His house was much larger than he himself remembered it. He went through the back rooms and through those rooms that were still farther behind them. There were constructions in Duffey’s own intrepid and inexact carpentry everywhere. As a carpenter, Duffey was one of the great originals. He himself had built all the rooms of these buildings except the front two tiers, which had already been there when he came. But had he built as many rooms as these? He was like a man encountering strange things in his own handwriting. “It’s my own writing, but when did I write such things?” he might say. “It’s my carpentry, but whenever did I carpenter such rooms as these?” he did say. Many of the back rooms had to intrude onto a piece of property that belonged to Zabotski. There was no calculation whatever that would allow them to be on Duffey’s own land.
“Ah, I can’t think of any overbearing neighbor I’d rather intrude on,” Duffey thought with laughter. But the building couldn’t have extended so deeply before today, or Zabotski would have made the howling trespass known to the whole town.
Duffey explored through the bright crowds in his own art bijou, through those in his secondhand book store, through those in his pawnshop, through those in his auditorium, through those in his soup kitchen, and through those in his flophouse. Never had the place been so full except for the few times when he had staged those Original - Masterpieces - for - Eighty-five-Cents - Frame-and -All Saturday sales. But these crowds today were made out of extraordinary people, exuberant as colts, touchy as velours, bright as primary-color-baked terra cotta, superior in their scoundrelry and saintliness, big-bellied with fresh life and invention, incredibly urbane and sophisticated, adolescent and arty and archaic, all at the same time.
Oh, Duffey knew some of them, of course. There was the child-hero; there was the hoyden; there was the Countess (how had she got there before him when he had started sooner?); there was the Sanctimonious Sam. But are these not types? No, they are people; they are everlasting and omnipresent people; and, though it seems as if there were more, there is only one of each. Who would ever make types of such as these?
And there were more local and less generalized folks. There was Danny Degas, who was history professor at Luno College there in town; Hugh de Turenne, who was deep in the humanities at Xavier; Sister Mary Susanna of Ursuline Academy; Robert Darnley, who was historian-in-residence at Dillard. And there were the dozen of those tome-toting eccentrics from the deep Quarter, who had each been working for thirty years on a thirty-volume history of the world.
There were the fine experts in the special fields of history: Berny Cacciatore, who was the finest historian in the world on boxing and other sports; Bulo Belonki, who was the nonpareil historian of jazz. There were high historians from all over the world—some known to Duffey, some known only to God. There were the flash-wits who were not thought of as orthodox historians. These were all nimble people. History had just made a fundamental change in itself with the defeat and obliteration of its old subject matter and the triumph of the new, just as the art of geometry and the art of words had made deep changes in themselves to accommodate new conditions.
There were also present many eminent persons in the field of hard science. There were physicists and exophysicists, chemists, nuclear nabobs. There were biologists and brain stylers and mathematicians. And here also were the psychologists and the cultural Gestalten and transcendental philosophers. There were music folks, artist folks, and both grid and linear narrators. Since history included everything, Duffey supposed that all these folks belonged. After all, there were such things as pop biology and pop veterinary medicine and pop theology and pop open-heart surgery. There was pop astronomy and pop aerodynamics.
They all had to be nimble persons, since all their sciences were now to be employed by the new and fearlessly nimble brains. Everyone here was clearly highly qualified, of the veriest elite. But even that many highly qualified persons will take up a lot of room. There must have been a thousand unassorted persons crowded into Duffey’s buildings, and there was not a doused light or an emptyhead among them.
A ram’s horn blew a towering blast. And it was time for the first sessions to begin. The first speaker had a smiling and unhurried incandescence about him; he spoke with a high and singing voice that can only be described as bridled thunder laughing down into valleys that weren’t there yesterday, and as hoofs pounding through flame-green grass. But why put it so fancy? He spoke like a thunder colt.
“We are all pleased to see one another,” he began. “We return to our continuing and never really interrupted sessions now. We ask again (it should be the oldest one of us present who asks it, but Duffey’s tongue hasn’t been taught nimbleness yet) the ritual question: ‘What is History?’ And the answer comes: ‘History is everything that has happened up till now.’ And then we ask (it should be the youngest one of us here present who asks it): ‘What is now? And so we move into our pleasant discussions and difficulties. Now is the all-embracing moment, so our answer really is ‘History is everything in the now.’ Or simply ‘History is Everything.’
“Our fun and our fascination will always be to track the kits of the wild history cat to their lair: it is to winnow the golden dust that we call historical evidence and to discover that it is really the green dust of life. And we can track the kits; we can winnow the dusts to a final arrival and solution every time. There is nothing that can hide from history, or from ourselves, who are the shapers and pruners of history. Where would anything hide? Everything is in the momentous now, and we are the lords of this now.” The speaker wore a rakish and gaudy turban, and a gaudy and exuberant gem, or eye, sparkled and winked from the middle of it.
