Love and Sleep (43 page)
"You start by wanting,” Spofford said quietly. “Even if what you want is for life to be different from what it is, the whole basic world to be different; even if you want your own"—he struck his breast, just as Rosie had done—"to be different."
"Ah,” she said, in pain. “Ah."
"You can have it all. That's what Cliff said. Start by wanting."
"Like three wishes come true? Sure."
"Wanting is life, Rosie. Dreams are life. What Cliff said is: Life is dreams checked by physics."
Rosie laughed aloud, relieved by this idea somehow, which made an instant sense to her.
Life is dreams checked by physics.
“Then you sure can't have it all,” she said.
"Well you'd have to see,” he said, getting up, grinning at her since she was at least no longer crying. He pulled a loose scroll of paper from a birch, and a pencil from his pocket. “Because look at this, how Cliff used to picture life, or the world. Look.” He spread the birchbark on the rock beside Rosie, and with the bit of blunt carpenter's pencil drew a small circle. “God,” he said. “This is what Cliff said.” He drew another larger circle around that. “You,” he said. Another: “The world. And last"—he drew a final circle—"God again.” He raised his eyes to her. “So see? Maybe you can do more than you think."
She looked down at him in wonder. “You believe in God?” she asked.
"I've always thought I could sort of imagine God, a little,” Pierce said. He sipped beer. “My problem is imagining that God could imagine me."
Beau had already departed from the colloquy, too primitive for him probably, and Val was losing interest. “You'll have to write that down,” she said, and yawned.
Pierce could postulate a God unaware of human suffering, a God somewhere out beyond the inconceivable frontiers of actuality, hidden for good in the paradoxes of untime and notspace; what he could not do was suppose that anything infinite—anything so large as to encompass the just-about, the as-good-as-infinite physical universe—could form any conception of something so small as himself.
There were other constructions of God that avoided this difficulty, an immanent God, a syntactical God, an aggregate God arising out of the web of human cognition, like the Skull suddenly apprehended instead of the Lady and the Mirror in the old Victorian trick-picture. But the God Beau talked about was not some artifact like that, it was a person. What person?
If you really felt the need for one, it seemed to Pierce that there were persons other than the usual one (beard, big robe, aged eye of power) that would be more congenial, more convincing too, at least to Pierce. As long as God had demonstrably no parts at all, why not assign him a different set, more consonant with his actual behavior? If you imagined God not as an old man but as say a nine-year-old girl.
As soon as, in fact almost before, he had formulated this conception, Pierce felt an unlikely satisfaction in it, a relief, as though a long-standing cramp had at last released. Sure. If the Author of the universe were nine years old, a girl-child loving and imperious and jealous. Jealous! Thou shalt have
no other gods
before me, nosirree. ‘Cause I said so.
He laughed out loud. God the Daughter. Infinite God with infinite knobby knees and an infinite plaid kilt, held together with an infinite safety pin.
Infinite.
With no inward fanfare, Pierce was just then visited by, or awarded with, one of those large simple insights, logical solutions or dissolutions of a mental obstacle you had not even recognized as an obstacle, the sensation of finding that a stuck door opens inward and not out. Infinite had of course nothing whatever to do with size. Nothing at all. In every other context he had known this to be so:
large
followed by
very large
followed by
very very large
was not eventually followed by
infinite
. He had only not ever applied this knowledge to an infinite God.
How can God notice a tiny human soul in the vast cosmic amphitheater? Because infinity is not relative. To God, Pierce was himself not appreciably smaller than the whole universe. No difference.
And contrariwise: God did not need an infinite universe to reflect himself in; Bruno was wrong, even though he knew this himself about infinity, knew that to an infinite being a really enormous universe is no larger than a small one; the abyss of space, the titanic creatures of the abyss, nebulae, galaxies, whatever, are not to an infinite being effectively larger than atoms; dogs, stars, stones, and roses, all equivalent. Bruno still wanted a great big infinite universe for a great big infinite God, who would be insulted with anything less. And yet an infinite God is not in any sense great big.
