A great wind rises: "Love & Sleep" concludes

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VIII

Becomes clear that the near-naked, long-lashed, flute-playing Robbie is Eros and that his conjuring by Pierce is not an answer to his need for love but rather presages a love that will arrive -- a love sickness. Val, with the Encyclopedia of Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle, passes Pierce on the library steps after just reading Plato on Eros: “He is not to be confused with the beautiful beloved, though men often make this mistake; rather his appearance presages the appearance of the beloved. He is the spirit who inspires love, who makes love unrefusable.” Had Pierce recognized the book, the narrator speculates, he might have been able to escape the dangerous love that awaits him.

Egyptian resonances in Pierce's somewhat cursed romantic life: just as the second lover of Pierce in New York was called by him "The Sphinx," so his lover in the Faraway Hills, Rose Ryder, drives a car called "the Asp."

Pierce notes that a therapist would say that "in some sense Robbie was occasioned by enforced chastity and sexual tension" and that "gratifying release with a real other person ought to cause him to evaporate. But he hadn't. Every morning, it was true, he had to be re-created anew, Pierce working with Pygmalion's patience on the attenuated phantom until for an instant, a string of instants, he was present, a Real Presence that could be communed with. It grew no easier, but Pierce remained willing, and Robbie didn't cease coming."

Pierce's conjuring of Robbie paralleled in the alchemical work of Dr. Dee and Kelly, seeking to make a Philosopher's Stone in Rudolph II's Prague. As Dee manipulates a chamber, an athenor to simulate the passage of an astrological year, Kelly, in a trance, mythically finds, rescues, and then sacrifices a golden youth.

Giordano Bruno comes to the understanding that the true power in creation is simply love. "There is no power on earth found greater than love. . . . Eros is the great daemon, the little lord of this world; the strongest bond of the world is Venus's loose girdle. . . . Love drives old and young; it drives hot youths into one another's arms against every prohibition of priests and elders, kings and kin, drives them into love-sickness, madness, even death. Love surprises grave senators and abbesses, tormenting their own flesh with young heats, making them dance and caper to his tune." "Love is magic," Bruno expounds, and "magic is love."

The werewolf story from Kentucky in reprised in the 16th Century Bohemia -- where Dee and Bruni have both taken refuge -- with an episode of a youth transformed into wolf, learning to run with others of his kind in feasting on lambs and battling witches by night. The contemporary Kentucky and Renaissance Bohemia/Prague stories are further connected by the reintoduction of first the girl Bobby (now driving, wearing high-heels, and now apparently on the side of the witches) and then Sister Mary Philomel of the Infantine Sisters, still sharing quarters with a worm-eaten statue of Saint Wenceslaus.

Madimi had foretold to Dee that the old world would be swept away not in a fire -- that would be next time -- but in a great wind. The wind arrives in both stories, 1588 and 1978, and in it Eros/Robbie (finding no room in Pierce's bed, now occupied with Rose Ryder) departs wistfuly; Madimi retreats from Dee's sightstone as the Spanish Armada is routed; Rose Rasmussen's daughter Sam sleepwalks and wakes to a seizure; and Sister Mary Philomel is delivered of a key to an antique chest by the animate statue of Wenceslaus.

As Sister Mary Philomel turns the key in the aged chest, "she felt a stirring, as though with the turning of the one key, all the drawers and compartments within (which no one in her memory had ever seen) also opened one by one in sequence." So, a possibility that the relic Fellowes Kraft had sought in Prague on behalf of Boney had actually made its way to Kentucky and the convent where the cancer survivor Sister Mary Philomel abides.

Final chapter begins with a conversation between Pierce and his mentor Frank Walker Barr, seemingly set in an afterlife of palm trees and pyramids, but soon slyly revealed to be a resort in Florida, where he is visiting his mother. In dialogue with his former student, Barr establishes that heart is the one unchanging force in man -- essentially reiterating Giordano Bruno's point about Love and Eros. Pierce at this point is sick with love and, literally, suffering heart-break (coronary symptoms and all) over Rose Ryder, "the succubus that clung there, his own cunning work, made in the smithy of his own heart, which was now shut and could make no more."

Immobilized and dispirited as the volume ends, Pierce waits for a messenger, a goddess to speak into his ear the words "Wake up."

A son conjured from a gray ledger notebook

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VII

Pierce considers the prospects of a quest for a surviving marvel of the earlier age, "when the laws of the universe were not as they are now but different; when such things as jewels and fire had properties they no longer have; when people witnessed, and carefully recorded, marvels we now know to be (and believe to have always been) impossible.

"A quest that would be for something real . . . A though in the next age of the world, a cooler and a duller she than this one, somebody were to come across a lump of radium, glowing eerily in the darkness, shedding particiles, decaying, showing just those properties that once upon a time, in Einstein's day or Fermi's, people actually believed it to have."

This section of "Love & Sleep" named after the fifth house of the zodiac, Nati, which Val explains is "the House of Children basically: it sort of includes sex, or at least procreation, but it's got to cover wills and legacies and inheritances too."

In keeping with this, the section concludes with a flurry of couplings and nurturings across gender lines. Rose imagines suckling, giving sustenance and begins, orally, an affair with Swofford. Beau imagines a cosmic coupling with the earth itself, returning to Adam. Val acts on her long suppressed knowledge that the bachelor Boney is her father. Pierce consummates his earlier intimacy with the other Rose (or does he?, given his succeptability to hypnerotomachia).

Most astounding by far is Pierce's creation, his drafting (in a gray ledger notebook) of a son and lover -- the twelve or thirteen year old Robbie, as his third of three wishes, the wishful result of an act of unprotected sex shortly after his graduation from college.

Robbie an act of imagination, of hypnerotomachia. "If we believe, or pretend, that the world is capable of being other than it is, alterable by our desires (as perhaps more people did then than we so now) then it is likely that we will spend a certain amount of our aimless mental time in imagining just how we might alter it. Pierce Moffat had never built model railroads, hadn't spent energy imagining himself into that small world, boarding the little cars at little stations, oiling the engine and driving it through the hills and over the bridges. He had never had a teddy bear who went on imaginary travels with him, or an imaginary friend, or even a dog he pretended could talk to him.

"But he had always, always imagined that wishes could come true [and] he had never quite quelled the habit. Though he had prepared himself with a couple of practical wishes for Health and Money, it was only that day, sitting on the steps of Fellowes Kraft's house as he once sat on the steps in Kentucky, twirling as he had then a long lock of hair, that he had discovered his deepest need and conflated it with desire."

"'Robbie,' Pierce explained the next morning to a tall gray ledger he had bought on arrival in the Faraways in the Spring, 'is my son.'"

The dying Boney's desires remain for immortality. Fellowes Kraft had jokingly addressed him as "Mon Emperor" (Boney being the nickname of Napoleon) and, in his convalescence, the "old monster" has adopted a regal silken kimono with a great dragon on the back. But Boney's Mages, first Fellowes and now Pierce, fail him in his hope to be brought the elixir of immortality. (To Val, he looks like "the person she had read about in the Dictionary, who got eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth"). Boney enters the afterlife still thinking of how he could retrace his steps to discover the secret.


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"Life is dreams checked by Physics"

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VI

Val, the local astrologer, has been taking books out of the library to study up on love (there being, oddly, no house of love in the arcana). Rosie notices: "the distinctive white paint of the librarian who had long ago carefully lettered the call numbers on the spine, and was for a moment touched. Not many people took out books with such numbers on them." From the description of its contents and organization, the book would appear to be that of Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle, poured-over by Pierce in his boyhood.

One step backward from Val's Dewey-numbered book is the idiosyncratic order of Fellows Kraft's library, of which Pierce notes "Kraft's system of classifying his books was unknown to Dewey and other pedants. And yet it was, must have been, a system."

