Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  It had already begun to grow dark; the frantic crowds of careening vehicles in the streets, though oblivious of foot traffic or signals, had turned on their lights; Pierce was, he recalled, still in the Northern Hemisphere, in fact at about the same latitude as the Faraway Hills from which he had come, where it was also darkening now to a winter night. He walked on. There was no piazza, no elephant, no Via dei Cestari. He went into a café. It was apparently not the hour for coffee; the beautiful bright bar was empty. With its cellophane-wrapped boxes of chocolates and biscotti, its alchemist's row of colored bottles, its shiny steel counter and great angel-surmounted shrine-like machine, it was exactly like the hundreds of others he passed or drank in, one on almost every corner, enough for every Roman in the streets to rush into at once when necessary, to toss down a miniature coffee and be off again. He asked for a whisky. Sit Down, Sorrow was in his bag, and he fished it out.

  The idea that Bernini was inspired to make an elephant by an actual famous elephant, a sort of Roman Jumbo, is inadequate. The absurd but compelling idea of an elephant that bears on his back a granite obelisk actually derives from Francesco Colonna's 1499 novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. As Colonna's eponymous hero Poliphilus wanders in a hortus conclusus, fast asleep and in search of love, he comes upon a great marble elephant with an obelisk on his back. Within the hollow elephant (Poliphilus finds a door to go in by) lie the corpses or images of a naked man and woman, Sponsus and Sponsa, Matter and Form. The Rosicrucians would later make much of these weird allegories.

  Pierce had found a folio edition of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili on Kraft's own bookshelf, though he had read it first in college. The same edition even.

  Bernini must have liked this conception; he first designed an elephant cum obelisk for the gardens of Pope Alexander VII, where it would have been better suited than the Piazza Minerva. But no, it is here, midtown, somewhat lumpish and graceless as nothing else of Bernini's ever was, with no insides of course, or only imaginable ones. The obelisk is a real one, Roman booty; the famed Egyptologist Father Athanasius Kircher was called in to try to decode the hieroglyphics. The pope himself wrote the inscription for the base, which speaks of what great strength it requires to bear the wisdom of Egypt. Stand at its backside and you face the Dominican Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, built over an ancient temple site; in its abbey next door Giordano Bruno was arraigned, condemned, defrocked, stripped, and sent to his death. Wisdom's great weight!

  But after all it was almost seven decades after Bruno's death when the little wrinkled marble animal went up in the piazza. It was all unimportant then, Egypt, mere decoration, artifice, no harm in it; it was all over, gone, put away, annulled, no force in it any longer; Bruno's ashes scattered, unrecoverable; the world's page turned.

  Out again into the evening. If Pierce could just know where he stood, which way was north, or east. Maybe he'd taken the wrong turn, a right not a left, at that Via Arco della Ciambella.

  If we have in error taken a right rather than a left at the Via Arco della Ciambella, we will soon enter the small Piazza della Pigna, where the famed great bronze pinecone of Rome again adorns the lost, the fallen but not forgotten Temple of Isis, yes her sacred pigna once stolen by the gloating triumphant popes for their own Temple of Peter over the river

  No, no, he could no longer make out words. He turned, entered not a small piazza with or without a pinecone but a great boulevard, the Corso, traffic streaming beneath high dark palaces but the sidewalks empty, night come on now, his feet leaden but still able to feel pain; he had utterly lost his way and walked on anyway, nothing else to do. Turning away from the blinding headlights, he went only farther into the wrong Rome, until at last—near tears for more reasons than he could name—he surrendered, and seeing a rank of taxis, he took one to his pensione. Tomorrow, tomorrow. Cras, cras, the old Romans said. But Pierce was never to go that way again; and when he left Rome he still had not seen the elephant.

