Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  Down in the basement archives of the library are other documents, which you can consult if you can convince the librarian you have good reason to look at them, though no one has asked lately. Here are the pamphlets Welkin wrote in support of many causes, and letters to and from him over many decades, and copies of his journal The Hylozoist, all filed in red cases. And here too is the remarkable manuscript account of his combat over many years with a number of demons or devils who pestered him and pursued him in youth: how he suffered, and struggled; how he freed himself at last from their dominion.

  There was talk after his death that his papers should go to some more august repository than the local library, which pleasant and spacious as it was for a town such as it served tended to be damp, being right next to the river; many of its older books smelled of it, faintly, shamefully. Welkin himself had made no arrangement for the disposition of his stuff. In the end it went to the library by default, no one caring to make an appeal for it to any other body or institution, maybe because it would have meant accounting for or explaining that manuscript book.

  Rosie Rasmussen had read it, or read some of it, in revulsion and pity, the day she was given a complete tour of the library, from basement to dome, and a survey of its holdings. It was one of those times when Rosie went out (she felt) in disguise among her neighbors, to listen to their needs and hopes, and ask questions (when she could think of questions), and try to think of ways to help. During the time that she'd been doing this—she'd been director of the Rasmussen Foundation then for a dozen years—she had got better at it, the Zorro disguise became familiar to her and the phrases that promised to advance causes without exactly promising to pay last month's bills came more readily and with less shame. And yet now and then she would be told some extraordinary story, or have an age-old seam of need or hurt opened to her that she'd never known about, or had known about for years but had never understood or put together—and she would think how big the world is, all folded up though it is and so secret.

  That was how she felt before Welkin's book, which the librarian lifted out of its archive box and put on the table before her. It was all handwritten, in a tiny perfectly legible hand, legible except for the paragraphs and pages of symbols meaningless to her. There were many illustrations done in what seemed to be colored pencils. The pages were sewn together with strong red thread, shoemaker's thread maybe, and there was a leather wrapper on which his name had been burned with a tool of some kind, and more symbols. No one, the librarian said, had ever recognized any of the symbols; they were his alone. Rosie turned the pages, awed by the care and thought the young man—only twenty-four—had lavished on the thing, thinking of him laboring over it, choosing among his tools, coloring carefully these demon faces, thinking. Every page had faint guidelines laid down in red ink to keep the pictures and the text squared up.

  The saddest and most fearful thing in it, Rosie thought, though she'd read only a few pages, was how proud he seemed to be of what he'd done: how strong a demon battler he'd been, how he kept them at bay and hurt and harried them. How, in the end, he won, or said he had. It was almost hard to think about.

  But it was time then for her to go meet the artist who claimed to be able to restore the long boarded-up pictures (of Dante, Shakespeare, Homer, and Longfellow) that filled the dome above. So Rosie closed the book, and the librarian replaced it in its box; Rosie would never look into it again.

  * * * *

  Pins, common steel ones with colored glass heads; the smoke of burned bay leaves and certain other fumigations; abjurings and yells spoken at varying speeds; and the written signaculae. These, though, could very quickly be emptied of their power, thus forcing him to discover others all in a moment, which fortunately he could usually do. They knew this, in Hell, as they knew and feared his other weapons; in their great conclaves they complained to their chiefs of his depredations and the harms they had all suffered at his hands. (He made a picture of them all gathered there in Hell, just as he had witnessed it, and surrounded the picture with images of the pins, the leaves, the words, the marks, to make them suffer the more.)

  They disguised themselves in ingenious ways, as animals and objects (he knew that one of the lamp mantels in the drawing room, which when lit glowed and sizzled just like all the others, was in fact a devil named Flot, but for a long time he pretended not to know). Not all of them intended him harm, not all seemed to concern themselves with him, but he felt always that he was at threat, in a way that none of the folk around him seemed to him to be: as though they all lived out of harm's way in Faraway County and he alone lived in some dangerous city neighborhood, Five Points, Robber's Roost, the loiterers and evildoers and unregenerates eyeing him and grinning.

  Sometimes they caused him harm. Sometimes they were able to kill his birds and chase away his helpers. In the greatest and most sorrowful defeat he suffered, they killed his parents. But they could not touch him, not deeply, not mortally.

  Nor did they know that he had learned how to reach the lands beyond death without himself having to die. He traversed the hilly uplands that were Heaven, and found his parents there, weak and vanishing sometimes, distracted, unintelligible, like the gibbering ghosts of Homer's underworld, but sometimes in good fettle and able to return his embraces and answer his questions. Why, if there are so many dead, did he see only the two of them here, and mere glimpses of others? They answered softly, maybe even without speaking, but he thought he heard them say that the land is vast, actually endless, room enough for multitudes. And why when he came here did he feel so oppressed and watchful, and when he was in the underworld feel so alert, so powerful, so delighted even? They didn't know, they were only sure that they would not.

