An apprenticeship to power: Balzac's prologue to "About Catherine De Medici"

Balzac's "About Catherine De Medici" (first titled "Catherine De Medici Explained") -- a passionately-argued defense of the widely villified Queen -- begins with a political philosophic essay in defense of Royal and Church authority. An interesting starting-point for considering the social politics of the "Comedie Humaine" as a whole and also Balzac's relation to Dumas and the attitude of both toward the Revoutionary and Napoleonic periods. Dumas' own novel of Catherine and her daughter Marie ("Queen Margot") appeared just two years later and did not partake of Balzac's revisionist royalism.

"Historians are privileged liars, who lend their pen to popular beliefs, exactly as most of the newspapers of the day express nothing but the opinions of their readers."

Balzac's Torryism:

-- "Liberty -- no, but liberties -- yes; well-defined and circumscribed liberties. This is in the nature of things."

-- On the Calvinist agenda for reform: "The outcome of free-will, religious liberty, and political liberty (note, this does not mean civil liberty) is France as we now see it. And what is France in 1840? A country exclusively absorbed in material interests, devoid of patriotism; where authority is powerless; where electoral rights, the fruit of freewill and political liberty, raise none but mediocrities; where brute force is necessary to oppose the violence of the populace; where discussion, brought to bear on the smallest matter, checks every action of the body politic; and where individualism -- the odious result of the infinite subdivision of property, which destroys family cohesion -- will devour everything, even the nation."

-- "Every power, whether legitimate or illegitimate, must defend itself when it is attacked; but strange to say, while the people is heroic when it is triumphs over the nobility, the authorities are murderers when they oppose the people! . . . The massacres of the Revolution are the reply to the massacre of Saint-Bartholomew."

-- "No one suspects how greatly printing has helped to give body both to the envy which attends persons in high places, and to the popular irony which sums up the converse view of every great historical fact." [Balzac goes on to complain here of Shakespeare's comic portrait of the apparently heroic and quite continent Sir John Falstaff]

-- "The power of the masses is accountable to no one; the power of one is obliged to account to its subjects, great and small alike."

-- "Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established."

[Reading all the above, one sees it is not by whim that Balzac added the "de" to his name as part of his self-creation as a writer]

Catherine De Medici, Balzac writes, weilded "the most dangerous but surest of political weapons -- Craft."

Catherine's chilling "Italian" political philosophy in story of her response to her son Henry III's announcement of his execution of a member of the rival House of Lorraine: "Well cut, my son. Now you must sew-up again" [that is: buy the Lorraine back into the political system]

Among the methods used by Catherine to counteract Henry III's homosexuality is "a supper to nude women" given in a royal banquet hall when he is being welcomed back from Poland to assume the French throne. Balzac, who admiringly assesses Catherine's reign as a "manly rule" states that her attempts to reform her son failed and that, politically speaking, the Valois dynasty died with her.

Balzac backtracks to discuss Catherine's formative years in Medici Florence and as a royal wife in the Valois court:

Balzac suggests one highly formative experience of Catherine was being caught-up, as a 9 year old orphan, in a siege by Florentine republicans and threatened, by Castiglione, no less, with being turned-over to the soldiers. "All revolutions of the populace," Balzac notes dryly, "are alike."

A side-effect of Renaissance Italy's surfeit of talent and genius: "When men are so great, they are not afraid to confess their weakness; hence, no doubt, this golden age for bastards."

Establishing the political parameters of Catherine's era, Balzac sketches a time when the murder of nobles and Popes alike was commonplace. Poisoning was a daily threat: "royal personages had their meals served to them in padlocked boxes of which they had the key."

Balzac approvingly quotes Spinoza on political succession: a new King "must confirm the maxims of him whose place he fills, and walk in the same ways of government."

Upon her unfaithful husband's (Henry II) death, Catherine begins a power struggle on behalf of her son and also takes a lover. Her political rivals contest both attempts to establish herself, seizing the army and leadership of the clergy and forcing her to send her lover to the Bastille.

"Such," Balzac writes, "was this woman's apprenticeship to the exercise of power."
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

The orphan boy "Wart," who will become King Arthur grows up in the shadow of Sir Ector's legitimate son and heir, the easily-bored and prematurely pompous, but essentially good-hearted Kay. The boys are "educated" in the ways of rural gentry: "Mondays and Fridays, tilting and horsemanship; Tuesdays, hawking; Wednesdays, fencing; Thursdays, archery; Saturdays, the theory of chivalry, with the proper measures to be blown on all occasions, terminology of the chase and hunting etiquette." Sir Ector is concerned that the boys will soon need a more formal tutor.

After a night on his own in the forest (seeking to recover the goshawk Cully lost by Kay's carelessness) Wart encounters his first questing knight, Sir Pellinore, and then finds his own peculiar tutor -- the magician Merlyn, who stares at the boy "with a kind of unwinking and benevolent curiosity." Merlyn is living backwards in time and his rustic home includes everything from taxidermied and live animals to weapons that "would not be invented for half a thousand years" to a set of the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. An owl, Archimedes by name, perches in Merlyn's conical hat, dropping its feces onto the magician's zodiac-embroidered robe.

[In Wart's easy acceptance of Merlyn's disheveled eccentricity, one sees perhaps a self-portrait of the White of "The Goshawk," whose Medieval hawking piqued the curiosity of local boys].

Merlyn gives Wart breakfast -- among his tableware is a walking mustard pot that, the magician complains, "is inclined to give itself airs" -- and the dazzled boy asks: "Would you mind if I asked you a question?" To which Merlyn, foreshadowing the teacher/student relationship to come, replies: "It is what I am for."








Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

A political conspiracy of women

Phineas is damaged politically by the scandal-mongering of the journalist Slide and by his own thin-skinned quarreling with the junior leader Bonteen. Thus falling out of position for an office in the new Government, he is informed by Mrs. Goesler that she is conspiring with Lady Glencora, and with other political spouses, to improve his chances.

Throughout his career, Phineas has gained advancement by the attentions of women who worked in his interest. Phineas stiffly and pridefully objects to this latest campaign on his behalf, to which Mrs. Goesler responds "If you have enemies behind your back, you must have friends behind your back also."

Laura Kennedy's aged and worried father, Lord Brentford, on the need to come to terms with his daughter's mad husband: "Mad people never do die. That's a well known fact. They've nothing to trouble them, and they live forever."

Brentford on the change in political culture that has enabled the rise of such as Bonteen: "There used to be a kind of honor in these things, but that's all old fashioned now. Ministers used to think of their political friends; but in these days they only regard their political enemies. If you can make a Minister afraid of you, then it becomes worth his while to buy you up. Most of the young men rise now by making themselves thoroughly disagreeable."

Finn privately disparages and underestimates Glencora, but she uses her considerable domestic political skills to attempt to advance his case -- largely in order to spite Bonteen, who she loathes but also in support of her friend Mrs. Goesler and in revenge upon those who have brought scandal upon her friend Laura Kennedy. Glencora helps to defeat Bonteen by giving him a social opportunity to make an ass of himself.

The Duke of St. Bungay is unknowingly enlisted in the anti-Bonteen cause. He, too, is drawn to the fading hereditary nature of Parliamentary politics: "Bonteens must creep into the holy places. The faces he loved to see, -- born chiefly of other faces he had loved when young, -- could not cluster around the sacred table without others who were much less welcome to him. . . . There must be Bonteens; -- but when any Bonteen came up, who loomed before his eyes as specially disagreeable, it seemed to be his duty to close the door."

Glencora's campaign succeeds in spiking Bonteen's ambitions but, as her manipulations become public in the form of rumors, not in elevating Finn -- the incoming Prime Minister, Gresham, being determined that "no woman's fingers should have anything to do with his pie."

Phineas despairs, believing the women's conspiracy on his behalf will be forever held against him, but Marie Goesler is not entirely sympathetic, judging "the thing lost is too small, too mean to justify unhappiness."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

A paragon of nobility and idleness dies

The idle suitor Gerald Maule's father is introduced -- a man equally lazy and, what's more, has an ideology of laziness. An aesthete with little income, Mr. Maule Senior is also vain and determined to hold onto what is left of his youth. "No one kenw better than Mr. Maule that the continuing bloom of lasting summer which he affected requires great accuracy in living. Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age."

Now 55, Maule, in his boyhood, "he had been one of those show boys of which two or three are generally to be found at our great schools . . . Winning prizes, spouting speeches on Speech Days, playing in Elevens, and looking always handsome."

