Love Sleep

by John Crowley

  O you haunters of bookstalls and shops, you searchers in libraries; who conceive of entering in at some big title page and not thereafter ever returning—one of those title pages where wise putti display the bones of the heavens, the Divine Name in Hebrew sheds effulgence over Earth, Hermes puts his finger to his lips, the Seven Arts are spread over the floor (viol, compasses, chisel and mallet) and a Searcher in robes draws a triangle, gazing at the figured stars—no matter how often you are disappointed, turned back perforce into your own chair in your old cold city, there are always further books, always other doors, shake their knobs and pound for admission. Whose book anyway is this? Master Dicson turned back to the forematter. Dedication, to the French Ambassador to England. Then an address to the Vice Chancellor of Oxford and to its celebrated doctors and teachers:

  Philotheus Jordanus Brunus Nolanus, Doctor (but of a more recondite theology), Professor (but of a pure and more innocent wisdom), noted in the best academies of Europe, a philosopher lauded and honorably received everywhere, a stranger nowhere but among the barbarous and low, waker of sleeping souls, scourge of presumptuous and obdurate ignorance, herald of a general benevolence; who does not approve the Italian more than the Briton, the male more than the female, the miter more than the crown, the senator’s toga more than the general’s armor, the cowled monk more than the layman, but only him who is the more peaceable, civil, faithful, useful; who cares nothing for the anointed head, the cross-thumbed forehead, the holy-water-washed hands, the circumcised member, but—what his face can indeed show—the cultured mind and soul. Who is hated by the spewers of foolishness and the hypocrites, but sought out by the honest, those willing to study …

  What on earth, or rather who. He shut up the big book, his now in any case, and went home through the crowds of the barbarous and the low, feeling vaguely fleeced. Who was this Bruno Nolano he had taken up, or been taken by?

  He was just then (he had been other things) a gentleman servant in the household of Michel de Castelnau, Seigneur de Mauvissière, the ambassador of King Henri III of France to the court of Elizabeth. He had been recommended to the Ambassador by the King himself, who had made Bruno his reader extraordinaire, and who had for a time been entranced by the Italian, by his powers, by the possibilities he shadowed forth.

  So Giordano Bruno Nolano, born under a kindlier sky, had crossed the channel and come into this country, more barbarous and dirtier than some, and closer to Thule than he had got before, closer than he liked to be. He had a room in the French Embassy on Salisbury Court, near the river, a room high up under the eaves, out whose window he could watch the river traffic, the foreign ships and the merchantmen, and see the weather come in too, gray rain and pale sun alternating.

  His duties, insofar as he had any that could be named, were to be in attendance at dinner, to be amusing and learned, to fill out the Ambassador’s suite when the Ambassador went to court. So much could be said aloud. He learned to read English in a few weeks’ time and to understand it when it was spoken, at least as it was spoken at court. No one but the Ambassador and his children’s private tutor, the Italian John Florio, knew this about the gentiluomo servante in the upper storey. He committed the greater part of Florio’s dictionary of English and Italian to memory by transforming the words inwardly into dancers, the Italians the men, the English their ladies, so that whenever he summoned an Italian word in his mind (tradutto, all in black, with a poison-ring on his finger) there would come along his partner (treachery, her gown sewn with eyes and tongues). He never learned to say many words; he only knew them by sight, he knew their faces.

  When the Ambassador and his party returned late to Salisbury Court, late from a dinner at some magnate’s house on the Strand, or from an investiture or an entertainment at court, he would dismiss his other attendants, order wine brought to his private chamber, and there he and John Florio would sit and listen while the Nolan recounted what had taken place.

  —The order at table, he said. Signor Leicester at the Queen’s right. Signor Burleigh at the Queen’s left. Milord Howard. Signor, signor, Raleigh.

  He could see them all well enough, arranged by physiognomic type around the table, a menagerie of cunning and talkative gentlefolk, only the weird names he could not always say aloud. Florio prompted him, as often confusing as helping.

