by John Crowley
Well he came down from there, boy, from that aerie.
He bit the pencil’s eraser, studying the crude roller coaster he had drawn. In the Up Passage Year before that one, it had been not himself alone on the upward and outward move but the city and the nation, belled baubled and crying aloud. The whole world, from Paris to Prague. Almost as though …
Yes. Almost as though.
He saw, all in a moment, how he could make a subtle improvement or epicyclic addition to the theory of Climacterics which would increase its power tenfold, one that Mike Mucho had perhaps not thought of, or had not noticed was latent in his scheme.
What happens when the rising curve in the seven-year Cycle in a person’s life (the life say of a thinker or a doer) coincides with violent stirrings or upheavals in the common life of a society? Then the liver of that life—all those in fact who stand just then at the same point on the same cycles—will perceive a revolution of immense magnitude occurring unstoppably all around them, the Wave of History cresting, where others standing at different points on their cycles perceive only confusion, mess, ignorant armies. In fact those people who are on the rise might make a revolution just because they see one, through the spectrum of their own rainbowing climacteric goggles, without which nothing at all can be seen.
For of course it would be natural for souls subject to these cycles to see the whole history of the world in cyclic terms, and to place their own historical moment on the cycle wherever they themselves happen just then to be standing. Cycles of ups and downs, possibilities and retreats, would account for the convictions we all have at different times in our lives—that the recent past is a dull closed book but the present is full of stirring possibility without limits, or contrariwise that this decade is jejune, a fabric of scraps and tatters, a falling off from the good old days. Cycles would account, in fact, for the oceanic and unchallengeable conviction that the world (“the world,” all this, human life in aggregate) is really made up of these vast shifts, climb climax and decline, each one separating us from the older world forever, except for our altered and unreliable memories, which are part of the new world and not the old.
Yes! That’s all it was, the individual life interpreting the whole life of the world in the only terms it had, and reinterpreting it as we roll along the cycle, the terms shifting from happy expectation (Up Passage Year) through confident power for change (Plateau Period) through accumulating contradiction and conflict (Down Passage Year) down to gloomy prison of repression and refusal to change (Bottom Period).
And whenever time and the soul that perceives it approach together the median line (as Pierce would soon be approaching it), that’s the Passage Time: then there comes that wind of possibility, that blows always along the frontier between Then and Now, between Here and There. Then new gods are born, great dæmons who assemble themselves out of the failing limbs of older and smaller ones; then appalling secrets are imparted to the soul, concealed histories of the world, the names of the Archons. Then we do magic, or fall foul of it.
God it was nothing but psychology, it was inside and not outside in the world; probably you would not even be able to imagine that once the world had worked in a different way unless you understood, however inchoately, that your own self had. As maybe Kraft had done when writing that last book, headed for death and for the Grand Climacteric at once. Maybe his last book was really a sort of autobiography. So maybe was Pierce’s; not a history of the world but of the soul, its chutes and ladders, strivings and failings, taking place against the of course eternal and changeless earth and sky out there.
He rolled a cigarette, gratified, feeling the solid satisfaction of the euhemerist on reducing a myth to sense, without having to give it up.
Robbie, who sat at the daybed’s other end in just his shorts, smiled at his father’s happy thought; then he lifted his silver flute to his lips, and lowered his long-lashed eyes to play.
That day at midday Pierce got a call from Rose Ryder.
“I don’t know about you, Moffett,” she said, in a tone he could suppose was teasing but couldn’t actually interpret. “I don’t know about you.”
“What.”
“All that about magic. I don’t know.”
Oh all that. What exactly did she.
“Well. Weird dreams for one thing.” She laughed lightly, low. “For the past three nights I have been having dreams about magic creatures. And these dreams are very hard to tell from reality. You know? That kind. I dream I go in to sit on the pot, and there’s a little girl there, an angel sort of, and I have to brush her away in order to go. She just sort of titters at me. Others, too. Then I wake up and see them in the next room, doing things.”
“You wake up and see them?”
“Well I dream I do.”
“Doing things?”
“Their own business. Like mice.”
“Well,” Pierce said. “That’s not so bad. They could be doing things to you.”
“That’s another thing,” she said in the same probably teasing possibly accusing tone. He guessed he knew what she meant by this iteration, and he pondered some replies. Before he could choose one, she began to tell him about an incident that had taken place in The Woods, which bore or maybe didn’t bear some relation to the day they had spent together and her subsequent or consequent dreams. There had been an encounter with a patient, unsettling, fatidic; her superiors hadn’t understood her tricky position; someone had offered her a casual insult.
“I guess I don’t completely follow,” he said when her story drifted to a halt. He seemed to have been presented with a problem by her, or a difficulty, to solve or at least comment intelligently on, and he had not caught the point. The story was loosely wound up, like a skein of mismatched yarns. The conviction came to him, he seemed now to have evidence enough for it, that this Rose was a weirdo. The longer he talked to her, the more remote she grew, even her voice beginning to sound artificial and far-off, signaling more than speaking.
“Uh huh. Hm. I see.”