  Yes, when he was in Hell, invisible to his enemies, he seemed to himself to be huge and ruthless. He overheard there the devils plan how they would invite him to join their fellowship, because he was so strong an opponent they could not defeat him; then when certain ambassadors came to him in his house, he, knowing their mission, was able to imprison them in a number of bottles specially prepared, and there they stayed, unable to get out. All the while they inveigled him he had kept his eyes fixed on his mother's picture of a holy angel, star on her forehead, who guides a little child across a rickety bridge over a chasm. In such ways he imprisoned some thousands of devils in his green and brown bottles when he was at his busiest. For the frontispiece of his book, he drew a portrait of himself, showing his weapons, his beloved starling, the Cross, his bottles, and a legend: Scourge of the Devils.

  When later on he read Swedenborg, he understood in what place he had wandered so long as a youth, for Swedenborg taught that the world beyond death has the shape of the human body: head and heart and limbs and all other members. That, then, is where he had been journeying all along, right here where he now was—inside his skin and flesh. He could laugh by then, and he laughed aloud in pity and wonder for all that he had suffered in here, in the body-shaped world, which is at once in the midmost of everything and is its outermost as well.

  * * * *

  The later, unbound pages that are now included with the Welkin manuscript were apparently written when Welkin in later life rediscovered what he called the “Battle Book.” The handwriting of these later pages is that of a different man entirely: a swift, fair-sized script, careless of margins and written on sheets of varying sizes.

  In the “Battle Book” itself, there is a Welkin drawing of Horace Osterwald, in which he appears as an opponent, murderer, and front for demons; the portrait is carefully enmeshed in powerful signs, including a drawing of a beef heart pierced with tatting needles. But there is also, among the unbound pages, a photograph of him, dating from the 1870s perhaps: a lean man with a wide white moustache, a gaze of compassionate, calm inquiry (or is that simply the nineteenth-century photography face, the features composed for a long exposure?). He sits in a wicker peacock chair and holds in his lap a great curled labial shell.

  Hurd Hope Welkin's parents p
rovided in their will for a guardian for their son for life. Horace Osterwald was a church deacon and former schoolmaster, and it was he who first interested Welkin in the wonders of the created world: animals and insects, rocks and flowers. He set him to collecting and classifying, naming and sorting—perhaps to calm his spirits with work that was exacting, time-consuming, and boring, or to reveal to him that these were creatures with their own insides and not the hiding places of demon enemies or both.

  Actually the demons were—Welkin knew—still there, but they had become less compelling, or attractive; he began to feel their attention slip away from him, and it seemed to him that they turned instead toward the things he studied, the things that he placed beneath his lenses, copied in colored inks: as though they hungered painfully for what they couldn't have, the sealed and well-made solidity that any leaf, any quartz crystal or hair root possesses. So he ceased to fear them, or hate them, and when we cease to fear them, or to love or hate them in fear, they lose their interest in us, and go away.

  "Whether it were the attentions of that good man,” he wrote of Osterwald, “who was for so long my only friend, that effected my release from the self-cast spells I labored under, or merely that (as has been often noted in cases of dementia praecox) the mania passed away by a natural physiological reduction, I do not know. But even now, in my old age, when I take up our albums of pressed specimens or the curious stones he liked to bring me, I can feel a sort of thrill through me that is the old madness, still lying like a long-healed lesion in my being. One of those stones was taken from the stomach of a deer, and Horace Osterwald called it a mad-stone, and said that it had the natural power to keep melancholy at bay. I no longer believe, if I was ever tempted to do, that it keeps me safe, but I still have it, in my pocket, for Horace was very clear that it would help me whether I believed in it or not."

  From stones and plants Welkin at Horace's urgings moved on to more fearsome things, to the weather and the animal world, with their apparent free will and their malevolence or benevolence. With them it wasn't enough merely to classify and sort, because thunder clearly spoke in words to him and foxes really looked out from their eyes into his, and this conviction took time and care to overcome: not to you, son, Horace would say to him, taking his hand; not at you. Last of all he faced those wise apes or primates his fellow townspeople, whose hostile or needful souls, clothed in the figments of their flesh and their dress, he had always shrunk from.

  Then when he could do that he was empty, or the world was: still, and possessed only by itself. He could ever after name the summer day on which, at dinner, he had looked up from his soup and realized that not for one moment in this day, from dawn to blue-green evening, had he feared, or sought to see, or growled at, a demon in hiding, and what was more wonderful, hadn't even noticed he had not. He put down his spoon, and with Horace he knelt on the floor and prayed. The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of Hell gat hold upon me, he said. Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee. For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling; I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.

  He was asked later by one who knew of his experiences if he didn't regret so much of his youth spent in unrealities, and he said he felt no regret, only gratitude that he had left them behind. Maybe there's always a regret, though, that the once-possessed know, along with their thanksgiving: to feel the wild beings they have shared themselves with, the vivid powers making free within them, depart, and leave them nothing but themselves.

  And his poor parents: whom no one could reassure him had not died from fear of his ungodly intractability, and grief at their own impotence to help him. He never altered the bedroom they had shared on the second floor of the West Plain Road house, and he never after entered it either.

