by John Crowley
“Well.”
“Novus ordo seclorum,” Axel said. “The pyramid on the dollar.”
“Right.” Why is there a rusticated pyramid on the Great Seal of the United States, surmounted by the mystic eye? Because the Founding Fathers believed in Ægypt too.
It occurred to Pierce that perhaps his book was at bottom an explanation of Axel to himself: of the stories Axel had repeated endlessly to him, man and boy, the Story of Civilization. If every question, every history Axel loved to ponder were swept away, then only the one question would be left, naked as a needle: why did you let me go? The question little Pierce went on asking, no matter how often big Pierce told him the answer.
Axel conceived the idea of walking to Brooklyn, which was well beyond even Pierce’s long legs; and somewhere downtown as evening came on they stopped in one of the low bars Axel favored, where Pierce looked into his wallet, and found it not up to a long crawl.
“Well come back to Brooklyn. We’ll rustle something up. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine.”
This idea appealed to Pierce so little that at length he drew out his credit card (since he could not, would not at any rate, simply send Axel home alone) and he and his father, to Axel’s inexpressible delight, set themselves up in a pleasant wood-paneled restaurant, where large drinks were placed on the white cloth before them. It had struck Pierce before that he was always forced to eat lavishly when he ate on credit, since the cheap places didn’t extend it.
For the remains of the evening, Axel suggested (hemming and hawing a bit, and holding out his glass for wine) that there were in this neighborhood some remarkable new clubs that had opened in recent months. Had Pierce heard of them? Axel laughed, as at the inexplicable turns of human folly. Cowboy and leather, he said, and extremes of histrionic indulgence, nothing hidden, nothing. He mentioned Tiberius’s isle of Capri, and the court of Heliogabalus. Some glorious young men, though, Axel was forced to admit. There was one of these places very nearby, the Seventh Circle, Pierce caught the reference no doubt.
“Axel. Are you real familiar with these places?”
Axel managed an expression of sly indignation. It was just a phenomenon Axel thought would interest Pierce, to whom nothing human was alien, was it? Of course they would not participate, there were many who didn’t. “Just stick with me,” Axel said. “Like Virgil with Dante. You might learn something.”
Pierce declined. He had no particular wish to look upon the incomprehensible lusts of other men. Glad as he was that Axel was getting his share of modern or latter-day fun, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t preferred Axel in the more repressed and guilty mode he had found him in when he had first come down from Noate, in which Axel’s adventures (when described late in the night to Pierce, and probably to his own soul as well) had been rare dramas charged with tragic necessity, and not merely goods he had found on the common counter.
“Actually I’m going to try to pay a call,” Pierce said. “Go visit somebody.”
“Who?” Axel demanded, at once miffed and crestfallen, a look which Pierce doubted any great thespian (as Axel would have put it) could have improved on.
“A woman. Uptown.”
“The one you used to. The Gypsy.”
“Part Gypsy. Yes.”
“Still carrying a torch? Oh Pierce.”
“Oh I suppose,” Pierce said, searching his pockets for a dime. “In my fashion.”
“I have loved thee, Cynara! in my fashion,” Axel gave out, adopting instantly a fin-de-siècle languor. “Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng.”
“‘Been faithful to thee,’” Pierce said, “is how it goes. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Non sum qualis eram. I am not as I was in good Cynara’s golden days,” Axel went on, not to be stopped now, Pierce could hear him going on behind him as he sought the phone. “I have forgot much, Cynara! Gone with the wind …”
He found the phone number, written in her hand on the inside of a matchbook, her seven with the little line through the upright, where had she learned that. He had brought it with him from the Faraways though he had urged himself strongly not to use it, and perhaps he would not have if it hadn’t been for the second bottle of wine.
“All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat. Nightlong within mine arms in love and sleep she lay. O God.”
On the day in March when he had left the city for good, Pierce had got to his knees in his emptied apartment and with absurd solemnity had made a vow: that in his new life he would spend no more of his heart’s energy (to say nothing of his money and his time) on the hopeless and hurtful pursuit of love. No more.
Some men are born eunuchs, some are made eunuchs; Pierce chose celibacy for survival’s sake. Love had almost killed him, and when he awoke and found the dawn was gray, he had decided to save up the little strength he felt he had left to make a life, just for himself. He was hors de combat, and he would shape his own ends hereafter.
She (it was just the one woman who had extracted Pierce’s hopeless oath from him, he had never been a philanderer, hard as he had tried to fling his roses with the throng) had a little apartment uptown to which she had moved from Pierce’s tower of steel and glass; it was an Old Law flat, he understood, in the last unrehabilitated building on a chic block, and cost near nothing. He had never been in it but he could imagine it in detail; a certain amount of his imaginative life was spent there.
“Ah but I was desolate and sick of an old passion,” Axel declaimed, near tears. “Hungry for the lips of my desire.”
