by John Crowley
I’m a long time trav’ling here below
I’m a long time trav’ling from my home
I’m a long time trav’ling here below
To lay this body down.
Coming up or down out of the Appalachians in the 88 after a year spent there, out into the grid again: into a Movement running through sudden vast congregations of people like wind through standing grain, where lights and shadows came and went. Beau kept on westward through those days as though beating against the current, for the current was hopeful and eager and hungry and happy and Beau was queasy and doubtful and afraid. They believed that the System was coming to an end, that Power could be tamed or expunged, first from their own hearts and then from the world, replaced by Love; that Evolution would bring this about even if it was resisted worldwide at first, or even for a long time. Beau came to know the cosmo-Marxists who remembered what Karl said, that all philosophers heretofore had tried to describe the world, when the point was to change it; but who also knew that these things were the same. That was the Revolution. And it looked easy right then, unless you saw that above the teem of people in motion, which seemed so great from within, were only further levels of the System, the Domination System, like rising levels of cumulus in a squally sky, passing right from the top levels of human power to the lowest levels of other powers.
He wanted to defy them, as Plato Goodenough had done. Over the years between that time and now he had often wanted to, had felt a limitless desire for an end to desire. But the way out in that direction was as closed to him as the way downward that led through MM and Mal Cichy’s temptations. It was escape; and escape was what was forbidden to him. He thought of the animals he had seen around the world who, hitched to a stone or a wheel, walked in circles, treading in their own dusty or muddy footprints till they died: beasts without whom the villagers would not survive.
The beautiful young foolish Wisdoma God! She had a partner now, and the partner was her own Anguish. And with that partner she brought forth a son! The lion-shaped lion-headed one, Jove Jehovah Jaldaboth, the maker and ruler of the heavens that we see and that we labor under.
There it was again, Radio WIAO, still emitting its rays, the stronger the farther west, the same ceaseless unwearied hectoring as he had heard in that past time, when he had wept to pass on, and known that he could not.
Oh brothers and sisters! The holy suffering Wisdoma God caught in the pitchy dark of the World Underneath! Waiting in the prison of the Lion-headed One for Jesus to come and strike off her shackles! Oh how many times has it happened, in how many ages of ages! In our hearts too, brothers and sisters, in our own hearts, in the secret prisons made there and maintained there by the black heavenly Powers within us!
They are all Her children, all the Powers are: for she’s Mother as well as lost child, and her restlessness and her smart mouth are the source of our miseries, but also the source of our saving consciousness of them; Mother yes of the ones who oppress us, but always our help against them too, teaching us how to evade or defeat them, like the giant’s wife helping Jack. Her tricks and techniques being what we call Human Life on Earth. She herself is the source of our knowledge that she must be rescued, source too of our knowledge that we can do that: rescue her.
We can do that: he, Beau himself, any of us.
Apostle Peter! He spoke to Simon the Magus and he said to him: How can you say what Jesus never said, that you are the embodiment of the Entire Holy Power and Lighta God? And Simon answered him saying: Because every soul on earth is. And Peter asked him again: How can you say that this woman Helen, this this this woman of ill repute, is the present incarnation of the holy beautiful suffering Wisdoma God? And Simon answered: Because there is no woman that is not.
Beau lifted his eyes to the green signs and the stern choices they offered in stark white letters, on front or back, upward or down, and he slowed, and exited. He was between East and West. Rain was falling, and up ahead, illuminated in their separate small booths, were the two people, a man on one side and a woman on the other, who admit those who go travelling and take the fare from those who have travelled.
Beau stopped his car there where you were not permitted to stop unless you were overtaken by some emergency, or were yourself a servant of the highway.
He thought: the thing to be found and fought for has come into being. The thing without which the new age could not be made different from the old, the thing that is also nothing but a kitten saved from drowning maybe, or a cocoon on a milkweed pod taken indoors to open in the warmth. Not an age or even a year from now but now.
