by John Crowley
“History doesn’t repeat itself, Julie. It doesn’t. It’s only one way.”
“No but like you said,” Julie said. “It’s rediscovered, this tradition, but in a new way; you remake it, in your own terms, and that remaking of it changes the way you understand the whole history of it. Right? That’s what taking it up again means.”
Pierce paused, his half-made smoke lifted to his tongue.
“To take it up like we’re taking it up right now, this kind of knowledge, like you’re taking it up, means understanding it newly.”
“Hm,” he said. Noncommittally he sealed and lit the cigarette. “Hm.”
“Because don’t you think regular science, the kind you said won out over the older kind, don’t you think it’s sort of run itself into the ground? Doesn’t the old, other stuff seem right now actually more modern?”
“In what ways more modern?”
“Well you tell me. I mean it just took in more, didn’t it, things that the regular kind of science leaves out. Telepathy. Intuition. Other ways of perceiving. Didn’t you say that Bruno and so on believed the earth was alive? Well it is.”
“Ecology,” said Pierce, the notion just then occurring to him. “Bruno’s planets, those living beings: our earth was one too, he thought, constantly in process. One big animal, and Man a part of it. A Biosphere.”
“Yes!” Julie said. “Yes, and what else, what else?”
“Well the Monad,” Pierce said. “The idea that the universe is one thing—that everything in it is intimately connected, interpenetrated by everything else. A dance of energy. Modern physics talks that way. It’s why the Renaissance magicians thought the magic that they did could work: why the casting of a talisman could reverberate in the interior of a planet.”
“Yes!”
“The union of observer and observed,” Pierce said, warming. “The idea that the observer, his mind-set—they might have said his spiritual intention—can alter what’s observed.”
“Influences,” Julie said, waving away Pierce’s smoke. “Affinities.”
“A sense of the marvelous, of possibilities. Electricity wouldn’t have baffled those guys. Or X rays, or radio. The magicians believed in causative action at a distance, but the rationalist scientists of the time threw it out; then they had a hard time with it when Newton proposed it again as basic to the universe. Newton called it gravity. The magicians liked to call it Love.”
“Love,” Julie said, and a sudden sparkle bloomed in her eyes, Pierce had always marveled at how swiftly it could come. “See?” she said.
“You’d have to be so careful though,” Pierce said, “careful to distinguish. …”
“Oh sure, sure,” Julie said, and her red thumbnail furled and released the corners of his few pages. “We have to talk, we have to think. To shape this thing, and focus it. But I know there are people, lots of people now, who want to hear this news. I know it.” The waiter’s hand placed on the table, in neutral ground between them, the check. Julie’s hand covered it. “And I tell you, Pierce. That book I can sell. The history book, just history, I don’t know.”
She allowed his thoughtful silence a long moment’s room, and then—“Listen, Pierce,” she said softly, almost shyly, “I know this sounds really dumb, but I have to go now and eat another lunch.”
“Huh?”
“Well I don’t think I’ll really eat. But it’s so crazy, so much of this business is done at lunch. And I’ve been away for three weeks now, and so I have to make up for it. Two lunches a day. Why is that, books and lunch.”
“I don’t know.”
“We never really got to talk.” She regarded him, cheek in hand, and seemed to remember an old smile she had once kept for him. “I thought about you so much, these last few weeks. Lots of stuff. I wondered: did you ever come up with that third wish?”
“No,” he said. It had been with her that he had first begun working out the constraints and possibilities of three wishes. He didn’t want to say that she herself, her person, had been the tentative subject of the third, in that time she had been off in California; the subject, in more than one casting. “No. Not finally.”
“Maybe now,” she said. “You’re learning all these new powers.”
“Not for me,” he said. “What should I do, practice conjuring?” He tossed his napkin onto the table, rising. “You’ve got to remember the one great drawback of practical magic, Jewel. It didn’t work.” She was rising too, but he forestalled her. “Sit, sit for a sec while I, and then we’ll go. One sec.”