“These are not ghosts of the past that we track down and set right. Really, there are no ghosts. There are only some persons and things that are wasted more than others. And there is no ‘past.’ There are certain times and incidents that have been misplaced. But we can find them, buried in barrows or trapped under the cement of barnacles, and we can free them from their incrustations. But even we adepts are in danger of thinking in terms of the inimical incrustations and surrogates, in treating some events as though they were not still happening. If a thing is not still happening, then how will it be revised? It is for the ordering and revision and clarification that we come together for these continuing meetings. That, and to reassure ourselves, and to enjoy one another’s company.
“As we as a people arrive at our full splendor, then we create a splendid history for ourselves, and we devise noetic and sophisticated and splendid techniques. Ah, the tracking down, the digging up, the freeing, with the finest weapons and tools ever, that’s where the fun is. It is the rich ritual of historical evidence, the forming in our hands of what was, and is, and what shall be. We shall keep it all in our hands. A line by an always contemporary poet reads ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water,’ as though that name might become difficult to read after the water had grown old and forgetful. The reading would never be difficult, of course—not to initiates like ourselves. Even the writing of it on rapidly running water would make its reading just about difficult enough to be interesting. It’s always easy to develop transparencies from living water.
“I have heard it said by an erudite man that it would be wonderful to have located recording microphones at various spots in the time and place of history. Oh, but it has been done. We use such microphones all the time! I have never found a dingle or dale on this earth in which there were not many such microphones. Stones are the most common recorders. Everywhere, to a person with informed eves and ears, these stones shine and shout their presence. It is in their thin (but not so thin as a non-historian might imagine) patinas that we may read complete histories.
“We commonly lift or peel off transparencies at six-second intervals. Each such transparency will give a detailed and accurate analysis of the air for its period, temperature, direction of wind, light intensity (whether in shade or sunlight or dark night or bright night, even, from the angle of the
shine, the hour of the day, and the day of the year), sulphur content of the air, significant pollen, aroma, and quality generally. Do you realize that it would take fewer than three hundred billion such six-second intervals, fewer than three hundred billion such transparencies to carry us back through the last fifty thousand years of history, the period in which we are interested, the period since our own first appearance? We can go deeper, of course, but frankly we have not the technique to go more than ten times deeper, or to about half a million years. Beyond that, we lose accuracy. But why should we go deeper than our own period? In those murky depths, we find only animals and uncouth creatures and peoples who are not ourselves.
“But we can slice the transparencies much thinner than six seconds. We can slice them down to a hundredth of a second for any period we wish to focus on. The six-second interval is merely cruising speed or hunting speed. The patinas deposited on good rock surfaces can be lifted down to the thickness of a single molecule.
“Complete visual pictures, from any aspect or direction, can be reconstructed of anything whose light or shadow fell even indirectly on one of our stones. We can get detailed pictures of animals, of plants, of people as they lived and moved thousands of years ago. We can reconstruct color pictures of the clouds moving overhead, and we can read the spectra of those clouds. We can reconstruct anything that was ever visible, that was ever to be discerned by any of the senses, that was ever subject to any sort of analysis. Give us a dozen tuned stones (they resonate to each other, and those of the same locale will always know each other) and we can reconstruct a complete countryside for any period we wish. Nor would upheavals which seem to scramble the record make as much difference as you might suppose.
“We can trap sounds and play them back with perfect fidelity. We can play the song of the ancestral cicada that had two more chromosomes than have its descendants. The old cicada (it is only coincidence) has two more notes to its song. We can say what the two disappeared chromosomes were. We can even, by very advanced technique, duplicate those chromosomes.
“And smells! Of course they are even more simple than sounds to lift in the transparencies. We can go back and pick up nearly every scene complete for the last fifty thousand years. We can do it at ten times that depth, if there were anything interesting happening there. And patinas and deposits on stones are only one of the dozens of tools that we have for such historical reconstruction.” “If I had a rock in this room, could it tell me the hanky-panky that my husband pulls when I’m gone?” a woman asked. She was a walk-in from the street, a mere jaywalker: she wasn’t an associate of the Pop Historians. “If it takes a special rock, where could I get one?” she asked.
“Oh, it takes at least a dozen seasons to set patina layers so that they can be removed as transparencies,” the speaker said. “I don’t know why this is so, but it does protect and make privileged all current information from the hot eyes and gawky ears of suspicious persons. You wouldn’t be interested in hanky-panks that are more than a dozen years old, would you?”
“I sure would,” the woman said. “I want to find out about them as far back or as close up as I can go. Where can I find one of these rocks?”
“Oh, any rock will do,” the speaker said. “But just any technician will not do. We exercise a certain discretion in just what the patinas should reveal. But many things other than rocks have secrets.”
“Aye, goatskins have secrets too,” Duffey told his beard. He had been thinking about the parchment that he had found nailed to his door that morning. Now he was inspired to use his own technique to lift transparencies and tracings from it. The parchment was still on the door. Duffey realized that it was a proclamation and was intended to remain there for the stay of the Royal Pop Historians.
He rolled a violet light through the throng and to the door. Several of the people—the child-hero, the hoyden, the Countess and others—were very interested in his doings. They followed him about as he made his hookup.
