Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  Whatever the actors said to the rabbi, what craft of their own they exercised on the great still figure in the crowded room, it was enough to bring him down the stairs to the courtyard; there the little ass stood patiently, big head looking from side to side; and the rabbi sent away the other supplicants who waited there, and bent down, with his hands upon his knees, toward the Ass, and waited for it to tell its tale—as the two actors had said it would do, and all by itself.

  And so it did, from beginning to end, supplemented by the human persons who had come with it. The rabbi, who considered it an affront to the endless invention of the Most High to be astonished by the speaking of an Ass, listened in silence to the end. Then he asked what it was the beast desired of him.

  —I wish, said the Ass, to be transformed from the shape I now hold, and acquire a shape more suited to the spirit within me. For I can't go into the places of men in this form. I would be spurned, or burned for a devil. Burned again.

  —And why is it, the rabbi said then (speaking in his own Jewish tongue, which an ancient secretary translated into German for the Ass and his companions) that you have come here to me? Why do you think I have a remedy for you?

  His visitors looked at one another, each unwilling to be the first to speak, for they all knew why here, why him. He was the Maharal, not only wise but good, and able, out of his learning and holiness, to accomplish wonders. It was well known that he had once made a golem: a figure of earth, sculpted on the ground like a dead man or like the figure of dirt that God's fingers first made, which the rabbi then, by prayers and other rituals few know about and fewer would have dared repeat, caused to stir, awake, rise. To sit up groggily on his elbows, dropping clods, looking about himself in wonder (or was he an unthinking lump still, with no more consciousness than the Emperor's Uhrwerk figures, which seem to obey the Emperor's orders like courtiers and knights, but were only metal pins and springs—earth too?) and at length stand up on unsteady earthen legs, not very well formed but not the less amazing for that, and ready to obey the Maharal's instructions, until the wise rabbi drew from its muddy mouth (or ear, in other accounts) the shem ha-meforash, the capsule containing the Name, that had animated it, whereupon the big fellow broke apart into clods again. Or—in another story—until the rabbi erased one diacritical mark of the sacred word Truth, emet, that he had inscribed upon the creature's forehead, leaving the equally sacred word met or Death.

  —Those are untrue stories, said the Maharal. Such things can be done by the cunning, but the truly learned refrain from them. To press light into darkness, to mix clean and unclean? Those who do so are brave perhaps and have great knowledge perhaps, but may the Holy One, blessed be he, protect me from imitating them.

  —I don't ask that you do those things that are forbidden, said the Ass. Only that you help me to learn what I must, to do it for myself. I ask for what anyone ignorant may ask of you: instruction.

  The rabbi regarded the beast before him. If it was not forbidden, it seemed to be required; it would be a mitzvah to help any being in the condition this one found itself in. The animal looked up at him with his great moist long-lashed eyes in supplication, and the rabbi had an irresistible impulse to scratch its head.

  * * * *

  This too, then, would become one of the stories told of the Maharal, in some worlds at least; how he used to walk sometimes in the town with an ass by his side, without lead or halter, an ass that would stay obediently by him like a nobleman's dog, and look up with doglike attention to the Maharal, who seemed to speak to it confidentially, though surely (observers supposed) his words were for himself alone, or were for God's ear, for who else could hear?

  —The Torah has six hundred thousand faces, the Maharal said to the Ass. One face for every Jew alive at the time Moshe rebiana revealed it. Some faces of the Torah are turned toward us, and some away; it is these turned-away faces we seek through Hokhmath ha-Tseruf, or, as it is said, gematria.

  —This is the art by which form and substance may be transmuted, said the Ass.

  When the rabbi said nothing in assent, the Ass added: So I have read in ancient authors.

  —All the beings in the universe have come into existence through the work of the twenty-two letters, said the rabbi. By combining their different kinds, the twenty-two make, in all, 231 gates. Through these gates have come, in their troops and legions, all the things that have names, in all the three realms, that is, the World, the Year, and the Soul.

  —Did they, then, precede the saying of the Fiat lux?

  —Perhaps they did, said the rabbi. A midrash says that the Holy One, blessed be he, asked for workers to make the world, and the Torah replied: Take these twenty-two, of which I am made.

  He spoke in simple terms, not only because he spoke in a language not his own, but also because he spoke to a famously simple beast, whose hooves clattered on the cobblestones beside him, whose long ears twitched and pointed as though in search of wisdom.

  —Even so, the rabbi went on, it took several attempts to get a creation that would sustain itself at all: earlier creations preceded this one, coming to be and going out like the sparks thrown off by a smith's hammer as it strikes the iron on the anvil.

  The Ass hee-hawed, for the idea of a Jove or Jehovah laboring over an infinite smithy, spoiling his work and beginning again, suited him very well: it was as though he'd thought of it himself.

  The rabbi (not noticing the interruption) went on to explain that those first universes emanated entirely from his Power, his strict Justice; each was too difficult to maintain, and destroyed itself; only when balanced by the smile of his other aspect, Wisdom, Mother, and Spouse, was the world able to remain alive and persist in the place it had been summoned to.

