Aegypt

by John Crowley

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes,’ and turned back to the typescript. A small stack of it on his left-hand side, a big pile on his right. He cupped his chin in his hands and sighed.

  ‘It’s stopped raining,’ Rosie said.

  While Pierce read, his old teacher Frank Walker Barr at Noate stood up before his senior seminar on the History of History, and, talking as he worked, opened the classroom windows; for the rain that was ceasing in the Faraways had passed from here too, and the sun was hot.

  ‘What, then, grants meaning to historical accounts?’ he asked, for the last time in that semester. ‘What is the difference between a history and a register of facts, of names and events?’ He had taken from the corner a long oaken pole, with a brass finger on the end of it; this he was inserting into the brass sockets set for it in the frames of the windows, and drawing them down. Many in the classroom remembered grade-school teachers doing the same, in past classrooms, and they watched Barr with interest.

  ‘What we might do to conclude,’ Barr went on, ‘is to try to think how meaning arises in other kinds of accounts or narratives.’ The finger engaged the hole of the last westward-facing window. ‘It seems to me that what grants meaning in folktales and legendary narratives – we’re thinking now of something like the Nibelungenlied or the Mort D’Arthur – is not logical development so much as thematic repetition, the same ideas or events or even the same objects recurring in different circumstances, or different objects contained in similar circumstances.’

  The window he tugged at yielded, and slid open, admitting a crowd of breezes which had been pressing for admittance there.

  ‘A hero sets out,’ Barr said, not turning back to his students but facing the sparkling quad and the air. ‘To find a treasure, or to free his beloved, or to capture a castle or find a garden. Every incident, every adventure that befalls him as he searches, is the treasure or the beloved, the castle or the garden, repeated in different forms, like a set of nesting boxes – each of them however just as large, or no smaller, than all the others. The interpolated stories he is made to listen to only tell him his own story in another form. The pattern continues until a kind of certainty arises, a satisfaction that the story has been told often enough to seem at last to have been really told. Not uncommonly in old romances the story just breaks off then, or turns to other matters.

  ‘Plot, logical development, conclusions prepared for by introductions, or inherent in a story’s premises – logical completion as a vehicle of meaning – all that is later, not necessarily later in time, but belonging to a later, more sophisticated kind of literature. There are some interesting half-way kind of works, like The Faerie Queene, which set up for themselves a titanic plot, an almost mathematical symmetry of structure, and never finish it: never need to finish it, because they are at heart works of the older kind, and the pattern has already arisen satisfyingly within them, the flavor is already there.

  ‘So is this any help in our thinking? Is meaning in history like the solution to an equation, or like a repeated flavor – is it to be solved for, or tasted?’

  He turned to face them.

  ‘Is this a parable? Have I simply repeated our seminar in another form?’

  The air in the room had all been changed now for the air outside, burdened with June, whatever that was exactly, something heavier than warmth or odor or vapor. It was the last day of classes.

  ‘No?’ he said, regarding their mild faces, absent already, and no wonder either. ‘Yes? No? Maybe?’

  NINE

  Out of Turin the roads west and northward rose quickly into the mountains, climbing toward the passes of Little St. Bernard and Mont-Cenis; and an endless train of wagons, carts, mules, and men unwound from the Piazza del Castello and upward, carrying mail, news, jewels, and specie (well hidden in the pack trains or sewn in the linings of merchants’ coats, not mentioned at inns and borders) and luxury goods of the Levantine and Asian trade valuable enough to make the overland journey worth the cost – ostrich feathers, drugs, silks, plate. The outlaws, the fugitives and spies, the friars and common people, went over the Alps on foot; the great were carried in litters, surrounded by clanking men-at-arms.

  The road they followed went up into the high Savoy, through meadows lush and spangled with flowers, into a country of dark firs; beside rivers now rushing and dangerous; between beetling walls of gorges where snow still melted. Snow: Giordano pressed a handful to his lips. He heard someone say that it was from drinking snow-water continuously that the natives of these mountains – the strong squat men and long-armed women whose cottages hung on the points of crags, whose sheep danced from steep to steep – were so often hideously goitered.

