The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

  There was a glint in the darkness before Moira’s figure. A trumpet appeared in her hands; it materialized from the air, or someone handed it to her from behind the tapestry. It was a curious instrument, a long and straight trump of the kind angels play in old paintings, with shiny mother-of-pear keys in the center. In the hushed silence she raised it to her lips and a slow and haunting phrase of music filled the hall. Then, after a pause, another, then the first phrase again, and this time the final questioning note seemed to hint at some kind of an answer. It was hard to grasp what it was about the music that moved the emotions. The voice that spoke was not human; it had a soul of brass. The final phrase seemed to hang in the air unfinished, yet it suggested to the spirit that by questioning and seeking, by pursuing the trace of that enigmatic final note, one might in time follow in the graces of the music that came after, a music so far unsounded, that led to the final things, to absolute bliss.

  The lights came on and the burning green legend disappeared. The audience stirred with a rustle and began rising to its feet. The red-haired girl next to Romer had disappeared. In the suddenly banal light, which transformed everything from its dream-form back into reality, Moira was standing before the tapestry surrounded by a crowd of people. Over her head Romer saw a sterile metal frame of some kind in the shape of the five letters. Feeling dazed and physically numb, he got up and began working his way toward the front of the hall. In the crowd around Moira the young men in Greek tunics mingled with the maidens in classical garb and a dozen or so other people who had nothing much in common except a general look of eccentricity. They were of both sexes and all ages; some were dressed in somber clothes and some garishly. One woman wore a crest of peacock feathers and one man a Mexican sombrero. To his surprise he noticed among them the old lady in black he had crossed on the university campus; she was standing next to Moira and holding the shiny brass trump. He saw now that she had a deformity in her forehead, a protrusion like half an egg under the skin. Through his vision passed the pale girl with red hair and a light dusting of freckles who had sat next to him during the séance; in the mere fraction of an instant she stared at him skeptically but with interest.

  He was distracted from her by Moira, who had caught sight of him and was looking fixedly in his direction. The others turned as he approached. It was as though Moira awaited him there before the tapestry, and as though the others too knew that he would come and were anticipating his arrival. The crowd around her was no longer a tight knot as it had been only a few moments before. It had reassembled into a semicircle facing him as he approached, or so it seemed to him; there was an element of hallucination about everything that happened in the hall. He stopped a few feet from Moira. They all stood fixed, Romer, Moira, and the others, as though a photographer had asked them to remain motionless for a moment while he adjusted his apparatus.

  Behind Moira he made out the redheaded girl, who like the others was gazing at him solemnly and without expression. He knew that he must speak. He had a queer feeling of danger, of portent, of the tremendous privilege of the moment. All his arcane studies in universities came to a focus in this moment in which he was granted the gift of asking a single question, like a boy in an Arab tale. If he asked the right one, all the mysteries he had pursued for so many years might dissolve away in an instant. After all his years of education he still knew nothing, but now he knew which question to ask. Where does spirit meet flesh, how can thought move matter, where was the invisible link between the spiritual and the material world? There were a hundred ways of putting the question, but they all amounted to the same thing: the Noumenon and the Phenomenon, the body and the soul, the stone and the thought. He knew for a certainty that she possessed the sixth sense she spoke of in the séance which could see into the hearts of others, that through this she knew the question he was going to ask, and that through this power or some higher one, still unglimpsed, she possessed the answer. Abruptly, without any preliminary, as though under a spell or a charm, he articulated the colossal enigma.

  “What is the relation between mind and body?”

  She smiled faintly, almost imperceptibly. After a moment she said in a low voice, “The Silver Cord.”

  Nothing more. It was a phrase as round and perfect, as elusive, as a drop of mercury, that said nothing and only left a mystery in place of the question it proposed to answer. And yet Romer was stirred as though with an electric shock. Just as, an hour ago when Moira had told him there might be a hundred senses, he had caught a glimpse of what the first of these might be, as a blind man might imagine a speck of sunlight under the fold of his lid, so he had the intuition, not that he knew the answer to this Question of Questions, but that he stood on the doorstep of the answer and with only a step, if he found the trick, he could pass into the sanctum. There was a Silver Cord and Moira had seen and touched it. If it was not visible to him yet, why this was hardly to be expected, when only a few hours before he was sitting in the gloomy and varnished offices of a university, matching wits with a quartet of professors. The Silver Cord! Of course that was it! The Mind and the Body. On the one hand, in his vision, was a silvery mist that trembled in the air and emitted light, energy, and love, but was invisible so it could only be apprehended by the inner eye, and on the other hand a lump of brown squamous matter that exuded a putrid lymph and smelled of musk; and connecting them a brilliant sinew of light, like the perfect idea of electricity before electricity was invented, and infinitely stretchable, so that the soul and body could be united in the same space or the soul could leave the body behind in dream, in trance, and wander far away to the far corners of the earth, or to other planets and galaxies, while wisdom and love flew up and down the Cord as on a busy telegraph line. A warm wave of gratitude, a spasm of devotion, welled up in him for this priceless gift. With a small remaining scrap of his intellect he asked himself why he believed so thoroughly now that the Silver Cord existed. The answer he found almost immediately: because Moira had told him so. He was stunned to find the way belief had taken up residence in his soul, almost without his knowing it. Only a few hours ago he would have mocked at such a mental state, and would have been capable of bringing to bear a whole complicated apparatus of modern scholarship to demolish it, to reduce it to a few glittering and naive shards of debris. He found hanging in his forebrain a phrase from one of the medieval Fathers, Anselm of Canterbury: Credo ut intelligam, first I believe and then I know.