  When he was thirty years old he read Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which Horace Osterwald had long steered him away from, fearing it would threaten his religious certainties, and thus his mental health: the terror of blind, meaningless, mechanical evolution. And for a long time after he read it, Welkin watched and waited, like a man who has taken something he thinks might be poison, for the dire effects to appear. There were effects, but he couldn't at first determine what precisely they were; anyway they weren't fearful. Darwin's arguments themselves were to his mind entirely and utterly convincing; it was as though he'd known them all along, as though so far from exciting his madness they described with great beauty and hopeful clarity the world he had recently awakened into.

  On a certain spring day he was botanizing on Mount Randa, the very day he discovered a theretofore unknown subspecies of Silene virginica, and—though he had not been pondering Darwin or his scheme for days—he understood, suddenly and yet without surprise, that what Darwin had done was to relieve God of the awful burden of making the world: of shaping every leaf and snail shell, squeezing out every litter of kittens and every pupating butterfly, building every snowstorm; relieved him both of the labor and the guilt. He had chosen an assistant to do that work, and the assistant was Chance. Indeed he probably had no choice; nothing else would do.

  Chance.

  Welkin wrote that at that moment there came over the world around him—he could see all the Faraways from where he stood—"a loud yet still gentle noise,” and a darkening, then a brightening, as comes when we stand up too fast. But light and sound were not what they were; he could not say after what they were, except to call them, together, Love, though he said he knew that made no sense, and his soul entered a new land. He saw that he had formerly, and without knowing it, thought of God as simply the greatest of the demons: a powerful perhaps good being, but working just as demons did, working in the world, working working his designs upon us, which it was our duty to discover, if only we could; his meanings, laid deep with every fashioned thing.

  But it wasn't so. There were no meanings, no workman, no designs. The world had no designs upon us. God's Love walked in Eden in the cool of the evening, our Friend, his infinite heart empty and cool, even as Hurd Hope Welkin's was just then. Together they walked down the mountain.

  It was after that that Welkin began talking and writing to others; he taught natural history in his books, and God's love in Sunday school, which he was allowed to do after years had passed and he had done no one harm and seemed as sane as the next man. Hurd Hope Welkin had climbed out of the demon world and into uncreated creation, a world whose only reason for being was being—that is, no reason, no blessed reason—and found, at the end of his journey, that he was returned into the human community. For him there had been no other way but this long way around to reach it, just as Dante could not climb the holy mountain he at first set out upon without going the long way around, right through the universe. “I saw my fellows in the town hall and in the markets and I saw them in the Church at Divine Service,” Welkin wrote. “They said to me, Come sit, and I did sit. I joined with them in praise and thanksgiving, not soul to soul, but now only face to face: which was to me, after all my wanderings, a great Relief."

  12

  And that's the last chapter of the history of the world: in which we create, through the workings of the imagination, a world that is uncreated: that is the work of no author. A world that imagination cannot thereafter alter, not in its deepest workings and its laws, but only envision in new ways; where our elder brothers and sisters, the things, suffer our childish logomantic games with them and wait for us to grow up, and know better; where we do grow up, and do know better.

  I know, Hurd Hope Welkin wrote in his “Little Sermons on Several Subjects,” I know now there is truly no Up, no Down; there is no Right, no Wrong, no Male, no Female, no Jew, no Gentile; there is not Light, nor Darkness, not Higher, nor Lower; there is not is, there is not is not; there is not Life, not Death. But there surely is suffering, and joy; pain, and surcease of pain. And from these come again all the others: for men must work and women
must weep, and if we are to relieve the one and console the other we must have cunning and wisdom. For this the Serpent gives us to eat of the tree of Knowledge, and we do eat, and then we turn to our labors.

  Pierce and Roo, Mary and Vita, Sam and Rosie Rasmussen, Brent Spofford, Val, Axel Moffett, all awoke within minutes of one another to find that the morning was not sunny as it had been the day before but that April silver-gray that pales and lightens the saturated greens and the violets and casts an unplaceable shine or glitter over what's looked at, or just away from what's looked at, like a secret smile.

  While Roo fed the girls Pierce carried a mug of coffee up to his father's room on the third floor; if he was left to himself he might putter and daydream for a long while, and today was a day to get going.

  "Axel?"

  "Come in, come in. Entrez."

  When the door opened, though, he seemed startled to see his son. Pierce wondered whom he expected: it could be one of a number of people lately; people only Axel could see had been visiting. Axel was still in his ancient gray pajamas, which gave Roo the creeps, like cerements: as though one of her patients had moved into her own house, in an upstairs room, and taken to walking around. Sometimes through the house; sometimes in the middle of the night. Just what I need to come home to, she'd said or shouted at Pierce one bad night. Another sick old man.

  And yet it was also Roo who, when Axel had called in despair a year before, had said or shouted in fury that of course Pierce had to take him in, of course there wasn't any damn thing he could do otherwise, didn't he see that, what was he going to do, tell him no? Pierce with his hand over the phone, caught between her rageful certainty and Axel's faraway tears. The building in Brooklyn was gone, taken by the bank. The Chief dead, the Renovators dispersed, bills Axel had no idea were accumulating falling suddenly due; judgments, liens, seizures. When? Almost a year had passed since then, Axel said. Axel had been on the street. Nothing, he kept saying. Nothing. Nothing.