  —At the third hour, he continued. Signor Leicester and Signor Walsingham depart for one quarter of an hour. They go out through the arras by the Queen’s door.

  —Had the Queen spoken yet of Sir Philip Sidney’s embassy to France?

  —Not then, not then. After the two returned. Signor Leicester danced. Walsingham also, not so well. A galliard. He took the Queen’s hand. Then the hour struck. Four.

  —So, the Ambassador said. Leicester and he spoke together. And then he had opportunity to tell the Queen. I wonder.

  The Nolan only sat, not wondering, only observing the entertainment at court proceeding in the miniature galleries and halls he had constructed for them within his memory palaces, the newest and therefore still the smallest of the fourteen distinct royal, civic, and ecclesiastical courts, some of them in disrepair, some shuttered, which he had had occasion to assemble in his memory as he went from country to country.

  What astonished the Ambassador about his servant’s accountings, besides their minute exactness, was that though he had stood in only one place or a few places at the receptions and affairs, he could tell the story as though he had been everywhere at once: when he retold the events, they seemed not to be merely remembered but to recur within him, and he could change his place in them at will. It was tedious sometimes to listen to his accounts, since he had no idea what was and what was not significant (though he was learning). It was more often illuminating. The King had suggested that it might be.

  How the Nolan was able to do the thing that he did for his master (and other things that he did not choose to tell of), his master did not know. The King had described Bruno’s arts in a cloudy way; when Bruno himself explained his techniques, smiling as he talked, as though a friendly demeanor could make his matter easier, the Ambassador had tried to listen. The Ambassador’s childhood tutor had used the same face when he had tried to teach the boy astronomy, and Bruno got no further than that man had. For his own part, the Ambassador remembered things by making a memorandum, or asking his secretary to make one. He had heard of men, sometimes mere children, who could do long sums in their heads almost without thinking or tell the date of Ash Wednesday in any past or future year. He supposed the Italian was a person of that sort; he did not see how mere practice in an art could accomplish what Bruno accomplished.

  The Seigneur de Mauvissiere kept his strange servant awake and at work for longer than usual on this May night. He was troubled; something was afoot, something which he was not privy to and which he yet stood at the center of: that was the feeling he could not shake. He was being used, and he didn’t like it. But by whom?

  —The order at departing, Bruno said.

  He counted backward on his fingers, starting with the smallest of the left hand. Signor Leicester, Signor Henry Sidney, Signor Raleigh. Milord Henry Howard. Signor Walsingham, who stooped to pick up your glove.

  —No, said the Ambassador. That was my own servant.

  —No, said Bruno.

  The Nolan’s head had fallen back against the chair now, and his eyes were closed, though his hands clasped before him were still alert (two fingers raised like a steeple). Whose glove was that?

  —It was a pale glove, he said. Of kid, the color of a hand.

  —No, said the Ambassador.

  He could see it all clearly from where he stood amid the Ambassador’s suite. Walsingham the fox, Leicester the goat, the phoenix Queen. Earl Howard the goggling fish. It was fox-faced Walsingham who picked up the. No.

  —It leapt when he took it from the floor. It was a severed hand. A right hand, severed for treason. You have been betrayed to Walsingham.

  —Betrayed, how, by who
m?

  —The plot is discovered, Bruno said. No: About to be discovered. Those whom you trusted have been betrayed to the English, and will betray you in turn.

  —But there is no plot, said the Ambassador.

  Michel de Castelnau closed his own hands as in prayer, and then lifted them to his lips; his troubled eyes looked within, reviewing his own actions, his household. It was past midnight. In his apartment above his wife lay, sleeping he hoped, recovering from a miscarriage, her second.

  —There is no plot, he said.

  There was a plot. There was always a plot, the same plot, it only thickened now and then into action as men’s plans and their courage hardened. It was a plot to invite Catholic troops into the country to remove the heretic Queen of England from the throne and seat there instead her cousin, Mary, formerly Queen of France and now Queen of Scotland, a Catholic whatever else she might be, and for some time now Elizabeth’s prisoner.

