Somnium

by Steve Moore

  I ate my dinner, smiled at Cynthia far too weakly, then came back up to my room, and stumbled on the stairs. I wrote to Liz, and sent her all the Somnium pages I had copied; but wrote as carefully as I could. Told her that as soon as I had finished writing, I’d be on the coach; and when I was returned I’d make up to her for all the time she’d missed me; for every kiss she thought I owed her, I would give her nine; and as for hugs, they simply would not stop at all. I told her, joking, of my envy for her mirror and offered then to stand there in its stead and tell her how she looked, in any state of dress she wished (but always would I praise her beauty). I told her many other things besides, though all of love and quite how sweet she is; but of myself I did not say a word. I thought it better not to, lest she think I have a brain-fever. I signed it with ten thousand kisses, told her to imagine them all placed exactly where she liked; then paid Tom Watkins far too much to walk my letter down the hill halfway, and leave it at the Red Lion. And then I slept again till supper; whitebait carted up here from the Thames. I knew that Cynthia had cooked my portion with her own sweet hand; somehow it seems, I taste her touch. I do not know quite how.

  When I had done dear Cynthia brought me water with a dash of claret, told me she had boiled the water so it was quite safe; said I should not drink of stronger stuff tonight. She is so kind to me, and makes me feel that I am all her family, not a paying guest.

  As if she knew that I was far too tired for any work at all, she later asked if she could entertain me; took me to her parlour, offered sweetmeats, and then an hour or more she sat there at the harpsichord. Played me nothing then but soft pavanes by Orlando Gibbons and John Bull; and when her finale was old William Byrd’s ‘Jhon come kisse me now’, I thought it was so sweet. She saw me to my room; I took my hint from her last tune, kissed her very gently and bid her fond goodnight.

  A little writing in this journal; now I am to sleep again.

  Saturday, 6th October 1803

  I slept on Thursday night and dreamt of Somnium; stood there face to face with dear Diana Regina. My memory it will not tell me how she dressed. She smiled at me all sympathetic, made me think of Cynthia; told me I was soon to die. I woke up with a whimper.

  I woke again mid-morning; smoked a pipe or two and finally decided I was feeling better. The way that Cynthia smiled at me when I went down to dinner told me that I looked it too. She sat and watched me eat; told me that it was to make quite certain I had had enough. And when she said those words, and looked that look, I thought to recognise my mother. ‘Enough for what?’ I did not think of at the time.

  The afternoon, she walked me down toward old Well Hall, although we never left the woods. She told me thereabouts was where the archers had their butts in centuries gone by; I could not see a sign of anything the like, and why she thought this was the place was absolute beyond me. Yet here, she said, all hanging on my arm so friendly, did Henry Eight and Catherine the Spaniard come for Mayday, find themselves with ‘Robin Hood’ and all his bowmen, dining then on venison that was quite plain the king’s his own and yet the robber-band’s besides. I told her fie on Robin Hood, there never was a better archer than Diana; no sooner had I said it than she kissed me, and such a big kiss too. I did not understand, but if she kissed me then, I thought to kiss her back, and so I did. She laughed and pointed to a squirrel, tufty-eared and red as robin; when I looked around to see it then she kissed me once again and ran away before I could offer anything in return. I told her she was Lilith and if she did such things again, I’d make her pregnant quite with demons; she laughed and looked at me defiant. I chased her then all through the woods, but no wise could I catch her; she simply lifted up her skirts about her knees and fled me, laughing, like a deer. Or more, I think, like Diana herself, the huntress of the forests. I chased her and I chased her, but oh she was so swift, and so at last I had to cry a loud ‘Enough!’ I sat me down beneath an oak that showered me with autumn acorns, caught my breath, and waited for her slow return. And though my chasing had been fruitless, I think it was done well enough to gain her approbation.

  She kissed me once, so hot, so sweet, then put a finger to my lips and said that, for the nonce, we’d kiss no more. I told her I was disappointed; she said there would be other times for kisses. I told her I relied upon it; more than that, I would insist. She laughed and said, for that, I’d never get another kiss unless it was beneath the Moon. I told her every kiss she’d given me so far had been beneath the Moon, for always did the Moon look down on kisses. And if she had any other riddles to propose like this, I’d think that just a kiss was far too small a prize for me. She looked at me so strange as if, upon the sudden, then, she thought I had grown up.