Of course.
You got no closer to God by imagining something huge, then something huger, then something hugest. No. You might, to imagine an infinite being, get just as close by imagining not something vast but something small; makes no difference.
Something small. Something tiny, since infinitesimal is infinite too; infinite tiny spark at the core of reality. Sure. Beau had drawn the first circle of his plot—Him, Her—actually too large for infinitude; it needed to be a dot, a dimensionless point.
Had he actually been told all these things long ago, and had he only not been able to receive them? Had Sister Mary Philomel explained it to him and been unable to broach his hardened heart? God is Everywhere. Sure. He has numbered the hairs of your head. Sure. The whole of great big God the Father, condensed without loss of fullness into the human body of His Son, is condensed further and without loss into the round of Bread, sure, sure.
Veni Creator Spiritus
: Come Holy Ghost Creator Blest/And in our hearts take up Thy rest. Here, maybe, was the real functional reason for a Trinity: an approach to the paradoxical and newly understood infinitude of God by positing three persons, big, medium-size, and small.
He balanced his brown bottle on a tussock of grass, where the sun struck through its heart, an amber spark. Whether or not it was what
they
had meant, he felt himself (at last and for no particular reason just at this time) admitted into the room where those who understood were gathered, those who knew that the idea of God, whatever its other merits, was not affected by cosmology. Hildy, probably, had known all along.
"I have friends who are Christians,” Val said. “Jesus Freaks sort of, I guess. A lot of love: you do feel a lot of love."
There were other big problems with the old Unmoved Mover still to be solved, of course. Never mind. Pierce thought his
vis imaginativa
had had enough workout for one day. He pulled his hat across his eyes and laced his fingers over his breast.
He ought to write this down soon. Sentiments that delicate, an insight that paradoxical, were just the sort of thing he was finding it hard to retain in memory; the kind of thing that could evaporate between the turning to a clean page and the finishing of an introductory paragraph.
New thought about God today.
Now what actually had it been, pen hovering bemused over the page like a bee whose intended flower has just been plucked.
A nine-year-old girl. An infinitely tiny spark of nine-year-old girlhood ensconced at the heart of things, and therefore apprehendable by, within, his own heart as well.
Like Tinkerbell, sort of. Hm.
The afternoon was golden on his eyelids, then dark, and his ears ceased by degrees to hear.
He experienced a sort of visitation then, a remembrance of a sort he only seemed to experience just before the onset of chance sleep; not a remembrance of something but a recurrence, occupying his whole self, of a stored past moment, a moment he could taste and feel and recognize as past but could not further identify. Pre-puberty; indoors; not summer; close guilty preoccupation ... gone.
A ghost of himself, haunting him momentarily, warning(?) or reminding, passing on.
Animula vagina blandula.
That little vial of time happened to have been filled in the winter of 1953, in the upstairs closet of the house in Bondieu, with Bobby Shaftoe next to him; but that wasn't returned to him, only the drop of melancholy sweetness on his tongue. Then the earth resumed its turning; the underside of Pierce's lids brightened momentarily, and there was a brief
ritornelle,
summer and the meadow, birdsong and human voices. Then that too was gone. Pierce was asleep.
She knew the secret names of the seven governors of the planets, but she could not recognize a picture of King Edward VI. She could be as cruel as a child, and as dismissive, consigning people and nations to perdition in a way that made John Dee's back hair stand. She teased Kelley tirelessly, speaking to him in Greek which he did not understand; she liked to play the older man against the younger one, until Kelley would stagger to his feet furious, and break off, despite John Dee's gentle remonstrances, now now, now now.
She took Kelley's black book and said it was no puzzle to her; it was written in the language of Enoch, the language men spoke with God before the Flood. Sit, she said to them; learn and do, she said; pluck up your hearts, she said, nothing will come of nothing; I will teach you this language by which the world was made, and the names Adam gave to the animals.
