Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  We know how in that warm room, on the eve of St. Martin's Day, young René had a number of dreams, three in fact, which seemed to him of the utmost significance. He dreamed of a great deforming wind, and a school and a chapel that the wind propelled him toward; he dreamed of the gift of a sweet melon from another country; of an encyclopædia of all sciences, which became a book of poems. He tried to read the poems, but (as they do in dreams) they kept changing, the one he wanted to find gone. One by Ausonius began with what he recognized as Pythagoras's choice: which way in life will I go?

  It's true, it's recorded. When he awoke from this dream he felt the world distorted, full of strange sparks or fires he could see in his room. When he slept and woke again, though, he felt certain that God had revealed truths to him that would take a lifetime to explicate, but would end at last in certainty. He thought the dreams had been sent to make him conscious of his sins, as well—sins no one knew about but he. And he thought of the Virgin, and vowed that, if he could, he would make a pilgrimage to her shrine at Loreto. Perhaps he was on his way there when he decided instead to join the Catholic forces marching to Prague for the battle against the Winter King and the Queen of Snow.

  The battle for the end of the world was brief. At dawn René and the Imperial forces sang the Salve Regina and the attack began. The word of the day was “Sancta Maria.” (For a long time—and the war beginning now would last thirty years—this would be a war between God and Mary.) And just as the mists lifted, revealing dimly each side to the other—heaving fields of creatures, like herds of haystacks or shaggy cattle on the move—a light wind sprang up.

  A light wind, able to stir the yellow fog but not at first to disperse it. A wind young and inexperienced, learning its uses and its work, but so far aimless; a wind that had been borne along with the world's great slow-marching airs and atmospheres from west to east, from Albion to the Middle Sea and over the Bavarian mountains, wondering, wandering. As it blew more steadily over the White Mountain, the day grew clearer. Not the light of day: what the day was grew clearer, though not at once to everyone, and to some not at all.

  A little wind. The first wind bears in the time, an angel said to John Dee, and the second bears it away again.

  The Protestant soldiers on the heights felt it first, lifted their heads and noses to it, to see from which quarter it blew. The various unearthly powers standing behind them felt it too, and turned from the battle to the rearguard, to see who or what was coming through from behind. No zephyr they knew. They were astonished then to be picked up and swept away by it, one by one, as by a broom, right out of the to-be and back into the once-was forever. All in a moment those powers were gone, were nothing—for they had all along really been nothing, less than nothing, mere signs, mere phantasmata, and no help now to the human soldiers, left with only their human commanders, standing on an insignificant little hill outside a contested city in the middle of Europe at the start of another battle in another war. Their warm mammalian breath condensed on the damp cold air. They thought how short life is, and of how little worth is the promise of Heaven. On the other side the same, as in a mirror. Then the first wave of Catholic pikemen, crying out as though for their mothers, advanced against the Protestant left.

  The Bohemians and their allies, though in the stronger position, broke quickly, evaporating, in effect, as though it had all been a show, and was now over. Anhalt, screaming hoarse with rage and panic, tried to hold the mob at sword's point, but couldn't. The soldiers and people inside the city locked the gates against them, left them to face the advancing enemy, and in the castle through that day and evening the king and his ministers disputed what to do next. There were reproaches; there were tears. The Bohemian leadership begged, demanded, shouted that the city had to be surrendered or it would be attacked and breached and put to the sword; the king berated them for cowardice—and was shocked to be berated in turn. He went on his knees to pray for guidance, but no one would kneel with him; he left the chamber, he fell into his wife's arms, she (terrified by how frightened he was, the deepest emotion she had ever seen pictured on his face, deeper than love, deeper than faith) could see that they had nothing left, nothing but flight. Anhalt in tears too said the same.