At his club, Maule apostrophizes the dying Duke of Omnium, who hour area as a paragon of aristocratic idleness, as opposed to the younger generation of working nobles, whom he detests: "they all go in for something now . . . They are politicians or gamblers, or, by heaven tradesmen. The Earl of Tydvil and Lord Merthyr are in partnership together working their own mines, -- by the Lord, with a regular deed of partnership, just like two cheesemongers." Omnium, however, is a paragon of nobility: "perhaps no man who had lived during the same period, or any portion of the period, had done less, or had devoted himself more entirely to to the consumption of good things without the slightest idea of producing anything in return!"

Parliament as a matter of families and heredity in the view of the Whighish Barrington Earl: "I do believe in the patriotism of certain families. I believe that the Mildmays, FitzHowards, and Pallisers have for some centuries brought up their children to regard the well-being of their country as their highest personal interest. . . . Of course there have been failures. But the school in which good
training is practiced will, as a rule, turn out the best scholars."

The yellow-journalist Quintus Slide of "The People's Banner" has
switched sides to the Conservatives, his duty to "speak of men as
heaven-born patriots whom he had designated a month or two before as
bloated aristocrats and leeches fattened on the blood of the people."

The staunch and honest radical Bunce mockingly says to Slide "I
suppose an editor's about the same as a Cabinet Minister, you've got to keep your place -- that's about it."

Trollope indicates Bunce's limitations: "Mr. Bunce was an outspoken, eager, and honest politician, -- with very little accurate knowledge
of the political conditions by which he was surrounded, but with a strong belief in the merits of his own class. He was a sober, hardworking man, and he hated all men who were not sober and
hardworking. He was quite clear in his mind that all nobility should
be put down, and that all property in land should be taken away from men who were enabled by such property to live in idleness. What
should be done with the land so taken away was a question which he
had not yet learned to answer." [Earlier, the good Mrs. Bunce had
confided to Phineas that she would rather her husband use his money
on drink rather than waste it on union dues].

Slide proposes to expose the marital rift between Robert Kennedy and Laura in "The People's Banner." Phineas objects that Kennedy is
clearly mad, to which Slide replies sanctimoniously "There is nothing easier in the world than calling a man mad. It's what we do to dogs when we want to hang them."

To Phineas' further objection that such a private affair is not of
public interest, Slide counters snidely that "private quarrels between gentlemen and ladies have been public affairs for a long time past" and that "the morals of our aristocracy would be at a low ebb indeed if the public press didn't act as their guardians . . . It's my belief that there isn't a peer among 'em all as would live with his wife constant, if it were not for the Press. . . . We go in for morals and purity of life, and we mean to do our duty by the public without fear or favor."

Phineas confronts the increasingly deranged Kennedy, who is staying at a dilapadated Scottish-owned hotel. Kennedy fires a shot at Phineas, who he believes to be his estranged wife's lover and the cause of all his agonies.

Omnium on his deathbed: "He was wan and worn and pale, -- a man evidently dying, the oil of whose lamp was all burned out. . . . He had never done any good, but he had always carried himself like a duke, and like a duke he carried himself to the end."

Omnium dies with the beloved of his years dotage, Mrs. Max Goesler, at his bedside. Mrs. Goesler reassures him that he lived life as a noble should, but Trollope opines that "her nature was much nobler than his: and she knew that no man should live as idly as the Duke had lived."

Omnium's successor as Duke, Plantagenet Palliser, has no interest in rank -- his passions are political and economic and his elevation of the House of Lords appalls him as it will make him ineligible to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer when the Liberals return to power in the lower house.

Mr. Maule Senior sees Omnium's death as an opportunity to court the wealthy Mrs. Goesler. Lamenting Omnium's recent death and the political ambitions of his successor, the effete ner-do-well says to the Duke's companion of his fading years "I dare say that Mr. Palliser, as Mr. Palliser, has been a useful man. But so is a coal heaver a useful man. The grace and beauty of life will be clean gone when we all become useful men."

Of the Duke's great achievement in life, Maule says by way of epitaph that "a great fortune had been entrusted to him, and he knew it was his duty to spend it. He did spend it, and all the world looked up to him."

Of Maule, the canny Marie Goesler assesses him to Phineas as "a battered old beau about London, selfish and civil, pleasant and penniless, and I should think utterly without a principle."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

"Cutting-up the Whitehall Cake": "Phineas Redux" begins

"Phineas Redux" begins with its hero called back from his Irish retreat by the Liberal Party and seemlessly renewing the relationships from two years earlier described in "Phineas Finn." His Irish retreat is seen as perhaps just a parenthesis in his social and political career in London -- a parenthesis that includes the death in childbirth of his wife.

Until Finn's , there had been no contact with his former associates, which Trollope treats as part of the normal order of things: "Distance in time and place, but especially in time, will diminish friendship. It is a rule of nature that it should be so and the friendships which a man most fosters are those which he can beat enjoy. If your friend leave you, and seek a residence in Patagonia, make a niche for him in your memory, and keep him there as warm as you may. Perchance, he may return from Patagonia and the old joys repeated. But never think that those joys can be maintained by the assistance of ocean postage, let it be at never so cheap a rate."

Finn has been recruited to run for parliament from an industrial district called Tankerville for which neither he nor Trollope see much appeal: "Tankerville was a dirty, prosperous, ungainly town, which seemed to exude coal-dust or coal-mud at every pore. It was so well recognized as being dirty that people did not expect to meet each other with clean hands and faces. Linen was never white at Tankerville, and even ladies who sat in drawing rooms were accustomed to the feel and taste of soot in all their dantiest recesses. . . . At Tankerville, coal was much loved and was not thought to be dirty."

The reader is duly reassured that it would not be part of Phineas' duty to actually reside in the be-grimed district he proposes to represent.

Finn had been recruited by the Liberals as part of their plan to regain the Parliamentary majority. They are irritated that the Conservatives, in their brief time in power, have so effectively taken advantage of the spoils system: "For to them, Liberals, this cutting up of the Whitehall cake by the Conservatives was spoilation when the priviledge of cutting was found to have so much exceeded what had been expected. . . . Was it to be borne that an unprincipled so-called Conservative Prime Minister should go on slicing the cake after such a fashion as so lately adopted?"

Trollope introduces the determinedly idle Gerald Maule, a guest at the home Phineas's old friends Oswald and Violet Chilterns, where he indifferently foxhunts and courts Adelaide Palliser.

Maule is wary of Oswald's foxhunting zeal, opining that he goes about it "as if his soul depended on it." Adelaide counters that Oswald is "very energetic," to which Maule responds: "a bull in a china shop is not a useful animal, nor is he ornamental, but there can be no doubt of his energy. . . . The man who stands still is the man who keeps his ground."

Adelaide is foolishly courted by a member of the gentry -- Trollope signals the mockery to be accorded such a venture by dubbing him Spooner of Spoon Hall and identifying his mother as one of the Platters of Platter House. Spooner believes he should be taken seriously by the distant, and near-peniless Adelside, as he is both more wealthy and a better foxhunter than the lackadaisical Maule.

Adelaide is appalled and insulted by Spooner's lack of recognition of the class divide between them. He says, fumbling: "You seem to think I'm something, -- something altogether beneath you." regarding which Trollope comments: "And so in truth she did. Miss Palliser had never analyzed her own feelings and emotions about the Spooners whom she met in society; but she probably conceived that there were people in thhe world who, from certain accidents, were accustomed to sit at dinner with her, but who were no more fitted for her intimacy than were the servants who waited upon her. Such people were to her little more than the tables and chairs with which she was brought into contact."

At the Chilterns, Phineas becomes reacquainted with the fascinating and masterly Mrs. Goesler, whose European wealth allow her to maneuver through and around the English class system. She continues to be devoted to care of the now-addled Duke of Omnium, with whom she began a flirtation after Phineas rejected her.

The parliamentary session, and the electoral battle between Liberals and Conservatives, turns on religion -- on the state establishment of the Church of England. But there is no true ideological battle as the real maneuvering is over power and spoils.

Lady Laura's spurned husband Robert Kennedy is truly animated by fierce religion and has converted his estate into a kind of hermit's retreat -- unlit fireplaces, empty candlesticks, scant food -- while he homicidally fumes over his wife's desertion. He wants her back not as a matter of happiness but to join him in godfearing misery: "Happy? What right had she to expect to be happy here? Are we not told that we are to look for happiness there, and to hope for none below? . . . I do not want her to make her to make me happy. I do not want to be made happy. I wanted her to do her duty."

Laura Kennedy in her German exile lamenting the briefness of Phineas, visit: "But when the lamp for a while burns with special brightness, there always comes afterwards a corresponding dullness."

Trollope's sense of love and passion (in Phineas' retrospection of his failed suit for Laura): "He knew now, or thought he knew, -- that the continued indulgence of a hopeless passion was a folly opposed to the very instincts of man and woman, -- a weakness showing want of fiber and muscle in the character."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Dr. Jenkins and the Innocents

Daudet develops his portrait of Parisian society as sapped of vigor, both physical and financial. For physical vigor, the elite rely on the arsenic pills of the Irish physician Jenkins: for capital, they rely on the North African based wealth of the feuding financers Jansoulet and Hemerlingue.