  All sudden then, she came into my arms, hugged me close, and then she led me up the hill. Her little hand was clasped in mine; her lips were firmly shut. And so we came back ‘home’ (for so The Bull has come to seem to me; I know it’s ’cause she lives here) without another word.

  She is a puzzle, but a lovely one; flirtatious as she is, I rather think she loves me nonetheless; and yet I see no cause to hope for any more than kisses. I think that if I ever understood her, then the world would end, and there would nothing left be but the Moon.

  Yet at the same time, too, since Severndroog I have to think that all the sweetest things we’ve shared, like kisses in the woods… they may be, too, the things I’ve most imagined.

  And yet again, I do recall my thoughts upon the burial-mound: that all Selene’s love is found within her kisses; and all there is of kisses is Selene’s.

  And if all those kisses should be both imaginary and Selene, then do these kisses make a syllogistic common-term, which means Selene is the imagination? And writing my imaginings of her, then, do I simply write down what she tells me? Now there’s an idea to please me.

  And more besides, if I interact with Selene-who-is-imagination through her kisses, does that make me Endymion? And if I’m Endymion, who’s Endimion Lee?

  There are too many thoughts that run about my brain. So let me merely concentrate upon my journal.

  Last night I managed to escape from further distraction; disappeared to my room with three full bottles of claret; and wrote. And when the wine had eased my mind, the words began to flow. I still ponder as to whether I write those words, or they write themselves, or someone writes them for me. However it may be, I had not expected them to turn out so erotic. If it’s me that writes (I know this sounds absurd; some part of me says it is of course), I think I understand: the thought that Cynthia will hear all this, it has a frisson; and just as much, that Liz will read it also. And more than this, I verge unto the risqué in the hope that they will feel this frisson too. I thought that Liz would have the pages that I sent her by last night; I thought the more of her abed, and mayhap even naked, reading what I’d written. And that was most distracting too.

  I fell asleep, and dreamt the strangest dream. I walked straight up a rainbow; Endimion Lee was on my right, the unnamed of the future on my left; and so we came to a crystal palace of the Moon which was and wasn’t Somnium. Four ladies there awaited us: my Liz, and Cynthia Brown-eyes, and Diana Regina, and one who was too Moonlight-bright for me to see; I know I could not look her in the face because she was so beautiful. We danced, each man of us with all of them in turn; I thought it sweet to share my ladies with these friends of mine and could not quite distinguish which of them was real and which of them was fiction. The lady all of lights I danced with last of all; and as I did so I looked round and saw we were alone. I knew the others had not left us, but somehow we two now were all of them combined. And then I knew I slept; and more, I knew she kissed me as I slept. I woke and could not help but cry: ‘Selene!’ It was a sob torn from my very soul. The Moon was shining through my window. My watering eyes had made her difficult to see; and so I know with whom I’d danced, and who had pressed her lips to mine.

  At noon I woke and went for dinner; I rather wished I hadn’t. Jude Brown was drunk and shouting at his
darling wife with oaths and curses quite horrendous. She simply looked him in the eye with a disdain as lofty as the Moon; and so he stopped and stumbled off outside. I was just too amazed.

  She came and sat down at my table; smiled at me as if no word had ever passed between them. She said that if I had an hour to spare this afternoon, she’d like to hear me read again. I think the expression on my face must have betrayed my fears; she laughed and told me Judas Brown knew better than to burst into her parlour. And from the way she’d seen him off just then, I thought perhaps that she was right.

  So after dinner I took my pages and my pipe, and joined her in her parlour (it was too rainy for the little garden in the rear). She offered me canary; said it was good enough for old Ben Jonson, but she preferred the words that claret put into my mouth (or rather, in my hand). I confess that I was flattered beyond all measure, although I told her the comparison was quite absurd.

  The thing I did not quite understand was that when I began to read, she asked me to go back and start where I had left off Sunday last when we were in the garden. I began to tell her that I had read her several more pages in Severndroog, but such a blank expression was on her face, I stopped. And so I read her what she wished, and as before she played the softest lute-stop harpsichord accompaniment that almost seemed the music of a dream.