  The crowd around Moira was dispersing. He floated away from the plinth and moved aimlessly among the other silent figures in the hall, now his companions, his sisters, his fellow souls in the Guild of Love: the Frieze of handsome young men, the pale and ethereal Vestals in their robes, even the old lady in black with the bump in her forehead who, as he was to learn, was Aunt Madge Foxthorn, an inveterate disciple of Moira who had been with her as long as anybody knew. The others included Joan Esterel the would-be and unsuccessful lover of Moira; Joshua Main, a rubicund old Australian sailor with a sweet baritone voice and a fondness for the bottle (he was the one in the Mexican sombrero); Cereste Legrand the manager of the Guild; Bella and Benicia Lake, the two sisters from Oakland; and Eliza Burney, the young Englishwoman with red hair and pale skin whose image had struck him powerfully, if only for an instant, as the séance ended, and who served, it seemed, as Moira’s medical attaché, a kind of nurse who wrapped up sprains and stopped nosebleeds for the others. Many other people might belong to the Guild, all those who pressed up to Moira after a séance and offered a contribution, but they were not included in the elect of the inner circle, those who traveled about the world with Moira. There were about a score of these, as far as Romer could tell, although they floated around in an ethereal way that made them hard to count. All these people, Frieze, Vestals, and the others, accepted him from that first evening as one of their own without any sort of initiation. This seemed to him perfectly natural, from the moment when Moira had caught his eye in the séance and the green fire had passed into his soul.
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br />   When he left the hall with the others that evening he forgot to take the dissertation and the suitcase with him and he never felt the need to go back for them. He would never need the dissertation now to become an instructor in a university. As for the suitcase, in subsequent months he sometimes had a vision of this pitiful collection of objects trying to go on and continue its existence without him: black socks rolled into balls, old-fashioned underwear, a Gillette safety razor, a packet of prophylactics with ticklers, a battered tea-egg, and a device for boiling water in rooming houses; all things which, united by his ownership, had a certain logic to them and filled a place in the world of particulars, but abandoned by him could only degenerate into the most abject kind of non-existence, forgotten in a dusty broom-closet or fingered over in secret by some lascivious old woman. Now he had no baggage or possessions and needed none. As a member of the Guild of Love, traveling around the world while Moira gave her séances, Romer was happy and wise, in a state of permanent enlightenment, as though a small electric bulb was glowing constantly inside him.

  It seemed to him that women and his own amorous yearnings had never played so large a part in his life, even though before he had been far from a neophyte on the subject. On the one hand the spiritual or divine part of him was filled with the vast presence of Moira, who performed in his soul the mysterious function of the Eternal Feminine as described by Goethe. His devotion to her was erotic, chaste, and visionary all at the same time. He sometimes felt a fleeting regret for the philosophy he had left behind, but Moira had completely transformed metaphysics by introducing a powerful new force into it, one previously unknown, or known only imperfectly by sages, mystics, and mediums. She had transcended all previous metaphysics in the way that Einsteinian physics had transcended Newtonian physics. That vision of bliss that the Christians called Salvation, that the East called Nirvana, and that she called Gioconda coruscated constantly in his consciousness like something that at any moment he might reach out and touch.

  On the other hand—in the university he had only studied about dualisms on the theoretical level, and now he found himself caught in the grip of one—on the other hand he had fallen deeply in love with Eliza Burney from the moment he had caught sight of her papery face with its beige spangles and its quiet ironic eyes in the darkened hall. In the months that followed he carried on with her an elaborate ballet of pursuit and withdrawal, flight and provocation, which would have exhausted the both of them if they had not been sustained by Moira’s enigmatic and smiling approval, which Romer never did succeed in understanding completely.

  The Guild of Love moved on from Ann Arbor to Wichita, from Wichita to Boulder, from Boulder to Ogden, from Ogden to Riverside, where Moira gave her séance in the vast hangar erected for the annual Orange Show. Moira did not take up a collection in the séances, but she invited those who were so moved to offer a small part of their material wealth to purchase shares in Gioconda, so that they might partake in a vicarious sense of its benefits, its joys, its nourishing fruits, even if they stayed behind for the moment in their accustomed lives, for pure spirit knows no space or time; and they might even, if destiny so approved, move on in physical dimension to join the spiritual pioneers at some later time, when their labors in the earthly sphere were finished and they could gather together and bring with them the small treasure they had set aside for the comfort of their twilight years.