Hemerlingue's employee M. Joyeuse, a widower with four devoted daughters, is introduced. He is subject to Walter Mittyesque daydreams of great bravery. Summoned by speaking tube by Hemerlingue's "oily and gelatinous voice," Joyeuse is informed that he is being discharged, after ten years service, due to having been overheard criticizing a shady deal.

Hemmerlingue: "obese, ill-shaped, and so yellow that his round face with its hooked nose, the head of a fat and sick owl, suggested as it were a light at the end of a solemn and gloomy tunnel. A rich Moorish merchant grown mouldy in the damp of his little courtyard."

Joyeuse is offered a position at the corrupt Territorial Bank of Corsica, now flush with money due to the Nabob, but refuses out of a sense of probity (for which he second-guesses himself).
Another figure in the Nabob's circuit is the sculptress Felicia Ruys. Her father, a renown sculptor and center of a Bohemian artistic circle, was a friend and patient of the ubiquitous Jenkins. Felicia taunts Jenkins by stating that it is artists who are now respectable and nobles, such as his clients, who live tenuous financial existences. "Ah! If we knew how much terpitude, what fantastic or abomidable stories, a black evening-coat, the most correct of your hideous modern garments can mask."

Felicia, born of one of her father Sebastian's many mistresses, grew up in a corner of his studio, from which she observed the Bohemian life. Some regularity is brought into her life -- she is "noisy, turbulent, ill-behaved -- by summers with a retired dancer, Constance Cremnitz, who adoringly refers to the motherless girl as "the little demon."

When her father becomes ill, the doctor Jenkins becomes her "friend, confidant, a vigilant and kind guardian." That kindness turns out to be a mask -- one of several worn by the hypocritical Irishman -- when the doctor attempts to violently seduce the 15 year old girl. He warns her not to tell her father as "it would kill him."

When the sculptor dies asking Jenkins to "look after my daughter," she is fortunate they the old dancer intervenes, taking the girl under her wing. As she comes into her young maturity, Felicia nurses a secret loathing for the hypocritical doctor.

Jenkins pet project, funded by the Nabob, is "The Bethlehem Society for the Suckling of Infants," a "mournful place" within the grounds of which orphans are given over to goats ("magnificent goats, Thibetan goats, silky, swollen with milk") for feeding. Except that the obstinate infants refuse to do so, "they did not suck them, they preferred to die one after another rather then suck them."

The director of the institution, Pondevez, sees the flaw: "Was Jesus of Bethlehem in his stable suckled by a goat? On the contrary, did he not press a woman's soft breast on which he could go to sleep when he was satisfied? Who ever saw a host between the ox and the ass of the story on that night when the beasts spoke to each other? Then why lie about it, why call the place Bethlehem?"

But when Pondevez tries to save the infants in his charge by bringing in wet nurses, Jenkins is outraged: "Are you out of your mind? Well! Why then have we goats at all, and meadows to pasture them; what becomes of my idea, and the pamphlets upon my idea? What happens to all that? You are going against my system!" of the fate of the starving, goat-resistant infants, the physician concludes: "let them go without, but let the principle of artifical lactation be respected! We are here for the demonstration of a philanthropic idea. It must be made to triumph, even at the price of some sacrifices."

As the death toll of infants increases, Pondevez wryly refers to himself no longer as "Monsieur the Director Pondevez" but rather as "Monsieur the Grantor-of-Certificates-of-Death Pondevez."

Journalists paid by the Nabob write articles praising the Bethlehem Society, with the result that Jenkins receives a government decoration, frustrating the Nabob, who continues to fund the misbegotten philanthropic scheme in the hope that his "cross and brevet" will come next.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Infusions of poison and gold: "The Nabob" opens

Alphonse Daudet, The Nabob: Reading Notes, Part I

Daudet's "The Nabob" opens with scenes of the society physician Dr. Jenkins, a native of Ireland, who has built a wealthy clientel on the basis of miraculous arsenic-based pills that lend an unnatural energy and glow to the eyes of those who take them. Jenkins patients are described as "worn out, debilitated" and "exhausted by an absurd life" to the extent that it is only his miraculous pills that give "the lash of the whip to their jaded existances."

Jenkins also has a scheme for the establishment of a hygenic nursery, "The Bethlehem Society for the Suckling of Infants," for which he seeks to extract funding from M. Jansoulet, a wealthy and generous foreigner whom Paris has nicknamed "The Nabob."

Despite the 1001 Nights monicker, the Nabob is in reality the poor son of a nail-vendor from the south of France who made his fortune in the service of the Bey of Tunis. Having left Tunis and the Bey's service, Jansoulet has determined to make his way in Parisian society. What he most desires is friendship with the First Minister, the Duc de Mora, another of Jenkins' patients.

Daudet describes the wealthy precincts of Paris that contain Jenkins' patients as comfortably shrouded in a morning fog, whereas in the poorer districts of the city, the fog is dissipated, cut-up and absorbed by the masses.

On his rounds, Jenkins visits the Duc, whose waiting room is full, even as he gives his attention to a costumer preparing a dress for the Duchess to wear at an upcoming Ball, "giving his directions with the same gravity with which he would have dictated the draft of a new law."

The Duc's residence has its own radiant warmth and environment into which the enveloping fog does not penetrate. In the entrance hallway "the staircase of shining marble [was] laid with a carpet as thick as the turf of a lawn" and the two blazing fires generate "a factutious sun of wealth."

Jenkins reluctantly leaves the wealthy precincts where his patients reside to visit, at his wife's behest, his stepson, Andre, who has left their home to pursue life as a writer, living on an upper floor of a tenement and seeking to support himself as a portrait photographer. The stepson refuses to accept a proferred position at the nascent Bethlehem Society.

Jenkins' next call is lunch at the recently-taken apartments of the Nabob, which is thronged with aristocrats and schemers seeking funds for their pet enterprises. The guests are noticably bored with the Nabob's conversation and the reading of the press announcement celebrating his charitable funding of the Bethlehem Society -- lauding its reversal of "the long matyrology of childhood" and "the sordid traffic of the breast" -- and only await with anxiety the moment of coffee, which is when the Nabob dispenses his investments, blue paper checques flying. "To sign a check on his knee for two hundred thousand francs troubles Jansoulet no more than to draw a louis from his pocket."

Among the investments the Nabob funds is the near-worthless Territorial Bank of Corsica, which continues to exist only so its principles can continue to try to recoup their losses, in the process cheating others into investing. An interpollated narrative by the Territorial Bank's porter, M. Passajon, who is writing his memoirs, describes a glorious trading floor where only lunch provicions are kept in the empty vaults and another member of the impoverished staff, which has not been paid in four years, crafts shirts from paper to keep-up appearances ("in this he has attained very great skill, and his ever-dazzling linen would deceive, if it were not that at the least movement, when he walks, when he sits down, the stuff crackles upon him as though he had a cardboard box under his waistcoat. Unfortunately, all this paper does not feed him; and he is so thin, he has such a mein, that you ask yourself on what he lives"). The desperate employees of the fraud-ridden bank greet news of new investors such as the Nabob with "dancing, weeping for joy" . . . "men would embrace each other like shipwrecked sailors discovering a sail."

The Minister, the Duc de Mora, arrives at a fete hosted by Jenkins where the eager Nabob is to be presented to his noble idol. Of Mora: "None better than he knew how to bear himself in society, to walk across a drawing room with gravity, to endow futile things with an air of seriousness, and to treat serious things lightly."

The Duke, like all those medicated with Dr. Jenkins arsenical pills, has a fire to his glance: "Oh, this man was a true client of Jenkins; and this princely visit, he owed to the inventor of those mysterious pills which have that fire to his glance, to his whole being that energy so vibrating and extraordinary."

The coy sculptress Felicia taunts the Duke with a fable from Rabelais of the meeting of the fox created by Bacchus "impossible to capture" and the dog of Vulcan with "the power to catch every animal that he should pursue."

The meeting of the wealthy but rough-hewn Nabob with the effete. Minister, whose power comes "from the deep comtempt which he had for man and women." The Nabob looks at him with "the beseeching, submissive eyes of a big, good-tempered mastiff." Daudet notes that "in an American drawing-room the antithesis would have been less violent. The Nabob's millions would have re-established the balance and even made the scale lean to his side. But Paris does not yet place money above every other force . . . ." The Nabob eagerly proceeds to lose money to the Minister at ecart.

The drawing room resounds with whispers of how the Nabob -- formerly a French iron worker -- made his fortune in service of the Bey of Tunis. The scurrulous rumors which have been spread by the Nabob's enemy Hemerlingue, describe both financial chicanery and procurement of European women for the Tunisian harem.