She told them, too, the names of their enemies at court, which included not only Burleigh, whom Dee had always suspected, but his friend and patron Sir Francis Walsingham too. So she said. And yet she was as hard to trust as a child, as the child she was, Jesus's child whom they were enjoined to become like if they would enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
They bent their minds and their wills to understand and believe, two large bearded men kneeling to be chastised and scolded by her, her finger raised (even Doctor Dee could see it with his mind's eye) and her brow darkened. When they asked for advice about the long sudden journey they were to take with the Polonian prince, where they would stay, what would become of them, she stamped her bare foot, arms akimbo:
Thou hast no faith. He is your friend greatly and intendeth to do much for you. He is prepared to do thee good and thou art prepared to do him service. Those who are not faithful shall die a most miserable death, and shall drink of sleep everlasting.
Just when it had been decided that they would depart with the Lord Laski, Kelley suddenly spent five pounds on a horse, saddle, and boot-hose. He was grooming the animal with fierce determination when Dee (who had sought him everywhere, he needed Kelley's help in making ready, he suspected some trouble) came upon him in the dark of the stable.
—Where do you go?
—Brentford. I have been told to get clean away.
—Who has told you?
—This one, by my right shoulder. Do you see him not? I did not think you would.
He poked viciously toward his own eyes with two fingers, as though to put out his sight:
—You have not eyes to see wickedness. Even did it speak the truth.
—And when return, asked Doctor Dee. Time is short.
—If I stay here I will be hanged; if I go with the Prince I shall have my head cut off.
He turned upon Dee, pointing to him with the curry-comb:
—You mean not to keep promise with me. I release you of your promise of fifty pounds a year. And if I had a thousand pounds I would not tarry here.
Dee raised his hand, palm out, to stop the man, but his gesture only made Kelley's face stranger and more suffused with violence:
—Oh
you
need not doubt God will defend
you
. And prosper
you
. He can of the very stones raise up children to Abraham.
You
need not worry.
He turned to his horse again, and began brushing violently, as though to flay the beast and not groom it.
—And I cannot abide my wife. I love her not, nay I abhor her, and I am misliked here because I favor her no better. She is a witch and has robbed me of my powers. You have helped her I doubt not. Touch me not.
Always in these possessions he feared to be touched, even by the friend who had knelt by him hand in hand for hour upon hour. Dee bowed his head in his hands as Kelley pushed past him unseeing and stamped into the house. His wife tried to shut the door of their room against him, but he flung her aside, gathered up clothes and books and a hat and some silver-gilt spoons in a parody of packing. Joanna slipped out and down into the kitchen, where she and Jane and the scullery-girl sat together and listened to the banging and muttering above.
When he had stamped down the stairs and ridden off, Jane climbed to her husband's small study.
—Jane.
—Husband I am sorry for thee.
—Well he is gone.
It was nearly dark then. Her husband's head was in his hands, his white hair disordered. She came to take his shoulders, and could tell he wept. He said into his hands:
—I beseech Almighty God to guide him and defend him from danger and shame. Oh let him not be hurt.
—Husband, she said again, but could think of no comfort to speak to him, did not dare tell him Good riddance, did not truly think it in her own heart: that strange angry man, she wanted to take him sometimes in her own arms and shake him and hug him into silence, as she did her own sons in their anguishes and fits. There there. There there.
She guessed, too, that he was not gone for good. And he was not.
Late that night John Dee (who had not left his study, sat up writing the records of his last dealings with his spiritual visitors) heard someone mount the stairs. It was he.
A well of hot relief overflowed in his breast. He said nothing, kept writing; only looked up when Kelley stood in the study door.
—I have lent my mare, he said. And so am returned.
—It is well done.
—I have come from Brentford by boat. Those were false friends.
He sat down in the chair by John Dee's table, the chair where some sixteen months before he had first sat down, whose arms he had taken in his hands (as he did now) and thought: Now I am home.