  I came back to my room a-wondering, and sat again to write. I’d thought her denial of our Full Moon night on Severndroog explicable, resulting from my oath. But if she will deny all memory, besides, of simple pages that I read her, then now I have to wonder: did I read them out at all? Or was it just a dream? Oh, Selene, dearest Goddess, what is dream and what is real? And how to tell the difference?

  Endimion Lee, he woke, although his head was still all full of dream, and wondered at its meaning; and still was pondering sin and guilt, the latter’s load and former’s expiation, when up he looked to see Diana.

  She sat there on his bedside, quite alone, with early-morning wine and breakfast ready on a tray. Her dress was simple, slightly pleated, all of silk that shimmered palely blue and white. Below a cobalt velvet zone that tightened at her waist, the skirt fell down about her ankles, and yet was slashed on either side the whole way to her hip; so when she placed one knee upon the other, all one leg was quite exposed, naked, smooth and lovely. Above, a loose and low-cut bodice slipped its sheening-silk half downwards, almost baring rounded breasts; and short sleeves, only palm-width long, slid lower ends toward her elbows. About her lovely neck, and all her other jewellery ’cept the crescent, were aquamarines and sapphires, lapis lazuli and Himalayan turquoise.

  ‘Good morrow, fair and noble sir!’ she gaily said, and laughing asked: ‘And did we dream of me?’

  He blushed and bit his tongue.

  ‘I rather think then, that we did!’ she chuckled next, and all the lights that lit her gleaming eyes partook of the divine. And all embarrassed as he was, his longing fought it down.

  ‘Oh, dear Endimion Lee,’ she said at last, with sudden tenderness. ‘No more teasing for the nonce. Eat and drink, and bathe and dress, and when you’re ready, step outside. A nymph of mine, she’ll be there waiting; and let her take you by the hand, and then she’ll lead you on, to join me in the library.

  ‘But first, sweet knight, will you just do a little thing for me? And kiss me gently on the lips? And tell me that you love me? Because for far too long, I’ve kept me in the Moon… and mortal men, that live and love and die… o heaven and the stars above… I miss them.’

  ‘Diana, queen and Goddess, mistress of my heart, come here’ he said, extending out his arms. ‘I love you now, I know somehow I always have, and know for sure I always will.

  ‘And if you send me far away, I’ll love you still. And if you tell me “nevermore”, then any woman that I see will always be the less than you.

  ‘So now, as if there never was another chance, beloved, let me kiss you.’

  And so she came into his arms, and as she did her dress slipped down below her breasts. And neither of them noticed.

  All cuddled close, he kissed her then, with love the like of which was never seen beneath the sparkling stars. No tongue, no teeth, but merely lip to lip, and mingled breath, and two hearts quite as one. And more than this, two souls all merged in lovely love, one human, one divine; and so in each they found the other half, and all the wholeness of the worlds, celestial, material, they merged in something more.

  At last, although they wished it not, they found the kiss quite parted. And yet, embraced, they lingered on, and gently wept a little, hugged in other’s arms.

  And then he knew, though naught was said, their fate was soon to part. How long before he had to leave, how long he’d live thereafter… these he would not ask. Instead, all tender-fingered, up he raised her dress about her shoulders once again, and covered both the sweetest breasts in all the cosmic worlds. With fingers just as delicate next he gently pushed aside her fringe, and brushed his lips across her brow.

  ‘And now, Diana, divine as light and sweet-eyed as a child, I’ll ask a thing of you, as well. And what I wish is simply given, for all I ask’s a smile. And though it’s only small for now, then mayhap it will grow… and let’s away with sadness.’

  ‘Endimion Lee…’ she soft began, then faltered all too soon. His finger, never tired to touch her skin, it raised up then her little chin, and so his eyes caressed her own. And what it cost them both to smile, they never ever knew; yet thought to see their smiles returned repay them at a profit.

  ‘And so,’ he sighed, ‘unless you wish to feed me, bathe me, dress me like a mother… and though I know you would, I think you’d better not… I’ll see you in the library.’