Boney in the cardiac unit at the hospital. Rosie feels responsible for him as nearly his last living relation: "almost everybody else he knew was dead already; there were far more ready to welcome him on the other side than to say goodbye."

The novel of Colona in Kraft's library, the Hypnerotomachia -- sleep, love, struggle. Recommended to Pierce, when a student, by his mentor Frank Barr. Also relates to Pierce's propensity toward wet dreams, the inevitable result of his curent chastity.

Pierce first dreams of, then receives a call asking for money from his old gypsy girlfriend who is twinned with the agent Julie just as the two Rose's are first conflated in the society of the Faraway Hills.

The Buddhist Beau draws his cosmology of concentric circles for Pierce. In a spiritual vision fueled by a Mahler symphony, he'd seen the original division of Adam in two, man and woman, waking and sleep.

Spofford: "wanting is life, Rosie. Dreams are life . . . Life is dreams checked by physics."

Pierce's revelation that an infinite God can actually be small. "You got no closer to God by imagining something huge, then something huger, then something hugest. . . . Infinitesimal is infinite too; infinite spark at the core or reality."

Pierce imagines God as a nine year old girl -- similar to the spirit that visits Dr. Dee and his skyrer Kelly (formerly Talbot) and warns them to flee England.

Dee's child spirit Madimi acts through books: "they had seen her first among books; she read to them out of books; she was a book angel somehow." She urges them across Europe, her grasp of knowledge sometimes inconsistent or erring (raising anew the question of whether the skyrer Kelly is a fraud).

Dee senses the great change in the universe: "If God meant now to roll up the heavens as a scroll, if He was now at work doing that, and a new heavens was to be revealed behind the old; if there was no longer to be lower and higher, up and down, no longer any measure by which a place in the universe could be found -- no more four corners to the world -- then men would have to be new too.

"Was God about to grant men new powers?. . . How would they use it? Please God they did no harm."

Dee's prayer: "O God let not sharp swords be put in the hands of children; let their hearts be made wise before their hands are made strong."

Dee and Kelly make their way to Prague and the court of Rudolph II.

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Beneath "the countless coverings of time and change"

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part V

Pierce's inquiries follow those of Kraft (which themselves follow Giordano and John Dee). In Kraft's study, Pierce is "alert as a dog's nose now to the traces of Kraft's track through these past woods.

The child Pierce had "invented" the same glyph -- of a man calling down the heavens -- by which Giordano is guided to sanctuary and Dee signs his "Hireoglyphica."

Fellows Kraft's final manuscript projects a meeting between Dr. Dee and Giordano that likely did not take place. Closer to the facts (the known ones anyway) it connects Girodano to one of Sir Philip Sidney's retainers, a young Scot, Alexander Dicson, who shares his interest in kingdoms made of memory. Giordano is hounded off the stage at Oxford for his heretical lampooning of Aristotelian cosmology and his postulation of an infinite, centerless world.

Dicson feels both cosmologies coexist within him: "His breast now contained two entire universes, and they kept replacing one another . . . the old one, great Earth lying under the wheeling heavensand the planets in their houses (mild or fierce or hot or cold) playing their lamps over her. The, hoop-la, the other: small quick earth, bearing all her seas mountains rivers cities states and men, taking her place in the dance amid the other great round beings, who smiled upon her." Dicson senses the first age, AEgypt, and its gods returning.

Connection of the "unsayable words" of AEgypt's hireoglyphs with the memory arts practiced by Giordano. The written word erased the power of memory and images. With Puritanism, images themselves become heretical. For Giordano "to think is to speculate with images."

Reading in Kraft's library a symbolic romance of Francisco Colonna (it's classic eroticism representing what the feral, illiterate Kentucky girl Bobbie quipped as "Bare Naked Land") Pierce senses the presence of a winged Venus, a Ker, who he attempts to call down. The Ker similar to the winged spirit (Madimi)called down by Dr. Dee and his skyrer who warns Dee to escape the coming wind of repression.

Pierce sees Kraft's library of works on the ineffible (itself reflecting Dee's great library) as the undistilled version of the book he is writing (just as such books are also the matter of Crowley's own AEgypt Cycle).

Boney reviews the jocular correspondence from Fellows Kraft's Rasmussen Foundation funded trips to Europe in search of relics from the past, hidden beneath "the countless coverings of time and change." Kraft had joked that Boney had despatched him to Europe in search of an elixir against death and, indeed, Boney mysteriously asks Pierce to be on the lookout for something else (he doesn't say what) in Kraft's library.

Kraft searches through relics of past Emperors, reflecting that even if they were genuine they may have lost their power "once the world worked differently from the way it works now, and what was then a powerful engine is now junk -- like a Model T left out in the rain due half a century."

In Prague, he visits the convent of the Infantine Sisters and the. Cathedral of Wenceslaus (linking back to Sister Mary Philomel in Kentucky). He also dwells on Rudolph II, who apparently met Giordano and abandoned his former devout Catholicism (he "had that characteristic ambivalence about his childhood that you see in people raised strict Catholics, a mixture of deep repugnance and unassuageable nostalgia." Rudolph apparently also sought an elixir of life.

Fellows' last communication from his trip is a telegram suggesting he has found what Boney is seeking.

Boney feels full of life on a summer day, subject to none of the psychic narrowing his physician describes: "He had heard his doctor say more than once that for the old and sick the world grows smaller and less dear, shrinking down to the compass of their sickrooms, its population reduced to a few or one or two (an heir, a nurse), all the rest forgotten. Which made it easier to leave."

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A jewel, an elixir, a cask, a sleeper

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part IV

Pierce's mother Winnie preoccupied with the problem of the forking path -- of the road not taken -- just as her son riddles through the optimal solution to the problem of the three wishes.

The now eleven year old Pierce receives in the mail, from his generally uncommunitive father in Brooklyn, a copy of a novel by Fellowes Kraft -- "The Werewolf of Prague."

As Pierce reads the epigraph, time's passing slows and the light brightens. "Holding the book in both hands before him, still standing in the same spot, as though rooted to it by a transmission of energy, a summoning beam coming from far away, from the future, passing through the transformer of the book into his being and out through his feet."

Pierce begins reading every book he can get by Fellowes Kraft: "read them one after another, lived within each for a week or two weeks, and forgot it when the next arrived."

"The Werewolf of Prague" begins Pierce's story: the one that will lead him, turning in upon itself, to it's author's library in Blackbury Jambs. In the book's power, he feels his adult self emerge: "the self he felt struggling to extrude itself from the strangling husk of his childhood."

The adult Pierce has forgotten much of his childhood adventures and thoughts. Visiting his mother in Florida, they hear a pelican smack into the water and both have a moment of recall, with Pierce remembering the name of "the wild Kentucky girl," Bobbie, and in that [and this is an unexpected morsel to say the least] "the name of his lost son."

At the insistence of Boney Rasmussen, Pierce has been reading the unfinished manuscript of Fellows Kraft. The ms. Projects that during one of the shifts in the earth's order, at the beginning of the Piscean era, wise men of Alexandria had sought to preserve evidence of the world they realized was extinguishing -- a jewel, an elixir, a cask, a personnage wrapped in changeless sleep.

These relics of AEgypt are again forgotten until in the Renaissance -- as the Piscean era itself fades -- "a new body of wise men" find references to the lost era "in stories and encoded in the obscurities of ancient sciences and the recipes of magic-books."

Seeing roses blooming on an early summer day where brambles had been the day before, Pierce has "a sudden conviction," "a clairvoyance distilled out of that June day" that "something entirely different is coming." Pierce postulates that in such times of change, individuals such as Giordano Bruno, Newton, Galileo have the chance to actually shape how the universe functions.

Going to New York to lunch with the agent and former girlfriend Julie, Pierce runs into his father Axel who, it becomes clear, has been frequenting the gay clubs of late 1970s New York such as The Ninth Circle.