  With only what they could push into a couple of coaches—someone thought to gather up the crown jewels, which would support them in exile for years—the Winter King and his Queen left Hradcany palace, nearly forgetting their baby son and heir—a nursemaid ran up at the last moment and thrust the little bundle into the queen's arms. Their people, servants, and followers, who knew what fate now awaited them, ran after the departing coaches, trying to climb aboard or hang on to the running boards, dropping away as the cavalcade careened downhill.

  That little wind went away from the ghastly battlefield, growing just a little less little as it went, though few still could feel it. Nothing hindered it, perhaps because of its small size—it was no more than a breeze, really, a breath, the puff of air that comes in at the thick small windows of desert dwellings to touch a cheek and say that the simoom might be coming, or might not; hardly wind enough to cover with sands the tombs and temples that its mother had before uncovered. Yet it blew “far and wide"; there wouldn't be anywhere it didn't enter in, rattling the windows of the present and scattering the dealt cards of the past, pushing closed the doors of opened books and scrambling the sense of their indexes and prolegomena. Finally its baby breath, propelled by those fat cheeks, separated the a from the e in every word where they were joined, or suppressed one and left only the other, like conjoined twins that can't survive together, encyclopedias of aerial etheric demons in Egypt. Nobody noticed. And then with a little laugh it blew itself out, bowling up its own nonexistent fundament and drawing all of itself in after.

  * * * *

  The imperial army entered Prague the next day without opposition. The soldiers were released on the city, as the phrase is, with the common results. One of those who entered was René Descartes, who wandered in the old town and up to the Carolinum; he had the idea that he would like to view the famous collection of Tycho Brahe's astronomical instruments that Johannes Kepler had left behind when he too left Prague precipitously. The young man had—would always have—an uncanny ability to pass single-mindedly through scenes that did not pertain to his own business, seeing in effect nothing. The instruments, unfortunately, had already been removed and dispersed, and René walked back again through the town, where snow was now beginning to fall, snow stained red in the squares and alleys. He was thinking again—of a way to reduce all kinds of physical problems to mathematical equations of the third and fourth degree, perhaps—and in his notebook that night he wrote: On November 11, 1620, I began to conceive the foundation of an admirable discovery.

  In the coming weeks those of the Bohemian leadership who didn't escape abroad were methodically tried and executed by an imperial commission. One cheated them by committing suicide (another tower window, another leap) but his head and right hand were exhibited, nailed to the gallows. Eventually twenty-seven knights, counts, ministers and patriarchs, judges, scholars, and burghers were executed; lesser men were whipped, branded, or lost goods. That Hussite preacher who once led a parade of fellows dressed as sturdy Hussite peasants to welcome Elizabeth to Prague (what a noise they had made with their flails, those false harvestmen, flailing, flailing—what an ungodly noise!) and who had given tongue so long and loud to praise her—he had that tongue nailed to the gallows. Nothing was to be forgiven, or forgotten either.

  Through the deepening snows Frederick and Elizabeth struggled toward home. Everyone says they were remarkably brave, clear eyed but calm, all happiness gone, everything lost, spoiled, and themselves to blame: especially Elizabeth. Her mind, said the English ambassador, could not be brought under fortune.

  Home slipped out of reach. The Spanish general Spinola, the Spider, left Flanders with his army and moved toward the Rhine and the Palatinate. Soon Mainz had fallen to him (in stories of war, cities f
all at the advance of generals, but it's not so; metonymy and synecdoche don't do the fighting and dying, the soldiers and the townspeople do, one at a time, and not in a sentence but for hours and days). Celadon, now with the Protestant forces trying to regroup, wrote to Elizabeth: Voilà, my poor Heidelberg is taken. They have used all sorts of cruelties, pillaged the whole town, burnt all the suburbs, which were the chief beauty of the place. The invaders seized the vast Bibliotheca palatina, which was sent off to Rome; the great librarian Gruter saw all his own lifetime's collection of books and papers thrown into the street and yard where horses were stabled, to be irremediably fouled. It always happens, a calculated insult, endlessly repeated: Protestant soldiery stable their horses in the chapels of saints, Catholics in the courtyards of schools or libraries. What was in poor Gruter's papers? A whole world vanished here, says Dame Yates. What story was lost in that street? None? This one?