Having heard these rumors, the Nabob's young clerk de Gery looks at his master differently: "Yes, he was indeed the adventurer from the South, moulded of the slimy clay that covers the quays of Marseilles, trodden down by all the nomads and wanderers of the seaport. Kind, generous, foresooth! As harlots are, or thieves. And the gold, flowing in torrents through that tainted and luxurious world, splashing the very walls, seemed to him now to be loaded with all the dross, all the filth of its impure and muddy source."

Other rumors in virulent circulation at the fete suggest that Dr. Jenkins' elegant wife is in reality a courtesan and their marriage a sham.

When de Gery hears from the Nabob the story of his bitter feud with the rival financier Hemerlingue, he warms again to his master and his naive dreams of social success in Paris. De Gery sees the Nabob's passage into Parisian society as akin to "a man on foot laden with gold passing through some evil-haunted wood, in the dark and unarmed."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Abductions, Insurrection, and Destiny's scythed car

Walter Scott, The Black Dwarf: Reading Notes, Part II

Elshie's misanthropy challenged when a brigand informs him that he intends to raid Hobbie Eliot's homestead. Elshie considers whether to try to warn Hobbie but concludes that his war against humanity cannot allow such mercy: "I will not be the fool I have been, to swerve from my principles whenever there is an appeal, foresooth, to my feelings; as if I, toward whom none hold sympathy, ought to have sympathy with any one. Let Destiny drive forth her scythed car through the overwhelmed and trembling mass of humanity. Shall I be the idiot to throw this decrepit form, this mis-shapen lump of mortality, under her wheels?"

The brigand spurs his reluctant horse to the deed and Elshie reflects "that villain, that cool-blooded, hardened, unrelenting ruffian -- that wretch whose every thought is infected with crimes -- has thews and sinews, limbs, strength, and activity enough to compel a nobler animal than himself to carry him to the place where he is to perpetrate his wickedness."

Any chance that Elshie will intervene for Hobbie is dashed when the yeoman's hunting hound instinctively slaughters one of the gentle goats the hermit had been given by Earnscliff -- a beast whom the hunchback Elshie had noted treated him with a kindness and gratitude few humans had extended.

Hobbie defends his hound's act as part of his nature. Elshie too sees the attack as "natural": "yes! It is indeed in the usual beaten path of Nature. The strong gripe and throttle the weak; the rich depress and despoil the needy; the happy (those who are idiots enough to think themselves happy) insult the misery and diminish the consolation of the wretched."

Elshie curses Hobbie, which sends a bolt of fear through the superstitious yeoman.

When the brigand returns to Elshie's hut to report he and his gang have destroyed Hobbie's farmstead and kidnapped his fiance, the hermit intervenes with a bribe (one of several recent indications that he is of the gentry) to save the maiden from being sent in bondage to the colonies.

Hobbie's vengefulness somewhat held in check, first by his grandmother's insistence that he say the words "God's will be done" to indicate his acceptance of whatever ill-fate confronts him, then by the oath sworn by Earnscliff -- "Hand and faith! Troth and glove!" -- against attacking the brigand once he surrenders. Hobbie returns glowering from his martial adventures to find that his fiance has been returned through peaceful means -- his grandmother's prayers realized (but really Elshie's bribe of the brigand).

The expedition to free Hobbie's betrothed instead freed Isabella Vere, whose abduction had been planned by her calculating father Laird Ellieslaw, a reformed rake with animus against Earnscliff. Ellieslaw's intent to foment antagonism and thus inflame revolt along the Border in favor of the Catholic cause and the exiled Stewarts.

A more moderate Jacobite speaks of the reformed rake Ellieslaw's rashness: "I am not of so indifferent a mould as my cousin Ellieslaw, who speaks treason as if it were a child's nursery rhymes and loses and recovers that sweet girl, his daughter, with a good deal less emotion on both occasions, than would have effected me had I lost and recovered a greyhound puppy. My temper is not quite so inflexible, nor my hate against government so inveterate, as to blind me to the full danger of the attempt."

A gathering of Jacobites at Ellieslaw castle also includes "many subordinate malcontents, whom difficulty of circumstances, love of change, resentment against England, or any of the numerous causes which inflamed men's passions at the time, rendered apt to join in perilous enterprise."

The insurgent party is anxious rather than ardent, finding themselves in circumstances "where it is alike difficult to advance or recede. The precipice looked deeped and more dangerous as they approached the brink, and each waited with an inward emotion of awe, expecting which of his confederates would set the example by plunging himself down."

The bold Mareschal tries to raise the spirits of the insurgents: "If we have gone forward like fools, do not let us go back like cowards. We have done enough to draw upon us both the suspicion and vengeance of the government; do not let us give up before we have done something to deserve it."

Mareschal succeeds in emboldening the conspirtors, who Scott has respond with a hilarious series of self-interested toasts. Mareschal "seemed to take a mischievious delight in precipitating the movements of the enthusiasm which he had excited, like a rougish boy, who, having lifted the sliuce of the mill-dam, enjoys the clatter of the wheels which he has put into motion, without thinking of the mischief he may have occasioned."

Mareschal's rousing of the crowd revealed as all the more reckless when it is revealed that he had private knowledge that the revolt is already falling apart. He explains to his agast fellow conspirators: "I am tired of a party that does nothing but form bold resolutions over night, and sleep them away with their wine before morning."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

"Why should not the whole human herd butt, gore, and gorge upon each other?": Walter Scott's "The Black Dwarf" Begins

Walter Scott, The Black Dwarf: Reading Notes, Part I

The titular character of Scott's "The Black Dwarf" a misanthropic individual who erects a stone hut on Mucklerstane Moor, a rock strewn area long rumored to be the preserve of witches and their master The Devil.

The dwarf is first espied by two acquaintances coming back from hunting, a somewhat superstitious yeoman, Hobbie Elliot, and Earnscliff, a young Laird of liberal tendencies. The book is set as separatist political tensions are rising along the Scots Border.

Earnscliff's family has long been engaged in a feud with a rival family, the Ellieslaws. Hobie taunts his companion's "newfangled notions of peace and quietness" even as his dead father's "blood is beneath the nails" of the rival Laird of Ellieslaw.

Encountering the dwarf in the wild, before he has begun construction of his hut, Ellieslaw offers to take him to shelter out of a sense of "common humanity." To which the dwarf replies: "Common humanity. Where got ye that catchword -- that noose for woodcocks -- that common disguise for mantraps -- the bait which the wretched idiot who swallows, will soon find covers a hook with barbs ten times sharper than those you lay for the animals which you murder for your luxury?"

The dwarf threatens Hobbie and Earnscliff with violence and they retreat.

At Hobbie's home, his grandmother good-humoredly chides him for coming home without meat from his expedition into what have become highly over-hunted woods. "'In my young days,' said the old lady, 'a man wad hae been ashamed to come back frae the hills without a buck hanging on each side o' his horse'" To which Hobbie replies: "'I wish they had left some for us then Grannie. They've cleared the country of them, they auld friends of yours, I'm thinking.'"

Earnscliff insists on engaging the dwarf, who is building his hut of massive stones, laboring "day after day, with an assiduity so incredible as to appear almost supernatural" and at the same time transporting dirt and mold for a garden."

The truculent dwarf gains a reputation for divination and household magic and cures. He announces his name as Elshender the Recluse and becomes popularly known as Canny Elshie. He shuns money and lives as a vegetarian from his garden but accepts a pair of milk-goats from Earnscliff. As a local seer and homeopath, Elsie has also become party to many secrets of the local populace.

People asking advice or seeking medicines from the dwarf "usually left some offering on a stone, at a distance from his dwelling; if it was money, or any article that it did not suit him to accept, he either threw it away, or suffered it to remain where it was without making use of it."

Earnscliff, on his way back from fishing, stops by the hut and observes the hard work the dwarf has undertaken. The dwarf replies: "labor is the mildest evil of a lot so miserable as that of mankind; better to labor like me than sport like you."

The misanthropic dwarf continues to the creel-carrying fisher of trout: "And yet ... it is better to execute idle and wanton cruelty on mute fishes than on your fellow-creatures. Yet why should I say so? Why should not the whole human herd butt, gore, and gorge upon each other, till all are extirpated but one huge and over-fed behemoth and he, when he has throttled and gored the bones of all his fellows -- he, when his prey failed him, to be roaring whole days for lack of food, and finally to die, inch by inch, of famine -- it were a consummation worthy of that race."

The dwarf continues to explain -- bitterly, but not entirely convincingly -- to Earnscliff that the medical cures he provides are for the purpose of preserving the destructive humans who will eventually immolate each other -- "prolonging the lives of those who can serve the purpose of destruction as effectively" as poision.