  If I chose Bruno by chance, I came to love him profoundly; he is one of those historical figures who is at once instantly accessible and yet permanently mysterious—just like our living friends and lovers, you see. When I came to read his works in Italian, I encountered a writer who was less a philosopher, it often seems, than a playwright, or even a novelist. His cosmologies are all dialogues; everybody gets to talk, himself or his stand-in only one among them. Some of the speakers we know to be fools, but others are merely in disagreement, and make some good points. The character who represents Bruno's thoughts is often only reporting what “the Nolan” believes or was heard to say; he may or may not be getting it entirely right, and there's no one to say for sure. We are reading Hamlet's story as reported by Horatio, as Hamlet might write it.

  Another morning, and Pierce read on the bus. He was going the wrong way along the Via de Lungara, aiming for the Vatican and St. Peter's, but soon he would lift his eyes and sense something was wrong; get off, and set off on foot.

  I found it impossible not to take the man's side. He could be hugely Promethean—he was, after all, out to overthrow the entire religious conception of the universe, not only of its shape, like Copernicus, but of its structure, meaning, and reason for being—and at the same time a rude comedian, who wouldn't shut up and sit down no matter what heckling he got; who wrote a titanic epic of the Reformation of the Heavens by the Græco-Roman pantheon that ends up as a satire on reform, on men, on gods, on the heavens themselves. No one ever after understood it, maybe because its ironies are too enthusiastic, or because Bruno keeps taking everybody's side in turn almost too fast to follow. And when they had him at last in prison, at the Castel St. Angelo (you can see the room today, or could when I was there), he kept on asking to see the Pope, and explain everything: and there's no way to know if this was anything but one last impossible joke.

  Pierce lowered the book. Why couldn't he take Bruno's side? He had once, hadn't he? What he felt compelled to do now was to counsel the man to sit down and shut up, he almost wanted to take the side of the authorities against him just in order to protect him. Pick a small universe, and go there and hide. Tell them you're sorry, that you didn't really mean it, that you'll take your medicine. Don't tease them, don't quibble, don't die.

  He stood now at the end of a bridge, a great round tower over the river ahead, which the guidebook now reluctantly identified for him:

  If we have refreshed ourselves with a light lunch, we are now prepared to visit the Castel St. Angelo, which will take nearly all the afternoon. The emperor Hadrian began his mausoleum here in 135 AD. Square base, circular tower covered in earth, as was the Roman custom; atop that was put the great bronze pinecone that is now in the Vatican. A tomb for only a few decades, it has been most famously a fortress, the popes’ stronghold for a thousand years.

  The fun way to get into the Castel St. Angelo, the guidebook promised, was to go from the Vatican Palace, way over there, down into a narrow corridor that tunneled right through a wall, the popes’ own bolt-hole. Narrow. Pierce's throat seized at the thought. In dreams he was invited into such places, or needed to enter them, and they grew smaller and tighter as he went, until panic woke him. No. He approached the castello instead sensibly over this bridge, the Ponte St. Angelo, past the lineup of Bernini's wind-tossed angels.

  Great glowering shapeless mound. Its classical columns and decorations gone for centuries. A group was just then entering, led by a guide speaking in a language Pierce couldn't identify; he followed along with his book open. We find ourselves first in an open courtyard; from here steps descend into the burial chamber of Hadrian. And on the wall of the chamber, empty now—Pierce almost passed by it without noticing—was a stone plaque, carved with Hadrian's own little verse, his address to his own soul at parting.

  Animula vagula blandula

  Hospes comesque corporis

  Quæ nunc abibis in loca

  Pallidula rigida nudula

  Nec ut soles dabis iocos

  Pierce felt a shudder of pi
ty. How could you ever translate those lines, so gently chilling, so un-Roman, so mild. Probably it couldn't be done. Animula vagula blandula: sweet little wandering spirit, little spirit wanderer, his soul like a child, like his own baby son. Hospes was the Latin word for stranger, and also for the shelter offered such a one: a word that ends up as both guest and ghost, host rather. Somewhere deep in Indo-European history, or in the heart, they had all the same root.

  Sweet little spiritlet wanderer

  My body's ghost-guest and companion

  Where will you go now, what will become of you?

  Pale little bare little shiverer

  No more now the games you liked to play.

