Mount Terminus (29 page)

He's on a mission, Isabella teased him, to achieve peace through optical illusion, to shine light into the eyes of the person living in darkness.

Dr. Straight looked at Isabella and kindly grinned. She likes to provoke me, he said. But she understands better than most what forces—what organized interests—summon men to war, and how these men, once indoctrinated, are irredeemably transformed on the battlefield. Those who have experienced the savagery I speak of, Joseph, the variety of savagery I participated in in the Philippines when I was a soldier, they normally refuse to revisit the horror because they're too haunted and repulsed by the memory, in some instances too regretful for the atrocious acts they've perpetrated, in other instances so overcome by pride they can't admit to themselves they were ordered to act in unconscionable ways, in ways that defy explanation, and in place of shame they choose bravado. Instead of healing their conscience, they choose to lean on the fictions of past glory and dwell in the darkest of silences, leaving the people who dwell in their ignorance of war to remain ignorant. For reasons I can't adequately explain, said Dr. Straight to Isabella, I have been affected differently than many of my comrades. I've been filled with a righteous indignation and am more than prepared to play the foolhardy proselytizer for peace, however naïve I might appear.

But how, exactly, asked Bloom, does the conceit of visual perception aid your cause?

Dr. Straight used his large hands to pantomime a barrier around him, and he explained to what extent man was a self-oriented, self-contained being, connected to others through spoken language, through the written word, through commerce, familial bonds, communal spaces, so much of which was predicated on what the individual saw of himself in relationship to others. I've been asking myself, said Dr. Straight, what would happen if we began to question not what we see on an ordinary day, but the very way we see it. How do we redefine what we take for granted? If we distance ourselves from our own points of view and question our basic assumptions of the world, what then changes within us? Do we begin to question what exists beyond our ordinary range of vision? Beyond the aggregate's accepted beliefs? Beyond its involuntary assumptions of the world?

And now Bloom asked how one created a distance between the self and what one sees.

That is the pertinent question, isn't it? said the doctor. Wearing a mischievous furrow on his brow, Dr. Straight turned again to Isabella. If you're genuinely interested, he now said, turning back to Bloom, if you're willing to give up a few days of your time to take part in our study, I'm sure Isabella will be very happy to administer the experiment.

For that you'll need to consult Mr. Gottlieb, said Bloom. My time belongs to him.

Please, said Gottlieb, use him in whatever manner you like. For however long you like. He's yours for the taking.

No, said Isabella to Dr. Straight. It's asking too much.

Nonsense, said the doctor. I promise you, Joseph, you'll benefit from the experience in ways you can't imagine.

To Isabella, Bloom said he'd be more than happy to participate.

You shouldn't indulge him, she said. He's indulged enough. Between me and his wife, he's spoiled to the core.

Dr. Straight ignored Isabella and began to speak of the work Bloom and Mr. Gottlieb were engaged in. He believed the art nearest to re-creating life—not as men experienced it, per se, but how they remembered it—was the motion picture. What are they, the pictures you make, if they're not a way to dream collectively? The experience, he argued, goes well beyond the solitary act of, say, reading a novel. It's somehow more real in its aftermath than recalling what happened between characters on a stage. He was fascinated with the way the moving images lived inside those viewing them, as if they were memories generated by the very minds they touched. I don't know about you, Joseph, but I've found myself on more than several occasions dreaming of pictures I've seen, as if the characters in those scenarios were men and women I knew from life. The question becomes, therefore, how can one use such a dream to most effectively evoke an inhibition response in the individual who's confronting the prospect of war? Dr. Straight believed it was imperative to bring to life for this individual, who would otherwise be seduced by glory and honor, the horrors of war in their entirety. He proposed that photographers should be sent out onto battlefields wherever war was being waged, to film its atrocities and present them to the public unadorned. He thought it imperative that artists like Bloom and Mr. Gottlieb feel an obligation to construct
mimetic events
in which the human spirit was shown—through the most uncompromising images—to be crushed by war's barbarity. Damn society's sense of propriety, he said. Damn its precious composure. Whether it should be incidental footage or artifice made real, Dr. Straight desired to introduce an innate hesitation, an instinctual pause, a deeply felt revulsion, that went beyond the hesitation of primal fear and the impulse to preserve oneself. These very rational fears had proven to be too easily overcome by tribal and national concerns. Beyond natural instinct, he argued, there was the need to root within the culture a third hesitation, a hesitation influenced by the artificial memory of violence and its haunting aftermath. On the eve of war, men should not only be reminded of the noble warriors among them, but also the monsters living in those same warriors. Only then would a new morality, a new consciousness, be born. There is no other way, said Dr. Straight, to demythologize the war hero.

