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.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
No comments:
Post a Comment