Earnscliff argues that the dwarf's curing of the good-natured Hobbie puts the lie to his malign intent. Elshie counters: "He is at present tame, quiet and domesticated, for lack of opportunity to exercise his inborn propensities; but let the trumpet of war sound -- let the young blood-hound snuff blood, he will be as ferocious as the wildest of his Border ancestors that even fired a helpless peasant's abode. . . . The trumpet will blow, the young blood hound will lap blood, and I will laugh and say, 'For this I have preserved thee!"

Generously, Elshie suggests that, due to Earncliff's peaceable nature, he would compassionately offer him a cup of poision to spare him the brutal human holocaust to come.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Description: The warehousing of Anasazi culture

From Craig Childs, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization across the American Southwest

1.

"When archaeological crews began digging in the ruins of Chaco Canyon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they dumped unsalvageable rubble into the wash for flash floods to carry off. From one excavation alone, led by the National Geographic Society in the 1920s, more than 100,000 tons of archaeological debris -- splintered ceiling timbers and unseated wall stones -- were hauled out in ore carts and fed to the wash, as if the workers thermselves were agents of erosion. Everything else was packed into crates and shipped in boxcars to distant museums and private collections. A startling wealth of objects left Chaco Canyon during those excavations: colorful flutes and planks of richly painted wood that once hung in rooms like banners; beautifully decorated bowls and jars found stacked neatly to the ceilings of these rooms; masses of bear paws and mountain lion claws and bird wings uncovered in ceremonial contexts." (page 19)

2.

"Looking for the artifacts removed from Pueblo Bonito, I had wandered the long halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, its treasures sealed in seemingly never-ending rows of gray metal cabinets. In the Peabody Museum at Harvard, I found three stories of ceramics. In a small Federal repository in Albuquerque, I went through thousands of beads in plastic cases, and painted seed jars crowded on metal shelves. In these modern storehouses I packed my journals with annotations, telling which of Pueblo Bonito's rooms contained which artifacts. This morning I put the pieces back, restocking these rooms from my imagination. I filled spaces with thousands of nested bowls, their severe geometric designs flowing from one to the next. Exotic birds went back into their burials under the floors, along with a necklace made of two thousand flawlessly graduated turquoise discs, with jet black finger rings and painted flutes. I fit ceiling beams back into position, first setting turquoise into their sockets, the hanging feathered sashes from their heights." (page 47)

"One soul in two tormented halves": "In a Shallow Grave" closes

James Purdy, In a Shallow Grave: Reading Notes, Second Part

Garnet's ideal applicant, Daventry, appears suddenly -- "I thought he was a will-o'-the-wisp" -- and has a warm, soft hand "like that of a goat." Indeed, he'd grown up in Utah as a shepard. Garnet has taken to dismantling clocks for a hobby, and notes that Daventry "shakes his head like the old half-broken pendulum of the clock when I am dickering with it."

Up until now, Purdy has successfully evaded any indication of the time frame of "In a Shallow Grave" -- including what war Garnet was injured in -- but now divulges as Vietnam with one word at the end of a long paragraph in which the veteran defends his flowery way of speaking: "I don't take any pleasure anymore in reading the newspapers, and anyhow they are about the living, Daventry, and writ in living language, no, I have got firmly habituated to these old books . . . and so gradually you are these old books have seeped or trickled into my speech and have took over from the way people talk today. But until you spoke just now I didn't know I had this peculiarity even. So that explains how I call you a courtly young man, dig?"

He dispatches Daventry with a letter to the Widow Rance. Predictably, she finds the youthful applicant, Garnet's physcal surrogate, to be sexually irresistible -- making him strip off his clothes so she can see every inch of his flesh. Garnet is horribly jealous, but it also brings the two of them closer together.

In the meantime, Quintus continues his reading of the old books -- "which I don't think either of us enjoyed" -- snatches of which stick in Garnet's memory. "It is a remarkable fact," Quintus reads, seemingly at random, "that the three chief natural elements, water, air, and fire, have neither taste, smell, nor any flavor whatsoever."

Later, browsing through a "Guide to Phrenology," Garnet reads the following under a heading "MAN IS A GLYPH": "Man is little more than a glyph which punctuates space, but once gone is as unrecollectable as smoke or clouds."

Daventry begs not to be sent any further to the Widow Rance, but Garnet is insistent, even as he knows what the result will be.

The widow becomes sexually obsessed with Daventry -- he is tortured with her voraciousness -- and he spends less and less time with Garnet and Quintus in the old house.

While Daventry is away, Garnet is served with eviction papers for non-payment of back taxes. In a pseudo-Christian ceremony -- fueled, perhaps, by the powerful pills and dope they have been ingesting -- Daventry makes a communion from his own fresh-spilled blood. A hurricane arises and prevents the eviction and, as part of his further sacrifice, Daventry agrees to wed the Widow Rance. With this, Garnet's physical self begins to regenerate.

Garnet, fearful he will lose Daventry forever is told by the former teen runaway, now-Christlike savior: "'Hear me Garnet,' he was going on, looking at me like he was in search of my soul, 'I will never leave you even though the firmament part, because we are one, one soul in two tormented halves.'"

Daventry is killed, crucified on a tree in a freak wind storm -- "his arms stretched out as if he would enfold me" -- with his scalp circled by a ring of blood. Sacrifice complete, Garnet is united for a brief moment with the Widow Rance. But he walks away; "the droll thing about getting what you long for is the longing was better, longing pains more, but it's more what you want."

The Widow Rance, her new love for Garnet now unrequited, begins recruiting her own applicants -- sending handsome young men to Garnet with love letters based on those Daventry brought to her.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

The Applicants: Purdy's "In a Shallow Grave" opens

James Purdy, In a Shallow Grave: Reading Notes, First Part

Purdy's "In a Shallow Grave": a half-dead and physically shattered, monstrous veteran, released from the hospital and returned to his family's mansion in Virginia, seeks hired men, "applicants," boys really, to act as his intermediaries -- his prostheses to the living world.

Characters in "In a Shallow Grave" variously divided, contradictory: simultaneously healthy/sick, beautiful/defiled, male/female, young/old, ignorant/refined.

The veteran, Garnet Melrose, is basically inside-out. His doctor tells him: "Well, Garnet, you look like an open anatomy chart, one can see all your veins and arteries moving with the blood." As a kind of living corpse, the healthiest part of him is his bones; again the doctor speaks:
"although your skin bears a total disfigurement, you ought to bear in mind, despite your outward appearance you have a wonderful fine and strong bone structure, and it is the bones that are the real measure of a man's bearing and good looks."

The doctor advises: "it is your memory which keeps you in pain, learn to forget and you will be well again."

At first, Garnet has difficulty finding "applicants" to be his servant: "all the young men acted the same way, that is they took one look, and their gorge started to rise, and they would strain and cough, wanting to vomit."

The primary duty of the applicants is to take messages to Garnet's childhood sweetheart, the "Widow Rance" who is herself an odd mixture of death and life -- only 28, she has lost two husbands (brothers) to the same war in which Garnet was disfigured. She also lost to early death the infants she bore to each.

"The Widow Rance is twenty-eight but sometimes acts like some old rich woman of sixty." It also becomes clear that while she has forbidden Garnet to approach her, that he spies on her at night.

Garnet's questions for each of the applicants: "Can you prepare simple food? Like say heat already prepared soup, boil coffee, rub my feet when my attack comes on and the flesh above my heart, and can you take letters to the Widow Rance?"

Few white boys are willing to perform such service -- particularly, it seems, the foot rubbing: "the human foot is the real nigger of the human body" -- and it is clear that the black boys he hires are not satisfactory in the primary duty of communicating with the Widow Rance -- for the applicants are clearly physical proxies for the once handsome Garnet who, despite his doctor's advice, refuses to forget his past, his youth (he went to war when he was 17).

Garnet, who was a devoted dancer before going into the war, relives his youth by sneaking into an abandoned dancehall at night and recreating in his mind the time when he was sought after by all the young women of the town.

Garnet's divisions suggested by his name: "people stumble on hearing my name, the first name doesn't fit with the second, the first name, they feel, sounds like a girl's, and the second to them sounds too historical." His nicknames in the Army are indicative of his mood swings: Garnet Melrose = "Granite" and "Morose." The girlish side of his nature embodied in his still flowing hair: "I remember my first-grade teacher had said, "You have hair a girl would die for," and whilst everything else turned the color of mulberries, my hair was untouched by when I was blown up in the war, and so it made me look even more outlandish."

One of the black applicants, Quintus, becomes Garnet's reader. Reading to Garnet seemingly at random -- but maybe not so randomly -- from the old, dusty volumes, he appears to combine learning and ignorance. He fails as the physical applicant Garnet desires; becoming instead a kind of intellectual prosthesis.