  —Yet even now the creation is not completed, said the rabbi. It is said that this world grows up through a succession of Years, or shemitah, each different in kind. The present shemitah emanates from the sefira Gevurah, judging Power: that is, the left hand of the Holy One. Anyone can see that this is so. And if this is so then the former age must have been that of the sefira Hesed, sweet Loving-kindness.

  —And the age to come? asked the donkey.

  —Rahamim: Beauty, Compassion, Mercy.

  For a moment he paused, and lowered his head, and so did the beast beside him: as though to await that age, so long in dawning.

  —Each Year, the rabbi then said, is seven thousand ordinary years long, and at the end of each, all things begin again, but differently.

  —All things?

  —Some say that in former shemitah, even the Torah did not contain the possibilities it contains now, and in the shemitah to come it will not contain them again, but will contain others it does not now. There are those who hold that there is a letter not present in the Torah in this age, a letter that the next age will reveal. A revelation that must of course change everything, however slightly.

  —Ah, said the Ass; so it must.

  —Others say that there are certain unfortunate souls formed in the last Year but still persisting in this one, where they wander in dissatisfaction, never at home, and not knowing why.

  The Ass pondered this, and his own state.

  —Perhaps, he said then, they are the greatest scholars, as well as the greatest fools. Searching for the sense that they remember, or expect, but that has changed forever.

  The rabbi walked silently for a moment, as though testing against his inward understandings this remark, to see if it could be so.

  —In any case, he said at last, those tales are false. There is but one age, one world, one Torah, one soul for each man.

  The Ass didn't dispute the Great Rabbi, wise enough to know better, patient enough to wait. That he himself was the proof that a man could have more than one soul made for him in the bosom of Amphitrite he forbore to say. He only paused and parted his hind legs, and sent a stream of urine into the gutter, while the rabbi tactfully went on ahead, and paid no attention.

  * * * *

 
; The work was long: the rabbi said it would be. The Giordanisti took rooms in a house in the castle district named after the Three Kings, die Heilige drei Königen (where one day in another world Franz Kafka would live, and dream about metamorphosis). To make their daily bread and board they put on plays once again, safer in this city than anywhere in the Empire. They acted, besides Onorius and Lucius, a new play of Johannes Faustus, like the ones the Pragerei loved—only in theirs the devil with whom Faust negotiates the sale of his soul was not a schwarze Pudel but a well-spoken Ass.

  Meanwhile, every day if he could, the Ass traveled to the Jewish quarter, to the rabbi's house, to learn and hope.

  He studied the nine chief methods of calculation or gematria, as Moses Cordovero lists them. Every letter by which the world was first called into being has a numeric equivalent, and gimetry is but the substitution of one name with another of the same numerological value—which value can however be calculated in an endless number of ways, for the letters of the names of the letters—the aleph of aleph, the beth of beth—have their own numerical values that can be drawn on too, and this being so no two numerically identical words are ever exactly identical, since their identity derives from different calculations.

  He learned—indeed he already knew it, as he seemed already to have known everything he had learned as an ass, except how to sleep standing up and bear loads as large as himself—that all the names of the deity, the potent semhamaphoræ, which are the shadows of ideas, are all hidden in the letters that compose the scripture's tales and truths and laws. The whole of the Hebrew scripture is not other than the one Great Name, expressed in the quasi-endless vicissitudes of alphabetic calculation.

  But for that to be so, then mustn't each of the stories that the scripture contains have been made to happen in the first place only so that it could be written down in certain words, having the value of certain numbers? If Samson had picked up not the jawbone of an ass but the thighbone of a tiger, one name of God would not be able to be read from the story.

  —Are they all nothing but fables then? he asked the rabbi.

  They sat (at least the rabbi and his secretary sat) studying in the inner court of the bet ha-midrash. The Ass, still an ass after many lessons, watched the rabbi's blunt quill dip in the inkhorn his secretary held, and make vermiform letters one after another.

  —No, said the rabbi. Those events did occur, and they also have the hidden meanings that they have. The Almighty favored Abraham not because he was a good man, but because he was Abraham: and yet Abraham would not have been Abraham if he had not striven to be a good man. It is the same for all of us.

  —The same for all of us, said the rabbi's secretary in Latin. Idem ac omnibus.

  Was it, though, was it the same for all of us, the same as for Abraham? The Ass thought, as they studied, of his own story: a story he could not have imagined in advance of its coming to be, the story that had plucked him as a brand from the burning, marked him as the bearer of a knowledge he could no longer apprehend, brought him here to this land, to this city, to this crowded and odorous quarter. With how much farther to go, in what form, for what end.

  We try to choose the good, he thought, and darkling and ignorant, to be wise: and in doing so we make the choices that will spell the stories, the stories that will body forth or contain or clothe the thousand- and ten-thousand-letter names of God. Those names—the skeleton of the made World, of the Year we inhabit, of the Soul we recognize within—all come to be in the stories we make. But the stories cannot be known before our labors make them; therefore neither can the names; therefore neither can the ending of the world we make.

  —We are not required to complete the work, the rabbi said to the little beast. But neither are we free to desist from it.

