by Marc Laidlaw
As I have said, he was kneeling. His head leaned forward. In his perfect silhouette I could see the blunt, broken shape of his nose, barely touched to his upraised fingertips. His hands were together in prayer. Thus had the heretic portrayed himself— worshipful, dedicated, a devout shadow darkly captured on the door of his cell, imposed in turn on the inverted sky above (or beneath) the courtyard.
I brought my lamp close to his shadow. More than the perfectly rendered pillars, trees, and arches, it was Bruno’s own outline that fascinated me. I had seen him before, naturally, in his crumbling self-portraits. But those had been done in the brief days of his glory, most of them in Wittenberg. Here in Rome at the end of his life he seemed a different man, broken—
Yet not without his triumph.
He had achieved a great part of his aim, had he not? The wall bore testimony to the scope and practicality of his dreams. Here was miraculous evidence that fleeting man could collaborate with the immortal sun. He had proven it in the face of the Church’s ban on cameras, when all chiaroscurographers had been considered heretics— with Bruno merely the worst of them.
In 1591 Giordano Bruno had returned to Italy, his birthplace, in order to convince Pope Clement VIII that the camera and its images were divine in nature—direct gifts from God. Bruno had made a name for himself as a chiaroscurographer and philosopher of the camera. In his De umbris idearum, he had eloquently stated his thesis that no other instrument was so inspired by pure, heavenly principles. In its renderings of light and darkness, the camera seemed to Bruno the perfect tool for the Church, an actual key to the Kingdom of God, the City of the Sun. He pointed out that while the Bible was itself largely incomprehensible to the common man, these images—named chiaroscurographs by their inventor, Leonardo da Vinci—could be widely appreciated, highly instructive, and capable of infinite subtlety, surpassing even the interpretive powers of a Michelangelo, a Raphael.
But Bruno’s words had gone no farther than the porches of the papal ears. The Church had already condemned all camera images; the instrument itself was dubbed the Eye of the Devil. For it was blasphemy to think of collaborating with the sun. The hand of a painter at least was guided by God, who could thus reveal or disguise His plan as He saw fit. But this perfection—it was unholy! Clement himself had toyed briefly with the device—and with impunity, given his position—but he abandoned it as too complex and never looked kindly on the attempts of lesser men to “dabble in light.” So Bruno asked, How will we ever erect the City of God unless each man understands the design and knows his part in the building thereof?
Clement remained silent, averted his gaze. For Bruno, to be ignored was the greatest of hardships. He decided he must go beyond words to make his point. He must let the images themselves speak to the Church and to the common mind.
In Wittenberg, Bruno had been welcomed and much admired by the Lutherans. He had taught chiaroscurography at Luther's own university until Calvinist scholars rose to power and drove him out, protesting in particular his scandalous use of the town's young men and prostitutes in composing his more elaborate scenes. He had never lost his fondness for the memory of Martin Luther, and now he followed Luther's example from the Diet of Worms— although in a style more true to his own extravagance. To the doors and walls of the Vatican he fastened a hundred of his images, the best of his life's work. He hoped they would persuade the Church to reconsider its position. And indeed the Church did revise its previous attitude, much to Bruno's misfortune.
That very morning, while Rome babbled of all it had seen or thought it had seen on the Vatican walls, Giordano Bruno was arrested. His camera was destroyed, his chiaroscurographs seized, and his soul confined to a dark cell where it was hoped that he would presently rot.
The Inquisition could not comprehend a creature that flourished in the dark. Apparently the masterpiece on his cell wall was the heresy that made all the others seem unbearable. Composed on Midsummer Day in 1599, it was not discovered until the following year. He was promptly burned at the stake, on February 17, 1600, like a martyr lit to warm in the chilly new century.
I marveled that the Inquisition had let the image stand.
For two hundred years no one had touched this wall. No other prisoner had occupied the cell. It had been sealed, toured occasionally by prison curators and Vatican scholars, and whispered of in imprecise terms. But it had not been destroyed. The Church kept it locked away but perfectly preserved, in the most perverse hypocrisy imaginable. They found the image intolerable and yet they treasured it, just as they treasure their pagan idols, their hundred-breasted Aphrodites, their forbidden books, and the thick compendiums of heretical chiaroscurographs which lie under lock and key in carefully humidified vaults in the Vatican library.
No one but those librarians and a few select others have been allowed to glimpse Bruno’s camera work for these two hundred years. I have looked on them. I have seen the hundred images he tacked defiantly to the Vatican wall. De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione. They were seized by the Church so quickly that none of the public seemed quite sure of what they had witnessed. But those images will never leave my mind: softly lit nudes—male and female both. Adam and Eve stand gleaming like statues in a sunlit grove, their hands joined, staring up at the sun. No fig leaf hides Adam’s sex; no modest torsion of the pelvis obscures the folds of Eve’s thighs, the curls of her pubic hair.
A pale Madonna nurses a silver babe, her face half in darkness with one eye gleaming out of the darkly textured shadows.
A white dove’s weight curves the olive branch on which it rests, forming a precise and delicate arch that resembles the expression of some forbidden equation.