  He supposed that these must be the mountains where witches lived as well, the witches who were prosecuted so relentlessly by his Dominican brothers; stories of the witch-hunters and their dangers and triumphs were the lore of Dominican houses. Down those deep passes perhaps; in those black cave mouths; in those low cottages, roofs piled comically thick with snow, a breath of dark smoke from their chimney-holes. He thought maybe he should go find them, and live with them. Raise winds, and fly. There was a wind rising even then, harsh and searching, and a few snowflakes blown in it like cinders.

  That night in the cold guest cell which he was allotted in a Dominican hospice in the Val Susa he lay awake before dawn, between Matins and Prime, remembering Nola.

  Brother Teofilo had told him that the earth was not flat, like a dish, but round, like an orange; it seemed right that Teofilo would know this, round as he was himself. Giordano listened to him; he watched the friar draw with a burnt stick the circle of the world, and the outlines of lands on it, a mappamundi – and was content to believe it. Teofilo did not know that the round world which Giordano had instantly conceived and assented to when Teofilo drew his picture was a hollow sphere, and contained the lands and peoples, the mountains and the rivers and the air, as an orange contains its meat; what the boy thought Teofilo had drawn a picture of was its outside surface, marked like a plover’s egg, the view God had. Inside was the earth we see. Along the bottom half lay the fields and vineyards; the mountains rose up the curved sides; the sky was the inside of the top, whereon the sun and stars were stuck.

  Bruno laughed, remembering, and laced his hands behind his head.

  When Teofilo at last realized what sort of world Giordano imagined, then the struggle began. Giordano’s world was just as round as Teofilo’s, and it made better sense; it was to him so obviously the case that it took him a long time even to grasp what Teofilo was laughing at, and then expostulating about. And when he did grasp it, the difficulties of it seemed overwhelming: What held the air and the light in? How could we live, sticking out into the nothingness? Why did the peoples in the Antipodes not fall off, and keep falling forever? It was absurd.

  And then on a golden day he sat eating an orange in the winter ruin of the garden, and he turned – it felt like cracked knuckles or crossed eyes all through his being – he turned the round world inside out, like the skin of the orange he was peeling; and all the mountains and rivers, the vineyards and farmsteads and churches, turned with it. The sun and stars flew out to fill the nothing where God lived. The world was outside itself. The world was round.

  Softly through the hospice of Susa the low bell sounded for Prime.

  That – that sense of the world turning inside-out like the peel of an orange – was what he had felt standing in the rain in Venice at the stall of the bookseller with the curious ring: that was what had made him laugh.

  If he put the center of the universe in motion, then what became of its circumference? If he turned the outer spheres inward, what became of spheres? In the center of the old universe had been the earth, in the center of the earth himself, in the center of himself the spheres of the heavens he had built within himself, in the center of them . . .

  If he turned the small universe within him inside-out, then what would happen in the one outside him?

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p; He heard the sandals of the postulant whose duty it was to wake the monks for prayer. The sandals approached his door, the postulant struck his door and passed on, calling at each door: Oremus, fratres.

  Snow was still falling in the spring air as the caravan Giordano joined went up through Novalese to Mont-Cenis. The travelers coming down from the top rode on sledges, a strong marron in front with a strap around his chest pulling, and another up behind with an alpen-stock to steer; on the slick path the sledges shot by, the marrons stoical, the faces of the fur-wrapped foreigners wide-eyed with alarm. All day the snow swirled heavily down from the heights; stuck carts began to burden the trail, the tough little mules waded in snow to their knees. Giordano, terrified and elated, felt his senses swallowed up in it.

  His caravan called a halt at last at a carter’s village just short of the Col; the villagers expertly tucked all the travelers in among themselves, every cranny could contain a sleeper; the animals were penned and the carts covered. Giordano paid high for a bowl of milk and bread and a share of a mattress stuffed with crackling beech leaves, not far from where the fire glowed.