  There exist a number of broadsides mocking the runaway Winter King, political cartoons as dense with symbols as alchemical texts, let him who does not understand be silent, or learn. In many of them the king is shown with one stocking falling down—he has lost his garter, or Garter, which means his English father-in-law's support. And in one he stands uneasily, fearfully, upon a Y; the Y stands on a Z; the Z, on a wooden ball. Saturn with glass and wings and scythe looks on, old Kronos or Chronos, and he declares:

  The wooden ball's this world of mine

  Whereon the Bohemians wedded the Palatine.

  They thought they'd teach the states anew,

  Reform the schools, church, law courts too,

  Return us to that blessed state

  Before the apple Adam ate,

  Or even Saturn's days of old

  Which all men call my Age of Gold.

  For this, those Rosicrucians yearn

  The mountains into gold to turn.

  So Y leads nowhere but to Z, the last letter, the end, the fall.

  In Bohemia and Moravia the Czech Brethren were harshly suppressed; their chapels and houses despoiled, their ministers and bishops hunted down, driven away, hanged if they resisted. Their last bishop was Jan Andreas Comenius, who was driven from his home and his congregation with only what he could carry—papers, of course, mostly. He wrote then in despair or hope: When the wrath of the nations has passed, the rule of thy country will return to thee, O Czech people. It was not a time he himself would live to see; he would never see Moravia again. His wife and two of her children died of hardships on the way to shelter with a sympathetic lord in Brandeis; there he wrote The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart.

  In that story—it would become a classic of Czech literature, until it became unreadable again—a pilgrim wanders in the dark maze of a city, which is divided into many quarters and streets, a multiplex of arches squares palaces and churches whereon he sees all arts and sciences laid out as in a Memory City. His foolish or obtuse companions insist on the wonder and worth of all that they see, though the pilgrim can only question. And a trumpet on high gathers all the seekers together, to the central square, where a robed brother offers Rosicrucian secrets for sale, in boxes with names like Portae sapientae, Gymnasium universitatis, Bonum Micro-macro-cosmicon, Pyramis triumphalis. They mustn't be opened, the hawker says, they will work by auto-penetration of the box, but some buyers do open them, to see the wondrous thing inside, and of course the boxes are empty, all empty, every one. Finally, despairing, the pilgrim hears a voice call to him: Return whence you came, into the house of your heart, and close the doors.

  In Tübingen, Johann Valentin Andreae (Comenius's friend in a former age) opened his own old, old allegory, The Chemical Wedding: by Christian Rosencreutz, which he wanted no one any longer to read. But there was no way to call back every one of the little winged things and send them into the flames. Andreae (one of those authors who can't resist reading their own prose, their old prose, when they come upon it) read the title page and the last page and the scene he loved the best, the one where Christian is induced by the wicked or reckless page to waken Venus before her time. He read from there to the end, when the brothers board their ships, the sign of Cancer painted upon the crimson sails, to go out into the world and make it new.

  Did he think that his book had helped to bring about the ruin all around? Was he sorry? He was also one of those authors who believe their works do bring about things, and indeed he was sorry, he was. And yet surely, surely they should have known, he thought, those who had read it; they should have seen Andreae's smile, seen through him and his book. Look: just below the title and the false date he'd put on it (1459!) there was the motto Arcana publicata vilescunt, et gratiam prophanata amissunt. Ergo: ne Margaritas objice porcis, seu Asino substernere rosas. Secrets told to all are spoiled, things made common have no power; therefore do not throw pearls before swine, nor proffer roses to an ass.

  It's true: it said that, and it says that still.