  [I am not sure about this passage here, about Lee’s mayhap-too-fond awakening. I read it out to Cynthia, and she queried if perhaps I’d portrayed Diana too much by far a human woman, too little far a Goddess. For my part, I wonder if the piece reflects too much my own yearning to take someone lovely in my arms and feel my love returned. I do not know. Perhaps I should revise it and somehow make it more ‘divine’. And yet I cannot imagine anything more divine than simple love between man and deity. And so for now I leave it as it is.]

  Too long by far the time that passed before he joined her there, although he hurried all he could. She waited for him, quite recovered, sweet with smiles and touched with mischief, a coy and charming maiden all impatient as she stood before a gem-encrusted door. The guiding nymph then turned about and left them quite alone.

  ‘Sir knight!’ she laughed, a naughty temptress look upon her face, a giant silver key a-glitter in her hand. ‘Will you thrust this in my lock, and open up my secrets?’

  ‘I will indeed, fair maid!’ he chuckled, bowing, gallant. ‘Though if you ask such things again, I have a better lock-pick…’

  ‘I know you have,’ she laughed all soft, although she blushed. ‘But lock-picks are for thieves… and English knights, due-dubbed by red-haired queens… for sure they would not steal a maiden’s treasure!’

  ‘Oh dearest love! Go to, for now you jest and tease! Or have you not been on the Earth for sometime since, and so forgot that men have cods and think of little else? Or more precise, they have no gods but stones and cods, and maidenheads are all they sacrifice.

  ‘So now, my sweet girl, that’s enough. Let’s open up your doors and see what we shall see…’

  ‘And would you speak to fair Eliza so?’ she asked amused, and handed him the key.

  ‘The Queen of England loves herself, and flattery, and mayhap Dudley too; but not Endimion Lee. And so I hardly speak to her at all, save “by your leave” and “if you please”.’

  ‘But how you will,’ she told him then, all serious on the sudden. ‘And when you tell her what I teach, you’ll gain her love as well… though never near as much as mine, and never more, I think, than fourth… besides herself, and flattery, and Dudley too.’

  ‘If that’s my lot upon the Earth, so be it,’ he replied, inserting then
the key into the lock, and turning tumblers sweetly with a click. ‘For having gazed once upon the lovely Moon, the Earth means nothing more.’

  With that, he opened up the doors, and stood there all amazed.

  Before him, long and wide and tall, there stretched away the library hall, and shelf on shelf of books, the thin, the thick, the large and small. Above, around the soaring walls, there ran along a railed gallery; and further up beyond, more shelves again besides. Ten thousand tomes within his sight, ten thousand more above; perhaps as many more again, beyond his estimation.

  ‘Sweet Diana, are there now as many books as these on all the Earth?’ he asked, a-wondered in his brain. ‘Johannes Dee his library I have seen, the largest in the land, and barely would it fill a corner here. How came you by so many books? And what do they import?’

  ‘Oh, let’s be in and take a look,’ she laughed, her little hand a-sudden in his own. ‘I think you’ll be amused.’

  She led him to a library shelf, and just for once her lovely looks found competition fore his eyes; for all around were words and books, his lifelong love and always first, before he met Diana. Endless shelves of endless tomes; in corners, racks of ancient scrolls, and cabinet-drawers of single sheets, and tablets, clayed and waxen both. Bound manuscripts of smoothest vellum and printed paper books, leather-bound or pressed in slats of wood, they drew his soul up through his eyes, and made demands: read me, learn me, treasure all I say, for every written book’s unique, a mind-child of the brain.

  Dear Diana kissed his hand and let him have it back, then pointed all along a shelf. ‘Now here, in Grecian, Latin and the English too, we have dear Lucian’s Dialogues of the Goddesses, Icaromenippus, The Fly, Alexander the False Prophet and True Story… all those works, surviving down the age, in which he speaks of me, quite often sweet, but on occasion slander too. For both I love him well enough; and even naughty, still he makes me laugh. But here’s one that you’ll never find in any library on the Earth, for only here a single Latin copy yet survives: wry Lucian’s Diana Fornatrix, its circulation barely public, the manuscripts all burned by Christians. And here’s another of his own, he never even wrote, but thought of; and so by dream it comes to be, a book existing here alone in Somnium, but never down below: Selene’s Private Sleeping Chamber in the Moon (and how I slept there with her).’