Right in his own backyard too, waiting for his return. How could he not have known? Every image, every moment in which it could have come clear to him now returned, one after another, linked in a memory chain so clear and incontrovertible it made him want to laugh, or to weep. Yet he didn’t blame himself for not knowing sooner; it was likely he could not have known until this moment was born, grew up, and reached him to whisper or cry into his ear. He only hoped he hadn’t gone too far, taken too long in coming to this certainty, that he would not be too late getting back. For even if he had allies, and his allies had allies that he knew nothing of, and so on out to spheres he had never travelled to, he knew that at the same time this was his alone to do, just as it was each of theirs. It always is.
Beau made a U-turn.
9
Rosie Rasmussen drove Pierce home in the morning, and though Pierce almost wanted to slip away from her into his unwelcoming little house, she made him stop and give her a hug, rough skin of his cheek against her smooth one. They had already said to each other that the night before hadn’t of course actually meant anything, and that that was the sad part actually, that it didn’t and couldn’t; anyway she said that, and Pierce assented.
But that night she called him anyway.
“I talked to Mike finally,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Just on the phone.”
“Oh.”
“I told him I thought what he had done was so unjust. I told him that if he had done that because his religion said it was the right thing then his religion was fake and so was he. I said that if he or any of those people put her in danger, I’d.”
Pierce gripping his phone listened to smoldering silence. It lasted for a time, and then she said:
“I didn’t really say any of that stuff.”
“No?”
“No. Just, like, when could I see her again. How to get some things to her. How to get her prescription refilled. Stuff like that. That I was asking for a new hearing.”
“Yes.”
“You know what he said? He said that unless the rules are changed he doesn’t have to let me see her at all. He said that. He said he would though.”
“Oh boy. Oh, Rosie.”
“I talked to her. For a minute.”
“Yes?”
“A minute. That’s all.”
Silence again, long and bleak.
“So whatcha doing?” she asked him.
“Making my costume. For the Ball.”
“Oh yeah? What is it?”
“Can’t tell you.”
“Aw come on.”
“I’ll tell you this,” he said. “It’s what I’m not.”
His conception had been a chess knight’s horse head, like the helmet of the good White Knight who guides Alice through the wood of no names. But he was unskilled in mask-making; having no idea how to begin, he had first built an armature of cardboard and tape, referring to an encyclopedia volume still open there on the table, to an article on sculpture, where Cellini’s huge equestrian statue of Montefeltro was analyzed. He had got the great arch of the neck pretty well, but the delicate length of temple and nose had come out blunt and ignoble; probably the old mouton cap he had found in The Persistence of Memory Shoppe and cut up for hair and mane had been a bad idea, too woolly and thick; and the ears, lovingly crafted and successful in themselves, were just too big, grossly big, no time
to change them or make new ones, and a sense grew within Pierce as he contemplated them that none of it was his choice anyway: or all of it was, and this was it.
ASS. The most famous Ass in literature is the “Golden Ass” of Lucius Apuleius. While visiting a far country, Apuleius becomes infatuated with Fotis, a slave girl, servant of an enchantress. Fotis procures from the witch a potion to increase her lover’s manly powers, but by her error the potion transforms him instead into an Ass. In this condition he suffers and labors long, is beaten and abused, and is returned to his human state only after he has a vision of the Goddess ISIS (q.v.) Isis rises from the sea dressed in the night sky and the stars, and tells him she is all goddesses, all gods too. He becomes her devotée, and is cured at last by feeding, at her behest, upon a rose. See ALLEGORY.
Gross buckteeth of wadded papier-mâché that (surrendering to the obvious) he painted yellow. In the Hieroglyphica of Valerian, the Ass is the symbol of the Scholar, humbly chewing his dry diet of texts, laboring mightily for Learning. The lacquered eyeballs moist, intelligent maybe, but a little cocked, not easy to make them both look in the same direction. Left side the wackier one, mad and errant; right side patient and mild.