  Romer attended every one of these séances (here he is in Tucson, in San Antonio, in Lafayette, in Tallahassee, in Augusta, in Charlotte, in Roanoke), even though what took place in the lecture hall, the borrowed church, or the Masonic Temple was always exactly the same, just as the sun sets and rises the same, the planets revolve, the moon eclipses the stars, in no matter what remote spot of the world. It might be imagined that Romer, who had a lively and vigorous mind and a pervasive curiosity about new things, would grow weary of these identical meetings in time, but he sat with the same rapt attention in each. When, in the turquoise gloom, Moira came to the part in which she addressed each listener as though he were the soul person in the hall, the sole other person in the universe (“Moira is the other you, the shadow who goes always with you, the voice that speaks when you question in the night”), he felt always the same prickle of the uncanny, the same spasm of pity for himself and for all mankind that he had felt the first time he heard her speak these words; when she told him there might be a hundred senses when he was only aware of five, he glimpsed at the edge of his vision the barely opened door through which he could see the first of those shining connected gardens where he might enter some day, the doorway into which each time he seemed to set his foot—a little farther. And each time, as she described the twinned souls that were cloven and wandered over the earth looking for their missing halves, a premonition of desire and bliss crept into him and he seemed to see, superimposed on the screen of his inner vision, the green glow of Moira’s visage and, locked over it and trembling as the two edges met, the pale and papery, solemn, enticing, and petulant image of Eliza Burney.

  In the mornings, when they were in a new town, the Woman of Body solaced the bodies of the others in the Guild, dispensing laxatives and squeezing pimples where people couldn’t reach them, and in her free time she played with the courtship of Romer, accepting it and then rejecting it in a whimsical and desperate way, so that he never knew who was the pursuer and who was pursued, who was the victim and who the tormentor. Since Moira seemed to smile, out of the corner of her eye, on these amorous yearnings of Romer (all unrequited so far, triple damn), this could only mean that the permission of the soul was given to pursue the body in its most sensual and intemperate forms. Or so it seemed to Romer. Eliza seemed more coy, or less interested in carnal union than in the claims of sentiment. In this they played out the archetypal roles of their two sexes. For Romer it was lust that drove him on, and it was fear of love (tenderness, emotional attachment, cloying verbal formulas) that held him back; for Eliza it was love that drew her on, and it was the fear of lust (male power, pain, penetration) that made her flee.

  In Harrisburg, they actually came to the point of renting a hotel room, a perilous enterprise in itself in those days of house detectives and crusading puritans, then ended in a pitched battle over the details of the arrangements, Eliza insisting on turning the lights out and Romer insisting on leaving them on, and Romer proposing that the ceremony be dispensed with in short order so they would have time to attend Moira’s séance in the Odd Fellows Hall at eight o’clock, while Eliza waxed indignant at this hasty dash into what she maintained (he had no idea whether to believe her or not) was her first solemn introduction into the Rites of Hymen. It might be imagined that the two of them could contain their lust and their indignation, sit quietly in the hall while Moira suffused their souls with their daily ration of the Divine, and then return to the hotel room; but the train left at ten for Scranton. This was not the night it was destined to be. In Bangor they rolled in a birch-copse in the public park until they were routed out of it by a cheerful policeman; in Fall River they found an abandoned boathouse whose shadows, damp-wood smell, and slivers of sunlight enticed them until they found it was inhabited by a family of raccoons who nuzzled them inquisitively and ran over them in the dark with their tiny human-like paws.

  It was fall now, six months after Romer had joined the Guild, and Eliza was still technically chaste. Moira now spoke of the vision of the voyage to Gioconda as something that might happen in the spring, or early summer. (She was not a devotee of calendars and preferred to take things as they came, one dawn after another, and it was Cereste Legrand the manager, formerly the proprietor of a traveling circus in Europe, who planned the schedule and wired ahead to meeting-hall managers in new cities, negotiating the small fees appropriate, as he explained, for an organization engaged in spiritual work and not seeking a profit). Moira, accompanied by Aunt Madge Foxthorn, went into seclusion, to meditate and consult her Visions. Before she withdrew she sent several of the Illuminati to various
parts of the world to carry out preparations for Gioconda, even though no one had a very precise idea what this term meant and it remained only a beautiful and enticing metaphor, except perhaps for Moira herself and Aunt Madge Foxthorn. Joshua Main was set to collecting antique maps from museums in Europe and America, and two members of the Frieze, Sebastian Knelp and John Basil Prell (who emerged from anonymity and acquired names under the charge of this responsibility) went to Fontainebleau for training in the Gurdjieff Institute. Eliza Burney was sent to study in a College of Spiritual Hygiene and Holistic Medicine in Geneva, and Joan Esterel, the lean and burning devotee from New Mexico whose erotic devotion to Moira was well known, (as was the fact that it was totally unrequited), was to take up residence in Cambridge and study international law, with particular attention to the principles of territoriality and national boundaries. Meanwhile Romer was ordered to prepare himself by further studies at Heidelberg. Studies in what?

  “The mysteries of the invisible. The world of the spirit. Metaphysics, as you would call it.”