Then the ideal physical applicant arrives: Daventry. He is a mixture of beauty and defilement: handsome but with his front teeth missing. And a mixture of innocence and brutality: he suffers from guilt at having, in self-defence, murdered two Mexican men. His beauty being on the outside, he is the perfect emissary for the inside-out Garnet.

Garnet says of his arrival: "I do not believe he was from this world. I believe he was sent by the Maker of All Things perhaps if such exists. I do not say that he brougt me total joy, but he was the ideal applicant."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Pitch, the boy-hating Missourian

Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: Reading Notes, Part the Third

The confidence man continues his tour of the steamship. He taunts a miser traveling in Emigrant class with a get-rich-quick scheme, teasing him as insufficiently "confident" until finally the greedy of man relents ("I confide. I confide") and invests $100 in gold coins.

Changing guise to that of a herbalist (purveying the "Omni-Balsamic Rejuvenator"), he inveigles a sick man into purchasing his cures. "Then you give me hope?" the "juiceless, joyless" man asks. "Hope is proportionate to confidence," he responds, "how much confidence you give me, so much hope do I give you."

The sick man's plea: "only make me so I can walk about in the sun and not draw flies to me, as lured by the coming of decay."

The herbalist encounters a fellow deceiver: a man whose health has been destroyed by the New York legal system but -- as the real cause of his infirmity would earn no charity -- begs as a casuality of the Mexican war.

Introduction of the gun-toting, animal-skin clad Missourian Pitch, a "hard case" who will dispute with three avatars of the confidence man in a row

Pitch suspicious of nature and a hater of humanity -- and boys in particular. He is seeking a machine that can replace the boys (thirty to date) he has been hiring to do his farm work.

"I'm now on the road to get me made some sort of machine to do my work. Machines for me. My cider mill -- does that ever steal my cider? My mowing machine -- does that ever lay a-bed mornings? My corn husker -- does that ever give my insolence? No: cider-mill, mowing-machine, corn-husker -- all faithfully attend to their business. Disinterested too; no board, no wages; yet doing good all their lives long; shining examples that virtue is its own reward -- the only practical Christians I know."

"What a difference in a moral point of view between a corn-husker and a boy. . . . A corn- husker, for its patient continuance in well doing, might not unfairly go to heaven. Do you suppose a boy will?"

Seeking to counter this anti-boy argument, the confidence man posits that a boy always has the potential to be good ("boys outgrow what is amiss in them") and that one must wait for the good to emerge. To which Pitch responds: "The butterfly is the caterpillar in a gaudy cloak; stripped of which, there lies the impostor's long spindle of a body, pretty much worm-shaped as before."

When the confidence man seeks to argue the benefits of natural cures, Pitch counters by saying that his cough was "natural" in the first place, as is cholera, deadly-nightshade, and killing winters. To which the herbalist replies: "you would seem to have little confidence in nature; which really, in my way of thinking, looks like carrying the spirit of distrust pretty far."

Pitch: "Look you nature! I don't deny but your clover is sweet, and your dandelions don't roar; but whose hailstones smashed my window?"

Further: "I have confidence in nature? I? I say again there is nothing I am more suspicious of. I once lost ten thousand dollars by nature. Nature embezzled that amount from me; absconded with ten thousand dollars' worth of my property; a plantation on this stream, swept clean away by one of those sudden shiftings of the banks in a freshet; ten thousand dollars' of alluvion thrown broad off upon the waters."

The confidence man, as the herbalist, asks what Pitch has confidence in if he has "no confidence in boys, no confidence in men, no confidence in Nature." Pitch replies: "I have confidence in distrust."

Pitch sees in the confidence man's studied neutrality on the question of abolition an offensive moderation: "Pickled and prudent sentiments. You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right."

Pitch: "Boy or man, the human animal is, for most work purposes, a losing animal. Can't be trusted; less trustworthy than oxen. . . . Hence these thousand new inventions -- carding machines, horse-shoe machines, tunnel-boring machines, reaping machines, apple-paring machines, boot-blacking machines, sewing machines, shaving machines, run-of-errand machines, dumb-waiter machines, and the Lord-only-knows-what machines; all of which announce the era when that refractory animal, the working or serving man, shall be a buried bygone, a superseded fossil. Shortly prior to which glorious time, I doubt not that a price will be out upon their peltries as upon the knavish 'possums, especially the boys. Yes, sir (ringing his rifle down on the deck), I rejoice to think that the day is at hand, when, prompted to it by law, I shall shoulder this gun and go out a boy-shooting."

Observes the confidence man (now in the guise of the man with the brass plate, an officer of the Philosophical Intellgence Office, which seems to also conduct a kind of orphan-placement service): "Shocking, shocking. . . . You seem to have very little confidence in boys."

Pitch, objecting to the confidence man's politeness: "Don't try to oil me."

Again, Pitch who finds machines more worthy of entry into heaven than humans: "Truth is like a thrashing-machine; tender sensibilities must keep out of the way."

Upon completion of the deal with Pitch to send him a thirty-first boy: "Thank you. Confidence is the indispensable basis of all sorts of business transactions. Without it, commerce between man and man, as between country and country, would, like a watch, run down and stop."

When the confidence man in his latest guise purportedly disembarks at Cairo, his influence on Pitch is dispelled as well "like one beginning to rouse himself from a dose of chloroform treacherously given."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Spreading the ideology of "Confidence"

Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: Reading Notes, Part the Second

The confidence man advises an effete young scholar to abandon reading the Greek and Roman Classics as heretical and injurious in their lack of "confidence" and thus undermining of God and Christendom.

The scholar overhears the confidence man in one of his incarnations promoting investment in the Black Rapids Coal Company and greedily seeks to buy shares when he appears in different disguise.

The confidence man denounces the Wall Street "bears": "The depression of our stock was solely owing to the growling, the hypocritical growling, of the bears. . . . The most monstrous of all hypocrites are these bears: hypocrites by inversion; hypocrites in the simulation of things dark instead of bright; souls that thrive, less upon depression, than the fiction of depression; professors of the wicked set of manufacturing depressions. . . . Fellows who, whether in stocks, politics, bread-stuffs, morals, metaphysics, religion -- be it what it may -- trump up their black panics in the naturally-quiet brightness."

The confidence man suggests that the bears get their "sulk" not from life but from plays and books. "Ten to one, he has lugged home from auction a musty old Seneca, and sets about stuffing himself with that stale old hay; and thereupon, thinks it looks wise and antique to be a croaker, thinks it's taking a stand 'way above his kind."

The scholar having gullibly invested in the mining concern, the confidence man seeks to lure him to a further speculation in New Jerusalem, "a new and thriving city, so called, in northern Minnesota."

Next, disguised as a Quaker, the confidence man scatters handbills about the Fidele's saloon containing an "Ode of the Intimations of Distrust in Man, Unwillingly Inferred from Repeated Repulses in Disinterested Endeavors to Procure his Confidence."

Observing a card game in the company of a new target, the confidence man poo-poos the idea that card sharpers may be at work, suggesting that "a fresh and liberal construction would teach us to regard those four players -- indeed this whole cabin of players -- as playing at games in which every player plays fair, and not a player but shall win."

Discussion of humanity from story of "anomalously vicious woman," that calls into question whether the "human form be, in all cases, conclusive evidence of humanity." Suggestion that perhaps "only the good are human" in refutation of Roman Senator Thrasea who, as related by Pliny, posited 'he who hates vice, hates humanity.'"
Woman in story is unpromisingly named Goneril; described as having a hardened and baked complexion "like that of the glazed colors on stoneware" and as "rather beautiful, though of a style of beauty rather peculiar and cactus-like."

Considering the dismal fate of the unfortunate husband (supposedly one of the confidence man's earlier avatars) of this inhuman Goneril, the current edition of the confidence man proposes that the real question is whether the spouse bore his misfortune despondently or "with confidence."



Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

"Where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase": Melville's "The Confidence Man" commences

Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: Reading Notes, Part the First

As pasengers embark on the steamship Fidele at the wharf in St Louis, a placard offers a reward for the capture of "a mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently come from the East."

Crowds gather about the sign, vendors sell money-belts and hawk handbills describing the exploits of captured violent thugs, "creatures, with others of the sort, one and all exterminated at the time, and for the most part, like the hunted generations of wolves in the same region, leaving comparatively few successors; which would seem cause for unalloyed gratulation, and is such to all except those who think that in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase."

Into this scene a stranger "in the extremest sense of the word" arrives and, working his way to the place where the placard is posted, mutely holds up a slate on which he writes a series of messages about "charity." Those in the crowd variously ignore and ridicule him.

