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."