She sat, becalmed, before her cold cup, her hand on the typed pages.
She really hadn’t been suggesting that his book ought to teach magic procedures. No. The meaning, the world-view behind them, the soul-sense they made: that’s what she meant. The practices themselves—that was much too dangerous. She knew more than one person who had been hurt that way: or who had hurt others.
Pierce would laugh to hear her say that.
What a strange guy. She had used to ask him What good does it do you, Pierce, working out these wishes, protecting yourself every which way, if you don’t believe you can make wishes?
And he would say: Believing in it doesn’t make it so, Jewel.
Old Pierce, she thought with a welling of pity. He thinks he’s so sharp, so unfooled: like a color-blind person, undeceived by color. What he could never see is that those powers he had been just talking about weren’t wandering around in the world free like mutts waiting to be adopted; they were the creations of souls, created between souls, they were creation itself, and bringing themselves into being was the use they had. If you can create such power in your life, then it’s your duty to create it. If you are somehow granted it, it’s not for no reason. That’s what evolution is.
One day he’ll learn, she thought, if not in this lifetime, the next, or the next. It’s the task set for him, even if he doesn’t know it: he who knows so much else.
There was a reason she was here, no longer Pierce’s lover but with her hands on Pierce’s work. The world is changing, evolving in a new and accelerated way, and its evolution too is up to people, people bringing the future into being.
Evolution. She felt a soft surge as of sea foam through her veins.
All that summer she had heard about these noises off the Atlantic coast, a series of great booms like sonic booms but not sonic booms. The TV had reported them but could give no explanation. No one knew what they were. The little group that Julie was one of, a group that kept in touch coast to coast as much by an interlock of thought and feeling as by phone and letter, had all come to think that what this might be—just might be—was the signal that Atlantis was rising: the time had come ripe at last. At Montauk Julie had stood sunburned on a headland in the salt breeze, growing certain that it was about to be: that the blazing tip of its pyramid would any moment break the rolling sea’s surface, then its towers and ramparts too, shedding green water, she knew it, she just knew it.
She felt it still, that certainty, just as she still felt the burn on her shoulders and the sweet tone of her muscles. She should tell him: and tell him too that her certainty itself was part of what was calling that drowned world back: like calling to like. She should.
“Okay,” Pierce said beside her, hands in his pockets and a guilty impatient air about him that she had used to know. “Okay.”
“Okay,” she said. And she placed on the bill a card of gold-colored plastic.
She took a cab; Pierce walked home, the September sun in his face and Julie’s new business card in his pocket (midnight blue, with the stars of Scorpio picked out on it in silver). In the fading elation of his two scotches he could not tell if he was downcast or triumphant.
The return of the magus, bearing in his hands the old potent physics out of the past, secret doctrines decoded, the numbers of the pyramid, was that in the end what he had to sell? Then he would sell it. There had been a time when he had thought of nothing else, when he had stood on his rooftop watch
ing the grimy spheres of heaven revolve around him, Oh I see, I get it: but to hear those notions in another’s mouth, unqualified, fitted to a different kind of consciousness, made them sound at once loony and banal, too much and not enough.
And yet were they not brave, those old mages, knights of Egypt, were they not heroes? Wrong as they may have been in almost everything they thought they knew for sure, they were heroes, the more Pierce had read about them the more they had come to be his own heroes. An Agrippa, a Bruno, a Cardanus about to take up the wand, open the book of Hermes, incise strange geometries on a sheet of virgin wax: they may have thought they were only tapping into the ancientest wisdom, only cleansing corrupt sciences and restoring them to purity: but what they were postulating was a new heaven and a new earth, and it was one like our own.