The story is clearly moving toward a quest narrative, but Pierce continues to refuse, to be skeptical of, the role of hero. Panning up to the heavens, "Love & Sleep" listens in briefly on a colloquy of "the powers of that age" who lament Pierce's vascilating nature and predict he will need to pass through a refiner's fire before he has a hope of fulfilling the destiny laid out for him.


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Holy Spurt and Devil's Fiddle

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part III

The boy Pierce's link to Floyd Shaftoe, a seventh-son and the grandfather of the feral girl Bobby, whom Pierce and his cousins secretly take-in and baptize. Pierce and Floyd are both called out into the night on spiritual errands and each is also a witness to the starting of the same forest fire -- indeed, each believes he started it.

Floyd, when younger, looks for explanations of what he sees in the night in the Bible (discovering the Holy Spurt is what calls him out of his sleep) just as Pierce looks for knowledge in the pages of Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle's compendium. In later years, Pierce tries to recall why he gave Floyd the diamond from his dead aunt's wedding ring, but the reason eludes him.

When Floyd was a boy in Depression-era Kentucky, and shortly after his mother died in childbirth, he was called out of his sleep to witness the town's dead walking -- a silent nocturnal procession into a cleft of Hogback Mountain. Later, working for the Good Luck mines, he has the job of picking shale ("bone") from the coal extracted from the same mountain into which he'd seen the dead recede. During his time working for the mining company, Floyd is never called out into the night; he is born again into a congregation of "forty gallon Baptists who insist of full immersion" and "takes Jesus into his heart."

Later he calls on this internalized Jesus to help him with the transformations that allow him to do battle with a local witch. Pursuing her, he is led to a procession of the early dead, those called before their time, and discovers "there were those, like himself, called out by the Holy Spurt; and there were others who were called out by the Devil's Fiddle." This "feud" goes back generations.

[This section of "Love & Sleep" essentially transcribes Carlo Ginzburg's "The Night Battles" into Appalachian Kentucky].

The witches who "suck away the world's life, draining it's goodness" are akin to "the great devil Hoover, who had brought ruin on the country, only to be turned out in disgrace himself." The despoilation of the witches also linked to the coal industry: "They only hastened the coming-on of the world's end with their money-getting . . . They had ripped-out the womb of the hills; they took away too much, took away the unripe with the ripe, leaving no mother by which more could grow; they would end by leaving the mountains barren."

Floyd sees the world dying around him but also senses, knows there is a new world waiting to be born, "he could feel it beneath his feet, see it before him as the new moon can be seen held within the old moon's arms. He had come to the end of his Bible, the last pages, and he knew."

Pierce has a dream of Purgatory ("filled with that dread, at once hopeless and apprehensive, that Pierce had known in schoolyards and Little League tryouts and day camps") as "a burnt-over hillside under a night sky, burnt blackness and shriven trees, the ash still warm under foot" -- that landscape very similar to the mining-despoiled land around the cabin at Hogback where Floyd lives with the girl Bobby.

In seeing the failure of his magic (of the Invisible College) to prevent Bobby from going to Detroit with Floyd, Pierce arrives at adult consciousness: "Pierce Moffat, who had been all one until then, came invisibly, indetectably, in two: one part of him passing into an underground river like sleep, where for years it would remain; and another part left alive aboveground, grown-up and dry-eyed, where wishes did not come true, where he did not know how plans were made, or deeds done. Not until the earth at length shifted in its course, and the dark river broke from its bed, would the lost boy come forth to stand before Pierce, and claim his place: the hidden at length patent, and the inside out."

As they mature, Pierce and his cousins come to forget the details of their interaction with Bobby and their desperate attempt to baptize her and claim her soul for Catholicism. "They forgot more than that; they forgot their allegiances too, and their college; AEgypt. They just forgot, as an emigre ruthlessly forgets the Old World from which he came, expunging it by an effort he does not even admit to, so that the New World, which after all holds all his chances for happiness, can have his whole soul."

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Superb in his loneliness

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part II

Religious and social disparity of Bondieu/Good Luck: "nuns and hillbillies," not to mention bohemianism of Sam Oliphant's household.

Convent of the Infantine Sisters placed amid a half dozen Protestant sectarian churches, one of which broadcasts its services ("songs and hectoring and indeterminate cries and moaning") to the entire town via loudspeakers.

Odd paganism of Infantine Sisters as well via the active role of Saints in their lives and devotions, almost as demigods. Their morning prayer invokes the moon and Egypt as well as the Virgin. Sister Mary Philomel has a wooden statue of Saint Wenceslaus whom she invokes to help her find misplaces objects (when he fails, she punishes him by turning his face to the wall).

"In some ways, dealing with Sister Mary Philomel was like dealing with a smart and powerful child . . . Saints and angels, when compelled by the proper invocations, interceded on the petitioner's behalf with the remoted divine figures, who then altered the weather or the natural order, sped weathermen on their way, and of course healed the sick and saved the lost or the endangered."

Sam's children have the absolute faith of the young, though Sam himself, as a doctor, is something of a deist -- "heterodox, Pelagian." Sam sees religious faith as, essentially, an aspect of childhood.

Pagan aspect of Catholic religious devotion. The Oliphant children and Pierce tutored by Sister Mary Philomel: "Sister Mary Philomel was their daily instructress in such pieties; she was the great pythoness of their cult, the guardian of the gate into the land of the dead."

Caught up in the spell of Sister Mary Philomel, Pierce's ritualesque turn of mind draws him into the seductive mysteries of Catholic dogma. Still he worries that her constant presence in the household, her "fuss-budgeting," will disrupt the secret society he has built for himself had his cousins: "The Invisible College had business, Pierce had far-ranging researches to complete. He experienced an anxiety almost unendurable to know that the nun was nearby, even if not actively interfering; anxiety that she would put her black shod foot through the thin fabric he and the others had woven."

Pierce, reading Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle in the seclusion of the attic, empathises with werewolves, who feel their furry coats on the insider and, unbeknowst to mankind, protect the harvest by doing battle at night with witches: "he thought of their sufferings: to be one thing on the outside, another on the inside; to seem nothing and no one, to be despised and ignored, unseen, and yet to be somebody of whom the welfare of everybody depends, even though they don't know it."

The boy Pierce develops a sympathy, a secret allegiance for "the doomed side, the side history History would leave behind." Which opens the question of which side to root for in the battle of the angels.

The Oliphant boys and Pierce at the movie house in Bondieu: 'the picture was ten years old, but thry neither knew that nor cared; and after it came a cartoon, rapid rituals of destruction and revival." After the movie, they go to the variety store, Joe Boyd browsing "Guns and Ammo" and Pierce the horror comics.

In the dusk, Pierce walks home alone from town "superb in his loneliness" and, like a werewolf, "the black melancholy burden of his nature, turned outside-in" as "night was falling and the mild beings of the day hid themselves away."

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Boyhood and the pagan imaginary: "Love & Sleep" begins

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part I

The second book of John Crowley's AEgypt Cycle opens with a more detailed account of Pierce Moffat's boyhood in isolated Kentucky and his imagination of the Invisible College.

It becomes clear that Pierce's mother, Winnie, had separated from his father, Axel, on discovery of his homosexuality.
(Perhaps significant that Axel, like Fellows Kraft, is homosexual).

Winnie and the eight year old Pierce relocate from Brooklyn to deeply rural Bondieu, Kentucky -- so isolated that the library service is via strapped boxes despatched from the state capital.

One of the books that arrives provides the matter for Pierce's imaginary world of Adocentyn: a massive compendium of the ineffible entitled "A Dictionary of Dieties, Devils, and Daemons of Mankind" by one Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle. It's endpapers "showed a mass of ruins . . . broken antique torsos, huge headstones covered in clearly cut but unintelligible words, toppled pillars sunken in tufts of grass, arches, urns, capitals, obelisks . . . . One sad square of split marble half-engulfed in forgetful earth bore a single, deeply-incised word: AEgypt."

Hamlet of Bondieu reflects the usual geographic temporal/spiritual doubling: the next town over is Good Luck.

Winnie's brother, the widower Sam Oliphant, on young Pierce: "'Lives in a world of his own,' Sam said to Winnie; though the opposite always seemed as true to Winnie, who knew him better: that Pierce lived in a world not his at all."

Pierce's opposite is Sam's oldest son, the crude Joe Boyd, whose secret club -- in contradistinction to Pierce's mystical Invisible College -- is modeled on fraternal organizations such as the Elks. The primary activity of Joe Boyd's club, The Retrievers, is cleaning an old chicken coop of encrusted guano, whereas Pierce leads his cousins into imaginary, caped and robed adventures in the countryside. Joe Boyd relishes books with obscure facts (just as Pierce absorbs books on obscure demons) and his imaginitive play is drawing elaborate stick-figure panoramas of military battles.

Sam had thought that Joe Boyd would provide an alternate role model -- "mentor, guide, and friend" -- for Pierce from his father Axel. "To Pierce, though, Joe Boyd with his sad, minatory eyes and jailbird haircut remained just what he had always seemed, the viceroy or dark archangel of Sam, the one who brought him Sam's wishes and instructions moral or practical, lessons Pierce could never learn."

As opposed to the desultory service model of Joe Boyd's literally "chicken-shit" club, Pierce's Invisible College in some manner dictates to him that he play destructive pranks such as breaking storm windows and leaving Sam's tools out to rust.

In the secrecy of his room, Pierce reigns over the Imaginary College with boyish eroticism, dreaming: "In the past, once, somewhere, somewhen, kings and gods had gone naked: armed and crowned and shod sometimes, but naked where it mattered, filled maybe with the same grave elevation that filled Pierce when in private games he as liberator, as ancient king come home again, would order his people to throw off their garments, and be as they had been -- he leading the way, putting aside his (bath) robe and reclining in easeful nakedness, a Royal Crown in his hand and magnanimity in his heart, the world returned to antique gaiety. In the past there had been a Golden Age."

In childhood, one can see with clarity the lost, forgotten Golden Age: "In the past, in the Old World, there had been empires whose geographies were now lost, the maps no longer had room for them, filled up as they were with classroom countries; empires still somehow in existence, though beyond the demarcated globe, undersea or underground. Pierce committed to memory lists of their interchangeable gods and godlets, the air and water had been crowded with them, potent but not omnipotent -- a comfort somehow, they were strong friends or difficult enemies but not all-seeing, not everywhere at once; the wise could compel them, back them (or maybe that was sometime later, when they had grown smaller): could bring them to mirrors, draw them into statues, talk with them. Magi, said Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle."

The gods expulsion from the physical world, and consequent end of the Golden Age, perhaps presages Pierce's own descent from the pagan imaginary of childhood into Catholic religious instruction: "When Jesus came the gods had hidden or died, the air had emptied; and at that time too, though maybe not all at once, and not because of His coming but only because the existence of a new order somehow cancelled out the other even retroactively (a wind blowing backward through time that brought down the collonades and temples and the groves or oak), those empires had fallen."

The other lost world, lost skill is the realm of childhood imagination: "Pierce would forget, as all adults forget, the effort required of children making believe, the concentration, no, the expansion, of the will, the conscious effort to erase the conscious decision to pretend . . . . When those gardens were all shut up in him, those wells capped, Pierce would not remember how good he had been at it."

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" The world turns from what it had been into what it was to be" -- "The Solitudes" ends

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VIII

At a balloon ascension in the hills above Blackbury Jambs, Pierce Moffat meets up with the would-be shepard Swofford and it becomes apparent that there are two Roses and, in certain ways, a Trinity of Roses: Rose, Rosie, and Rosalie.

After reading the incomplete last ms. of Fellows Kraft, Pierce reflects on whether the world "might just now be on the turn again: for it would only be in such moments of turning -- when not only all possible futures come into view but all possible pasts as well -- that the previous moments of turning become visible."

Finishing his reading of Fellows Kraft's ms., Pierce wonders (and the same could be ruefully said of the AEgypt Cycle itself) "what public, he wondered, had Kraft thought he was writing for . . . For it wasn't a good book at all, Pierce supposed, considered as a book, a novel; it was a philosophical romance, remote and extravagant, without much of the tang of life as it really must have gone on in the world."

Pierce considers whether he truly came to Blackbury Jambs to write a book or to read one: "his whole life up to this time, the religion he had been born into, the stories he had learned and made up and told, the education he had got or avoided, the books somehow chosen for him to read, his taste for history, and the colored dates he had fed it on, the drugs he had taken, the thoughts he had thought, had all prepared him not to write a book at all, as he had thought, but to read one. This one. This was what he had once upon a time expected and hoped of all books that he opened, that each be the one book he required, his own book."

Pierce imagines a Noah-like flood that ends the world as we know it, with the heroes of the age gathered up to sail to a distant refuge. Just as Giordano was "the harbinger, messenger to the future, sure that the age to come will bring more magic, not less" so another epoch is heralded "by those who cried the new age in Pierce's own time." ( the time of the current-day events in "The Solitudes" has been established as 1978).

Sense that the emerging world might actually lie in the lost world of childhood, "the sharp sense that their lives are in two halves, and that their childhoods, on the far side, lie not only in the past but in another world . . . that the things contained therein, the Nehi Orange and the soiled sneakers, the sung Mass, the geography book and the comic book, the cities and towns, the dogs, stars, stones, and roses, are not cognates of the ones the present world contains."

Pierce walks out of Fellows Kraft's study into the sunlight, sees Rose and her daughter Sam, and hears the the harmonica of the shepherd Swofford, in the role of Pan. And "continuously, unnoticeably, at the rate of one second per second, the world turns from what it had been into what it was to be."

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The universe replicated within Man

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VII

Pierce discovers that Fellows Kraft was writing a book in many ways identical to his own (and to John Crowley's own book). Pierce describes the ms. as well as his own project to Boney, Kraft's executor and friend, and is engaged to edit the work.

Boney decribes Kraft's preoccupation, very similar to that of Pierce (who, of course, was influenced by Kraft's books during his boyhood): "'He said. He often used to say. What if once upon a time the world was a different place than it is now. The whole world. . . . 'And what if,' Boney went on, 'there remained somewhere in this new world we have here now, somehow, somewhere some little fragments of that lost world. Some fragments that retain something of the power they used to have, back when things were different. A jewel say. An elixir.'"

Pierce meditates again, more complexly yet, on this common project of his, Kraft's and Frank Barr's: "He thought: there is not only more than one history of the world, one for each of us who studies it; there is more than one for each of us, there are as many as we want or need, as many as our heads and wanting hearts can make."

In Kraft's manuscript, Girodano is brought to see the Pope in order to show off his prodigious memory skills. Allowed into the Vatican Cellars to have the chance to read from Hermes' works, his escort, a smiling boy, shows him a wealth of AEgyptian-themed mythical and symbolic art.

In the Hermes texts, man preexists the world, has a role in its making; the Fall comes when man falls in love with his own creation. Man strives to regain the godly powers he lost in his fall.

Giordano reads Hermes: "Unless you make yourself like God you cannot understand God . . . Therefore make yourself huge, beyond measuring; with one leap free yourself from your body. Lift yourself out of time and become Eternity."

The chief diety of Hermes' system is Pantomorph or "omniform."

Girodano reads of the withdrawal of the gods from the earth ("the great god Pan is dead!") with the coming of Jesus, who "banished them all, all but Himself and His Father." The Gods depart and only the evil angels remain on Earth.

Warned by the boy that he is a target of the Inquisition, Giordano flees into the Italian countryside: "Siena, Vitello, Cecino, to a weary walker seeming to be only the same town repeated over and over, like the single tiny woodcut that in geographies stands variously for Nuremberg, Wittenberg, Paris, Cologne: another steeple, a castle, a plume of smoke, a gate, a little traveler stunned and wondering."