Man, he thought. To take up this would mean many hours of tedium, only fitfully alight. “I’ve been thinking, by the way,” he said, “about Climacterics,” change the subject to one more discussable.
“O God,” she said.
“It really is, you know a real old system of signposting a life. You know that.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Why we reach our majority at twenty-one instead of twenty.”
“Sure. I think maybe people instinctively felt it.”
“Seven,” he said, “is the Age of Reason. In Catholic dogma. The age after which you are held responsible for sin.”
“Huh,” she said. “Really? Well, see, right there.”
“Amid the Etruscans,” he said (he had only lately remembered this, the references were turning up one after another like fruit on a slot machine), “men were considered ready for public office at thirty-five. The Romans adopted that from them. We adopted it from the Romans. Which is why you can’t be president till you’re seven-times-five years old.”
“Really. Huh. Listen can you hold on while I get a pencil?”
“Sure.”
Where was she? He could hear, faintly, birdsong on her end. The Etruscans, he thought, had actually counted in fives, five years to a lustrum, never mind.
“Say again?” she said, returning.
He did. He had thought once that he might make a living in the country by setting up a shop, dispensing history to those who needed it. As who, who after all did not. They slipped again into hesitant inconsequentialities. He wondered what he was doing, as perhaps she did herself. They made another date, though. Closing suddenly at the end of the exchange like horse-traders who had only been pretending to talk about the weather. Pierce cradled the phone carefully, and for a long time sat not thinking of anything: sat as though with his back to a door against which many thoughts were pressing for entrance.
He had lunch at the Donut Hole, beneath the fly-stuck fan th
at spooned the humid air. He didn’t sit in the booth he had shared with Rose Ryder on the Fourth of July, but in a booth from which that booth could be seen. Empty now.
He found he had paid his bill and left the little cafe without really participating in the process, and that he stood now in River Street facing the Blackbury. He shrugged, and walked out across the bridge that crossed to South Blackbury, the less populous shore, that ran along the river southward, lined with factories and rows of workers’ houses and rusting water towers. Before this though there was a little row of two-story stores, a bar, a barber, places that seemed to be able to live in suspended animation off the stored resources of other decades. One was a sort of department store. It had wide windows in which a few dresses, bolts of fabric, toys were displayed, bearing hand-lettered price tags; glass doors, framed in wood painted many times, led within. Pierce didn’t remember it being here before. That was not, probably, because it had not been here before, though indeed there were streets and houses hereabouts so gratifying to his senses, so useless to the world, that they did seem to be of that kind that only appear before lost travelers once in a century.
He went in.
There was but one clerk, an elderly woman with a silver chain to her glasses, busy with her merchandise. He saw he would be alone with her, a situation that usually made him intensely uncomfortable, but which now did not. He walked in the coolness, soothed and happy, around the big tables where shirts and bags and perfumes were displayed, the overstock in the wide drawers of glossy wood beneath.
“Hot day.”
“Yes it is.”
“Anything I can help you with?”
“Oh,” Pierce said.
He did not need a bow tie, a pair of boxer shorts, sock suspenders. Yet he would have liked to spend much time here. At last he chose a chambray work shirt of honest blue, and brought it to the counter.
“On sale,” the woman said, as pleased as he was himself, it seemed, to be here in the untroubled quiet. He noticed on the crowded counter a basket of colored scarves thrown together. They were a dollar apiece. Pierce took a corner of one at random and pulled it out. A foot square. The clerk lowered her glasses, watching Pierce as he chose one, another, another. He could not have said what criteria he used, but he knew which ones he did not want. Not this one with bulldogs’ mugs; not this one with yachting flags. When he had a cloudy pile of four, he handed them to the clerk.
“Oh don’t fold them,” he said. “Please. Just put them in a box. Can you.”
“Sure,” she said placidly, unsurprised.
He went out into the heat, the shirt and the white box in a bag; stood for a moment, surprised again to find himself where he was; and turned back toward the Jambs, back over the River Street bridge, down to the library. He went up the library steps, thinking it was possible that Rose might be inside, at her work; then thinking it unlikely; then deciding it was unwise anyway to come upon her now. He turned back down, and nearly collided with Val, who had been coming up behind him and had not expected him to reverse direction suddenly.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey yourself. Supposed to ascend on the right.”
She looked at him warily for half a moment to be sure he intended a joke, and then laughed. They shuffled momentarily before each other, two big people in an elephant’s mating dance, till Val got by. If he had not been filled with other thoughts, Pierce might have noticed the big book she had in her arms, and glimpsed the title, but he didn’t. He didn’t recognize its purplish morocco binding either, for the binding on the copy the State Librarian of Kentucky, that pythoness, had sent him was bound differently, in olive buckram. Still he would have taken it from Val and discovered what it was, if he had noticed the complex hieroglyph stamped on its cover, a seal of silence and revelation that he knew.