By way of contrast to the mute stranger, the ship's barber, opening his shop, hangs a sign reading "No Trust" (that is: No Credit), thus establishing the polarity of "The Confidence Man" between faith and skepticism, gullibility and suspicion.

That polarity further explored with appearance of legless negro beggar who is denounced as fake by an embittered peg-legged man, "a limping, gimlet-eyed, sour faced person -- it may be some discharged custom house officer, who suddenly stripped of convenient means of support, had concluded to be avenged on government and humanity. . . . hating or suspecting everything and everybody."

The crippled Negro begs by creepily imitating a dog and catching pennies in his mouth. When the peg-legged man continues to denounce him, the beggar is asked by the crowd for people who can attest to his honesty. He describes several, all of whom, it becomes clear, are disguises of the "confidence" man at loose among the ship's population.

Later, the peg-legged man, challenged as to why anyone would perform such a massive deception for mere pennies, jeers "you greenhorns! Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and deviltry in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?"

The Fidele's passengers representative of all America, indeed all humanity: "As among Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims . . . there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; man of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers and mocassined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fe traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man."

Episodes that follow describe various disguises of the Confidence Man, extracting charity (the Seminole Widow and Orphans Asylum) or investment (the Black Rapids Coal Company) from the ship's passengers -- pleading, sometimes querilously for their "confidence," soliciting their "trust." As each new incarnation of the confidence man emerges, queries regarding the prior ones are answered by saying he has just disembarked.

Among the confidence man's targets is a "good" man whose suit is lined in white and who wears a white glove (though his ungloved hand is just as white); the bills in his wallet are "crisp with newness, fresh from the bank, no muckworm's grime upon them" and all manual activity needed of him is performed by a black servant who "did most of the handling for him; having to do with dirt on his account."

To this visibly "good" man, the confidence man proposes a "World's Charity" that by taxing all the globe's population at a rate of a dollar a year would efficiently eliminate all poverty and heathenism by letting out charitable projects for bidding "in the Wall Street spirit."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

The War of Fat against Thin ("The Belly of Paris" concludes)

Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris: Reading Notes, part 3

Observing how the church of Saint Eustache can be seemed framed through the massive arches of Les Halles, the painter Claude Lantier observes to Florent: “Since the beginning of the century, only one original building has been erected, only one that is not a copy from somewhere else but has sprung naturally out of the soil of our times, and that is Les Halles. Do you see it Florent? A brilliant work that is a shy foretaste of the twentieth century. That is why it frames Saint Eustache. There stands the church with its roseate window, empty of the faithful, while Les Halles spreads out around it, buzzing with life.”

Lantier and Florent go on an excursion into the countryside, where they smell thyme in the air and see produce growing in rich soil. Florent finds himself “deeply contented in the wholesome and peaceful earth. For about a year now, the only vegetables he had seen were bruised from bouncing in wagons, yanked from the earth the night before and still bleeding. . . . The Les Halles they had left that morning seemed to him a sprawling mortuary, a place for the dead scattered with the corpses of the once living, a charnel house with the stench of decomposition.”

Lantier tells Florent of a series of subversive prints entitled “The Battle of the Fat and the Thin” that depicts several episodes in the conflict throughout the history of mankind of “two opposing groups, one devouring the other to grow fat and jolly.” [Very strong resonance to Eugene Sue’s “History of the People” here]. “The Fat, bursting from their enormity, prepare for the evening glut, while the Thin, doubled over from hunger, look in from the street, stick figures filled with envy.”

Lantier classes both himself and Florent as clearly among the Thin and notes that Florent is surrounded by the Fat where he lives at the charcuterie and where he works among the fishmongers. The “large bosoms”of the Fat, he warns, have it in for Florent as naturally as a cat chases a mouse.”

The radical group of which Florent has become the leader draws the attention of the master gossip of Les Halles, the aged and thin Mademoiselle Saget, who goes rom stall to stall in Les Halles, trading gossip for morsels of food. From one of her observation points of a park bench she “seemed to stretch taller and glide along each story, right up to the round flaring eyes of the attic windows. She gawked at the curtains. She could develop an entire drama from a head that appeared between two curtains.” When she extracts the secret of Florent’s past, “her little feet barely touched the ground. She was carried by her delight as though caressed by a breeze. . . . Now the whole Les Halles neighborhood belonged to her. There was no longer a missing piece.”

Claude Lantier perceives the impractical nature of Florent’s detailed plans for the uprising. He tells his friend: “you approach politics exactly the way I approach painting. . . . You’re an artist in your own field. You dream politics. I imagine you spend entire evenings here, gazing at the stars, interpreting them as infinity’s ballots. Then you tickle yourself with your ideas of justice and truth. It’s also true that your ideas, like my paintings, strike terrible fear into the hearts of the bourgeoisie.”

Florent’s dreaming of revolution extends to his designing banners for each nonexistent cadre. When Lisa discovers the red armbands and flags in his room, she resolves to denounce him to the police. When she does so, she discovers that Florent has already been denounced, anonymously, by nearly everyone she knows. The police have been aware of the movements of the “dangerous” revolutionary since he landed back in France.

When Florent witnesses Marjolin beheading fattened pigeons for market, he nearly faints – revealing his ill-suitedness to the role of revolutionary leader. He is arrested at a politically useful time and led off like a lamb. As the novel ends, he is sentenced to return to Devil’s Island.

The thin idealist expelled, The Beautiful Lisa stands in the doorway of the once again thriving charcuterie, “taking up its entire width. Her linens had never been so white. Her rosy cheeks had never been so refreshed or so perfectly framed in smooth waves of hair. . . .This was total tranquility, complete happiness, lifeless and unshakable, as she bathed in the warm air. Her tightly stretched bodice seemed to be still digesting yesterday’s happiness. Her chubby hands, lost in the folds of her apron, were not even outstretched to catch today’s happiness, for it was certain to fall into her hands.”

Abstemious Radicals

Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris: Reading Notes, Part 2

At the fishmarket, Florent befriends Muche, the wild son of The Beautiful Norman. “The Beautiful Norman’s son was growing up wild in the fishmarket. He had been brought there when he was only three and spent his days squatting on a rag surrounded by fish. He slept as though he were a brother of the great tunas, and he woke up among mackerel and whiting. The ragamuffin smelled so fishy that people almost wondered if he hadn’t emerged from the belly of some giant fish. For a long time, his favorite game when his mother wasn’t looking was to build walls and houses of herring.”

The job at the market almost seduces Florent, making him forget Devil’s Island: “after seven years of suffering, he had fallen into such a state of calm, in a life so perfectly ordered, that he barely felt alive. He simply drifted mindlessly, each morning caught by surprise to find himself in the same armchair in his cramped office . . . in the ceaseless racket of the market that made him dream of a swelling sea surrounding him. ”

But “little by little, an uneasiness began to eat at him. He became dissatisfied, accusing himself of all sorts of indefinable faults, and began to rebel against both a physical and mental emptiness.”

“Florent was upset by the magnitude of food that he lived with. The sense of disgust he had felt at the charcuterie returned even more forcefully. . . . His own stomach, the small stomach of a thin man, was turned when he passed the heaps of wet fish.”

“As was his destiny, Florent returned to politics.” Florent falls in with a group of “radicals” who meet in a side room of a wine shop and debate revolution. All of them are thin and near-abstemious: having just one glass of wine or beer, or liquor each which they stretch-out over the course of hours of political posturing. “Florent took a sensual pleasure in these meetings.”

Florent tried to recruit the malleable Querau to the radical cell, but The Beautiful Lisa gets wind of it and tells her husband where their real interest, as prosperous business owners, lies: “To please those who have nothing we are supposed to give up earning a living? Of course I take advantage of every opportunity and I support a government that is good for business. If they commit acts of evil, I don’t want to know. As for me, I know I don’t commit them.”

Lisa is increasingly impatient of Florent, whose very thinness is a sign of his bad character. “He . . . . never skips a bite for all the good it does him. His bad instincts feed on him so that he can’t even gain a few pounds.” Troubled that Florent’s thin presence seems to be souring their once prosperous business and household, Lisa visits the Abbe Roustan at the nearly deserted Cathedral of Saint Eustace to ask his advice for whether she should denounce her radical brother-in-law.

In a perverse twist on the romantic tale of Paul et Virginie, Zola tells the story of the two foundlings -- the chubby boy Marjolin and the waif Cadine -- who grow-up together at the market, living lives of sylvan sensuousness amid the plenty and the rot of Les Halles. Taken in by an old vegetable seller, the two small children share a bed into which they smuggle stolen turnips and carrots as well as ”stones, leaves, apple cores, and dolls made of rags.”