An Ass bore Jesus to Jerusalem, and peasants still see a Cross in the markings of the Ass’s back; in the Golden Legend it is said that the Ass who bore the Savior was the same one that stood by His manger at Christmas. Because of this, the Pyx bearing the consecrated Host was often carried in procession on the back of an Ass: asinus portans mysterium, they said, the lowly servant unable to understand higher things.
Time to try it out. Despite what he had said to her, he feared that he had actually violated the rule that Rosie had laid down, that what he would become inside this head smelling of papier-mâché and his own hot breath—he hoped it was what he was not, but felt pretty sure that this hope was vain.
Bruno is pleased to mock the pedants by naming the Ass as the steed of MERCURY (q.v.), but classically he is Priapus’s beast; indeed PRIAPUS (q.v.) was at first an Ass, and asses were sacrificed to him; but he belongs to SATURN (q.v.) also; and in ancient Europe at the Saturnalia, the Ass was slain by the New Year. He still appears at Christmas in French mumming, his ears transformed to a long-eared cap: a Fool, slain only to be reborn.
When it was given its last touches, feathery lashes of curled paper and a last painting, he placed it to dry and cure there on the kitchen table, ogling the wall with its cockeyes; he had another drink, and went to sleep or at least to recline upon the daybed in the office; from there though he could still see the creature’s snout, and the teeth.
After a time he could hear its voice too, quite clearly, telling its life story.
Once, it began, I was a real Ass.
Pierce was actually asleep then, of course. Or maybe this conceit is from a later time: a “false memory” of himself on that daybed, plaid blanket pulled up to his nose and his own eyes wide in horror hearing the empty paste-and-paper thing discourse. Or it’s neither of those things, it’s a ludibrium, the one about the ass that saves the world, whose name is or was Onorio.
I grew to maturity in the neighborhood of Thebes, where on a certain day, as I was grazing at the edge of a steep ravine, I saw a nice thistle I longed to get my teeth into. I was sure I could stretch my long neck far enough, and, ignoring both my Wit and my natural Reason (for I was after all an Ass), I leaned farther, and farther, till I couldn’t lean anymore; and I fell. And my master looking down saw he had bought me just to feed the crows.
I myself meanwhile, freed from the prison of the body, became a wandering spirit without corporeal parts; and I saw right away that I was no different from all other spirits, who upon the dissolution of their animal or compound bodies immediately set out to Transmigrate. For Fate erases the differences not only between the body of a dead Ass and a dead Human, but between their bodies and the bodies of things thought to be inanimate. Not only that: also erased is the difference between the Asinine and the Human soul, and indeed the soul of all things. All spirits return into Amphitrite, who is all spirits; thence they come back again.
I did so; I skipped over the Elysian Fields amid the multitudes guided there by Mercury. And I drank—no rather I pretended to drink from swift-flowing Lethe, just dipping my chinny-chin-chin so that the Watchers would be deceived. Back down then through the Gate of Horn I came, but—choosing my own destination this time—I headed for the purest air and not the lower depths, and alighted at that famous Hippocrene spring on that famous Mount Parnassus; and there, though Fate ordained I must still be an Ass, yet by my great strength I grew from my flanks two wings more than strong enough to bear me. I was the Flying Ass, or Pegasean Steed!
Yes it’s the Cabala del Caballo Pegaseo, Bruno’s story or kabal of the Universal Ass, patient/mocking, shiftless/hardworking, wise/stupid, stubborn/willing little gray Onorio, the Pegasean Steed of every age; returning again and again after his life on earth to be swallowed up in Amphitrite or Fullness, and spat out again.