  Bernardino de Mendoza, Ambassador of the Most Catholic King of Spain; Cardinal William Allen, the exiled Englishman at the Papal court in Rome; the Pope, Sixtus V, who had forbidden Catholics to obey their heretic Queen; the Duke of Guise and the burning hearts of the Catholic League in France—this current mutation of the plot involved them all. Firm plans were being laid, numbers of troops and their dispositions and embarkation points, the names of those marked for seizure and death.

  The French Ambassador had not been told of it. He was firmly Catholic, and Protestant enthusiasm frightened and disgusted him; but he had seen St. Bartholomew’s Night in Paris, Protestants slain on his doorstep by Catholic fanatics, the gutters flowing with blood, and it had darkened his spirit for good. He was not reliable; too soft, too politique, to be entrusted with the details of a plot to murder Elizabeth and forcibly reconvert her realm to the True Faith. He didn’t know that his house was used as a meeting-place, and that certain English gentlemen who took refuge in his garden, who heard Mass with him in his chapel (the English could not forbid it there), were deeply concerned in the plot.

  He wrote often in cipher to Mary, in her imprisonment in Sheffield, cheering her with news of his negotiations for her release and return to her own realm of Scotland, transmitting news from her brother-in-law the King of France, sending money and jewels from devoted liegemen in England and France. He didn’t know that his letters were intercepted and read before they were sent on, not always unchanged.

  He didn’t know that his personal secretary (a Frenchman with money troubles named Courcelles) was in the pay of Walsingham and the English, and communicated to them whatever he saw and heard and read in the Ambassador’s house and papers; or that his chaplain, who said his Masses, who consecrated the Bread and placed it on the Ambassador’s tongue, was also an agent of the English, and told all that he saw, all that he heard, even in the darkness of the confessional.

  On the 29th, this priest wrote to Elizabeth’s chief of spies, Sir Francis Walsingham: “Monsieur Throckmorton dined this night at the ambassador’s house. A Catholic. He recently conveyed 1500 écus sol to the Queen of Scots, on the Ambassador’s account … At midnight the Ambassador was visited by Milord Henry Howard, a Roman Catholic and a Papist,” who entered privily through the garden, and awakened the Ambassador with a handful of sand thrown against his window, to talk to him about saving a Scots Catholic who was staying in the Embassy from being imprisoned; with such tasks the Ambassador was trusted.

  The Italian gentiluomo servante was not mentioned in anyone’s dispatches anywhere; no one attempted to recruit him. He talked too much and too loudly. The chaplain in particular avoided him: when he felt Bruno’s potent attention turned on him, he made excuses, vanished, hid in his little vestry and sweated, running through in his mind every move he had made that day, looking for the slip Bruno might have noticed. But Bruno’s stare was only a fascinated repulsion, frank appreciation of a specimen. For Giordano Bruno had, himself, been an Italian monk; his fingers were still consecrated, nothing could wash the chrism from them; and he knew a bad priest when he smelled one.

  —You suffer fools gladly, Bruno would say to the Ambassador, late, late in the Ambassador’s private chamber. I would not. I cannot.

  And the Ambassador’s narrow ascetic face would smile a little.

  —You are a philosopher, he said. You see farther. Perhaps. These troubles are as nothing sub specie æternitatis. And yet we are flesh and blood, we are here, and the work is ours to do now. Let us talk now of the reception at court for the Prince of Laski …

  So John Florio would pick up his pen, and Bruno would lace his fingers before him, a sarcastic smirk on his face, we will play this game if we must. There were few men the Nolan had loved as fully as his huge heart was capable of loving: the Seigneur de Mauvissière was one of them. So he would give him now the order of the guests arriving for the reception, and the nature of the compliments given, the asides made and the faces of those who made the asides, the winners at the games and the prizes awarded them, the unspoken currents of fear, malice, unawareness, and suspicion that held all of them together like a purse-seine.

  The French Ambassador did not understand how Bruno was able to do what he did; but Alexander Dicson knew. For he had read (as the Ambassador had not, to whom it was dedicated) Bruno’s book on memory.