“Why do you use that obsolete apparatus?” the child-hero asked him. “There is nothing intuitive about it at all, nothing dumfounding. I wouldn’t be caught dead with an apparatus that wasn’t in some way dumfounding.” Duffey’s violet light was not obsolete. He had bought it that very year. His older violet light had been obsolete but still workable. But neither of them had been very intuitive or dumfounding in their operation.
“What is with you children?” Dulfey demanded. “This does not make great speeches, but it works. Well, what is the latest thing you Pop Historians would use to divine the depth of this goatskin?”
“For such primary work as that, where the levels are of the doings and undoings of people (some of them probably human), and with so few such recordings, a peach branch would probably be the newest and most sophisticated device,” the child-hero said. “It must be a forked branch, and it must be cut like—”
“Like a dowser’s forked stick,” Duffey finished. “Yes, I have one of them somewhere. I often use it. And also I often use my violet light here.” In his business as art dealer and pawnbroker, Dulfey often examined things by his violet light. It would bring out underlays of paintings. It would bring out filed-off serial numbers of pawned equipment. And also he often used his dowser’s forked stick (his was from a red peach tree). It would tell whether blood had been shed in the history of an article or artifact. It would tell particularly whether there was a murder in the history of ownership of an item (only the forked rod of the red peach tree would tell this latter). But the forked sticks told all these things scientifically and not intuitively.
For this particular job, the violet light was best. The parchment was a palimpsest, written over many times and scraped imperfectly. Its latest underlay was quickly made manifest under the violet light. It consisted of some unfamiliar verses of Boethius, but in his overly familiar style.
“I never cared for his doggerel,” Duffey said. “It would be valuable in a money way, I suppose, but essentially his stuff is completely worthless. May the weed-cutter take him!”
“He was never really one of our group,” the child-hero said. “There was just too much of the human element in him.”
The next latest underlay was a first-century copy (or the original) of the Fourth Gospel. It had the sweep of understanding and authority in its lettering.
“A fine hand,” Duffey said. “I wonder if it was his own?”
“Oh, it was, it was,” the hoyden said. “Did you ever know him, Duffey? He was one of our group. And he was so patient and thoughtful. He once put up more than two hundred of us in a small sheepshed. I don’t know how he did it, but he made us feel at home. That was one of the better segments of our always continuing meeting. Yes, this is the original. But of course the thing can be found in print now, so there’s no need to save even good hand.”
The third latest underlay was a spate of priceless drivel of the classical Greek era. Well, what more can one say about it? It was priceless. And it was drivel.
“It’s fake, of course,” the child-hero said. “All of the classical period was a fake. There wasn’t any classical period. You’ll hear more of that. It’s a favorite colt of Cyrus Roundhead, who will be .speaking by and by.”
Then, a bit deeper on the goatskin, there was a highly polished passage of epic from one of the pre-pre-Homerics.
“No need to flash that into the light of the day,” Duffey said. “It would only confuse the scholars.”
“He belonged to us once,” the child-hero said, “but then the weed-chopper cut him down. There were lots of defections among the pre-pre’s.”
A bit earlier then, and there was an imposing, closely written, clearly alphabetical screed from the pre-alphabetical time. It might easily establish itself as the earliest alphabetical writing known. And below this there were many depths of writings and scrapings. But Duffey, not wishing to tip his hand, went no deeper.
“Times are hard,” he whispered hoarsely in his shyster voice, for he had come under the influence of
a part of himself that he could never control, “and I don’t know where the devil I’d ever find a buyer for the thing. But I feel generous today, and I cannot resist the plea in your entreating eyes. I’ll go nine dollars for this worthless old piece of goatskin.”
There were peals of laughter from the child-hero and the Countess and several others of the people there. But for the kindliness of it, the laughter would have shriveled Duffey irreparably. The laughter meant that the parchment was not for sale. It meant that not nine or even nine million dollars would touch it. It meant that Duffey was a perfect clown. So he accepted that role. But he would dearly have loved to have that parchment for nine dollars or even nine thousand. He put his violet light away. The parchment would never lodge permanently in Melchisedech Duffey’s Walk-in Art Bijou.
Back in the auditorium, the main and largest room of the Duffey buildings, the opening speaker was still holding forth on stones and their patinas…
“We forget that our time scale is purely conventional,” he was saying, “and that all events are pretty much simultaneous. Take the case of God, and the Person who presently holds most persuasive claim to that position. There was a sort of vacancy several months ago and the question was which strong man would seize the opportunity. There was one (who almost certainly had suffered a human interval) who had mutated quite recently (though some maintain that it was his second mutation) and who had learned the total trick of time dealing while doing so. He then intruded himself back into time, into history and history’s records, into the oceanic unconscious mind that is shared by both creatures and uncreatures—and so he became God. Certainly he is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-present now; part of his peculiar mutation was his mastering of the tricks of power and knowledge and location. And certainly he created the worlds. At least he created the historical evidence that he had created the worlds. That’s almost the same thing.”
In the Wake of Man Page 3