  * * * *

  A year passed before the Ass discovered the solution to his quandary, and when he did it was all on his own.

  The stories that great Moses told, of the making of the world and the coming to be of men and beasts, angels and demons, fathers and heroes, sinners and journeys and judgments: they contained all the names of God in the permutations of the numbers of the letters of their words. So the rabbi said. But then, the Ass concluded, it must be that all those sacred histories could be exactly substituted by other stories about other journeys, judgments, heroes, et cætera, and—so long as they were told in words that had exactly the same numerical values—those stories would yield up the same names and numbers, indeed the same Great Name and Number. When he expressed this discovery to the rabbi, the rabbi at last sent him away, scandalized.

  But it was so, and he knew it. And, finally and therefore, his own little name and its number, the number of his whole tale, could be reversed, construed, inverted, reduced, multiplied, and divided, and then made to spell out a new name, the name of a new being different from but exactly equivalent to the old, with a new tale, a tale both having been and still coming to be.

  And into or onto that name and tale he could press or tack or strap or infuse or pour or discover his self and soul, as he had once before infused the same self and soul into the body and heart of an ass, and by similar means perhaps, only not numerological ones. (What ones, then? How had he done it? He couldn't remember.)

  So he took the gold he had made as a comedian, and he caused to be made (by the same instrument maker then serving Johannes Kepler up in the castle on the hill) a vast set of interlocking brass wheels, which were etched and numbered like an astrolabe, or like the proportional compass of Fabricio Mordente, with the Hebrew letters, and the letters of Latin and Greek, and the lettered Divine Qualities of Raimundus Lullus for good measure. For the signacula of Moses were wonderful, and the hieroglyphs of Ægypt are wonderful, but all letters and the images made from them are finally just as wonderful and eternal, and are equally the world.

  As the Giordanisti turned and turned these wheels at his instruction, he combined and transliterated and reflected the resulting nonsense in the mirror of his heart of hearts. His soul studied it in that mirror, where of course it appeared backward, upside down too like the reflection in a silver spoon's bowl; studied and read until it all ran backward again, that is forward, and so at last made sense, sweet sense, which raced through his fibers and his sinews and the macaroni of his veins and nerves, remaking him as it went.

  He was a tabby kitten; then he was a stick of elmwood; a silvery trout with a rainbow belly wriggling in air; a live coal, shedding sparks; a gray pigeon, drop of ruby blood at its beak. For an infinitesimal instant he was an infinite number of things, and then for an endless moment he was one thing eternally.

  Then he was a man. A small naked man, though not smaller or more naked than he had been in the Campo dei Fiori. His name was Philip à Gabella. Instead of hooves he had ten fingers—no, nine fingers, one minimus lost somewhere along the way or failing to be produced in metamorphosis. Big headed, exophthalmic, with large yellow teeth. A large membrum virile too: that and his loud and horripilating laugh being marks he would henceforward keep hidden, for he remembered how, long ago, they had frightened off the giants in their revolt against the gods—that is, the powers and the principalities. He remembered the tale, and the names of those gods and powers, and the names of the giants too. It was a well-known tale; its occurrence in many authors ancient and modern unrolled within him. The strong image of the ithyphallic Ass up on his hind legs displaying was one that he possessed; here it was.

  And he laughed his terrible laugh then, right then, unable not to, laughed and laughed as the brothers covered their ears. Because he remembered.

  He remembered. The great gates of the many-linked memory palaces he had built over the whole of his life before his death were flung open with a bang, for his new man's brain was large enough for them to unfold at last into, and they did unfold, they opened like the damp wings of butterflies just come from their cocoons, like folding game boards of a thousand inlaid panels, like cunts, like caves, like dreams suddenly remembered backward from th
eir terminus at waking, oh yes! ever backward till their infinities can be glimpsed, distances where one day we will go, or might go.

  He remembered all the writings he had written and all those that remained unwritten. He remembered the lands he had crossed, the languages he had mastered, the shoes he had worn out, the meals he had eaten or refused, the women he had coupled with, Venetian, Savoyard, Genevan, Picard, Walloon, English. He remembered the faces in all the crowds in all the squares of all the cities he had added to his own Memory City in the time he had walked the earth.

  He remembered the prison in Rome where he had lain for so many years, and all the places he had traveled to while he lay there, on earth, under the earth, in the heavens: he remembered even the small window above, by which he had used to go out. He remembered all those he had summoned to sit with him there, and all the conversations he had had with them, the answers he had got from them. And also the questions they had asked, that he had answered. And lastly he remembered how he had learned from one of them, and from the instructions of his own soul, the means by which he had been able to run away, again.

  Freed by his grandfather Hermes, who had told him the plan that he, Giordano, had already known before he was told it. Step by step. And who then said to him: Now go, and free all men.

  And so he had gone from Rome and crossed the mountains and the plains and come to this golden city on four legs. Now again he had two, and a new or an old Work to accomplish, in consequence of all that he had been given; a Work he had been saved to do. And if he was not able to accomplish it all to the end, that was no reason not to begin.