*   *   *

When they had all explored Dr. Straight's various ideas at length, and found they had exhausted all aspects of the subject, Gottlieb rose to his feet and said to Bloom and Isabella that they should get acquainted. I'll take Dr. Straight to the library.

Dr. Straight said to Isabella, Take your time, my dear.

As the two men walked into the villa through the courtyard door, Isabella said of the doctor, There's nothing he says, he doesn't believe. And there is nothing more he enjoys than to play the gadfly.

Don't you believe in what he advocates?

On the contrary, I believe in it all. Her father, Carlos Reyes, she told Bloom, died fighting alongside Dr. Straight in the Philippines. Her father had been an astronomer, and it was he, she said, and her mother, Anna Sorenson, a cultural anthropologist, who influenced Dr. Straight's thinking. When the doctor returned from the war, he often visited Isabella and her mother, and during those visits, she recalled, the two of them would sit together in the garden, and she would eavesdrop on them talking about how they might promote the practice of a pacifist ideal. So, you see, Joseph, it's deeply ingrained in me. It's as much my mother speaking as it is Dr. Straight. In many ways, it's all I have left of either of my parents.

Why is that?

A few years after the doctor's return from the war, she told him, her mother left her in the care of Dr. Straight and his wife, and went on an expedition in the mountains of Central America, where she contracted malaria and died before she made the return journey home.

I'm so sorry, said Bloom.

Thank you, said Isabella. I know you understand what it is to be alone in the world.

Yes, said Bloom, I do.

*   *   *

Over dinner that evening, the passion of their afternoon conversation turned to Jacob Rosenbloom's remarkable collection of optical devices. All three of Bloom's dinner companions were well versed in the medieval world of scryers and the writings of John Dee. Dr. Straight was particularly impressed with the two items Gottlieb had pointed out to Bloom the first day he was introduced to the elder Rosenbloom's collection. Bloom would learn for the first time that evening that the device he had used to project the slides of
Death, Forlorn
for his father was a seventeenth-century thaumaturgic lantern designed and forged by an optician named Walgensten, which was known to the world from an illustration drawn by an optics enthusiast and Jesuit priest, Athanasius Kircher, who, in the year 1646, began publishing the journal
Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae
, all of whose editions were collected in the other item Gottlieb had pointed out. They really are remarkable companion pieces, said Isabella. What's more, they discovered when examining the journal, Jacob was also in possession of Kircher's
magia catoptrica
, a spin wheel with a peephole for viewing images on interchangeable disks. They discovered several boxes of slides specifically designed for the
catoptrica—The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Son of God
;
The Ascent of Icarus
;
The Descent of Icarus
;
Orpheus in the Underworld
; and
Original Sin: The Fall of Man
. They were intrigued by the
Visionary Phantasmagorias
of Etienne-Gaspard, and spent time viewing
Apparitions, Spectres, Phantoms, and Shadows
;
The Drum of Eumenides
;
His Satanic Majesty
;
Medusa's Head
;
Doctor Young Interring His Daughter: The Head with the Revolving Glory
;
The Head of the Departed Hero
. They tried to imagine how he conducted his hydraulic experiments:
The Turkish Smoker
;
The Lantern of Diogenes
;
The Pneumatic Pump
;
The Ascending Egg Upon the Point of a Waterspout
;
Illuminated Lustre, Upon the Jet d'Eau.
Isabella, it turned out, had seen many of the modern projection devices—the phenakistoscope disk, the zoetrope, the choreutoscope, but she had never before seen a zoopraxiscope, an electrotachyscope, or a photographic gun.