It would be lit by candles in peculiar holders (she had not had the electricity turned on, didn’t have the money for a deposit, had no desire to be officially listed anywhere). For a bed there would be a block of foam on pallets rescued from the street, but clothed in faded figured stuffs and piled with souvenir satin pillows where pink sunsets occurred over blue lakes and green pines. The walls too were probably hung with cloth. And everywhere there would be the things she found in rummage sales and junkshops, and resold at a profit, the advertising dolls and costume jewelry, scarves, toys, statuettes of cartoon characters, risque party favors, plastic tortoiseshell, postcards, “smalls” as the dealers called them; they would be arranged in ever-shifting subtle combinations, tableaux, miniature dioramas, accidental-seeming but really as consciously self-referential as a modern novel. There would be (he remembered this combination from her dresser in the apartment they had shared, though perhaps it had been dispersed) a Gypsy cigarette smoker on a painted cocktail tray, offering her pack or herself or both, and a jeweled cigarette holder on the tray, along with a poison ring, an Eiffel Tower and an Empire State Building in pot metal; and a Sphinx, in plaster, which she had painted with rouged cheeks and cat’s eyes, pink claws, and a hooker’s rosebud mouth; and around its neck a little gold watch on a band. Time flies.
He let the phone ring long in this place that he imagined, let it go on ringing after it was evident no one could be there; and even after he hung up it went on ringing for some time within him.
Long past midnight and far from dawn he awoke with a start in his old bedroom in Brooklyn. The wine, maybe; but what he thought of first was Julie Rosengarten, and what he had proposed to her. He felt the seducer’s guilty doubt, that he had promised too much in order to win her, and had been believed; or worse, had not really been believed at all, would not be until he acted on his promises.
He rolled over in the little bed where he no longer fit, and closed his eyes; but soon opened them again and rolled back.
Why should he try to impose this shape on time? For surely he was imposing it. Wasn’t he?
In the room beyond, his father snored and whistled in long classic snores out of funny movies. The old air-conditioner panted out the window, but the air was close, the smell of his old home. Pierce at length got up, and pushed open the casement.
Warm air and the street’s smell; new tall apartment buildings and office towers visible above the street, still alight, having wat
ched through the night. New gleaming futuristic streetlights. Brooklyn had been much renewed since he was a kid here, yet it looked older, worn out; when he was young it had looked fresher. So it seemed.
Frank Walker Barr, his old teacher and mentor, had once written a whole book (Time’s Body) showing how we have always conceived time as having a shape. Maybe in this day and age (Barr had written) the only shape most of us conceive time having is a simple geometry, a big bow-tie at whose infinitesimal knot—the present moment—we stand, with past and future opening out infinitely before and behind us. But other conceptions have been potent at other periods, not only determining how people have imagined history but determining what became of them: Cortez arrives in Mexico just as an old Age (the Mexicans are sure of it) is declining and growing feeble, and a new young Age is waiting to step forth.
Why have we always supposed that time has a shape? Pierce asked the night. Couldn’t it be that we believe time has a shape because it does have a shape?
There was that patient of some famous psychoanalyst he had read about who was tormented terribly by the delusion that he could sense time experiencing its own passing, and that the experience was intensely painful—not to him but to time. That time suffered in the birth and death of every second, the secretion of every daybreak and nightfall.
It was not a dumb idea, not just food for the gullible, though it was maybe not a history: it was something both more and less, a critique, an essay, it was perhaps not even actually a book at all, it was a compound monster, a mammal, a person even, himself or someone like him. Whatever it was its central trope was one rooted deeply (he thought) in the human heart, one of the unremovable ones: An old world dying, and a new world being born; both able just for a moment to be seen at once, like the new moon seen held in the old moon’s arms.
His narrative too was an old one, that had never failed to hold readers, had once held readers through romances many volumes long: The search for something precious, lost or in hiding, waiting to be found. If he failed in the end to deliver it, so had those old romances sometimes, and they were still held in honor.
So he had everything in ready now, stores of weird knowledge prepared, notes piling up, pencils metaphorically sharpened.
Why then did he feel so heartsick this morning, and so unready to begin?
He was afraid, is what it was.
For it now seemed to him clear—more clear in the dry light of hangover—that in fact the passage time was over; it had come and gone, and it had left the world unchanged. More or less the same.
Yes not long ago the world had turned over in its sleep, muttering, and seemed to wake; yes he had seen it shiver, startled by the hot flashes of some sort of climacteric. He had seen it, it had passed right through the open windows of the apartment across the river which he had shared with Julie Rosengarten. But after that—had it not grown more obvious with every passing week, every daily newspaper?—Time had just gone on continuously opening his packages; and none of them were turning out to be what he had been guessing, or was being paid to prophesy, they would be. The new was in fact looking a lot like the old; shabbier even, like the new horizon above his old home street; deeply ordinary. And as the new passage time evanesced, the old one started to look less convincing too; the more he learned about it, the less any sort of an age it seemed to be, the less subsumable under any myth, including his new one. It was probably just history after all.
Maybe if he had been able to write his book as fast as he had conceived it. But it would be months, years, till it was done, and already it was beginning to seem shamefully belated.
What Kraft somewhere said can happen to books: their fires can go out, eternal truths whose day is over, turned to ashes, gone with the wind. It was happening to his own even before he had seen it into print, and reaped his reward, turned his trick.