Giordano takes refuge within a network of heretics, including one who has a statue of Pan secreted away in a grotto. As he wanders the countryside, avoiding the Inquisition, he carries in his head a second world: "even as he walked the old tracks and high roads of Europe he walked in AEgypt too."

In Geneva, hearing the lecture of a scholar who intends to build an automata that will mechanically replicate the action of the universe, Giordano laughs in the knowlege "that such a machine, such a model already existed. The name of the machine was Man."

Giordano moves to Paris, where his fame as a philosopher spreads. On an embassy for the French King to England, he boards a ship to make the channel crossing. As he does so, an angel points him out to Dr. John Dee and his skyrer Talbot as they gaze into a showstone.

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Giordano and the midden of manuscripts

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VI

Pierce begins reading the unpublished manuscript of Fellows Kraft, a novel of Giordano Bruno, beginning with a discussion of how the coming of printed books destroyed the empires of memory through which Monkish minds could hold all creation.

The library of the Dominican monastery of which Giordano is a resident "was a midden of a thousand years' writing; no one knew all that the monastery contained, or what had become of all that the monks had copied, bought, written, commented on, given away, and collected over centuries."

Reflecting on the then dominant Aristotelian astrology, Girodano asks himself why the fixed, unchanging outer spheres of God are "perfect" as opposed to the changeable, living terrestrial spheres. "Why is changelessness better than change? Life is change, and life is better than death."

Giordano reads the commentary on the spheres by the heretic Cecco in secret, "shut up in the privvy, swallowing it like sweetened wine." The privy is the secret reading room, and library of the monastery.

Late Medieval Naples: "There were always riots; there were always the poor, crowded in the tall close houses of the port quarters, in narrow alleys piled with refuse, where the children grew like weeds, untended and wild and numerous."

The roots of Giordano's heresy that he incorporates the "twelve houses" of the heavens into his memory palace; he merges the heavens into the terrestrial.

The leaned mage Della Porta, who had run afoul of the religious authorities as a youth for casting his eyes "above the sphere of the moon" -- and now practices "only the whitest of magic" -- advises Giordano to utilize the secular hireoglyphs of AEgypt for his nmeonics rather than the heavens. He advises the young scholar to read Hermes.

In the privy one day, one of Giordano's followers -- a Giordanisti -- slips him a copy of a banned book: the Picatrix.

The heresy contained in the pages of the Picatrix: "Man is a little world, reflecting in himself the great world and the heavens: through his 'mens' the wise man can raise himself above the stars." The Picatrix lays out the form of the talismans by which a wise man can capture and guide the spirits.

The Picatrix tells of the lost twelve-mile, four gated city of AEgypt founded by Hermes. Pierce's heart beats fast when he reads that the name of that city is the same as that of the mythical kingdom he created in his boyhood imagination: Adocentyn.

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Croquet and the atomism of human life

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part V

Pierce's move from the city to Blackbury Jambs: "it was as though he had suddenly been returned to the common intercourse of earth and man from some stony planet, these nice people couldn't imagine how off it was for him, a city man, to be wished a good morning by strangers in the street. . . . There was so much to relearn' the names of plants and flowers and the order of their coming forth, the usual greetings to be offered between citzens and the usual replies to them; the streets and alleys of the town, its stores, customs, history."

Pierce discovers the local Variety store has more of his needs than he would have expected, including the Sunday New York Times: "For a long time Pierce had stopped taking that immense wad of newsprint; he had become convinced that what gave Sunday that particular character it had for him -- a character it retained in all seasons and every kind of weather, a headachy, dreary, dissipated quality -- was not Jehova claiming his own day and poisoning it even for unbelievers, not that at all but a sort of gas leaking out from that very Sunday Times, a gas with the acrid smell of printers ink, a narcotizing' sickening gas. And in fact the symptoms seemed to have been at least partly relieved when he began refusing to buy it. But out here its effect might be neutralized."

Again, the merging of the two rivers is tellingly described -- a figure of the two streams of history Pierce is seeking to distinguish: the broad, muddy Blackbury with its wide black iron bridge and the sparkling Shadow, crossed by a narrow stone bridge.

Pierce notes that astrology is common currency among many of the residents of Blackbury Jambs.

At a croquet tournament (croquet is apparently a pervasive passtime in Blackbury Jambs), Pierce meets Rose and discovers from her that Fellows Kraft was a local resident. Rose has been asked by her uncle Boney to take up duties at the diminished family foundation, which includes management of Kraft's literary estate and home (which has seldom been entered since his death).

Rose has been browsing in Fellows Kraft's unpublished memoir, and reads about his lifelong search for an "Ideal Friend" -- always a male one. She cannot determine if Kraft was being coy about his sexuality, or if he was truly a sexual innocent.

Kraft's idea of human relations expressed in terms of croquet: "We will be solitary, inevitably, like balls struck across a wide lawn, striking others now and then, and being struck by them. We must be glad of that striking; and keep up our courage and our cheer; and not forget the ones we have loved -- no, and pray that our remembrance will in turn earn us a place, however little visited, in their hearts."

She reflects that "nowadays everyone -- no, not everyone, but lots of people she knew -- lived the way gay men like Kraft had always lived; in brief collisions, restless."

Kraft described his artistic inspiration in the Baroque ceiling of a Venetian church. Painted by the elusive artist Fumiani, the ceiling shows "flights of angels ascend[ing] not to a Godhead but to an empty, white-clouded center of the sky."

Rose asks Pierce to accompany her into Kraft's long-shuttered house -- an erastz Tudor (appropriately enough for an historical novelist). Loaded with books and "darkened with smoke, like a Mohawk's lodge," the house "had the musty smell of a reclusive animal's den."

In a glass case, Pierce finds a Medieval ms. labelled "PICATRIX."

He also finds an incomplete manuscript that begins with an epigraph (apparently from Novalis) relating to Parsifal's search for the Grail.

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The angels hear footfalls

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part IV

The book agent, gypsy-blooded Julie, perceives that the new science is the one that is out of energy and that "the old, other stuff seem[s] right now actually more modern.". Among other things, the old knowledge recognizes planets as "living brings": "one big animal, and Man a part of it. A biosphere."

Of Pierce's reluctance to actually employ his studies, to embrace magic, Julie mulls: "One day he'll learn, she thought, if not in this lifetime, the next, or the next. It's the task set for him, even if he doesn't know it: he who knows so much.

Dee's decoding of the cypher text brought by Talbot also links the two prologues -- one possible solution refers to Pierce Moffat's fascination with the "three questions" conundrum and the other to Dee's own obsession with orders of angels.

Julie part of "a group that kept in touch coast-to-coast as much by an interlock of thought and feeling as by phone and letter." The group senses that Atlantis is about to rise.

Pierce leaves New York and moves to Blackbury Jambs to write his book, renting a second story apartment, and recommencing the imaginative journey of his boyhood: "And beyond, out there, he would sail the porch. Just as he had once used to sail a narrow second-story porch of the Oliphant house in Kentucky long ago. Vigilant; calm; his hand on the wheel; sailing at treetop level a sun porch windowed like a dirigible's gondola, or the bridge of a steamship headed east."

Pierce's imaginative sun porch voyage doubled in similar second story journey of the Buddhist child care giver Beau, who sits with folded legs on a carpet and soars over the surrounding countryside, then doubled again in John Dee's journey to Glastonbury with his son Arthur and the skyrer Talbot, when the Doctor ascends a hill and sees figures of the zodiac inscribed on the hills and valleys below.