  * * * *

  After his very interesting journeys René Descartes returned to Paris. Just at that time placards were appearing everywhere in the city to announce the appearance there of the Brothers of the Rose-Cross. We are making a visible and invisible stay in this city through the grace of the Most High. We show and teach, without books or marks, how to speak all languages and how to draw men away from error and death. Or perhaps there weren't any placards, maybe people only heard rumors that there were placards, or had been placards, and what they said or warned. From invisible we will become visible, and from visible, invisible. Were they witches, were they promising powers only granted to the Devil's followers—invisibility, flight, purses never emptied, eloquence to draw all men to them so that they would forsake the church and the prophets? René's friend Marin Mersenne was among those who denounced all such appeals, empty or wicked or both. But it was well known that Descartes had in Germany gone looking for the Rosicrucian brothers and returning as he did just now, when those brothers were said to be circulating invisibly among the people—Father Mersenne feared for him. So René, rather than hide or return to his solitude, went around town, showed himself, visited his friends, took their hands. In this way he demonstrated that he was visible, and therefore not a Rosicrucian. QED. In any case no Rosicrucians appeared to change the course of things or work wonders; the panic passed. Descartes resumed his meditations: a method for deciding what we can know with absolute certainty; how to strip thought of words entirely; how pure mind can know mindless matter.

  A long time afterward—Frederick was dead by then, of the plague, in some German town, following another army—René Descartes came to know Elizabeth of Bohemia (as she continued to be called) at her little court in exile in the Hague; he became attached to her daughter, yet another Elizabeth, and dedicated his Principles of Philosophy to her. When she went to take the waters at Spa, he wrote to her that to get any benefit from them she should free her mind from all sorts of sad thoughts and even from serious reflections because those who look long on the green of the forest, the colors of a flower, the flight of a bird, can beguile themselves into not thinking, or thinking of nothing. “Which is not wasting time but using it well."

  Once, Descartes met Comenius, still dragging over Europe his store of manuscripts and plans for a Polity of Universal Wisdom. The two thinkers had little to say to each other. For Comenius, Descartes was himself the laceratio scientiarum, the wound suffered by Knowledge. For Descartes, Comenius was the past. His Universal Language (Panglottia), Universal Dawning (Panaugia), Universal Education (Pampaedia), Universal Reform (Panorthosia) were actually no bigger than the paper they were written on. What he praised the older man for was the little primer he had written, the Orbis pictus sensualium or picture book of the physical world. But everyone loved the Orbis pictus; it really was universal; for a century and more boys and girls would learn language from it, in classrooms from Russia to the Massachusetts Bay, following along with the book's pupil and his Master (who's sometimes pictured in the Frontispiece as a Pilgrim
with hat and staff) as they went along the forking paths and climbed the mountains of the real world.

  Come, boy! Learn to be wise.

  What doth this mean, to be wise?

  To understand rightly, to do rightly, and to speak out rightly, all that is necessary.

  But before all things, thou oughtest to learn the plain sounds, of which man's speech consisteth;

  which living creatures know how to make, and thy tongue knoweth how to imitate, and thy hand can picture out.

  Afterward we will go into the world,

  and we will view all things.

  Come, let us learn the words. Afterward we will go into the world, and view all things. Pierce Moffett alone in Baroque Rome walked the maze of streets, and went in and out of buildings built in the centuries of its triumph. The Fountain of the Four Rivers represents the Ganges, the Danube, the Plata, and the Nile, who hides her eternally hidden head. The Obelisk is a later addition. The right foot of the statue of the Magdalene has been polished smooth by the kisses of the devout. Pushing aside the heavy leather curtain, we enter the Basilica. Scarcely distinguishable in the shadows is Giotto's mosaic of the Navicella, Peter's fishing boat. The Santa Scala is linked with the stairs to Pilate's palace that Jesus went up. The papal chapel at the top into which only the pope can enter. We can discern through the screen a (covered) painting of the Virgin made by no one, or by itself (archeipoieton). Non est in toto sanctior orbe locus, no more sacred spot in all the world. Pierce wrote in his red journal: