by John Crowley
An infinity inside another infinity?
—An infinite number of infinities. Nothing, in fact, is finite except as it is perceived by the limiting categories of the mind. Indeed we keep coming upon things that disrupt those categories, like certain stones that have seemingly impossible properties of attraction, or animals that combine the qualities of sea and earth, or persons neither dead nor alive. The infinity contained within atoms is soul, that is, divine intelligence; all soul is the same, and only varies because of the disposition and nature of the atoms that compose it.
A sad fate to be made of agglomerations of atoms, and not by processes of Justice, Worth, Providence; to be a heap, rather than a self-based subject.
—All beings, including us human beings, are formed not by a process of casual agglomeration but by an internal principle of unity belonging to the atoms, their energy, their creative soul. Thus instead of a chaos they make the ranks and systems of things in all their specific and endless multiplicity, as the conjoined letters of the alphabet make the words of the language. The words of the world begin with the irreducible atoms, which have their rules of association and attraction, their passions and repulsions, demanding and forbidding certain combinations, permitting or discouraging others. Still the sentences they make are endless in number, and go on being made forever.
And how many categories and kinds of atoms are there? An infinite number too?
I don't know how many categories. I ponder how many would be necessary to account for a limitless number of combinations. I think of the words of a tongue, or of a tongue that has no limit, as perhaps the human tongue was before the fall of Babel. If there were no limit on how long the words could be, or how often the same word might appear in the whole, then a limited number of letters could create an infinite number of words. I think that a mere twenty-four letters, as in our alphabet, would be enough. That would suffice to spell the universe, and if we could come to understand them, name them, recognize them, we would know how.
Only a divine mind, a nous, could spell the infinite world with the letters you describe. How is your mere human mind to encompass them?
—The vicissitudes of nature are endless but not unlimited. There are reasons why some atoms are drawn to some others, to join with them, creating particular compounds, which in turn create bodies that persist as themselves through time. Those Reasons are like lamps lit within the things of which the world is composed, lamps that cast shadows of the things in the perceiving mind. By means of certain living images, the mind can grasp the Reasons and their working. For instance the reasons may be called gods, and the vicissitudes of nature may be truly reflected in stories of the gods. Thus the infinite number of things reflected in the mind is ordered into ranks and kinds, special and general, under all its varied aspects, which can be called Jupiter, Hera, Venus, Pallas, Minerva, Silenus, Pan.
So the gods are but stories.
—As the stories that we men read and write are but letters. Not the less true for that.
Very well, he said, after a moment's wavering between presence and absence, offended possibly. Continue. How are these images for the Reasons cast?
—We discover them. We have them within us, we have them inside, actually further inside than we are in ourselves. They are as much a part of nature as the atoms themselves, the numbers of Pythagoras, the figures of Euclid, the letters of the alphabet, the intentions of the spirit, the persons of the gods.
Why then do not all men agree on how the world and the things are to be conceived? Numbers and geometries are fixed, and describe many things under a few terms, but images may have as many forms as there are things, and what use is that?
—The images change because the world changes. It is a work that it undertakes itself, that goes on continuously. Merely my standing still changes the names around me. Every age must find its own figures for the things that are, to correspond to a changed reality. As in the practice of alchymia, where one thing can be seen under many figures, so that Mercurius is called a dragon, a serpent, a mermaid, a whore, tears, rain, dew, bee, Cupid, or lion, without error or ambiguity, because Mercurius is continually changed in the work.
His interlocutor smiled and perhaps slightly bent his head, as though he had noted the compliment paid his name and nature.
So they, I mean those compound bodies, made of those cohering atoms, do not remain stable.
—They do not. All compounds—ourselves and our bodies too—disintegrate over time. The bonds are merely bonds, however strong the attraction, and impermanent. Yet neither the corporeal substances, nor the atoms, nor their souls, can ever disappear. The atoms and the reasons that they bear inside themselves wander through the vicissitudes of matter, in search of other groups of minima that they recognize as compatible, and into which they insert themselves as into a new skin.
Are the minima so wise as that?
—The atom or minimum contains more energy than any corporeal mass of which it is a part, no matter how powerful—a sun, a star. The energy contained in and expressed by the minimum is soul, and that infinity is what makes us and all beings immortal, merely passing from being to being. If the process of that dissolution and agglomeration could be controlled, our beings, our selves, might pass intact to other beings. The Ægyptian priests inveigled the souls of stars into speaking statues of gods and beasts. We might—as those wise workers do who cast codes and ciphers—respell the words the atoms make, and therefore make of them other words, that is, other things.
So words are things?
—Better to say: things are words. This is the secret of the Cabala of the rabbis, which says that all things are made of the words of God, and to rearrange their letters must be to create new things.
This then is the principle of transubstantiation. Jesus's most brilliant trick—the minima of his being, containing his infinite soul, passed unchanged into the circle of bread. Is that correct?
—You have said it.
The gods too—their endless transformations into things, Jupiter into swans, showers of gold, bulls; others into other things, Venus into a cat, everyone knows.
—Everyone knows.
But of course such power of transubstantiation or metensomatosis is impossible for those not gods or the sons of God. It may be that a clever man may have the power to make himself a simulacrum of another thing, and so fool the unwary.
—It is possible. It is also possible for one living thing to become another, and thereby cease to be what it has been.
Possible!
—Unless we teach ourselves by our thoughts to act, there is no point in thinking. Every philosopher has attempted to describe the world, but the point is to contain it.
So the wise man may do what the immortals have done.
—Given enough years, a wise man might accomplish it.
Years, dearest friend, son and brother, are what you have.
With that, the messenger bent his head, smiling confidentially toward the immured philosopher. Around them the stone walls of his cell and the thicker ones of the castello; around the castello the Papal City all in its ranks and the battlements of the Holy Roman Empire around that.
I have a plan, he said.
II
BENEFACTA
1
When he came at length to believe that he was too sick to finish his last book—that he would himself be finished before it was—then the novelist Fellowes Kraft experienced contradictory impulses.
On the one hand, he thought to put it aside and think no more of it, while with the little time left him he put his (few, pitiful) affairs in order. On the other hand he wanted to do nothing but work at it, to be found at the end (facedown on his pages, like Proust) to have escaped or at least exited into it. He spent the mornings making long notes to himself about further chapters and scenes, further volumes even, expanding an already immense project into unrealizable grandeur (since he was to be freed, he supposed, from having to execute it) and then when the horrid
lassitude returned at day's end, would push away the mess of alien handled paper feeling ashen and sad. Then he would find himself thinking, for no reason or for many reasons, of his mother.
In the course of, or more exactly instead of, settling his life's business he had been collecting from his files the letters his mother had written him over the years, most of which he had saved but never looked at again after first opening them (saved in their envelopes, whose faint addresses charted his own old restlessness, chasing him from house to apartment to pensione as the stamps in the corner rose in cost). There were fewer than he recalled.
"Son,” she began, she always began, in pencil vanishing now but that would never vanish away. Son. What was he attempting to pack up, or unpack for good, that was in them? How could their envelopes, when he pressed open their torn mouths, exhale the familiar mildew of the house on Mechanic Street, after so long in his own house? It was the smell of the gnomes’ entrance into the basement apartment, the crumbling linoleum of the hall; the smell of the damp-soft wooden stair that stepped up to the door to the alley: and it certified to him, as mere memory could not, that his own life had in fact begun and continued there, and so could not have done so anywhere else.
"Son, I forget whether I told you that Mrs. Auster in the front has died. So just for a moment there is no one in the house.” This one from five years ago, just before the letters ceased to come anymore, before her final illness. “Now Baxter is worried that the next people to come and take the apartment will be negroes, because there are so many of them on Mechanic and all around. He's terribly worried, I don't know why."
Baxter. He should do something about Baxter, make sure he gets the house (though for sure now all filled with Negroes) for himself, blessing or curse or only destiny, amazing how few the choices we have, how strait the way. Baxter found asleep in the entranceway of the house on a December night in the Depression, taken in, still there tonight.
"Well it's odd,” Ma had written, starting a fresh paragraph. “Baxter says that negroes care for nothing but sex. He says when they have their lodge meetings or preach or dance or have a rent party or perform in a jazz band they're only playing at those things, and what they're really doing is trying to get sex. I tell him I don't think that's different from anyone. People are always being blamed for doing things just to get sex, aren't they? It was always said when I was younger that whatever men say, they're only thinking about one thing, and this was always said in a very censorious way, as though the men were selfish hypocrites. No one ever considered that the poor men were to be pitied after all for even trying to think about anything else at all, trying to be politicians or preachers or banjo players or generals—because isn't it actually Sex that's selfish, Sex that twists every ambition and desire into only itself? Here a poor fellow wants to be a poet or a bandit and all he's allowed to make of his desires is babies."
Well it's odd. How often had he heard his mother say it, with her small smile of satisfaction, having hit on another flaw in the fabric (as it seemed to her), another mismatch of the soul and the earth.
Odd: all his friends who over the years had sobbed into their drinks about how they'd broken their mothers’ hearts by not marrying, not making babies, and his own mother quite satisfied to learn of her son's constitution, even proud of him, as though it had been a sly choice of his, a way of defeating if not the enslaving itch itself then at least the usual outcome of it: embarrassingly curious as to how he had managed this coup against the world, and awarding some credit to herself too for taking his side in the matter.
Except for the iceman there had been no Negroes at all on Mechanic Street when he was a boy, or much of anywhere else in the city beyond the confines of the Sunset district, which at the age of three or four he had named Browntown when he and his mother passed through it on the streetcar. With the other kids on his block he had followed the old long-armed hugely strong iceman in his wagon, waiting for the chunks of hard white-veined ice he would sometimes toss out to them. The cruel tongs with which he clamped the blocks and threw them onto his rubber-caped back. The dripping wagon advertised Coal and Ice, and he used to ponder that, why it was appropriate for one place to sell both, the fiery and the cold, the dirty and the clean.
He pocketed the letter in its envelope, disheartened suddenly, having glimpsed that eager receptive kid, and missing him: lost to him now, he alone left inside his flesh. Wonderful and terrible, how children love the world, and swallow it down daylong in spite of everything, everything.
There could hardly have been a street in the city less appropriate than Mechanic for his mother's house, though she hardly noticed: satisfied to be inappropriate everywhere, walking to market past the battling Polish housewives and the kids (heads cropped close for lice) who played tipcat and rolled smokes in the alleys: she in the remains of some ancient æsthetic costume, of which she had many, and her hair coming down. Buying a frightful yellow newspaper and a tin of Turkish cigarettes at the corner store and then making a telephone call that the whole store overheard, a call perhaps to the school principal to explain her son's absence from class: he standing beside her meanwhile (not as good as she was at assuming invisibility, at believing or pretending to believe that people neither notice nor care much about you) and staring fixedly at his shoes.
Back in their basement, when she lay on the musty divan and smoked her aromatic cigarette and read to him out of the newspaper (atrocious crimes and bizarre fatalities) he found it easier to be on her side against the world. They weren't the only ones on the street (she let him know) who lived without a husband or a father; they were simply the only ones too proud to lie, as the others did, who called themselves Mrs. and claimed to have husbands traveling the world or dead in the war. He wasn't, in fact, too proud to lie, and did lie, at school and on the street; but he was proud of her pride, and took it for his own.
For a long time he believed his mother didn't sleep at night, because she would now and then come into his room in the depths of darkness, wearing the clothes she had worn in the day, and wake him, to give him an orange section or a vegetable pill, or to rub camphorated oil into the wings of his nostrils. Often she was lying on the divan in the same clothes when he got out of bed in the morning. He could tell she had worked late into the night, because on her long table would be the piles of silk flowers she had made. Some of them went for hats; some were for restaurant tables; most were for deathless funeral wreaths. She who was so unhandy otherwise, who rarely even tried to master manual tasks, was magically good at her craft, the miniature blossoms realer than real coming to be within her nearly unmoving fingers as though she conjured them like an illusionist from her palm. Many years later, when he saw a “time-lapse” film of a flower sprouting, growing, putting forth petals and pistils, bowing its heavy head, all in a few seconds, he was made to think in wonder not of Mother Nature but of his own mother at work in the night, her pile of poppies and roses, oxeye daisies, lilies and blue lupines.
* * * *
On an autumn morning when he was eight, nine perhaps, she woke him in the predawn. Instead of dosing him, she urged him gently out of bed and into his chilly knickerbockers. They were going somewhere. Where? To see an old friend of hers, who wanted to talk with him. No, not someone he knew. No, not a doctor. She gave him tea in the kitchen, whose windows were only just blooming gray, then pushed his cap on his head and went out with him into the silent alley.
How had she chosen that morning to begin his education? For sure there was nothing special about the date or the year or the day. He had not just reached the age of reason like the tough Polish boys who went together all on a day to communion, crossing into religious maturity, dressed fatuously in white and lace. Maybe (he thought later) she had picked the day just for being no day in particular. And yet the unguessable workings of his mother's spirit had been in a way the same as a flair for drama: plucking him out of bed without warning for what he intuited was a journey of initiation, a day unlike other days, a
door opening in the wall of diurnality.
(That was how it had been too when one day he came home from school, and she met him at the door, and said to him mildly, Guess who's here? And then held open the kitchen door for him to see sitting at the table a pink-cheeked man with a kind smile and hurt eyes. His father, owner of his home, looking like Herbert Hoover in his tight suit and hard collar, and holding in his lap a big box of blocks. Was it that she thought her son needed no explanation, or couldn't grasp one? Was it that she had none to give, not to herself any more than to him? Or was it that she believed there was something salutary in the shock of sudden knowing? It had imparted to him a lifelong expectation of surprise, a conviction that everything important will come suddenly, leaping on the unwatched back like a predator, and nothing the same afterward: an expectation—he thought, now, this night, in helpless grief—that had caused him to neglect and not notice the very most important things, the things that had been alongside all the while, right in plain sight, his humble and now failing organs for a single instance; no matter, too late, too late.)
He had been surprised to see lamplight in the kitchens along the alley, and women inside making breakfast; he hadn't known life began so early. They had walked out to Mechanic Street and out and up the town.
Above the Mechanic district the climbing streets were filled with houses of decorated red stone or brick, with arches and steps and peaked roofs like those that had come in his box of blocks. He passed one after another of these ramifying places, following his mother in her tatty cloak, abashed by strangeness but not unwilling to miss school. The houses were mostly dark but for the areaways where maids and deliverymen went in and out. One or two of them (it would be the eventual fate of all, as the Heights district slid metaphorically downhill) had been divided up inside into warrens of rooms and apartments, though looking the same outside, and into one of these his mother took him, holding his shoulder now and steering him up stairs and down high-ceilinged corridors to a door she chose.