There were ten thousand dæmons in Bruno’s heavens: but for all its occult influences, for all its affinities and sympathies, the magician’s universe worked the way it did not because God or the Devil was interfering in it, but simply because that was the way it was. It was an immense, even a limitless universe, a nexus of spirit and matter in which the magus’s perceptions and aspirations were bound up, it was far more full of possibility than the small, enclosed, God-and-Devil-animated world of orthodoxy, and it was natural. The true magus didn’t need to believe in witchcraft, or in miracles in favor of believers, because his universe was not only large enough to contain reasons for any astonishing thing that happened, but so full of forces, world spirits, angels (themselves objects as natural as stones or roses), that anything was possible, any effect of desire or will working in the world.
So despite how wrong the magicians might have been about any given feature of it, and they could be wildly wrong and amazingly gullible, the size of their world, and the fact that not only did they not know all that it contained but knew—with joy—that it was impossible to know all that it contained, makes their minds like ours.
And not so incomprehensible then after all, or so inexpressible either.
Well then.
He was just then passing beneath one of the stone lions who guard the public library, and he sat there on the step and took a notebook from his pocket. The sun was dazzling. He wrote: “Travel backward to a lost land heard of in childhood; find it to be incomprehensible, rich, strange; then discover it is the place from which you set out.”
Oh God you would have to be so careful though, so careful. Time doesn’t return, turn full circle, and bring back what is past; what turns full circle is the notion that time will turn full circle, and bring back the past. That was the secret Pierce knew, the one he must tell. Time turned not in a circle but a spiral, sleeping and waking; any Golden Age perceived to have dawned again, or sad decline repeating itself, or new millennium come, creates in the very perception all the past Golden Ages, or declines, or rebirths, or millennia that it seems to be repeating, Oh I remember, I remember: we ascend upward through the spheres that seem to hem us in.
Wake up, his book must say, you can do nothing unless you wake up. Like Bruno shouting that the sun was rising: wake up.
Bruno himself should be the book’s hero, in fact; Bruno with his cocksure announcing, Bruno with his infinitudes and his planets swimming through space like great placid beasts, alive alive-oh; Bruno with his endless impossible systems for remembering and thus mastering everything in the whole wide world—an enterprise that might after all turn out to be not so different from Pierce’s own. “Mind, at the center of all, containing within itself all that it is the center of”—yes! Just as Pierce himself had felt the brains within him tightly packed with all that he had ever perceived, like a Kodachrome movie reeled up tightly, and all colored too, for if the mind is not colored, then nothing is.
So could he not do that, then? Could he not entertain the notions that Julie thought would sell, the notions that brought that sudden sparkle to her eyes; could he not do that, and be paid to do it, while at the same time engaged in a different enterprise, the same he had been engaged in for so long: to grasp as in a hand the truth of stories patently false, to recover as a dream is recovered the dream-logic of history, because he had himself long dreamed it, and was now awake?
Could he? He could and would. If fools fell for the stories he would retail, let fools fall for them; for himself, he was smart, and if he did not know the way to say one thing that had the effect of another, a much more qualified, even a contradictory thing, then his long Catholic upbringing, his expensive education at St. Guinefort’s and at Noate, had gone for nothing. We thank You O Lord (he blasphemed, exulting) that You have concealed these things from the simple, and revealed them to the wise.
They couldn’t make Bruno give up his large world, in the end, and take their small one instead: and so in February of 1600, that white-numbered year, they took him from his cell in the Castelo Sant’ Angelo, and, dressed in white penitent’s robe and seated backward on a donkey, he was led to the Campo dei Fiori, the Field of Flowers (Pierce imagined a meadow filled with spring blooms), and there they tied him to a stake, and burned him.
But Pierce would not be burned: no, even if he aimed for the same powers, the same infinite grasp and freedom that Bruno had aimed for. That was the difference between then and now: Pierce would not be burned.
“So,” said Allan Butterman to Rosie, inviting her with a hand to sit, elegant again in soft tweeds and a shirt blue as the October day. “So now.”
“So,” Rosie said. She swiveled slightly in her comfy chair, feeling quite at home here on her third visit. “It seems like it’s okay, and he doesn’t mind.”