  It was still night when he awoke amid the snorers. The inn was a lightless cave. Giordano struggled out from the pile he was ensconced in, and pulled a fur robe with him; he wrapped it around his monk’s robe, and – stepping over and around and sometimes on sleeping dogs and children on the floor – he found a door to go out by.

  The air was shocking, as still as if all crystal, corrosive in his nose and throat. The storm had passed, and the sky was clear, more clear than he had known it could be: as though he were high up, away from the earth, and within the sphere of air itself. His warm breath hung before his face in a cloud. He gathered his robes and his fur around him and stepped into the yard; his rag-bound feet left black holes like pools behind him in the starlit snow.

  But was there a sphere of air above the earth, if Copernicus was right? The old earth of Aristotle, black thick and base, collected at the bottom of creation, within finer spheres of water, air, fire. Whatever was lighter – sparks, souls – rose up. But Copernicus said the earth itself rose up, lighter than air, and went sailing; and so which way was up?

  His heart was full. In the moonless sky the stars and planets stared down or stared away and burned. Burned. There was Cassiopeia’s great chair. Lyra. Draco. The Bear standing on his tail, looking at the North Nail on which the heavens turned. Only they didn’t. The eighth sphere of stars only seemed to turn because the earth turned around once a day, spinning on its toe like an arlecchino.

  Perhaps there was no eighth sphere.

  With a sound of not-being, a kind of tinkling indrawn breath, the eighth sphere went away. The stars, liberated, rushed away outward from the earth and from one another; the smaller ones (rushing away even faster) were perhaps not smaller, they were only farther off. Yes! And there might be – must be! – others, too far off to be seen at all.

  His heart might burst, filled with cold starlight. The Milky Way, a powder like snow, might be stars simply too far away to distinguish from one another, like the blue haze of a far-off vineyard, which is nothing but all the blooming grape-globes seen together.

  How far off ?

  What could mark the limit? What reason could there be for them to end?

  Infinite, Lucretius said, who could think of no reason. Cusanus said: a circle, whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.

  No. Cusanus had only spoken so of God. It was he, Giordano Bruno, who was saying it of God’s creation, the shadow of God that was the universe. If there was an end to the stars then God was not God.

  It was not only clear to him, neck bent staring upward, as clear as this air, it was self-evident; he seemed to have always known it, and had simply never said it aloud. Infinite. He felt its infinity tugging at his heart and eyes, and he felt an answering infinity within himself: for if it was infinite outside, then it must be infinite inside as well.

  Infinite. He stirred his cold feet in the snow, and turned back toward the hostel. The little ponies stamped in their pens, breathing whitely, their shaggy manes powdered with hoarfrost. In the windows of the hostel, candles flickered, and furry smoke filled with sparks rose from the chimney; someone laughed within. Wake up.

  It wasn’t far from the village to the top of the pass. The sky had only begun to pale, and the dimmest stars – or those farthest off – had disappeared, when the caravan began clambering up the path toward the summit. The great starless darknesses on either hand were not sky but mountains, coming suddenly clear as though they had just awakened and stood up. Between them in the azure there flamed the morning stars. Mercury. Venus. Wet to the knees with snow-melt, Giordano climbed toward them.

  Earth was a star as they were; and the bright beings who inhabited them, looking this way, saw not a cold stone but another like themselves, aflame in the sun’s light. He hailed them: Brother. Sister. A strange and soundless hum seemed to be filling up his ears and his being, as though the dawn itself were to make a sound in breaking, continuous and irreversible. The star he rode was turning pell-mell toward the sun with all of them aboard it, dwarfish stolid carters, chairs, animals, and men; Bruno laughed at his impulse to fall and clutch the hurtling ball with hands and knees.

  Infinite.

  You made yourself equal to the stars by knowing your mother Earth was a star as well; you rose up through the spheres not by leaving the earth but by sailing it: by knowing that it sailed.