Sunlight on craggy mountains; sunlight on the towers of a walled town; pillars of sunlight falling through broken clouds, setting pools of fire upon a sea of grain.
White breasts, dark nipples, the faint gray stipple of pores—all against a background of deepest black.
A penis, uncircumcised, nested in dark curls. Another standing erect against a shadowed backdrop. I remember the smooth arch of pubic bone beneath the flesh. A couple entwined in a forest, their clothes piled at the base of a tree whose long branches stroke his back and her legs.
Images of dangerous beauty, of course these dominate the memory.
But had the scandalized church fathers even looked at half the images they snatched down? What of the street scenes? What of the portraits? These were the people of Bruno's day, the people of any day. Laughing, grieving, beautiful, and disfigured. One was a man who posed for the sculptors of gargoyles, his face hideously contorted by a syndrome which has yet to be named. Then a succession of dark-eyed Magdalens, all of them different yet somehow similar. Bruno’s lovers? I wonder. I wonder that these marvels have survived.
The door creaked and swung open, taking Bruno's captive shadow with it.
“Wait,” I told the keeper. “Just a moment longer. I’m not quite finished yet.”
He peered in at me, puzzled, and shrugged. “As you like. Knock when you're ready.” He shut the door.
I set my lantern on the high window ledge and set it at full radiance. Crouching, I let my eyes rove over the entire surface of the wall. They returned again and again to the door, the praying hands, the profile. A curve of the doorway hid the cuff of Bruno’s sleeve; I moved the lantern slightly to one side so that the entire shadow lay revealed. When I was satisfied, I unsnapped the leather cover on my own camera and peered down into the lens. Bruno’s wall more than filled the ground glass. There was no room to move back, to encompass more of the wall.
I took in a deep breath, let it out, and at the turning of the next inhalation—the moment of greatest stillness in the soul—I triggered the shutter, exposed my image.
One was all I made. Like Bruno, I felt I had one chance.
It was as I approached the door for a final time, to leave the cell, that I noticed faint scratches within the head of Bruno's shadow: lines of poetry, engraved there by the pr
isoner himself:
“Escaped from the narrow murky prison
Where for so many years error held me straitly,
Here I leave the chain that bound me
And the shadow of my fiercely malicious foe.”
"My fiercely malicious foe . . . ”
Had he meant the Inquisition or himself?
I sensed the frustration in the scratched handwriting. If only he had been quieter, subtler in his methods, the Church perhaps would have let him go on with his work, even ignored him. Other chiaroscurographers had thrived, albeit on other continents. With time the world might have come to appreciate him. He might not have had to die upon the pyre. But Bruno was Bruno. He could be no one else. And who can escape his own shadow?
Moments later, I stood in the corridor with my camera packed away, my lantern dark, watching the back of the old gatekeeper as he led me out of the prison, amiably chatting the whole way. I did not hear a word he said until we stood nearly on the threshold of the building, when he opened the last great set of doors to let me out onto the street. The noise of the world pressed in, with all its sights and sounds, its complex shadows and harsh images. I wondered what Bruno would have made of this.
I wondered how different this street might have looked today had the Church reconsidered its position in Bruno's hour and let him continue his work—with some modification—under its aegis.
I could not envision it. The lens of time lay focused on this moment to the exclusion of every other. Combustion carriages roared and fumed in the street, terrifying the few remaining horses. I prefer to walk, to take my time in this swiftly changing world, to look for images that seem to embody our progress—and our decline.
The doorman fell silent, as if in sympathy. I turned back to him. He had a good face, skin that held the light. I thought of taking his image as he stood there half in shadow, dwarfed by the huge iron doors. The sun's position was ideal.
“Would you mind?" I said, raising my camera slightly.
His eyes widened. “Are you allowed?”
“Allowed?” I asked, uncovering my ground glass.
“I didn’t think—well, you being the Vatican 'scurographer and all. . . Someone like me is of no importance.”
“On the contrary.” I uncapped the lens. “The sun shines on us all.”
He stood waiting, stiffly posed, his eyes appearing empty as a statue’s in my viewing lens. I wondered how to unlock his face’s expressiveness.
“You know the reason why I've come here today, don’t you?” I asked.
“Not exactly, sir,” he answered, still looking somewhat awkward and expectant.
“I wanted to get a record of Bruno's cell. You see, they’re planning on tearing this old prison down.”
The doorman whistled between his teeth, eyebrows raised. Now there was a look worth capturing. In that instant I exposed the image.
“And what’s to go in its place? Another bank? Will they be needing a doorman, do you think?”
“I imagine so. It's to be a gallery, a museum of art. The Giordano Bruno Institute of Chiaroscurography.”
And with that, I bid him good day.
* * *
“Bruno’s Shadow” copyright 1988 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Omni Magazine, August 1988.
YOUR STYLE GUIDE—USE IT WISELY
by Marc Laidlaw
Director, Style Enforcement Agency
WHY A CONVENTIONAL FORMAT?
Your reader has just come out of a Phom McNguyen Shoe Store and is standing on the curb, expecting answers. It is always advisable to make an attempt to link disparate images in order to create the illusion of causality:
·Peering through side window of lowrider car as it waits at stoplight.