Dee sees the multiplicities of meaning-systems and quests contained in the earth: "the grail sometimes a cup, sometimes a stone, sometimes a dish . . . there was not one Grail; there were, or will be, or have been, not one Grail but five, five Grails for five Percevals to find. There were grails of earth, water, fire, air; there was a stone, a cup, a crater or furnace, and the basin borne by Aquarius, who is a sign of air. And another, the Grail of the quintesence. . . . Doctor Dee raised his eyes to the heavens, whose stars were wept of cloud now, and Tell me, he said: Tell me: Is the universe one thing? Is it after all? The angels saw him, who manage those skies he put his quesstion to . . . They smiled, hearing his question; and then one by one turned away, tolook over their shoulders -- for they were disturbed by a noise, a noise as of footfalls far away and faint, the footfalls of someone coming through behind."

In the Carnegie library at Blackbury Jambs, Pierce browses and inwardly mocks a bestseller of the "ancient astronauts" variety, scowling at the questionable veracity of the very "lay lines" that have drawn Dr. Dee to Glastonbury along with the (it is now clear) fraudulent skyrer Talbot. Pierce remains an historian and it remains to be seen whether he will assume the role of reconstructing magical knowledge that Julie believes is his task.

Unpacking his own books, Pierce browses his copy of Dr. Dee's elusive metaphysical tract along with the four volume work of his mentor Frank Walker Barr (again, the Joseph Campbell resonance seems clear).

The broken machine of magical knowledge

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part III

Via Rose's reading of Fellowes Kraft's novel about Shakespeare, "Bitten Apples," the book detours into the future playwright's life, projecting a meeting with Dr. John Dee, who offers the youth access to his library: "there are books here a player might well study . . . If you like, you may come back, and look into them. Read what ones you like. There are many who come here to find this or that. Tales. History. Knowledge.

Pierce's rejected parallel course to History 101 is Mystery 101: "how history hungers for the shape of myth; how the plots and characters of fable and romance come to inhabit real courts and counting-houses and cathedrals; how old sciences die and bequeath their myths and magic to their successors; how the heroes of legend pass away, fall asleep, are resurrected, and enter ordinary daylit history, persisting as a dream persists into waking life, altering and transforming it even when the dream itself has been forgotten or repressed."

Dr. Dee's vision of angels as a great machine: "Nine choirs of angels fill up the universe, each choir meshing with the higher and lower ones like immense gears of different ratios, their meshing making for hierarchy throughout creation, making distinction, difference, this, that, and the other . . . if God were to withdraw them the universe would not only come to a halt and die, it would probably disappear altogether with a single indrawn breath."

Dee's angelic research resonates with Pierce's earlier classroom lampooning but then reconsideration of Dante's geography of hell, purgatory, and heaven.

At about the midpoint of the novel, the events of the two prologues are recapitulated, expanded -- Dr. Dee meets the earless skyrer Edward Talbot and Pierce narrates to his gypsy-blooded ex-girlfriend Julie, now a book agent, the story of Giordano Bruno. Both link back to writings by the novelist and polymath Fellowes Kraft.

Girodano Bruno "the first thinker of modern times, really, to postulate infinite space as a physical reality . . . What was it, Kraft was wondering, that compelled Bruno and Bruno alone to break out of the closed world of Aquinas and Dante, and find an infinite universe outside." Bruno's heresy, for which he was burned at the stake, was that man's mind contained all potentiality. The mind itself if infinite and contains all creation.

Giordano Bruno's revelation traced back by Pierce, himself following Kraft, to arrival in Italy of the spurious Greek works of Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Great) based on Egyptian texts. Purportedly, Hermes had transcribed Egyptian magical practices and conveyances of those texts to Europe "responsible for serious people taking up the practice of magic." But, in reality, the "Egyptian" texts were spurious: the work of a Hellenic mystery cult of the second or third centuries A.D.

The spurious Egyptian magic texts misled adepts from Roger Bacon all the way to Aleister Crowley.

Magic belongs not to Egypt but to AEgypt, a parallel place. Pierce explains: "You can trace the story of Egypt back, and back, and at a certain point (or at several different points) it will divide. And you can follow either one: the regular history book one, Egypt, or the other, the dream one. The Hermetic one. Not Egypt but AEgypt. Because there is more than one history of the world."

"It is as though there had once been a wholly different world, which worked in a way we can't imagine; a complete world with all its own histories, physical laws, sciences to describe it, eytmologies, corespondences. And then came a big change in all of them, bound up with printing and the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and the Cartesian and Baconian ideals of mechanistic and experimental science. The new sciences were hugely succcessful, bit by bit they scrubbed away all the persisting structures of the old science. . . . The whole old world we once inhabited is like a dream, a dream we forgot on waking, even though, as dreams do, it lingered on into our all-awake thinking."

The lost knowledge of the pre-scientific system of knowledge "a drowned mountain," a broken machine."

Pierce: "We've forgotten the whole story. All we retain are details, impressions, bits and pieces scattered through our mental universe, like parts of a huge machine that's been smashed, and can never be put together again."

Pierce proposes to the book agent Julie "a kind of archaeology of everyday life" to recover the old knowledge. Julie, sensing a potential payoff ("lucrum" is the title of this section of the novel) counterproposes that Pierce actually reconstruct the lost system of magic.

Pierce's immediate response: "Nonononono"

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The history without time

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part II

Pierce circumvents work in his college career: "maintaining everyone's good opinion of him without exactly justifying it, and giving the impression of having acquired learning he had in fact only fingered lightly."

Born in a year with a low number of conceptions due to the war, "he was too young to be a beatnick; later he would find himself too old, and too strictly reared to be a hippie. He came to consciousness in a moment of uneasy stasis, between existential and communal, psychoanalytic and psychedelic."

Pierce's questions about alternative histories come to him from his mentor Frank Barr -- perhaps a Joseph Campbell figure? -- and occupy his thoughts unbidden. Re-reading one of Barr's books during his first year teaching at Barnabas College, he comes across the story from Plutarch of a Greek mariner in the reign of Tiberius (the era when Christ is born) passing an island and being commanded, amid loud lamentations, to tell his countrymen that "the Great God Pan is dead."

Pierce's loss of his vocation for history, his prodigality, in the trajectory of history from story and myth to fact and statistic -- the imperative as an adult "to put away childish things."

"His progress had always been outward, away from stories, from marvels; it had been a journey, as he saw it, away from childhood, the same journey outward that the human race had long been on, and which he, Pierce Moffett, was only recapitulating in his own ontogeny, joining up with it, at his maturity, at the place it had by then reached."

Acquiring of knowledge an act of "passing through the circles of history . . . outward through whole universes of thought, each growing somehow smaller the more he learned about it, until it was too small to live within, and he passed on outward, closing the door behind him."

Leaving college and returning to New York, Pierce discovers "reissues of books that had meant much to him in childhood, a childhood that had been largely spent between the covers of books, one way or another, a childhood he found he was able to taste again by cracking the same books, unseen since antiquity, since his own Age of Gold."

As the "Age of Reason" is assailed by the tummult of the 1960s, Pierce begins to look for the other path of history, the lost one of stories, the "history not made of time" that lies alongside the factual accounts of people, events, movements backward toward prehistory. The second path forks away, "just as long and just as mazy, only long since lost; and for some reason now, just now, it had suddenly become visible again, to him as to others."

This history is made of internal stories -- "the stories inside which the human race has never completely wakened from" -- that are closed off from consciousness as part of adulthood, as part of the Piscean (A.D.) era. As Pierce pursues them in old books, he feels the closed doors of abandoned knowledge opening.

He begins to dwell on the lost kingdom of the gypsies, AEgypt, a place of mystical knowedge which is not to be confused with the materialist Egypt of the Pharoahs. And he realizes this AEgypt is a country he knows, his own lost kingdom of childhood, when he formed as a secret society among his cousins an "Invisible College" in which stories, not facts, are the course of study. The college sessions, which take place when the cousins are supposed to be sleeping, "come to an abrupt end" when Pierce is sent away to a religious prep school.

