father's House there are mansions even for Charlatans.”
3.
In Wisconsin Rapids they met the Carnival. Now there are some who might think that the smartest man in the world would be doing something better than running a carnival: but these are mostly small-minded stylized people who have neither run a carnival nor been the smartest man in the world. Should he be a ruler of countries or a general of armies? There are drawbacks to those jobs, for paradoxically they are the most limiting. No, all the other worthy occupations are either exposed to the contaminatory theory of diseases of power or money or intellectual pride; or they involve too large a clutter of retainers, or doom one to a sessile life and too avid an attachment to the furniture of the world. If you will only think about it for a moment, you will see that the operation of a small carnival is the only possible occupation for the smartest man in the world.
The carnival was not set. The Professor owned some equipment. In the spring, he would either rent it out to another operator or he would lease some more for himself. He would charter various acts and form combos, or sometimes he would perform for others.
As a mind-reader, memory and information expert, and hypnotist, he had played most of the world: the old circuses of Europe and America, the music halls and vaudeville theaters of many countries. He was a nightclub magician. But mostly he was the answer man, claiming to answer any question in the world.
But now he was seventy years old, give or take a decade. While still the smartest man in the world, he was no longer the strongest. Actually he had never been the strongest man in the world, but he had often billed himself that way. He could still break horseshoes with his hands, or lift a horse in lifting harness, but he no longer had endurance nor agility. He no longer walked the ropes nor did the high dives, and he had not been on a trapeze for twelve years.
Hans at this time was fourteen and Betty Hochstapler was sixteen. He suffered from her. They worked together in the carnival and the clubs. She was beautiful, but he was not ready for her. She had worked in acrobatics and balancing acts all her life and her body was of iron. Her heart was also metallic, but of a peculiar alloy: a lot of brass, a streak of merciless vanadium steel, an element of extremely resilient phosphor bronze, and a warmer metal that often glowed cherry red. Often she was almost human.
She enjoyed humiliating Hans until he became an adept around the carnival. After that it would be very hard for anybody to humiliate him.
One afternoon they walked in the woods with Mabel the bear.
“If only you were older,” Betty said. “Will two years always make such a difference?”
“Not when I'm a hundred and you're a hundred and two.”
Well, it does now, Hanschen, and if you kiss me goodnight on the cheek again I'm going to bite off your nose. I'm worth lots more than a kiss on the cheek. Almost anyone would want to be my sweetheart.”
“How about Angelo Angelino?”
“He's all right, but I'd rather marry you.”
“Who said anything about getting married?”
“I said something about it, Hans. You should pay attention. What do you think I'm always talking about? It isn't good to have a bachelor around a carnival. You'll have to get married in a couple of years anyhow, and I'm the prettiest girl on the lot. And you are a good catch. You are the Zauberlehrling, the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Did you know that they called you that? I love you more than anyone but I will not wait long.”
But Hans was embarrassed when he was with the unbreakable blonde doll, so he conspired with Angelo Angelino that Angelo should marry Betty.
“But I have deferred to you,” Angelo said. “You are the favorite of the Professor.”
“But I don't want her.”
“If you say you don't want her, you will have to fight me. Everyone should want her.”
“Well, I do want her in a way, and she is wonderful. But I believe it would be better if you married her. It is possible that I will not always stay with the carnivals, and she could not live in anything else. And I'm too young. It would be better with you and her.” So Angelo said that he would proceed to that goal.
Hochstapler had been the name that the Professor and others had given to the father of Betty. It means a high-class swindler. He was that until an uncooperative wool-hat killed him over a matter of less than three hundred dollars. This wool-hat was smaller game than Hochstapler usually hunted, and three hundred dollars to him was not even pocket money. Being killed by a wool-hat was like being slaughtered by a cotton-tail rabbit after killing leopards and lions.
The Wool-Hat had killed him with Hochstapler's own little barkers’ mallet or gavel. He hadn't meant to kill him, he said, just to bang him on the head. He had no idea you could kill a grown man with a little thing like that. But Hochstapler was dead; and the Wool-Hat got a year and a day.
Betty had admired her father, and for the very qualities that had earned him his name. She believed that everyone in the world was crooked, and it worried her when she couldn't find the crookedness in someone, as in Hans. Betty, before marrying Angelo, was already connected in some ways with the Angelinos. It was a mixed family. Nowadays the Angelinos are mostly Italian, and after that they are mostly German; and beyond they are Bohemian and Mexican and Irish Tinker. Their names, besides Angelino, are Obermeyer and Viskochil, and Borg, and Trevino, and Larrigan. The cousins of them are all over the world.
Nor were these the only strains in the clan. Elena Angelino, who had the trained bears, always insisted that he great-grandfather was a bear and that this is why she understood them so well. The Professor also believed this, and Hans once said that it was the only silly thing he had ever known him to believe. Yet the Professor never believed anything without a reason. He insisted that he had known both the great-grandfather and great-grandmother of Elena: and that the great-grandfather was a bear.
4.
Hans was with the carnival for five or six years. This is where he grew up, and where he developed the conviction (not entirely false) that he could do anything in the world. He traveled several continents and saw much of the world. He learned to tell the dukkerin, the fortunes, as well as Nastasia Angelino, and he learned to talk Deep Romany. The Angelinos were also part Romany, Gypsy, and the Romany strain is wilder than the Ursine.
Hans read minds like the old Professor, and loved for the rest of his life to amaze people by answering unasked questions. And like the Professor he took the platform to answer any question in the world. He was a good sorcerer's apprentice, but he was still fifty years behind the old sorcerer.
Hans also was a strong man in those years. He had learned that it is no great trick for a husky boy to lift a horse in a lifting harness. A horse is a horse to the viewers, and a very shaggy horse of no more than eight hundred pounds will appear much heavier.
And there was the Donkey Walk. Pete the donkey would walk up a pla
nk that was laid across the stomach of Hans, teeter it on the stomach, and walk down the other side. It is no great trick if you are made of iron. Even Betty could do it.
Coin-bending was effective, and horseshoes are not bad. It takes a certain sort of angry determination and a disregard for pain. Nobody can bend them cold. Even the strongest man must get a little mad first. Steel bars can be made of any temper, just tough enough that the strongest untrained country boy cannot bend them and the apprentice strong man can.
Hans was a good hypnotist though not in the professor's class. He could not develop the Presence of the Mystic. But he hypnotized people genuinely where the Professor sometimes had to fake. The real thing isn't quite as effective but it must sometimes be used where the counterfeit is beyond one's ability.
Hans could give an hilarious performance with the help of Betty and Mabel the bear. Mabel would come up at the call for volunteers from the audience, scattering the people as she came, for people are as afraid of a good bear as a bad bear.
“You want to volunteer for this?” Hans would ask. Mabel would nod.
“And it is absolutely true that you never saw me before tonight?” Hans would ask, and Mabel would shake her head ‘No, Never’. This was the only dishonest part of the act, for Mabel knew Hans well and saw him many times a day.
“You are drowsy,” Hans would say, and the bear would wobble her head.
“You are a canary.” Mabel would squeal, and flap her legs like wings.
“You are a kangaroo.” Mabel would bounce around the stage like one.
“You have robbed a honey tree and the bees are all over you.” Mabel would throw a fit at this for she was genuinely afraid of bees and this part was real to her.
Most of the act was broad, hypnotizing fat farmers into bathing beauties, and young boys into great lovers with Betty as the object. Betty herself was easily hypnotized, and Hans would put her into a state and make her eat fire and glass. Though she was from an old fire and glass-eating family, she could do it only when she was hypnotized.
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