Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  If the Rose Cross was the Monas hieroglyphica, and the Monas hieroglyphica was the Golden Stone, and the Golden Stone was born of the coupling of the alchemical spouses, then (as in the best alchemical paradoxes) the Stone could only be generated by the action of the Stone, which, before it was generated, could not exist.

  No wonder Andreæ called his work a comedy.

  The culmination of the whole story, at the end of the Seventh Day, was the reception of the guests into the Order of the Golden Stone, after which they sailed away in their ships. So Yates said. Sailed away: either for the Fortunate Isles of the West to live happily ever after, or more likely to all the lands of men, to undertake the universal reformation of the whole wide world.

  But what she didn't say is that Christian himself is left behind.

  For on an earlier day of the story, Christian, roaming the wonderful castle to which his letter admitted him, went farther than he should. A mischievous young page told him that in a deep-down chamber Venus herself lay buried or asleep—did Christian want to see? He showed Christian a trapdoor of copper they could go down by. And Christian, trusting and terrified, followed him down.

  By the torch's light I saw a rich bed all made, hung with curious curtains. The page drew one aside, and there I saw the Lady Venus, stark naked—for he threw aside the coverlets too—lying there in such beauty, and somehow so astonishing, that I was almost beside myself. I could hardly say she wasn't a piece of marble carved, or a human corpse that lay there dead, for she was completely immobile, and yet I didn't dare touch her. The page covered her again, and drew the curtain, and yet she was still in my eyes, so to speak.

  My page put out the torch, and we climbed out again to the chamber above. Just then, in flew little Cupid, who at first was a little shy in our presence, considering what had been done to him the day before; but seeing us both looking more like the dead than the living, he couldn't help laughing, demanding to know what spirit had led me here. I answered, trembling, that I had lost my way in the castle, and just by chance happened to come here, and that the page had been looking everywhere for me, and at last had found me here. I hoped, I said, that he wouldn't take it amiss.

  "No, it's all right, my busy old grandpa,” said Cupid, “but you might easily have played a nasty trick on me, if you had known about this door. I'd better fix that.” And he put a strong lock on the copper door we had gone down by. I thanked God that he hadn't come upon us sooner! My page too was very glad that I had got him out of a tight spot.

  Maybe Cupid believes him, maybe not, but the winged boy declares he has no choice but to punish Christian for coming so close to where his mother lies sleeping. He heats the tip of his golden dart in a candle flame and pricks Christian's right hand, laughing to see the blood well up. The mark will never vanish.

  That naughty page. That cold goddess. That laughing boy.

  The story of the wedding goes on from there. Guests are weighed and the lightweights expelled. The remaining guests travel to another, darker castle, where arduous labors of fire and water are undergone, plays are acted, boxes containing precious eggs are opened, and at last the dead king and queen are brought to life and the stone their son is manifested. Then the King (newmade, golden) brings the guests, all now sworn Brothers of the Golden Stone, back to the Wedding Castle. At the gate stands an aged porter—the very porter who once admitted Christian to these precincts, who was kind to him, who saw that he got safely inside. Long ago, the King tells the brothers, this porter came too as a guest to the castle, but after he was admitted he went wandering where he should not have gone, and spied prematurely on Mother Venus. For his sin he is condemned to stand here by the door, to let others in or keep them out, until the day when one comes who has done as he did, and who is willing to relieve him.

  And—though I hated myself and my tattling tongue that I couldn't keep quiet—Christian must tell the King that he is, himself, that one. And he says that he will do what is required of him. I said that if I could wish for anything at all right now, and have it come true, I would wish myself back home again. But I was told plainly that wishing did not stretch so far.

  His wish (the last wish, the wish to undo) can't be granted; he has to stay, and take the old porter's place. The next morning, he is told, the Knights will gather at the harbor, and board their red-sailed ships, and sail away; but Christian will have to remain alone at the castle, and take up his duties, until—perhaps—another appears, who has done what he has done, and is willing to replace him.