AEgypt, "the country where all the magic arts are known," has fallen and its people are in exile, yet "they still carry with them, in however degraded a form, the skills their ancestors had." Similarly the AEgypt of childhood, the land of stories, exists locked within adults.

Similarly relativism, as perceived centuries before Einstein by Giordano Bruno, reveals that life has not one irreversible path but "extends out infinitely in every direction you can look in or think about, at every instant."

Walking along the dirt road from Spofford's cabin, Pierce "felt his childhood returned to him as he walked: not so much in concrete memories, though many of those too, as in a series of past selves, whose young being he could taste in the breaths of air he drew."

Spofford takes him to a party near the river at which Adamite, prelapsarian revels are underway and a piper , the Buddhist Beau, plays Pan flutes. There he meets Rose, who has been reading the historical novels of local writer Fellowes Kraft, who is also among the writers Pierce has been reading.

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"A runaway mood": John Crowley's "The Solitudes" begins

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part I

Two prologues: one with the 16th century magus John Dee being told of glimpsed angels in a showstone; the other of a boy in the 1950s, the birth of the age of Einstein and relativism,
perceiving the multiplicity of the world and saying to himself: "I'm not from here; I'm from someplace different than this."

The historian Pierce Moffett (apparently the the boy from the second prologue, now an adult) treats the three wishes of childhood fairy tales as a serious philosophical problem, critiquing various approaches (Midas' being obviously the worst of them).

Reflecting on wishes that have overarching, altruistic goals (e.g., world peace) and their potential negative consequences, he recalls a lesson taught him in religious school: "if you will the end you must axiomatically will the means."

On a bus journey from New York City into the "Faraway Hills," Pierce remembers childhood auto journeys from Kentucky to New York city where his father lived --along the new Pennsylvania Turnpike (the primeval illusion of first highways to bypass towns), across the hellish flats of eastern New Jersey and into the Holland tunnel, "like an endless dark bathroom" to New York.

Distinction between yearning and wishing.
Yearning: "a motion of the soul toward peace, resolution, restitution, or rest; a yen for happiness." Wishing, on the other hand, centers on "an object of desire."

Pierce had been teaching at a liberal New York City college where the students were part of "the searching young . . . forming into a colorful nomadic culture of their own, Bedouins camping within the bustle of the larger society, striking their tents and moving on when threatened with the encroachments of civilization."

He is enroute to interview at a more conservative upstate institution, the letterhead of which features an engraved, domed building. Pierce wonders what "new poured-concrete forms and labs it was now immured in."

"Buswrecked" in a small town, Pierce runs into an old student and friend -- Spofford -- who is now a shepard and impulsively decides to abandon the interview: "a runaway mood had been in him all day, all week; all summer for that matter."

Pierce concludes that the third wish -- after wealth and happiness -- should be for oblivion, for forgetting the whole wishing process. He thus imagines that the process of the first two "practical" wishes could already be in the process of fulfillment.

Trying not to be intrusive when interrupting a Buddhist in the Lotus position: "Don't unfold just for me."

Remarkable descriptions of a faded industrial town, Blackbury Jambs, gradually being transformed by the tourist economy.

Resort hotel transformed into sanitarium: two different eras of "rest." The sanitarium declining since the introduction of more powerful drugs: "even the profoundly troubled who cannot live in the world can stay at home now and still float on quiet seas far away."

Of Florida: "his mother had recently drifted with the aged to that land."

Circumstances of Pierce Moffat's departure from he faculty of the liberal college become clear. Invited to participate in an orgy scene for an arty pornography movie, he'd fallen in love with a younger woman in the cast who claims gypsy heritage and supports a champaign life style by trafficing cocaine.

Moffit's downward spiral into debt and addiction fuels composition of a proposed course syllabus to parallel History 101: one that incorporates his new knowledge of gypsy fortune-telling and proposes "there is more than one history of the world." shortly after its submission to the Dean, he is informed he is very unlikely to receive tenure.

In the pages of a Spanish translation that Pierce has been asked to review -- the "Soledades" of Luis de Gongora -- he finds precise echos of his recent history and current dilemma.

Spofford inquires of Pierce what he is reading. He responds: "Pastorals. Poems about sophisticates who leave the city for the country."

Spofford proposes that Pierce move to Blackbury and "set up shop as a historian."

"'Local history,' said Pierce, 'that's a good field. Not mine though,' he added, thinking of it: a field bounded by a low-piled stone wall, long grasses and lichened boulders, an old apple tree. Fireflies glimmering in the thistled darkness. Not his field: his field lay farther off, or closer in, beyond anyway, geometrical paths through emblematic arches, statuary, a dark topiary maze, a gray vista to an obelisk."

As Pierce ponders his plans "the owl, Athena's wisdom bird or obscene bird of night (these Gongorisms are catching, he thought) asked again its single question."

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The Replacements: "Sag Harbor" concludes

Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor: Reading Notes, 4th Part

"Sag Harbor" begins to reach back to toddler games, to happiness as a lost estate, as Benji confesses that his "long lost love" is a house -- the Sag house in which he spent his youngest summers.

Recalling the black-and-white television at the Sag house: "It took five minutes to wake up, making all sorts of frantic sounds, like you'd startled the people inside from their dozing. A white dot finally materialized in the middle of the screen. A white dot in a sea of blackness. The first star in the universe on the first day. It grew and spread and the sound came on and eventually the comedian hit his punch line, the weatherman told the future, the monster stepped out of the fog."

Walking through the empty Sag house with the girl who seems to remember the past there better than he does: "This was my old house where all the good things still lived even though we had moved on. Everything as it was. Even the boy, the one who always seemed happy. He had to be there. This is where he lived."

"I was nostalgic for everything big and small. Nostalgic for what never happened and nostalgic about what will be."

Concluding at the annual Azurest Memorial Day picnic and bonfire, "Sag Harbor" returns to the idea of replacements: "We were all there. It was where we mingled with who we had been and who we would be. Sharing space with our echoes out in the sun. The shy kid we used to be and were growing away from, the confident or hard-luck men we would become in our impending seasons, the elderly survivors we'd grow into if we were lucky, with gray stubble and green sun visors. The generations replacing and replenishing each other. Every summer this shifting over took place in small degrees as you moved closer to the person who was waiting for you to catch-up and dome younger version of yourself elbowed you out of the way."

Benji scans the crowd of kids for his replacement: "Where was my replacement then? . . . Probably the knock-kneed creature in the green mesh t-shirt, with the scabbed knees and the telltale messed-up Afro."

For all the continuity there is also change, as in the destructive party
crasher, Barry David, who taunts the little kids and' after the adults wander off, commandeers new garden furniture to throw on the bonfire. Like the BB gun incident, Barry David is an indicator of violent forces at the perimeter of childhood.

Memorial Day: "The next day we'd close up our houses, pulling in the lawn furniture, winding hoses around forearms in messy loops, leaning on faucets with all our might for that extra bit that meant peace of mind for nine months. School work, autumn. As if autumn was not already here. Nights we zipped jackets to the neck, and data gooseflesh popped on our legs as we tried to squeeze one more use out of shorts we'd never wear again."

Thinking of his past and future self, Benji reasons that the summer, however brief, has changed him: "I had to be a bit smarter. Just a little. Look at the way I was last Labor Day. An idiot! Fifteen looks at fourteen and says, That guy was an idiot. And fifteen looks at eight and says, That guy knew so little. Why can't fifteen and three-quarters look back at fifteen and a half and say, That guy didn't know anything. Because it was true."

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The quality of dorkiness

Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor: Reading Notes, 3rd Part

BB guns introduce new variable into time-killing of Benji and his pals. Rehearsal for shift of black manhood from "fighting" to "annihilation."

Benji relates how overhearing a black-consciousness TV show on the self-esteem impact of black kids playing with blond dolls causes him to shun human Star Wars action figurines in favor of aliens.