  He had the sensation as he stood there of a hand slipping into his, and felt the world turn colorless and silent—it was colorless and silent here in this tomb, but now another world became so too; he cast no shadow there. Won't you call me back at last? He was not asked that, he heard that not, no. But he stood there as devastated as though he had been asked.

  Why was he what he was, and not better? Was there still time? He had come to nothing. Why? Why had he not done what he should or could?

  There wasn't an answer, only that hand slipping away again. A right hand, which had taken Pierce's left. A hot thread ran from there to where his heart had been. And Pierce thought: I can't fill myself with only myself.

  The dull echo of shod feet on stone and far voices returned, and Pierce seemed to shrink, or expand, or both at once: to become small in a great world or huge enough to contain a small one. Only a moment had passed, it seemed. His group had gone on, and Pierce followed after. The guide pointed out a grille set into the floor, a dark deep hole below, and the crowd looked down in as they passed and made small sounds of awe and horror. Prigione di San Marocco. An oubliette, the only one Pierce had ever seen or would ever see, only excepting the ones within himself. And down there Casanova or Cagliostro or Benvenuto Cellini was briefly thrown, if he understood the guide.

  Upward farther. They seemed to be climbing up around the funerary mound or mountain from within. Small doors led off the path to rooms named for various popes who hid there, or rested there; one a bathroom, with marble bath, painted grotesques. And then they came out onto the tower's top, where once the symbolic earth of the original Roman tomb had been laid, deep enough to grow trees; now all stone and a Renaissance fountain. Pleasant for the popes to wander in, refresh themselves. But around the courtyard, just below ground level, cells for celebrity prisoners: the guide showed them the stone air shafts rising here. For the Pope walking in the garden here to contemplate? Historic. Prigione storiche, the crowd whispered. Beatrice Cenci, who killed her father. Cardinal Carafa, strangled in his cell. Giordano Bruno. That one.

  There was a way to go down into it.

  Small. The thick door open, eternally now. In a sort of alcove was a stone shelf where his mat would have been laid. He must have had a table at least, and a stool. A bucket. A crucifix. It was said he was allowed no books except those that related directly to his defense, but that could have been thousands, a library. Not as large as the fluid living library in his head or heart. Hungry, though, maybe: the feeding of a prisoner was the responsibility of his family, and Bruno had none.

  Pierce sat down on the stone bed. He touched the rough-smooth walls. He lifted his eyes to the square of sun at the top of the air shaft. Had Bruno suffered from heat in summer, cold in winter? Had they allowed him candles on long winter nights?

  He wondered if it was really possible to be certain that this cell had been the one Bruno had been kept in. Had the knowledge somehow actually come down through the years, passed on from keeper to keeper, then archivist to archivist, guide to guide? And was it unchanged since then? It seemed that it could not have altered much: its stone walls, warm Roman stone, almost appealing, feet thick no doubt. He looked for incised initials, like Byron's at Chillon, but there were none, none now. No other mark either of the thousand he might have made.

  The record of Bruno's trial before the Inquisition is lost: Pierce knew that. All that exists is a sommario of the proceedings prepared by the famed Jesuit cardinal and doctor of the church, Roberto Bellarmino, sainted in 1936, a big figure therefore in Pierce's childhood. Bellarmine apparently talked long with Bruno over the last year of his imprisonment. Winning heretics back to the church was a passion with the gentle ugly cardinal; he engaged in a long theologico-ecclesiastical dispute with King James I of England, father of Elizabeth, the Winter Queen. Getting Bruno to see his errors would have been a coup. With his powers Bruno could have become one of their stars, like Gaspar Schopp, the young Protestant scholar and thinker who turned Catholic, and who was there in the Campo dei Fiori at the end to watch Bruno burn.

  Would His Eminence have come here to question Bruno, or would Bruno have been taken to him? His horn-rimmed spectacles, red silks sweeping this floor; a little stool for him set by a servant. Wearied maybe. Bruno never grew tired of talking.

  Shall we go on, Fra’ Giordano, from where we broke off: of things, and what causes them to come to be?

