Irenicon (36 page)

1
One example will suffice: “All that is required to discover a new world is to sail until one runs out of water. Bernoulli did something immeasurably harder: he illuminated that sphere we stumbled over since Time began, before we had even seen the darkness.” Sycophantic drivel like this may keep Duke Spurius Lartius Cocles in print, but it is not History.

2
In one charming version the babe floats down the Irenicon in a basket, rejected by mother and river both. Others have it that he had no human master; an Angel taught him the Divine Masonry. Predictably, many southern versions replace this Angelic instructor with an erudite Demon.

3
As elaborated in Volume II, from a trivial theological disagreement came schism. A reforming branch of the Curia proposed that the
Original Sin
was not Seeking Forbidden Knowledge but
Murder
. In the heat of the controversy, the
Empiricists
(as they became known) went further: no knowledge was forbidden. After the Heresy trials the surviving
Empiricists
resigned themselves to the study of Nature. Within a single generation the Engineers’ ecclesial origins were forgotten.

4
That generation’s fate is a question for another History. Most of his first champions denounced him eventually: Plagiarist, Heretic, Tyrant, and so on. In turn the Inquisition denounced many of them, while others were simply discredited. After the Re-Formation there was small appetite for Theology.

5
The Author’s father.

6
He consumed facts “like a pig, eating all that was put before him,” according to contemporary diarist and wit Ciuto Brandini (Born 1304–Executed 1348).

7
“
Pace
Pythagoras, material proof of Perfection, X
³
+ Y
³
= Z
³
, possible?” Since it was found scribbled in a proof margin, most scholars consider it a whimsy rather than a question proper.

8
Two decades were to pass before the Most Holy Inquisition made their jaundiced interpretation of this passage the centerpiece of Bernoulli’s trial for heresy.

9
He was, however, already universally lauded as a second Daedalus and had just been made Chief Architect of St. Eco’s Cathedral. A decade would pass before it acquired its current title.

10
The morphological changes occurring postmortem make corpses inefficient for anatomical study but ever practical; when subjects expired, he used them for “harmonic” experiments. It is unlikely, however, that these attempts to find “Divine Music” to animate the inanimate produced anything but ghastly smells from his student quarters.

11
A set of reforms pushed through the Senate by Bernoulli’s obliging Patron, Senator Tremellius.

12
Drawn from Bernoulli’s inner circle, the brilliant young men known as the Apprentices.

13
By unhappy coincidence, eight Generals died in the last decade of the war. The four remaining were purged in Forty-Eight. Our current Generals’ limited tactical authority makes them pale beside these predecessors.

14
Unpopular in the Senate; this voicing of intellectual independence changed the way the Guild saw itself and becomes, in hindsight, one of the early intimations of the reforming spirit of Forty-Six. Afterward Bernoulli decided never again to bow to intellectual inferiors. As ever, he planned patiently.

15
As less conscientious commentators have seen fit to do. Conscious that he is a relic of an obsolete pedagogy, the present Author proceeds with gratitude for his Masters’ patient explanation and the needless caution that any errors are his own.

16
A ratio of extreme and mean, i.e., the
Golden Section
of the
Etruscans
. Before this discovery, Bernoulli dismissed Clerical reverence of Classical authority as “ancestor worship.” He soon began studying the
Disciplina Etrusca
.

17
Luca Pacioli, our first First Apprentice (served 1353–1357), commented on “this drive to unify in Bernoulli’s thought, strategy and administration. His method was to find in separate truths, one larger.”

18
This research prompted private misgivings, with Bernoulli noting in the margins of his
Disciplina Etrusca
, “I have plucked the Tree of Knowledge bare; the great Spiral is now visible and, with it, the great Secret: the War between Order and Chaos is
itself
the cause of Beauty. I have built a Tower tall enough to spy on His design, and for that am damned.”

19
Did the Wave will itself into being
, he wondered in later life.
Did it cast a shadow on the Past as well as Future?
The question, variously phrased, appears often in his last notebooks.

20
We live with the unexplained side effects to this day. After two decades of research, the pseudonaiades, colloquially known as waterfolk, or
buio
, remain a mystery, a subject where even the use of the word
creation
is contentious. Were they created, or were they freed? Whatever the truth, after the more dreadful example of Gubbio, a dread of unweaving other hidden bonds of reality prompted the moratorium enforced to this day.