“Doesn’t mind?”
“Well we had some talks. And he didn’t really want to talk about anything legal. But I wanted to get it decided and over with. And he said he thought we should talk a lot more, and anyway he didn’t like the idea of ‘no fault’ when it was me who walked out. So I explained to him what you said. What our options are.”
Heart beating hard and throat dry, stuttering somewhat from overrehearsal, she had made her speech, explaining to Mike that if he didn’t want to participate in a no-fault divorce she intended to sue him for divorce on the grounds of adultery. The awful weightiness of this, which seemed at the same time as weightless and illusory as some big scene in a movie, had ended discussion for the day; Mike, saying he was unsure of his ability to control his response, left the Donut Hole, neutral ground where at a deserted hour they had met.
It was a little like playing Rock, Scissors, and Paper, this countering of Mike’s psychotherapeutic strategies with her new legal ones; sometimes when the hands came down she won, sometimes he, but at least she didn’t always lose.
She had left it at that for a few weeks, feeling like a gambler who has put up a big stake and waits for the other side of the table to see it or fold; she pondered this scary and exhilarating sensation, the sensation of having power, and when she thought she had waited enough, she made this appointment with Allan Butterman, and then called Mike to get an answer: Allan, she said, would have to know how he was to proceed.
And Mike had been reasonable. He had, apparently, lost interest in tormenting her about it all, as though he weren’t up for the game; he had seemed—as since their separation she had felt him more and more often to be—distracted, not altogether there, to be on the point of turning away saying Yes yes half over his shoulder, his eyes elsewhere. Rosie supposed she knew the cause, though it surprised her.
“This same woman?” Allan said.
“The same one,” Rosie said. “I thought it was just going to be a fling. It looks like it’s more than that. It looks like he’s kinda swept away. But really he’s always been sort of a dope about women.” That had used to be one of Rosie’s real strengths, that Mike had been a dope about women, that she had known it and he had not. She swiveled thoughtfully in her swivel chair. “I wonder if he’s still in his Down Passage Year.”
“His what?”
“That’s in Climacterics,” Rosie said. “It�
�s sort of a new science Mike’s inventing. I can’t tell you a real lot about it, because I don’t understand it really, and also because I’m not supposed to talk too much about it, it’s basically a simple idea and he’s afraid if the wrong person hears about it they’ll steal it.”
Allan stared at her, seeming to be pondering something other than Climacterics.
“It’s about how life is divided up into these seven-year periods,” Rosie went on, at least wanting to reassure Allan she wasn’t talking nonsense. “Every seventh year you sort of hit a plateau, where you’re pretty sure of yourself and have a good hold on things. Then gradually you descend, like on a curve, through a Down Passage Year; then you bottom out, and there’s an Up Passage Year, and finally you plateau again, seven years later. Psychologically.”
“Uh-huh,” Allan said.
“It really sort of works,” Rosie said. “You can draw it on a curve.” It did sort of work; it described Mike’s own life better than it did any other life he had applied it to, but Rosie remembered seeing her own ups and downs reflected pretty truly in the chart Mike had drawn for her shortly after he had worked out The Method, as he always called it, with those audible capitals. She remembered his excitement, passion even, and her own wondering assent, a winter’s night years ago. … With a wholly unexpected heave, like a freak flood, she filled up suddenly with grief, and covered her eyes, a sob caught in her throat.
“Oh God,” Allan said. “Oh don’t.”
She looked at her lawyer; his face was a shocked mask of pity. Her own rush of feeling receded before his. “Wow,” she said, and snorted. “Sorry, sorry, where did that come from.”
“No no,” Allan said. “No, oh God it’s just so rotten.”
She laughed, fragments of her broken sob caught in it. “It’s okay,” she said. “You got a hankie?”
He proffered a box. “Go ahead,” he said. “Go ahead and cry. That schmuck.”
“Allan,” she said, blowing her nose. “Really I’m okay. Calm down. What’s next to do.”