Benji's dork penchant for applying Dungeons & Dragons character attributes to classifying people around him: precursor to Whitehead's fascination with typology.
"Taken with the reassuring clarity of the [D&D] alignments, I didn't stop with people, proceeding to label inanimate objects, abstract systems, and states of being. . . D&D had few other real-life applications, except as a means of perpetuating virginity and in its depiction of existance as a never-ending series of grim adventures in dungeons. I rued the former, embraced the latter as an elegant metaphor."

Clinging to D&D an indicator of Benji's backwardness in grasping the "lame/not lame" divide. "The guy dropping off the weekly pamphlets outlining the shifting teenage codes and edicts skipped my house."

Benji's barbecue identified father when passers by encourage him to use alternate fire-making methods such as a chimney or kindling: "whitey made lighter fluid for a reason."

Domestic rage and bullying of Benji's father a counterpoint to then-dominant presence of Cosby on television. "The Road Warrior" a more apt model for how Benji navigates through household disruption.

Whitehead returns to the porn (secretive longings) parallel in describing his submission to the sentimental pop songs on WLNG, violating his own self-styling protocals: "WLNG was (one of) my secret shame(s), indulged when I had the house to myself. . . . The furtive way I scoped out the premises, slowly turning up the volume on the radio, wary of every increment, setting it a little higher and higher as I grew bolder, certainly echoed universal porn protocals. Sometimes I forgot to clean up after myself . . . ."

As with the sugar addicts who line up for mounds of ice cream at Jonni Waffle, Whitehead charts the varieties of "perversion" offered by consumer society, culturally authorized and unauthorized.

"Getting rid of your Sag house, that was unforgivable. Like selling your kids off to the circus for crack money."

Benji's sister Elena has self-styled into the club scene and Eurotrash boyfriends -- her way of escaping home just as Reggie has chosen street style and long work shifts at Burger King.


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Sag Harbor, Queequeg to Waffle Cones

Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor: Reading Notes, 2nd Part

Whitehead charts the parameters of the black enclave at Sag Harbor -- "the Rock, the Creek, the Point: the increments of our existence. Earth, solar system, galaxy" -- the places that subtly define and divide it from the white zone.

The local fauna on the beach is dried-out sand sharks and voracious horseflies. Benji projects the wildlife past the Point in the white section of town: "Who knew what kind of fauna lurked around the bend of Barcelona Neck? Pterodactyls wearing ascots and sipping gin and tonics, trust-find duck-billed platypuses complaining about 'the help.' It was all hoity-toity over there."

Self-definition in Sag Harbor: "Everybody had their brands, black kids, white kids. Sperry, Girbaud, and Benneton, Lee jeans and Le Tigre polos, according to the plumage theory of social commerce."

The cultural contradiction of "black boys with beach houses." Defining yourself along the double consciousness divide, you can embrace either the "beach part" or the "black part." Benji's friends have available to them black modes including "bootstrapping striver," "proud pillar," "militant," and "street."

From his older sister, Benji had been given an eight-track tape player with just two cassettes: Kraftwerk and " The Best of the Commodores."

Benji ribbed by his friends for wearing a black Bauhaus t-shirt to the beach. He appreciates the Rap his sister and brother play, but he "spent his money on music for moping . . . The singers were faint, androgynous ghosts, dragging their too-heavy chains across the plains of misery, the gloomy moors of discontent, in search of relief. Let's just put it out there: I liked the Smiths."

Successon on Azurest Beach: "It was where Reggie and I and Marcus and Bobby had spent most of our sunny afternoons as children doing the standard kid-on-a-beach stuff, making things out of sand, throwing dead crabs at each other. Our replacements were there, reenacting our botched creations, our futile passtimes. And one day they'd be passing their own replacements as they tromped off to work in town."

Recalling failed swimming lessons: "Swimming Instructor, Prison Camp Guard. . . Guppy, Snapper, Shark -- I can't remember the specific benchmarks because I never reached them."

Whitehead reflects on how Sag Harbor was a whaling town and that, in "Moby Dick," Queequeg was transported from his home by a Sag Harbor ship: "perhaps you'll recall how that turned out for him."

Queequeg, he further notes, "had a bit of double consciousness about him as well."

Once lined by whale ships, Sag Harbor's Long Wharf now home to Jonni Waffle, the ice cream stand where Benji works. "The Long Wharf was the main drag during the whaling days. Now it served a different trade -- tourism and leisure, although given national statistics on obesity, blubber still had its niche."

Industrial aspects of work at a beachfront ice cream store: "The dust of the Belgian waffle cone mixture swirled in the air like asbestos in the guts of a condemned factory."

American sugar addiction from the perspective of behind the counter at
Jonni Waffle's: "you looked up from the vats during the evening rush to see a ferocious throng. . . at the end of the night the floor was tackier than the aisles of a porn theater."

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Double Consciousness on the Shore: "Sag Harbor" begins

Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor: Reading Notes, 1st part

Whitehead introduces DuBois "double consciousness" early and with a light touch in his father's two track listening habits when driving to Sag Harbor -- either Easy Listening or black political radio. "When a song came on that he didn't like or stirred a feeling he didn't want to have, he switched over to the turbulent rhetoric of the call-in shows, and when some knucklehead came on advocating some idea he found too cowardly or too much of a sellout, he switched back to the music."

Easy Listening, as exemplified by the Carpenters "Top of the World" is "like the lid of a sugar bowl tinkling open and closed to expose deep dunes of whiteness."

Black Talk Radio's "playlist" is "headline after headline of outrage, in constant rotation were bloody images of Michael Stewart choked to death by cops, Grandma Eleanor Bumpers shot to death by cops, Yusef Hawkins shot to death by racist thugs."

Another kind of double introduced in the early pages is Benji's near twin (they were born 10 mos. apart) brother Reggie. Further doubling in the divide between city existence and Sag Harbor summers -- to be in Sag is to be "out."

The civil rights lawyers Mr. and Mrs. Finkelstein's race consciousness: they "respected all races, colors, and creeds unless that creed was their own." That their daughter has Benji, a black classmate in her private school, helps allay their guilt. "Sending their daughter to a fancy private school was a betrayal of core values, paying tuition when you were supposed to support public schools being in traitorous equivalence with eating grapes when you were supposed to boycott grapes. Those days, every nonunionized grape was a tear squeezed out of the eye of a migrant worker's eyes."

Generic snack foods circa 1985: "Mini Hot Dogs, La Choy, Egg Rolls, and other lovelies of the Preheat to 350 school."

Pop songs such as "Betty Davis Eyes," "Xanadu," and "Big Shot": "they were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture."

Arrival in Sag Harbor after "nine months banishment in the city"; sense the the place comes back into being with return, "the illusion that the town was switched off when we weren't around."

Black/White reversals in Benji's and Reggie's sneakers. Reggie has new B-boy style Filas, "a little further out into the street than we ever ventured," that he meticulously keeps white. Benji recently switched to punk-style black Chuck Taylors that have become dilapidated -- "the black canvas had sickened to an uneven gray, and the toe bumpers a jaundiced yellow" -- from their passage across "whole marathons of Manhattan pavement."

Suggestion this will be the last summer of Benji's and Reggie's "twinhood."

Arrival in the summer town. "No matter the size of make of the house, the early arrivals were tormented by the same questions. Did the roof keep through the winter, did the pipes hold, did a townie or local bad kid break in and steal the television, or was it just the raccoons and squirrels who had given the place the once-over? Is it still here or did I dream it?

Benji and Reggie come across their soul-centric pal NP ("Nigger Please") who also has new Filas, kept meticulously white. Also like Reggie he's abandoned bike riding.

Benji's own act of self-styling is to declare his name as Ben.

Being "out" for the season. Whitehead glosses: "there was also the language of the prison in there, in how long are you out for. Time on the East End was furlough, a day pass, a brief visit with the old faces and names before the inevitable moment when you were locked-up again. That hard time that defined the majority of our days. You did something wrong, why else would something like the city happen to you."

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