·Pulsebeat music, foam dice, soccer scores.
·Clear catheters trail from young driver’s intestines into vinyl dashboard. Gauges register fuel, speed, rpm, blood pressure, heat of digestion, petroglobin viscosity.
Subjectivity is the chief variable, but several constants must be taken into consideration:
F = Feitzer’s Reader Credulity Quotient (calculated by sexual precocity indices and National Debt at date of birth)
A = Avogadro’s Social Security Number
Mister X = Number of times reader has encountered references to faceless technicians in genre literature (Western, Romance, High Finance)
It is important to explain all facts and insinuations, especially those which are most easily accessible in other textual works, for purposes of providing internal coherence to 20th Century Prosody and in order to facilitate cross-referencing careers to 21st Century librarians. Supervisual footnotes are the most acceptable format for such interpolations.
Example:
I never shop at Phom McNguyen’s despite the weekly sales. I am afraid that people might look at my shoes and know that they are a generic brand, or the next worst thing, and not the work of a reputable Italian designer.
Example:
By "lowrider," the author is referring to an automobile, preferably of mid-20th century American manufacture, favored by urban North American Hispanic adolescents, equipped with a mechanized suspension system whereby the relationship of the chassis to the street may be varied by remote control. For social context, ask your librarian to matriculate the glossary.
If you are contractually bound to the conventional design, precede as outlined in Author’s Guide to Plot Concretization published by the National Arts Task Force. For the convenience of such authors, the work has been done for you. Please recast in your own writing, or enter attached soft-mag cartridge into any UPS-compatible text generator with your personal access code and savings account number.
For Manual Entry
·Reader spied by Hispanic driver; laser-guided eyes fix on reader’s tennis shoes; face shows no expression but bioregisters on dashboard betray slight fluctuation.
·Sourceless panic.
·Standard chase.
·Agency intervention. (File Form XT-1023 for list of Agencies possessing Intragenre-Specification license. Unauthorized mention of any Agency, licensed or otherwise, is punishable at discretion of Civil Service Defense League.)
·Enforcement of judgment. If your reader is still permitted access to literature after sentencing, hse may finish the story in hsis own words, expressing sorrow for any ethical-civi1 violations, and include completed work with Form RHB-1134, Plea for Rehabi1itation. Otherwise, drive to next corner and check pedestrian shoes. (GOTO "Riverrunrrex:Joyce". )
Authors who have been granted permission to proceed by a licensed organization (National Semiconductor Foundation for the Arts, President’s Council on Fractal Plot Exploitation, North American Treatise Organization) may continue in accord with principles and intentions as detailed in the approved Proposed Request for Funding. It is advisable (although not enforceable) to employ abstract verbs instead of nouns, and to make liberal use of excessive clauses, empty phrases, promotional sex defects, and dehumanizing slang. Such techniques will give the innovative work a superficial resemblance to standard texts and therefore render it palatable to the general audience.
·Driver nods. Silver-nailed finger lifts from the steering wheel three times.
·Covert code recognition.
·The crowd pushes out around you but you keep your place on the curb, nodding three times back at him.
·He looks away from your shoes.
Obviously the Style Guide cannot follow authors beyond this point. Until the artist files the Provisional Acceptance Form, hse must follow hsis best judgment, as provided by the strictures indicated on all credit allotments.
·Finger the cold plug in your belly; you touch a leak, wishing that it looked more like a sweat stain, wondering who in the crowd can see.
·Shrill brass horns. The sun caught in the cement warren. Oven temperatures.
·Lowrider rumbles and pulls away into traffic.
·Jealousy, you know?
DEALING WITH REJECTION
·The light changes back to red. Trapped again.
·Another lowrider pulls alongside you. Driver glances out.
·You decide to make contact.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE TEXT AFTER ACCEPTANCE?
For the dedicated artist, this may be the most difficult phase of creation: artifactual collaboration. An acceptable text is immediately distributed nationwide and judged for applicability by a wide range of media utilities, including cinevideo inducers, sociocultivators, satellite principalities, light rail surgeons, hive designers, rheological medics, extermination surveyors, and UPS-compatible academicians. All of these departments and many others are required by law to put your text to work.
·The finger lifts three times from the wheel.
As the social order encounters your text, facilitators will first reduce it to the basic constituents, then "predigest" any content for maximum bioavailability. A consumable product may take the form of a mass-marketed "Eat&Learn" planarian diet, or it could be as homely as a mandatory printed-wall feature. There can surely be no thrill to compare with that of the author whose work has been injected into the economy, to become part of every citizen’s neutral baseline status.
·You give three nods.
WRITER’S BLOCK
This maladaptive syndrome has become less common in recent years. At one time, authors stated that the sight of a sheet of blank paper waiting to be filled was an obstacle to the first stroke of creation. We have tried to remedy this problem by providing a plethora of forms and flow-sheets, many of which are already at least partially completed for the author’s convenience. In addition, there are many public domain programs designed to break the seemingly endless sheet of ice represented by 93.5 square inches of white paper.
