Love and Sleep (34 page)

He arose from his chair, Kraft's chair, and left the study where Kraft had spent so many hours; he went out through the puzzle of the little house (puzzling to one like Pierce, who could not ever reverse in his mind the way he had entered a place in order to leave it, nor always tell left from right). He stopped in the center of the faded rug in the room where Kraft had chiefly lived.

In here somewhere, he just bet.

Whenever these days Pierce found a footnote or a citation in one of his own secondary sources saying that such-and-such a fact or bit of lore could be found in such-and-such an old book, the source would lodge in his brain, alert as a dog's nose now to the traces of Kraft's track through these past woods. There were only a few sources that Pierce knew of for Dee, and they would be here, as well perhaps as other ones that he didn't know of, that might tell a longer though not necessarily a truer story.

John Dee, strange tireless man, really had written down all the conversations that he and Edward Kelley had with the angels who visited Dee's glass. He kept another record too, of all the human comings and goings at his Mortlake house. Both of these had been printed, though Pierce had never seen either one. The secret record had first been published in the seventeenth century, a very famous book ever since in some circles:
A True & Faithful Relation of what passed for many Yeers betweene Dr. John Dee, a Mathematician of Great Fame in Q. Elizabeth and King James their Reignes, and some Spirits; Tending (had it succeeded) To a General Alteration of most States and Kingdomes in the World.

This big book was issued in 1659 by Meric Casaubon, the Huguenot refugee and Protestant polemicist. Casaubon was quite sure that Dee and Kelley had talked to spirits, and that they were wicked ones; that their relations with such spirits had damned them; that the “general alteration” would have been a frightful disaster, a demonic empire from which the world was narrowly saved; the author then
shewing the Uses that a sober Christian may make of all
, as the gigantic title finally concluded, that is, the avoidance of spirits altogether: this warning issued just as the great Terror was drawing to an end, a hundred thousand or more old women, men, vagrants, priests, and children having been burned, tortured, crushed, drowned, and hanged for such dealings.

Puritan divines had got the book suppressed, having missed Casaubon's point, apparently, but a lot of copies had got out before then. The book could probably be got from specialists, might even turn up in shops. Kraft had more than one seventeenth-century book on his shelves, some more recondite than that one.

Where to start? Kraft's system of classifying his books was unknown to Dewey and other pedants. And yet it was, must have been, a system.

Nothing more soothing and hopeful than summer light through open windows illuminating the spines of many books. Pierce did not suppose that there were all that many who felt so. Odd duck that he was, he could remember when he was ten, twelve, how on the cool mornings of hot summer days he would sit at breakfast in the bright air and think what a good day it was to read a book, take some notes.

Well look here. Very nearly the first case he approached, the first shelf along which he ran his hand.
John Dee (1527-1608)
by Charlotte Fell Smith, Constable and Company, 1909. Nice old buckram book, deckle-edged, letterpress. On its cover this was stamped:

He gazed at it for some time, feeling something in the summer and the day gather in its blankness. But he didn't remember it: didn't remember drawing it on his cousins with a Scripto, or on the flyleafs of his lost books. Memory in that age did not hold such things very well, or only some memories did; nor did the things themselves always awaken when they were looked at long and steadily enough, as sleeping children will; they had to be shaken.

Pierce opened to the index, and looked up Bruno. One brief reference.
Paracelsus had been dead but forty years. Bruno was still alive, developing his theories of God as the great unity behind the world and humanity. Copernicus was not long dead, and his new theories of the solar system were gradually becoming accepted. Galileo was still a student at Pisa, his inventions as yet slumbering in his brain.

No more.

No meeting, then, or none in the records available in 1909, or this lady would have made much of it, it seemed to be that kind of book.

He leafed through the pages. Why had he wanted it to be true?

My my. Kraft had certainly gone through this book, and more than once; here were underlinings and brackets in several colors of ink, little wordless exclamation points beside choice bits, the whole thing marked up for repackaging, like the diagrammatic steer that butchers display. Was this an easy way to write a book, or not easy, this bricolage of facts and phrases, fixed with your own affections, given a bright coat of lifelike paint? Was it what he would have to do?

He put Miss Smith into his own bag, to study at leisure.

The thought occurred to him that Kraft's shelves were in fact the uncondensed version of his already pretty large book; or that the book was an epitome of the shelves, as though they had brought forth the book simply by their arrangement, each book a chapter, or a sentence.

What's that?

He had spotted a leather-bound folio on the next-to-top storey. To reach it he had to pull over a chair and mount it (as Kraft, he thought, must often have done); it was surprisingly light, though, and he levered it out and leapt not very featly to the floor with it.

Unreadable gold-stamped name on the spine. He took it to the window and opened it on a table there, where half-a-dozen African violets had died, thinking he knew what he would see.

Well for heaven's sake.

Not the
True & Faithful Relation
; not Dee's diary either. It was a book he knew: a polyglot edition of an Italian sort-of novel, the very edition he had struggled with one summer in college, writing a paper.

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
by Francisco Colonna, 1594 though written almost a hundred years earlier in a Dominican monastery. In Italian with French and English translations in triple columns; big woodcuts, fine light paper that crackled with a familiar sound as he turned the leaves.
Le Songe du Polifil. Poliphil's Strife of Love in a Dreame.

Oh the cool still air of the rare book room of Noate's library, the summer vehement outside ... The summer before his senior year, working on an Honors Thesis they called it, for which he was actually paid money, though not enough, he had washed dishes at a downtown hotel too, good Lord the things youth can put up with that age never could.