Dr. Straight explained to Bloom how meaningful it was to him to see Kircher's journals, as it was an article on the Jesuit priest that Isabella's father kept in his files at home that had inspired his conversations with Isabella's mother. He, too, said Straight on the subject of Kircher, was a man who dedicated himself to a life of seeing the world anew after having wandered the battlefields of the Thirty Years' War. Like Bloom's father, Straight drew inspiration from Dee's postulate that light was the exuberance of God's great goodness and truth, that mirrors were the divine means to reflect that truth. He, too, believed in the limitless magic of the mind. You must take some time with the journal, he said to Bloom. If only to see the sketches of his magnetic oracle and botanical clock, his diagrams on magnets and sunspots, the stuffed crocodiles and skeletons, geodes, and ostrich eggs. With your permission, Dr. Straight said to Bloom, Isabella and I would very much like to stay for as long as it takes to document the collection. To which Bloom said with his eyes on Isabella, Yes, please do.

*   *   *

Maybe one day, Joseph, you'll recall the experience Isabella and I are about to give you and apply it to one of your pictures. Maybe one day in the future, you'll recall what it is I'm about to say to you now. Which is this: out of the depths of the mind, new powers are always emerging. And with that said, Dr. Straight and Isabella strapped onto Bloom a shoulder harness, which was attached to a device Isabella had invented and named the invertiscope, an elegant contraption consisting of a series of angled mirrors that rose up in a shaft whose design resembled a periscope's. At its highest point, its neck bent forward and then down; it could be manipulated with a system of pulleys whose cords dangled from rings just above his ears. If he pulled on the cord above his right ear, he could elevate the scope's angle upward and turn it a full 180 degrees around to his back; if he pulled on the cord above his left ear, he could rotate his perception back around and downward. The scope, therefore, provided Bloom a field of vision extending from the front of his body, to the sky, to his back. When the invertiscope had been fully secured to his head, he could now fully appreciate Dr. Straight's short speech in the courtyard, as he clearly understood, quite literally, the doctor's notion of heightened consciousness. He felt himself made strangely tall and elongated, and detached. It was as if he'd stepped out of his skin altogether, released—as Straight said—from his containment to become an invisible interloper looking down on his own life.

It took the better part of the day to learn how to maneuver with the invertiscope towering over him, but the material Isabella had used to manufacture the device, and the shoulder harness she'd designed, were remarkably well engineered, so well, in fact, that before the morning had finished Bloom had grown accustomed to its weight and was able to adjust his balance and gait. As a precaution, however, Isabella remained at his side, her arm entwined in his, advising him along the way when to make small adjustments to the scope with the pulleys. They spent the day walking the grounds, first through the mazes of the front gardens, next through the open field to the promontory, where Isabella held him with her chest pressed against his back, her hands gripping his shoulders, as Bloom stood at the headland's edge. There, he looked down, and saw himself looking down, and he described to Isabella the state in which he discovered his father at the bottom of the ravine. She guided him through the grove, around low-lying limbs, walked him under the canopy of trees jeweled in ripe summer fruit, and there in the shade he looked down on himself and Isabella as a bird might.

And here, when Bloom had begun to question his ability to love, he found this was the perspective he needed. He reached out with the hand nearest Isabella's shoulder and said to her, This space between us, this narrow space separating our shoulders, reminds me of a passage I read in Leonardo's notebooks. He advised painters who lacked inspiration to contemplate with a reflective eye a crack in an old wall, and there the painter, he advised, would find what was lacking. When Bloom said this, he could see from his vantage point Isabella look at his hand and tenderly take hold of it. She then leaned into him to close the gap between them. They next walked with great care up the stairwell to the tower's pavilion, where Bloom introduced her to his birds and demonstrated the various lines of repartee he had developed with Elijah. Here he could see the muscles in Isabella's face relax in appreciation of his aviary; and, later, when he observed with what ease she adjusted the gauges of the telescope to suit her eye, he couldn't help but think how naturally she fit into his private world above the tree line.