21
With such hypocrisy was the revolution nourished. Consider: the same Curia that commanded Bernoulli to make the Wave subsequently characterized it as a usurpation of God. The same Curia employed Natural Philosophy when it suited them. The same Curia’s theologians were pleased to use Pythagoras’s description of the flawed third dimension as a mathematical explanation of Man’s fall, a practice that Bernoulli gently reproves in the
Discourse
as “unsound.”

22
Choice examples of the Scholastic category mistakes that impeded philosophical progress for centuries.

23
When the first proscription list began with Senator Tremellius’s name, speculation began that he was manipulated from the start. Right or wrong, the truth is the Re-Formation consumed its Author.

24
Which makes the current generation of Historians’ willingness to repeat old myths and Imperial propaganda doubly disappointing. Our vocation is to doubt, to fearlessly probe and dig, however unsettling what we unearth may be to earthly power. Our first duty is to truth.

25
Concord had been locked in a mortal struggle with Rasenna, so while Rasennennesi bewailed their fate in 1347, they understood it had been earned. Gubbio, an unimportant backwater, had maintained neutrality throughtout the conflict; however, it was deemed to be a perfect site for the second test of the Wave. Without any formal declaration of war, Concord sent a Wave substantially more destructive than that which divided Rasenna thirteen years before. It incurred universal censure and, more seriously, created the Frank-Anglo pact that has so protracted our current Europan war. Filippo Argenti, the second First Apprentice, criticized it as “a callous failure, technically and politically.” The drain of resources halted Imperial expansion at a crucial period, and though Gubbio was extensively studied, the aftereffects remain mysterious.

26
Taken from Bernoulli’s address on the Re-Formation’s fifth anniversary. This subtle revision of the meaning of
Re-Formation
, the expansion of Concordian society rather than its perfection, became more pronounced over the decade. By Fifty-nine it had transmuted into the bellicosity that made the second test possible. That is not to give credence to the theory that Gubbio’s purpose
was
Gubbio; personally, the present Author finds trite the fashion of describing the
test
as a
demonstration
. That Concord has not since employed the Wave proves nothing.

27
Is one of these secrets the answer to the
Dialogue
’s last question? I inquired of my Masters what such a proof would prove. Pythagoras describes two-dimensional perfection as X
²
+ Y
²
= Z
²
. The rumored proof proving that X
³
+ Y
³
= Z
³
is mathematically absurd. Perfection and reality are incompatible.

28
It was Concord’s awed citizenry who dubbed it the Molè, usually translated as
Miracle
, although I find the secular
Wonder
renders it more accurately. Bernoulli himself gave it its less reverent handle.

29
Though it must be obvious to the Reader that such thorough research has as seldom been tempered with such rare insight as it has been so eloquently expressed.

30
Too rigidly defined now, some argue. The
Empiricist
school and the more generous vision of the
Naturalists
continue to find their adherents within the Guild. The second First Apprentice, himself an aggressive
Empiricist
, did much to foster the materialism of our contemporary Guild. Our current First Apprentice takes a more embracing view; like Bernoulli, Guglielmo Bonaccio is a bridge builder.

31
Owing to the dearth of records. If Bernoulli was secretive in his public works, imagine, Reader, how much more jealously he concealed his researches alchemical.

32
He investigated folktales of autoconception with credulity marvelous to our age of reason.

The archives contain accounts of ewes producing lambs without rams, frogs changing sex, fish inseminating themselves, and reptiles dying to be reborn with new skin, new youth.

33
Metamorphosis is a recurring theme. As the Virgin made water become wine, so he theorized that water and man were interchangeable states.

34
The first two books of the
Disciplina Etrusca
concern Divination and Interpretation. But judging by dog ears and annotations, the last book, concerning Ritual, is the volume that most preoccupied Bernoulli.

It too trisects: the first book concerns Lifespan, of everything from People to Empires. The second, those Worlds we visit in mediation and death. The last book, on Reading, purports to be a key to hidden truths in Scripture; imagine a lock that is key to itself!

35
Why he assumed Concord’s end and the Second Coming would occur concurrently is unknown. The date, he speculated, corresponded to the relationship of the Golden number to its conjugate, approximately –0.618. “The first describes all that is Perfect. Its Dark Twin (the absolute value of the length ratio in reverse order) must then describe all that is Wrong. The perfection of an anti-God.” An elegant hypothesis, but what the Devil he meant by it, we have no idea.

36
What it says that we, who live surrounded by his monuments, have remained ignorant of this, his shadow, is a question for Philosophers more than Historians. If nothing else it reveals the slipshod scholarship of the present Author’s colleagues.