Part One, Chapter One, Poliphilo spends a bad night, tossing and turning:
altogether uncomforted and sorrowful, by meanes of my untimelie and not prosperous love, plunged into a deepe poole of bitter sorrowes
. Then, having spent some part of his wakefulness in the usual way of frustrated lovers, how well Pierce knew—
my wandering senses being wearie to feede upon unsavoury and feigned pleasures, not directly and withoute deceite, uppon the rare divine object
—toward dawn he falls asleep, and has this dream.

God he remembered: his first summer as a scholar; that splenetic dish machine. Possibility: how could a life, a time so constrained have seemed so full of it to Pierce, a banquet, not his yet but set for him as much as for any. Despite all of which, he had struggled to employ a disparaging irony against the fatuous extravagances of this book, as against his own inward parts: irony having at last been granted him, his newest weapon, sword and shield at once.

Sleeping Polifil dreams he wakes, finds himself in the usual flowery mead; stumbles in his dream into the usual dark wood,
a pritty way entered, I could not tell how to get out of it
. A long struggle, after which he escapes, hears seraphic voices, falls asleep again, dreams he wakes again, another flowery mead, this time with a titanic temple or shrine in the distance, toward which he makes his way.

Here was the illustration, a half-page woodcut. Pierce, a battlefield of conflicting feelings, put his hand lightly on it. Obelisk of AEgypt, flight of stairs, cube, pyramid, sphere.

He had been pointed to this book by his Senior Advisor, Frank Walker Barr, twinkle in his eye as though he knew just what trick he was playing. What Barr really thought of the book Pierce never discovered; what he liked about it himself at the time was its obdurate unlikeableness, all surface, no inside, as claustrophobic as a fancy tomb: for in those days he was drawn to the closed, the circular, the labyrinthine, maybe because he thought he knew better, was not himself caught. Ha.

Poliphilus enters the temple, attempts to mount the steps, fails, retreats; enters the cubic base of the temple instead, reads inscriptions, interprets murals, all about love, all pertinent without being in the least illuminating. New things continually happen and manage to give the impression of perfect immobility. He finds an elephant statue on whose back is carried another obelisk, cut with what the artist imagined to be hieroglyphs; he enters the body of this beast, finds tombs or statues of a naked man and woman, reads inscriptions (Pierce struggling with the elliptical Latin, never sure he understood). It was like a Dream Sequence in the black-and-white art movies he went to then, accumulations of minatory images never repeated or endlessly repeated.

More woodcuts. Little Eros in his chariot, pulled by naked girls, he lashes them with a bunch of switches, interesting. Love. No power on earth stronger. It was easy to lose track of whether a picture showed a scene Poliphil dream-witnessed, or one he dream-perceived in a mural or read about in a tablet. At the book's end he has found his beloved Polia, but then wakes to find her not there. Pierce had had only one critical insight into this hermetico-archAEologico-crypto-romance that summer, and that was that though the hero falls asleep twice, he wakes only once.

So at the end he's still, apparently, asleep, an unusual ending among dream-books, one which Pierce in his paper had ironically maintained must have been intentional; he liked incompletion in those days too, limbos, imprisonments, the un-exitable-from. Eventually, he remembered, he lost his notes and drafts at the movies one night, and never did hand in a paper.

"Polia” could mean “many,” couldn't it. Poliphilus: the lover of many, or lover of the Many.

Here was an illustration of that. Pan, Hermes’ son, father of many-ness, Omniform or Pantomorph, shown surmounting a stele. Drawn clearly and hugely erect too, “ithyphallic,” wasn't that the word; for this book was, also, a sort of delicate pornography. Nymphs around him bringing him fruits, flowers, produce; a garlanded bull; music, wine spilled, smoke of sacrifice. Bare Naked Land.

And here was winged Love, older now, a smiling boy, leading his mother in, winged too, he had not seen that before, a winged Venus, unusual.

A
ker,
the word tumbled into his mouth, a word out of Frank Walker Barr's course on the Greeks, maybe, or some old book he had had once, what book. KER, a dangerous and terrible winged being, smiling, merciless.

Pierce's senses were suddenly alert, as though they had perceived something, some presence, there in the bright-dark room with him.

What is it?

He, or the room he stood in, had begun to fill with some numinous something. Or was it within? His heart opened to admit the passage of something out or in, something that seemed to him to be at once returning to him and coming toward him from ahead.

"What,” he said aloud, taut and all attention; and then “Yes,” he answered, or cried, as though jumping from a cliff, he didn't care, all he knew was that something was nearby, in his grasp, offered him, and he would not have long in which to assent to it.

"Yes come back,” he said. Yes please come back please, listen I'm older now, I won't waste it, I'll use it in the context of life I will; this time I'll be wise, just don't die don't go forever.

It was not there with him anymore. Whatever it was.

He realized he had been standing unmoving for a long time, trembling like a bowstring.

"Gone,” he said.

What had been offered him? Had something? There had been a sort of picture in his heart or mind: a woman was in it, maybe, and and. Possibility somehow. A transforming power shown him at his heart's root; something he recognized at the same moment he knew how long he had been without it.

"Love,” he said.

He closed the stone-dead dream-book, and mounted the chair again to put it back into its place. Then got down. The light had altered in the smelly old room. He could think of nothing vividly, nothing but lunch.

It was in his bag, the stained and ragged bookbag in which he had lugged books for years, as a woodcutter might lug his fagots. In a paper sack (as they called those in Kentucky), under the borrowed book on Dee and the curled and cup-ringed pages of his proposal, the proposal that his agent Julie Rosengarten had used in selling him to Cockerel Books.

He took out the book and the lunch, went out of the library (a moment's doubt again in the hall, no one would believe he could possibly be confused here, left? right?) and out the kitchen door into the garden; sat on a stone bench there to read and eat.