  Many gloomy thoughts were running around in my head, about what I was going to do, and how I would pass the time sitting at this gate for the rest of my life; and my final thought was that, old as I was, and in the nature of things not having many more years to live, this anguish and my sad life would quickly finish me off, and then my doorkeeping would be at an end. On the one hand it bothered me terribly that I had seen such gallant things, and must be robbed of them. On the other I was glad that at least I had been accepted and found worthy, and not forced to depart in shame.

  So after the king and his lords had bid each one good night, the brothers were conducted into their lodgings for the night. But I, wretched man, had nobody to show me where I was to go, and all I could do was to go on tormenting myself; and just so I would be always conscious of my function, I was made to put on the iron ring that the old porter had worn. Finally the King urged me, since this was the last time I was likely to see him as he was now, to remember that I should always behave myself in accordance with my place, and not act against the order. Upon which he took me in his arms, and kissed me, and by all this I understood for certain that in the morning I must in fact sit at my gate.

  That's the end.

  Except it isn't. The book doesn't, Pierce found, end. It has no ending; it stops, in midsentence, right there. There's nothing more but a brief statement not in Christian's own tale telling but in the book's own voice: Here are missing about two leaves in quarto, this note says, and he—Christian, the author of this tale—though he supposed he must in the morning be a doorkeeper, returned home.

  What? Pierce stared at the page in astonishment.

  Why was Christian allowed to go home? He should have gone on sitting by that door, from that day to this. Was the wrong that he had done not a wrong? Did his honesty in admitting what he'd done win him a pardon? If so, who pardoned him, who commuted his sentence? If the Golden King could not, who could? What other sinner came, and confessed, and took up the post in his stead? Did his author take pity on him? Or did Christian simply stand up, forgive himself, and walk away?

  Like The Tempest, this so-called comedy—which started so much trouble in its time—had at its heart a dark spot, a contradiction, only made right by the assertion of a happy ending, the happy ending itself an abnegation. Ile break my staff.

  Or maybe the desperate writer had only spun this twisted little sentence in order to tie the mystery up with it, shut the box he had himself left open; maybe he couldn't think how to end it, and just finished it up instead.

  It seemed suddenly very important to Pierce that he know. He knew the story wasn't true. But he wanted to know what it meant. As though he had crossed the sea and come here only to learn.

  De te fabula. Had he like Christian looked on Venus bare, too long or too soon, and now could never be a knight, be a brother, never find or make or effect any good thing? He looked at his palm. Was the best he could hope for just a chance to go home?

  9

  Rosie—I am writing this on the train from Heidelberg. I am going the wrong way, not south but north. We are going to be in Frankfurt in twenty minutes. Where G. Bruno wrote and published his last books, on atoms. There's a star next to Frankfurt in the guidebook, one of Kraft's. It was the book center of Europe

  There in midsentence that postcard, of Heidelberg Castle by moonlight, was filled, and Pierce took out another to continue: Frankfurt, the river Main. Prewar, found in a train-station kiosk. He had a pocketful.
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  and still is. I will get off and go stand in the streets. I don't know how else to proceed. I don't understand how Giordano Bruno fits. By the time of the Winter King and the Bohemian thing he was 18 years dead and forgotten by everyone. No matter what Kraft thought. Weather is cold.

  Snow fell in the streets of the Altstadt. Black Ys printed by Frankfurters’ diverging footprint and tire-tread paths through the whitened lanes and streets. A huge red church of St. Bartholomew, where the electors once met to choose their emperor, and where the chosen emperors were crowned. Rudolf II sat for hours at his coronation listening to the reading of the Capitulation, an ancient volume detailing every free city's rights, every bishopric's standing, every duchy's ancient liberties, every crown's limits and traditions and exclusions (in Kraft, this was all in Kraft; Pierce knew nothing of it himself, he seemed to know less the farther from home he got) and in all those exclusions and freedoms and restrictions, which made his empire as ungovernable as life itself, the sad young man knew how dear and how complete his empire truly was: complete, and dear, because at its center sat his own person. Its center was his own person, still and empty. If he could only be calm, and keep his seat, and not try to do what could not be done, all would be well.