It was I who carried out old Jove’s orders, served Bellerophon when he saved the maid Andromeda from her bondage on the Rock, which without my help he could not have done; I had a hundred other adventures, died and was reborn as a hundred heroes and pedants, Aristotle not the least famous. Unlike my brother written of by Apuleius, the Man made an Ass, I was the Ass made Man. At last I was assumed into Heaven right there by Andromeda, to one side of Cygnus, near Pisces and Aquarius.
His work still not done though; Hermes-Mercurius has always further tasks for him; in every age there is plenty of scope for an Ass. Braying and kicking, or mild and patient, Onorio again and again is turned back from Heaven’s cool shores and the prospect of green fields, to embody down on earth the coniunctio oppositorum, the best and worst, and to show us what it means to know and suffer. Or to laugh and refuse to suffer, same thing.
Among those who will listen, speak [so Mercurius directs him]. Among mathematicians, measure and weigh; among students of Nature ask, teach, affirm, determine. Go everywhere, among all, dispute with all, be brother to all, be One with the Many, win over everybody, be everything.
Bruno in the dungeons of the Venetian Inquisition told the whole story of Onorio to his fellow prisoners. (He cast their fortunes for them too, writing phrases from Psalms inside circles he drew in the dirt.) He said to them: Samson killed a thousand Philistines with an ass’s jawbone; what could he have done with a whole, living Ass? He told them—we know this from the prisoners themselves, a couple of whom were spies put in with him to record his sayings—that the Pope was a great Ass, that the friars (of whom he had been one) were asses, and the teachings of Holy Church dottrini d’asini. Of course Bruno knew that what he said would be reported. He supposed that the Venetian inquisitors would get the joke, and ponder it.
The Venetians certainly wrote it all down, and perhaps they did ponder it.
When the Roman Inquisition demanded that Bruno be turned over to them (they had been waiting twenty years to have a talk with him about his opinions) the Venetians, who usually resisted such requests, gave in. Bruno was sent to Rome.
He seems to think that iron bars and stone walls are as nothing, the Venetians wrote to the Romans. He comports himself as though he were an honored guest, and when he is questioned he trims and with a smile makes little of his beliefs, not out of fear but as though he wished not to offend us, his hosts. He has sought, he says, an audience with the Most Holy Father, for whom he has news of great importance, and with a bow thanks us for transporting him thither. And lastly they added this note concerning the strange man they had kept for a time without fathoming: If he is proven to be mad, we ask that all mercies be shown him.
* * *
Now all over the Faraways, men and women were dressing up as persons, places and things they were not, laughing at themselves in mirrors, as the day died and the shadows lengthened.
“Sybil,” said Val to Rosie. “She’s a character I read about. In that book I showed yo
u.”
“The Dictionary,” Rosie said. “I just saw that book at Pierce’s house.”
“No wonder I couldn’t get it. I had to do this from memory.”
Val was vast, swathed in white sheets over pink long underwear, gold rope crossing between her breasts and cinching her waist, cape and hood of red velvet, and a long golden curly wig. In her arms a big loose book or folder, full of paper burned around the edges.
“So okay,” said Rosie. “What.”
“Sybil. She was a fortune-teller; she knew the secrets of the future. An oracle.”
Rosie laughed. “Right. Good choice.”
“‘Come as you aren’t,’ right?”
“Right.”
“She had this book, full of prophecies about this family. And she brought it to the mother of the clan, the matriarch. And says, Pay me, like, a hundred gold pieces.”
“Right.”
“The mother is ripped. A hundred? No no. Too much. So the Sybil takes a page out of the book—a leaf, that’s a page, right?”
“I think.”
“And tosses it in the fire. What the hell are you doing? Okay, says the Sybil, the price is now two hundred. Two hundred? For less? She’s not paying more for less. So the Sybil rips off another leaf, and tosses it in too.”
Rosie laughed, getting it.
“Now the price is three hundred.” Val held up three fingers. “And the mother is going nuts, watching her burn up the future. She’s raging. Too much? Okay another page goes. Price goes up.”
“And?”