  Sunlight struck the lifting white heads of the peaks, though the snow of the pass was still blue. Giordano had been taught that on the highest mountains the air is eternally still, but dawn winds pierced his robes here, and from the summits glittering streams of snow were slowly blown like banners. The peaks all had names, and the huffing carter who climbed beside Giordano named them, pointing. They sailed too.

  The caravan stumbled and slid through the cold roaring throat of the Col, out of sight of the dawn, passed by a multitude going the other way, all jostling as in a city alley. Then they came out onto a field of shattered flints and a steep path downward. They had crossed the ridge. The sky was huge and blue, but the far lands Bruno looked out over were still soft and asleep, mountains folded rank on rank, the rest of his life. The path that way – it brought his heart to his mouth to trace it – traversed the mountainsides switching back and forth like a whip; you could see, far far below, the turns you would have to take, and the travelers there who toiled upward. Along the fingernail of silver path that edged the precipice a shepherd walked his sheep along in a single file.

  Earth turned, coming about like a trireme, beating East; and thus the sun rose, gigantic spark, God visible. Bruno, stock still, hum in his ears and heart in his throat, felt its smile on his cheek.

  Hermes said: make yourself as God. And Bruno could feel his smile too, like the sun’s. Make yourself as God: Infinite. And Bruno had been infinite even as he had read the words and longed to understand them.

  Earth gave up its valleys to the sun. The burdened men, cheeks warmed, laughing with relief and apprehension, started downward. Day had come.

  *

  The next morning Bruno reached the Dominican monastery at Chambery, in France: he was Brother Teofilo, witch-hunter of Naples. As he stood explaining himself to the puzzled prior in the sunstruck garden, the earth took a sudden northward tilt, and the flagstones rose up to meet his darkening sight. He woke in the infirmary, where he spent Holy Week, sticking-plaster over his eye, head and heart empty, as still and weary as though he had moved the sun all by himself. He could take nothing but broth, and the Host; he slept long, and when he slept he dreamed of Ægypt.

  They were returning, as he had seen them returning: they were returning now. The new sun of Copernicus was the sign of it; Copernicus might not know it, but Giordano Bruno knew it, and would cry it now like a bantam cock through the world. Sunrise.

  Once back on the road, Bruno was rarely to cease journeying his whole life long: but ev
en as he walked the old tracks and high roads of Europe he walked in Ægypt too, its painted temples, the glitter of its sands, its blue skies dark. Sleeping and dreaming, working and wooing, he walked toward a city built in the east or in the west of Ægypt, in the region of the rising or the setting sun, a city whose name he knew.

  Those who everywhere took him in – in Paris, in Wittenberg, in Prague – those giordanisti who furthered his fortunes, or dressed him, or printed his books; who won him interviews with the great; who fed him; who hid him: they seemed often to recognize him too, or to remember him from some other time or place, to have once known but forgotten him or forgotten that it was he who was to come and not some other: Oh yes I see (holding out slowly their hands to him, eyes searching him), yes I know you now yes yes come in.

  He left the house at Chambery as soon as he was well, bored to madness by the monks’ thick stupidity, the endlessness of their talk, like prayer, and their prayer, like talk. In 1579 he reached Geneva; he won the protection there of a Neapolitan nobleman, the Marchese de Vico, who told him for God’s sake to get out of those robes of black and white, and who bought him a suit of clothes; but Bruno dismissed with a joke the Marchese’s Calvinism, on account of which the Marchese had given up all he had. He registered at the University under the name Phillippus, and there began to read the Reformers, with a mixture of amusement and contempt. What poor stuff. He stood in a lecture hall full of ticking automata, planetary clocks, moon machines, and listened to a puppet-boned fellow tell how he was attempting to make a machine, an automaton, that would somehow so exactly replicate in its geometries the workings of the universe that when something happened in the universe an identical thing would be caused to happen in the model, however differently manifested: another universe, in fact, only smaller, like the image in a mirror.

  But Giordano knew that such a machine, such a model, already existed. The name of the machine was Man.