And if he had taken it from her, and in wonder opened it, would it not very likely have fallen open (in that age of the world, when Coincidence was so strong a god) right to the page from which Val had read to Rosie in the Volcano—that verso page where Plato was quoted on Eros? He is not to be confused with the beautiful beloved, though men often make this mistake; rather his appearance presages the appearance of the beloved. He is the spirit who inspires love, who makes love unrefusable … And wouldn’t he have known then what had siezed him, known it was already past escaping, and thus perhaps have escaped?
He didn’t take it from her. That age was passing. Val’s arm was over the hieroglyph of the Monas stamped on the book’s cover, and Pierce didn’t see it, and this time it didn’t call to him.
She came to collect him (she was driving, of course), and they went up to a place on the mountain and had dinner on a broad deck overlooking the confluence of the rivers (the Shadow, the Blackbury) as day turned to night with long reluctance. She talked of her youth, how she had been restless but good, and only later got a little wild.
“Wild,” he said. “Now it’s an odd thing, because …”
“Not so wild,” she said. “Really. Comparatively.”
“Because once, you know, in Shakespeare’s time say, when a man called a woman wild—a poet anyway—it meant she was chaste.”
“Oh yes?”
“Yes,” he said. “Wild was chaste, like Diana’s handmaids. Uncatchable. Untamed.” He poured her wine. “The lover set out to tame the wild. It was the tame one who came when she was called.”
“Huh.” She was listening carefully.
“Who came to eat from his hand. The poet’s. Willing to come. To take the bit,” said Pierce, and drank. “Funny, huh?”
“Funny,” she said.
They talked about The Woods, a place unimaginable to Pierce. She had taken work there somewhat as an underling, earning a college credit in social work and getting work experience useful in counseling or teaching, where she seemed to be heading, without a lot of enthusiasm Pierce thought. And it had begun to seem that she might lose the job anyway. The Woods was not in healthy shape financially.
“Because a lot of the need for a sort of retreat like that has gone away. Not entirely. But maybe there are too many to share the business. So they’ve been trying to develop other resources up there.”
“Like …”
“They offer these week-long sensitivity-training sessions for men. And self-esteem and reorientation workshops for women who are say going back into the job market.”
“For men must weep and women must work,” Pierce quipped.
“It’s real important,” she said, as though she meant “unimportant.” Important, unimportant. “And then there’s the special project in healing.”
“The what?”
“A little core group has gotten interested in this,” she said, her eyes losing focus in a certain way he was beginning to log, without being able fully to interpret; one thing he thought it sometimes reflected was other men, passing peripherally through her thoughts, associated with the topic she spoke about. “Non-traditional approaches. Or more traditional you might say compared to therapy.”
“There are a lot of those.” Pierce envisioned astrological medicine, Ficinian mood-alteration by means of solarian plants, music, colors. Surely not.
“Well that was the idea at first. But it’s gotten narrowed down. Everybody’s gotten real interested in this one guy. A Christian. He’s come back twice.”
“And he’s a healer? What, Christian Science? Or faith healing?”
“Well I’m not sure,” she said. “I haven’t been invited to be part of it. It’s just being a Christian, I think. Healing, you know, like Jesus. I mean I know he says you have to be a Christian.”
“To heal or to be healed?”
“Dunno.” She looked at him levelly. “Is that something you could be interested in?”
“No,” he said. “Not even to get healed.” He rolled a cigarette. “I was raised Catholic,” he said. “I think that functions as some kind of inoculation. After that it’s almost impossible to become any other kind of Christian. It m
ay immunize against other belief-systems too. I don’t know.”
“Magic,” she said. “Don’t you believe in magic?”
He inhaled tobacco smoke, and breathed it out in mystic calm. “No,” he said.
“But you think it works.”
He said nothing.
Rose ran her finger around the edge of her wineglass, and a faint ghostly cry arose. “If you knew a lot about it,” she said, “as much as you know—I’d think you’d be tempted to try it. If I knew a lot about it I’d give it a try.”
“You would?”
“Maybe I could be an apprentice. You teach me what you know.”
“You could,” he said. “You could sit at my feet.”
She regarded him for a time, her head nodding ever so slightly first for a moment to one side, then to the other, a small smile on her lips, as though (Pierce thought) she listened first to the good angel on her right, then the bad angel on her left, unwilling to choose between them.
“The training is long,” he said. “And terribly arduous.”
“But you do know,” she said.
He considered. He could say he didn’t know. In a sense he didn’t. She waited. With a sensation of stepping into dark water, he said:
“The magician does what he wants by knowing the inner workings of things. He knows the big general things that influence everybody—the stars, first of all, I mean the planets, the big forces that control us and make us what we are. He would be able to just look at me and say I was Saturnian. For instance. Under Saturn.”
“How?”
“Signs. Emanations. Smells. I don’t entirely …”
“Well you don’t know me, Moffett.”
He looked at her without irony, fully and frankly, and for a moment she grew still. What he knew of her had not been picked up by occult means, but only by his sensitive melancholic’s antenna pulling in the faint hint that Rosie Rasmussen dropped, and acting on it. All magic is illusion.
“What his perception gives him,” Pierce went on, “is that he knows what images he should project in order to compel the soul he wants to capture.”