  Fellowes Kraft liked empires that were so old, and grown so complex, that they could be named, and belonged to, and traveled in, but not controlled: that had frontiers, but inside were limitless. Pierce thought he did, too.

  Just at this early hour of the day the Dom was geschlossen. After a time Pierce returned in the gathering snow to the Hauptbahnhof to wait on a bench for the next train to the south. The cold was appalling, American cold, Minnesotan, Alaskan. In his bag, with the red guidebook and the new journal, was the only other reading matter he had, which was Kraft's memoir, Sit Down, Sorrow.

  He had always known Kraft. So it seemed now. He knew Bruno because of a book Kraft had written about him, a book Pierce had at first thought was a novel too, but it wasn't. Bruno's Journey, Kraft's first, though Pierce in those days didn't notice that sort of thing either; books were books, all coevals in Bookland. Would he have been surprised if, in that year 1952, some agent of Y-shaped Time had come to tell him that he would be allied with Kraft in life and in death (Kraft's), repeating Kraft's journeys and his thoughts? He had not long ago marveled at the coincidence of his path and the older man's, and—anyway at the time—found in it a confirmation that the world held wonders: not that his own fate might be among those wonders, but that perhaps he actually had a fate, greatest wonder of all. Now he felt oftener that he rode an eternal bus, Kraft's life, which he could never get off.

  In 1930 I closed my childhood like a book, and took ship for the world, Kraft's memoir began, and a closed book that childhood remained, though there were hints and phrases that revealed a little, hints that Pierce didn't think were accidental. He was without a father, had grown up alone with a weirdly feckless mother. Never married, of course, and without other relatives that he named; had never corresponded with others in the writing life, never formed literary friendships, or wasn't interested in detailing them; his best friend his dog, Scotty. There was no way to tell how he had come to write the books that he had written, why these anyway and not others; nor why they were the way they were. He did give an account of the growth of his erudition, and you could take that as an account of his heart too, maybe. Pierce, whether from pity, fear, or impatience, found it hard to read more than a page or two at a time; impatience, maybe, that the reason for his pity and fear were not being revealed, and would not be: not in here.

  I wanted warmth, and so I sailed to Naples: the silver Bay, the Grotta Azzura, golden stone warm in the sun. Only to find that the Mediterranean in winter was piercingly cold and damp, colder in effect than my far northern land, for the citizenry seemed to have given no thought to the possibility—stunned into lassitude by the summer heat, maybe—and made no provision for chilling rains and the falling temperatures of rooms made of solid stone. Braziers and shutters, shawls and woolen socks, all rather ad lib. Maybe it won't last, they must think, summer will come back tomorrow. But it does last. And on the beach for weeks a sort of smelly thick seaweed was strewn each day, to be gathered for purposes I never learned, and replaced by more the next day: its sweetish rotten odor stayed with me for years. Never mind: I was Elsewhere! And the napoletani were as kind and importunate and brown and great-eyed and laughing, even as they shivered, as when the sun beat down. Which in the course of time it splendidly did again. But in that first winter, in the sweet loneliness of being truly adrift, I discovered the subject of a book, and the possibility within myself that I might write it. I discovered, in the Dominican abbey where it was his misfortune and his fate to have been immured, the philosopher and heretic Giordano Bruno (but he was a young man then, no more than a boy really, from the suburb of Nola). It was another solitary fellow, himself adrift, a scholar and antiquarian, who told me of Bruno and his story, and offered himself as guide to the Neapolitan places associated with him; it was he who showed me the cell where Bruno lived and thought, who took me to the church where he said his first mass, and the mountain beneath whose beetle he was born. Nor was that all I learned, and have learned later, from him. We were inseparable: an Anglo-French scholar, a young Nolan monk, and I; and we have continued to be, in shifting and altered ways, ever since.

