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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