Love and Sleep (71 page)
He lay awake on his damp pillow looking instead up into the ceiling tiles, which seemed to make faces, squarish pocked flat-hatted desperadoes squinting at nothing.
The heart, Julie, the heart. Isn't that something? The last magic engine persisting unchanged, still able to do wonderful things, Julie, if you want to dare to try them; terrible things too.
Magic is love, Julie. Love is magic. And hadn't she known it all along? The best kind of surprise, the one you could have guessed, the one you had known and yet hadn't expected. Though what Julie meant by love was surely not the awful winged
ker
that had covered Pierce; the heart she would think of wasn't the fearsome synthesizer of binding images cultivated by potent Saturnian melancholics of the Bruno type.
Bruno—ah it was clear now, very clear—had actually been trying to contract this disease of the heart,
amor hereos
, on purpose: allowing his own subjectivity to be overthrown, exiled, killed, replaced by a phantasm of the beloved, who would rule in his stead. Only his beloved wasn't a fleshly woman but the Goddess Diana: self-created image of the universe of which the heart and brain and self were all products. After he had fashioned in the erotic heat of his heart's workshop an image so gorgeous, so incandescent, that he could not but fall in love with it, he was going to undergo death in the replacing of his own consciousness with it: with a spiritual cognate of the whole wide world, all inside himself then as well as outside, and at his command. He would become a god.
Nut. Misguided nut. Let him get to Rome, and explain this to the Inquisition. Then he would find out where the real power lay, in which god's hands.
Pierce's heart had again begun that horrid tiny rapping at his ribcage.
When in the course of a dreadful night he had told Rose Ryder that he was afraid he had become unable to write the book he had promised to his agent and to his publisher, was going to have to abandon it maybe probably, she'd said
Well anyway it was all falsehoods, Pierce.
All falsehoods. He hadn't bound her with his spells at all, and now she had found stronger magic than his.
Oh jeez just let them not hurt her. Just let her not be hurt.
Maybe if he got up now and called her; told her how sorry he was for the way he had acted, and how he would try now to really understand, really.
No she would be sound asleep for sure, and not glad to be wakened. Sleep, peaceful sleep, was one of the benefits promised to believers.
Sweet dreamless sleep.
What he could not have expected, what he would not ever have thought possible: that his old God, miserable deistical structure compounded of bad metaphysics, scholastic quibbles, absolute claims subscribed to by absolutist child's logic, should suddenly come alive, factitious but animated, stirring like an eyeless lump of foulness in a dream; seeing through his evasions and casuistries just as Sam had seen through his old effrontery; alive, potent, immune to excuses, and claiming for His own the woman Pierce had hidden in His house.
And he had had nothing to fight for her with, no sword, no shield, they were lost, gone, broken; his soul wasn't pure either. He had had nothing but argument. He had entered into rational argument with her, about her God's existence, the truth of her Book, the claims of her hierophants, entered into argument as into a wood of tearing thorns that closed immediately behind him.
Hypnerotomachia.
Nor did it do any good; he could hurt her with his relentless hacking, make her weep, but couldn't shake her heart from the one good great thing (she said) that had ever taken hold of it. It was only himself he convinced, arguing even when she wasn't present, all by himself daylong, nightlong, not moving from the chair where he formulated his case: until at midnight or dawn his speaking mouth froze in horror, and he realized that for hours, for days, he had been living in
their
universe, and staring at
their
God, giving him only more life by his discourse.
Where was it that Barr said, was it in
Time's Body
or another of his books, that in the religious history of the West old gods are always turning into devils, cast from their thrones into dark undergrounds, to be lords over the dead and the wicked? It had happened to the old Titans when the Greek sky-gods came, it had happened to the
dives
of Greece and Rome in turn and the Northern gods too, who became horned devils for the Christian to fear.
And now look, the wheel turns, Jehovah becomes the devil. Old Nobadaddy, liver-spotted greasy-bearded jealous God, spread over his hoard of blessings like the Dragon, surrounded by his sycophants singing praises, never enough though: Pierce could see him, when he closed his eyes, reigning in his dark and fuliginous heaven. Also when he opened his eyes. He wondered if in the end he would see nothing else forever.
Winnie said:
I don't understand why you don't just drop it.
And he hadn't understood himself, and now he did.
In the little cabin by the Blackbury they had conspired together, she and he, to forge a hieroglyph of Love in the shape of her (multifoliate Rose) in his spirit, by the alchemical power of Eros. Now it could not be evicted, it was nothing but an image but it was ruling in
his
heart in
his
stead, while she went on living the tragicomic real life from which they had at first extracted it.
Weird, because the story they had built between them in the little bedroom by the river was all about how she was to surrender her throne to him.
Oh, come back, come back, soul, self, how was he ever to find his way back, by what awful journey, to the empty throneroom of the heart?
He wished he could weep.
Hermes, he prayed, old devil, god of binding and unbinding: release me from this spell I've caught myself in. I'm not so smart, I thought I was so smart, I'm not. Bruno: You got me into this, come to me now if you can, teach me how to take back the magic I started. You bastard.
He lay still and tried to believe there might be help for him if he could believe in help, but there was none. And why should there be.
No the only hope was to ride it out; to make it over somehow unkilled into the next age, the new world, when the loathsome and beautiful creatures of the passage time will disinvent themselves, gone with the wind. All that he saw and felt now (gripping the edges of his motel bed, tasting the sweat on his lip) would maybe become plain madness then, a simple mental or moral mistake. Understandable. Curable. Maybe there would be a pill he could take. A calm clinic, he could see it clearly; the nurse entering, and on her tray the glass of cool water, and a pill, rose-colored, divided in half by a tender groove.
O world stop spinning. Like a ball in a roulette wheel seeking for its resting place.
It might be years, though, it might be decades from now. He would have to keep himself alive till then, make his way across this wild waste, alone too, not even Good Deeds to go with him, for he had never done any; he could not remember one, not one.
Just let him not cease hoping for it to come to be, the new world. Let him not cease longing, or it might not come; its coming into being might depend upon his longing, his willingness to want it still.
He sat up. It was no use lying in the dark. If there were something to read. But he was afraid of the books he had brought with him, history books, magic books. Falsehoods. He wished he had brought Enosh, just one volume, to be by his side.
When he got home, he decided, he would call Rosie Rasmussen. He would tell her he was ready to go to Europe now, ready to fill out his application, whatever; that he was ready to go soon. A different sky, a long vacation; something to look for there too, and a reason to look for it: an
apotropaic
, gorgeous black word, something to fend off this evil. He felt in his pants pocket for his smokes, and lit one, though he knew that meant he was now awake till dawn. He sat in his shorts on the edge of the bed, the ashtray between his legs, and his back bent with the weight of the succubus that clung there, his own cunning work, made in the smithy of his own heart, which now was shut and could make no more.
But meanwhile, meanwhile: from somewhere in the Realms of Light, wasn't help on the way?
Had not a messenger already set out, tiny messenger, infinitesimal at first, but surely much grown up by now? Traveling outward or inward, through AEon upon AEon, with a message just for Pierce?
Well he had got lost; had got lost more than once in fact, had been distracted, led astray, sent off in the wrong direction or even backward, wandering in spheres of confusion and forgetfulness, delayed over and over, unconscionably, fearfully delayed, as by the twists of a plot, an old farce plot. Now, even as the hoary powers of the old age of the world shuffle offstage, their work still undone (it was never to be done, never would or could be done, has not been finished ever in any age so far), he, or is it she, stands at the border of some vacant and evanescing circle, trying to remember where she, or is it he, was headed, toward what place, with what word for whom: fretting like the traveler pacing the midnight station who suspects that the last train has gone.
But will she come in time? Oh yes just in time; whenever she comes is just in time; when we have despaired for the thousandth midnight of any such a one ever coming from anywhere, she will arrive, in a tearing hurry, breaking into or out of the last spheres of air, fire, water, earth as though throwing open the successive doors of a long corridor, down which she rushes, her hair streaming and her brow knit, her hand already beside her mouth to call into the ear of our souls
Wake up.
In the preceding volume of this series of fictions I acknowledge my debt to many writers, thinkers, and historians from whom I have learned, principally the late Dame Frances Yates.
To that list I wish now to add, for the particular contents of this book, some further thanks: to Harry Caudill (
Night Comes to the Cumberlands
) for reminding me of much I had forgotten and explaining much that I had not understood; John Bossy (
Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair
); Gerald Mattingly (
The Armada
); Carlo Ginzburg (
The Night Battles
); R.J.W. Evans (
Rudolf II and His World
). I have drawn on the researches of Piero Camporesi, Caroline Walker Bynum, Caroline Oates, and Ernan McMullen. Thanks also to L.S.B., Jennifer Stevenson, Thomas M. Disch, John Hollander, and Harold Bloom.
Above all to the late Ioan Culianu: for
Eros and Magic in the Renaissance
, from which I have taken much, but for far more than that, I offer gratitude and grief.
QuAE nunc abibis in loca; nec ut soles dabis iocos!
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