No no no.
Julie still felt herself to be living in a time of manifestation, and she had said to him that lots of others did too: the time when the next age becomes visible, mankind coming out of the dark wood, finding the bright path unrolling before, the path over the hill, where the sun is rising: she had suggested such a picture for his book’s cover. But she had always stood there, for as long as he had known her she had stood just there, always expecting dawn. Pierce envied her, sometimes. She had talked to him of other books that also prophesied wonders: but he had seen that they too were already wrong. The time was over when all things are possible. He had actually felt for a while now that, despite his luck and the happy changes he had wrought in his life, he had somehow entered onto some sort of dull plain, a featureless changeless wasteland where progress was impossible to measure. Not a wasteland out there; out there was still as fruitful, really, still as full of this and that; a wasteland in here, in his own interior country.
Frank Barr had once pointed out to his class in the History of History a particular feature of wastelands in myth and literature: a wasteland is made not so much of barrenness as of repetition, pointless, endless, mechanical repetition. A wasteland even if what is endlessly repeated is the story of the wasteland redeemed, and made to flower.
What he precisely was not, Pierce knew, was a hero. He hadn’t ever felt himself to be as much at the center of things as that; did not always feel himself to be in the center even of his own existence. And anyway the moment was passed when it was possible to believe that the world is made of stories.
But if that moment of possibility was gone (was not anything but illusion now, and therefore had not ever been anything but illusion), then what was it that had come close to him in his sitting room as he looked out at the roses? What had brushed by him, and touched his cheek?
Only the wind of its passage away.
The powers of that age looked down upon him where he stood. They shook their great heads slowly, and tsk’d their great tongues against their teeth. Yes doubtless it would take much to forge the man into anything; he would have to pass through some sort of refining fire before he was capable of carrying any precious thing into the future. To those who have, much will be given, even to abundance; but from those who have not will be taken even the little that they have. He was likely to lose all, every knowledge, every certainty, even the companionable regard he held himself in, even the comfort he still took in the taste of his own nature.
Face front, those aged powers wanted to call out to him, in need of redemption themselves. Wake up, they wanted to shout. But even if they had spoken, Pierce would not have been able to hear them; for they could not, as yet, be heard.
II
NATI
ONE
Books, like certain gems, can be fragile despite their great density and weight. As pearls darken against the skin of certain antipathetic wearers, there are books that time will darken; time will dissolve a book entirely, as vinegar will dissolve a diamond, whose name is the name of indestructibility, adamant.
Books disintegrate; their fires go out, which burned the senses of readers once, and leave only cinders: hard to see how they could ever have been read with reverent ardor. It comes to seem they were never read at all, that they were never even really written, that writers only accumulated them, covering pages with what looked like prose, numbering their chapters, marking their subsections, seeing them into print, where they started fires in the minds of those who only handled them, and dreamed of their insides. Amphitheatrum sapientiæ æternæ. Basil Valentinus his Triumphant Chariot of Antimony. Utriusque cosmi historiæ.
It can’t really be so, that people were so very different from the way they are now, and loved and needed so much inert printed paper. So it must be that once the books were different.
Which ones, for instance?
A lover of books who walked in the yard of St. Paul’s in London in the spring of the year 1583, looking among the bookstalls there for something truly new, passing up the tables of religious tracts and tales of horrible murder uncovered, the stalls of stationers who issued almanacs and books
of prophecy mostly outdated or those who sold sober histories of the late wars of the barons, would have been able to put his hand on a folio volume in Latin, no date or place of publication, though it looked like an English book. Ars reminiscendi et in phantastico campo exarandi, and much more on a crowded title page.
The art of remembering, and how to lay it out on an imaginary field. Wrapped in parchment covers, sewn but unbound, its pages uncut and therefore not easily searchable, caveat emptor. The book lover (this one is a young Scot of good family, his name is Alexander Dicson, he is in the service of Sir Philip Sidney) has seen books of this kind before, books which seem to offer instruction in some useful art, how to remember, how to write in secret codes, how to find ores and gems in the earth, but which to the reader who persists begin to offer more, as though stirring out of bonds of sleep.
The Scot even knew of this art of remembering, though he had never practiced it: places, and things cast on them, by which the order, say, of a sermon or a lecture might be remembered. In this book the place is termed subjectus and the thing adjectus.
There was also included a book of “seals,” whatever they might be, ad omnium scientiarum et artium inventionem dispositionem et memoriam, for discovering and arranging as well as remembering all arts and sciences. How could memory discover knowledge? Was not a seal a shutting and not an opening?
Then an Explanation of the thirty seals. Then a Seal of Seals. Last.
Per cabalam, naturalem magiam, artes magnas atque breves whispered the title page in its smallest type. By cabala, natural magic, great arts and small ones. Shifting from foot to foot Master Dicson dug through the pages, glimpsing diagrams, Hebrew letters, the Adam drawn in a square, the Adam drawn in a circle. He pulled open his purse (the money it was supposed to pay his month’s lodgings) and raised his eyebrows inquiringly to the bookseller.