  Your Eminence, by speaking of things we cause them to come to be: or to be tempted to come to be, or recognize in themselves the power to come to be. Why shouldn't it be so? We see ourselves in the mirror of the world, placed before us by the infinite creativity of divine intelligence; and that universe is as alive as we are ourselves; so it may see itself in the mirror of our intelligence, and think to refashion itself.

  But it hasn't. It never has done that, refashioned as you say.

  No?

  No. It was fashioned by God in the beginning, and has remained as it was built. The foundations of the earth.

  Oh? For how long then was the world flat, like a plate or a cowpat, and the sun went down at its western edge, and traveled through the Austral waters to rise again at its eastern?

  It never was so. It was only our lack of understanding that described it in this way. It was always as it is now, a globe. In the center of the universe, around which the stars and planets go.

  No edge? No Austral waters?

  No. Of course not.

  Ah. Well then. Maybe when we have described the earth long enough as traveling with the other planets around the sun, in an infinite universe of suns, then that too will always have been so.

  But you couldn't know, really. Galileo hadn't yet been condemned, then; Bellarmino was himself a proponent of the New Learning. It was easy to imagine him trying hard to win Bruno over, probe for the places where his old faith might hook him again; explaining just what Bruno had to assent to, what minimum, in exchange for safety. All over Europe there were people doing it, in the lands of one confession or another. He, Pierce, had done it most of his life. He had thought, in the winter of this very year, in the middle of some very bad nights, that he might do it again: thought he might return, under threat of deracination and dissolution or out of a desperate hope of peace, to the safety of Mother Church. If only Mother Church had stayed put to return to.

  But not Bruno.

  How can I be as brave as you were? Pierce asked. If I can't go back and can't go forward, what can I do here?

  It had begun to grow dim in the chamber. Pierce could no longer hear small sounds, feet striking stone, the grinding of a hinge. It might be that the hours of daylight when the prisons and the tomb itself could be visited were over, and he should have continued with his group of Belgians or whoever they had been; the doors he had passed through to reach this chamber might even now be shutting, one by one, all down or up the way that led to here, and he not be able to come out again till dawn.

  10

  Why is there anything and not rather nothing? Tell me. Why does a universe come to be?

  —It comes to be because it can. No other reason.

  And why is everything the way it is, and not some different way instead?

  —It is the way it is because it chooses to be. It is always choosing, and thus changes how it is, within the limits
of its nature.

  But why should the things that are have these limits that they have, and not different ones?

  —Because this is the age we inhabit, and not a different one.

  And you—do you choose to be here, or are you constrained to be here?

  —Who are you that you should ask me this?

  A countryman of yours.

  —Allow me to doubt that.

  Why? What country do you say is yours?

  —Who are you?

  Have you forgotten me?

  —"Forget” is not a power allotted to me.

  Then you remember. In this city long years ago we met at first, in the library of the Vatican. Ever since then you have been my ally, my messenger—the messenger of a messenger! More too.

  He did remember. Remembered how he was brought to Rome and permitted to sit in that library and read the works of Hermes Ægyptiacus. And he remembered the one who came to him there, and warned him as the angel warned the Holy Family, but to flee from, not to, Ægypt. Remembered the terrible gay eyes, the pitiless smile, the kind hand upon him to throw him out into the world, into the safety of no safety. Now he seemed a sadder, older fellow, in a plain gown of black stuff, than he had been when he had first come before Bruno, in the library of the Vatican next door. He crossed his slim legs, and took his knee in both his hands.

  We will continue from where we broke off, he said. Of what nature are the things of this world, this universe, that they are capable of continuous change, without falling into chaos?

  —The universe is infinite in all directions, without center or limit. In itself it has no qualities, it cannot even be said to have extension, because it is infinite, which is beyond size. It is a vacuum, or æther, or nothing, and that nothing is filled with an infinite number of minima or atoms, though these are not the tiny hard grains or balls of Lucretius, but invisible infinitesimal centers whose circumferences touch one another everywhere. The infinite universe is compressed within each infinite atom of the infinite number of atoms of which it is composed.