  Pierce looked to the bottom of the page, and to the back of the book, but the note that gave this Anglo-French, or imaginary, scholar's name—the note that Pierce only half believed he would find, really, the absolutely impossible last straw—wasn't there; and despite what was averred concerning him, the fellow vanished from the book in the very next paragraph: When Bruno was summoned to Rome, never to return to Naples, I went as well, and our trio was dissolved.

  In Kraft's story it was his mastery of the Art of Memory, for which the Dominicans were well known, that first brought Bruno to Rome. Summoned thence by the Dominican cardinals around the pope to show off his powers. That's certainly what he told the inquisitors in Venice. Whether or not he was ever really in Rome before he ran away, he was for sure here at the end, when for mad reasons of his own he came back, back from Protestant Frankfurt to Italy, apparently with plans to lay before the pope: a new ancient way of reforming and improving all human activity, and incidentally a new picture of the cosmos as well. Soon after he reached Venice he was arrested; after long interrogations, the Venetians turned him over (rather reluctantly) to Rome.

  Frankfurt—Zurich—Milan—Genoa—Livorno—Rome. For a week Pierce wandered backward along the way that Bruno had at first taken fleeing from Rome and his order. In Kraft's story—not the book Bruno's Journey, but his big last unfinished novel—Bruno is warned by a young man who comes to him to tell him that proceedings in the Holy Office have begun against him. A young man who seems to know him seems also to know of a network of brothers who will take in the young runaway, keep him from the Inquisition, feed him and hide him and send him on to the next, a sort of heretics’ Underground Railway that, for all Pierce knew, really existed, though this one of Kraft's seemed to come into existence only because Bruno himself proceeded along it: finding, at every stop, that sign that John Dee had made or discovered. He found it in books, on the signet rings of kindly helpers, in John Dee's own house in England, and in the center of Rudolf's palace in Prague, where Dee drew it with his staff on the stones of the floor. The center of the center of the empire at the center of the world. There for a moment the two stood together.

  In Kraft's story.

  But if Kraft could draw the young monk on, and give him shelter, refashion the world he went in, why did he then send him back, along the wrong ways, the fatal ways? Why couldn't he grant him the power to escape? What on earth was the point of writing a huge tragicomic epic full of powers and possibilities if it couldn't rescue him or anyone?

  It was late afternoon when Pierce left the somewhat prisonlike pensione he had found in an anonymous part of town. His shoulder
s still felt the bags they had carried, but he didn't feel he could eat, or sleep. He thought of his father, Axel, and how he had promised, when he was just a kid, to bring Axel here one day, when he was grown up; here where Western Civilization lay cradled. He set out to find the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, first stop on his list, double starred in Kraft's guidebook. It seemed to be not far away.

  Before long he didn't know where he was exactly. European street names (he had only at length learned this, probably you were supposed to be born knowing) were not put up on posts on the street but stuck to the corner buildings’ walls. Ill lit and ancient, most of them. He opened the guidebook in the streetlight, and tried to make sense of the finely printed little tissue-paper maps, tangled spaghetti of ancient streets stamped with coffin-shaped or cross-shaped churches. He turned, turned back. That vast dark-domed bulk there, an obelisk rising before it: surely that should be a landmark, even in a city made of them. He should try to find the Pantheon, right around here somewhere, and from there he might follow these instructions backward to the place he sought.

  Leaving the Piazza de Rotonda we follow the Via dei Cestari along the west side of the Piazza della Minerva. We will stop there to study the grand Bernini monument, which legend has it was inspired by a pair of ponderous pachyderms that visited Rome with a circus, where they attracted the attention of the greatest of all Baroque sculptors, Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini. In a neighborhood rich in obelisks—the obelisk of Psametticus, which we passed in the Piazza de Montecitorio; the obelisk of Rameses II, rising before the Pantheon—the one borne on an elephant's back in the Piazza della Minerva is the most beloved.