  The way to remember things is to establish irremovably within your intellect a series of places, like the parts of a large building—the arches, the windows, passages, stairs, pillars, galleries and even the gardens and barns. You may commit to memory the parts of a real edifice, or you may invent a more spacious and complex one of your own. Onto the places or parts (subjecti) you put images (adjecti) of the things to be remembered, in the order in which you wish to remember them. The images are to be cast in such a way as to excite the feelings, for things that are striking or beautiful or disgusting are more easily remembered than things that are bland and uninteresting.

  Very well; Dicson practiced this, using the few spaces and partitions of his room at the Ox and Pearl, and it seemed to do what was promised. Then the way grew harder.

  When your memory places have all been filled with interesting and important matter that you do not wish to evict, more places can be added; on your travels collect new places, attach them with simple bridges or portals to the earlier places; or contain the old places within squares or streets of new ones. Your memory grows, and nothing is lost.

  Was it possible, Dicson wondered, to use the art of memory to retain and recall the rules of the art of memory? To build houses and construct images to remind of the rules for building houses and constructing images? He had not yet even reached the Seals themselves. He got out paper and ink, to make notes, and put them away again.

  The first Seal is the Field: the Field is memory itself, which is not different from the vis imaginativa, the power of imagination. Look out upon this Field, its many many folds and convolutions; for though it seems plain and patent we know how many hidden places it contains. In those places are the ten thousand, the virtually infinite number of things my eyes and ears and other senses have put there since I was a boy, every scene of childhood, every noble or foolish person, every dog, star, stone, rose. It is the chaos of Anaximander. I know what things are contained there but I cannot grasp any, or if I do I cannot tell what I will come away with, jewel, dog-turd, something useful, something I do not need. How will I bring order to infinite memory?

  The second seal is the Chain. Dicson began to understand. All things, whether we perceive it immediately or do not, are linked, lower to higher, preceding to following, first to next to next. Aries acts on Taurus, Taurus on Gemini, Gemini on Cancer: the Zodiac is a chain; each of its links is made of smaller chains, ad infinitum. Everything has its place. Thus also is memory ordered.

  Dicson slit the pages with his knife as he devoured bread and cheese and the text. Cut bread, cut a page. The Seals now grew more difficult.

  The Peregrinator, who walks through the different chambers of the memory hous
e, gathering what he needs from what was stored for other reasons. The Table, where twenty-three people sit, whose names begin with the letters of the alphabet. It only slowly dawned on Dicson that he was to remember individual words by means of these people, who were to change places with great rapidity, spelling out words in his mind as his tongue formed them, impossible. But the seal called the Century employed not twenty-three but one hundred boys and girls (they should be young, attractive, friends of yours, Bruno said, faces well known to you; Dicson doubted he knew a hundred people’s faces), and they were to stand in the places of memory, ready to carry emblems, play parts, a laughing helpful cohort at your service always. Always. For some reason tears rose to Dicson’s eyes.

  There was the Garden of Circe, where the four elements mutated and changed through seven houses belonging to the planets, generating as they went not only all species of animals and plants but all the human types that resembled or shared the nature of those animals, the hot-dry sun-loving Lion, his yellow Dandelion, his planet Sol, the King whose nature and face is like his. The elemental flux of Anaximander took shape and order in the memory-artist’s mind.

  All things proceed from lower to higher, and beginning with the lowest we may proceed to the highest. Dicson on the stair midway to the top dared not look down; he felt with his foot for the next stair, arms out like a blind man. The twenty-second Seal was the Fountain and the Mirror. The mirror reflects the fountain: the bounty of eternity gushes forth unceasing, an uncountable tumble of this and that, but the mirror, Mind, contains every droplet exactly as it is produced. Why are we troubled, why are we confused? There is but one Knowledge, placed in one Subject.

  Unable to read more than a few pages together before he had to rise, giddy and overcome; finally unable to take in more than a page, a subsection, a paragraph, before lifting his surfeited eyes, Dicson approached the Seal of Seals.