Cadine is industrious from an early age; Marjolin lazy. Cadine is also sexually precocious, and when she and Marjolin are forbidden to share the same bed at home, they find numerous hiding places in the market to continue their intimacy. “It was in the basement of the poultry pavilion that they were able to sleep together. It was their special tradition, and finding a way to sleep against each other, the old way they had lost, made them feel warm. There by the slaughterhouse table and the big baskets of feathers, they could stretch out.”

“They lived like happy young animals, ruled by their instincts, satisfying their appetites in the midst of mountains of food, where they had grown like plants made of flesh and blood. . . . Neither of them ever left Les Halles for for more than a few moments. It was their perch, their stable, the colossal manger where they slept, loved, and lived on a huge bed of meat, butter, and vegetables.”

"A Whole World of Things that Lived on Fat" ("The Belly of Paris" begins)

Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris: Reading Notes, Part 1

Zola’s “The Belly of Paris” shows consumerism’s –- and specifically food’s -– power as a kind of political soporific, drowning the middle class in prosperity and contentment.

An escapee from Devil’s Island, Florent Quenu, returns to Paris starving and, ironically, in the back of an overflowing cart of vegetables headed for Paris’ central market. He had been arrested as part of the popular uprising of 1851, though, in reality, he slept through the action, waking only when he was arrested. This presages Florent’s dreamy, impractical –- indeed, gentle -- side as a revolutionary.

In Florent’s absence, the modern market of Les Halles has been built, a vast cathedral of consumerism replacing the old medieval market. When Florent hears a “peal of bells,” it is from the market buildings, not from nearby St Eustace cathedral (which we later see is nearly deserted). “Florent looked at the huge market emerging from the shadows. . . . . [its buildings] seemed like some kind of oversize modern machine, a kind of steam engine with a cauldron.”

“These markets were like a huge central organ, furiously pulsating and pumping the blood of life though the city’s veins. The uproar from all the stocking and provisioning was like the chomping of the jaws of a colossus, at one end the cracking of whips of the big buyers driving their wagons to the local markets, at the other the plodding clogs of the poor women who sold lettuce door to door carrying off their baskets.’

The malnourished, bedraggled Florent takes refuge with the family of his half-brother Quenu, whom he raised as a boy. Quenu and his wife Lisa – known as “the Beautiful Lisa” have become highly prosperous – indeed, fantastically fat -- as proprietors of a charcutrerie located adjacent to the market. “They looked brimming with good health, solidly built. . . . . The two in their turn looked at Florent with that uneasiness that fleshy people always feel in the presence of someone who is extremely skinny. Even their cat was puffed-up with fat and stared at Florent suspiciously with dilated yellow eyes.”

The atmosphere of the kitchen behind the charcuterie: “A whole world of things that lived on fat. . . . Despite the excessive cleanliness, grease dominated; it oozed from the blue and white tiles, shone on the red floor tiles, gave a gray sheen to the stove, polished the chopping block to the glow of varnished oak. And in the vapor from the three continuously steaming pots of melting pork, the condensation, falling drop by drop, ensured that there was not, from floor to ceiling, so much as a nail that did not drip grease.”

One evening, in the kitchen, the morose Florent is urged to tell the story of his privation and escape from Devil’s Island as a kind of bedtime tale for Lisa and Quenu’s equally plump daughter. The little girl takes it as a fairy story, laughing at the idea one could like three days without eating.

Florent has befriended the artist Claude Lantier, who dreams and talks obsessively about the paintings he wishes to undertake, but never completes them. Lantier finds inspiration in the excess of the modern market but –- another thin man –- actually eats very little. “He found something extravagant, crazy, and sublime in all the vegetables.” But “it was obvious that it had not occured to Claude at that moment that all those beautiful objects were there for people to eat. He loved them for their colors.”

Florent is ill-suited to life in the environs of the market: “Florent felt out of place. He recognized the inept way in which he, a thin and artless man, had fallen into a world of fat people. He realized his presence was disturbing the entire neighborhood.” And he finds his principles fading in "the fatty repose of [their] sleepy kitchen."

Nevertheless, to please Lisa, he agrees to accept a job at the market as temporary inspector in the fish pavilion. Once introduced into the fish market, he falls in with The Beautiful Lisa's rival, the saltwater fish seller known as "The Beautiful Norman."

Prospero breaks his staff: "Endless Things" concludes

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part V

Last section of "Endless Things" centered on the moment when Prospero "has to drown his book and break his staff." Like Bruno, Dee, and Kraft before him, Pierce leaves magic behind as "when the world has gone on," when one world has ended, "you must live in it without magic." It seems clear at this pointh that both the pagan and the Christian world systems have been expelled, replaced by absence, spiritual remoteness -- a void.

Returning to the Faraway Hills from his European quest, Pierce meets and falls in love with yet another Rose -- Rosamund Corvino (Roo). Pierce, his questing days over, goes to work for a plastics factory and lives at a rundown motel: the Morpheus Arms.

At the wedding of Spofford and Rosie Rasmussen, the local band "The Orphics" have been renamed "The Rude Mechanicals." In a Shakespearean sense, the world now a place for low comedy rather than fairy stories. Spontaneously, Rosie's daughter Sam sings a wordless song "long and lilting, without shape or repeat, and endless melody" a song "not for human ears."

"Sam couldn't know that the song without words she sang was the last breath to be breathed, the last spirit exhalation of the previous age, or the first of the new, same thing."

It is revealed that the scholarly mage Frank Walker Barr -- Pierce's mentor -- has disappeared in Egypt, where he was on an archaeological expedition: another withdrawal of the fantastical from the now thoroughly quotidien world. [And one can't help imagining Beau Brachman's Olds 88 sweeping up through the desert to collect him].

Pierce and Roo travel together to Latin America. On a hike in the mountains, Piece confesses his perverse past loves for the masochist Rose Ryder and his imaginary son Robbie. Roo sees in Pierce's incestuous fantasy a desire for his own father's love; so Robbie as Eros, as magic, dispelled into the language of pop psychology, of recovery.

After Pierce and Roo are married, they travel to Rome, but it too has lost its mystery -- and terror -- for Pierce. In the Campo dei Fiori, site of Giordano Bruno's martyrdom, they come to the statue of the monk, at the base of which is a young couple spoon, sweetly oblivious to the history of the place. Wordlessly, Roo buys flowers, roses, for Pierce to place at the philosopher's feet: "Swallowing in embarrassment and grief, with the incurious eyes of the hylic youth in their beauty upon him, he laid them at the statue's base, and stepped away."

Roo and Pierce return to Latin America to adopt a child and end up becoming parents of twin sisters: Maria (Mary) and Jeusa (who they rename Vita). Washing dishes one night, Pierce, not unaffectionately, tells Roo that in an archetypal sense she is the "crone," the woman in the hero's life that comes after the mother and the beloved and who "humiliates and challenges the hero and charges him with interpreting her commands and unriddling her harsh riddles, to labor under her sanctions until liberated."

To which Roo replies, also not unaffectionately, "that is such bullshit."

At Roo's insistence, Pierce has isolated himself in a retreat house, an Abbey (but of recent construction) to finish the work of sorting through Kraft's final manuscript. "It reminded him of the welcoming and comforting structures of stone and timbers built in the wild places by the government just a few decades before, when labor was cheap and hopes were high, the lodges and the nature centers of state parks, the riparian works and dams, places Pierce loved to come upon as a boy."

While at the Abbey, Pierce once again confronts the Y-shaped moment of decision between salvation (which is also intolerant) and sinfulness (which is also innocent). He looks for counsel from the retreat coordinator, Brother Lewis, who is at first kindly but then sternly condemns his marriage to Roo as "a great wrong" due to her having been previously married. That night, Pierce wanders from the Abbey grounds and finds himself at the "Paradise Lounge," a strip club. His attention focuses on a lap dancer with shaved pubic hair ("Edenic," Pierce thinks). "When you get to hell," the lapdancer says seductively, "mention my name. You'll get a good deal."

Pierce feels exulted for a moment, but then empty. And he has the revelation of how distant creation is from everything we know as meaning.

The "realm in which all is contained" is beyond heaven and beyond meaning, both of which lie within. That realm "provided all that was needed for the world to be, but it touched nothing here. It made nothing, altered nothing, wanted nothing, asked nothing, urged nothing; the fact of its existence beyond existence had nothing to do with what went on here, didn't shine through it as a dome of many-colored glass. No. This world shone with its own light, and its light is all the light there is."

The Y-shaped decision between salvation and damnation has no greater meaning than the world that is becoming. "Here at this place, existence divided in two, before and after, though nothing, not an atom, had changed because of it, or would."

The book ends with a hike up the mountain over Blackbury Jambs to see the monument to one of the town's luminaries -- Hurd Hope Welkin, whose struggles with demons now appear to have been simple psychological delusion. Sam, who could once see spirits is now an anthropologist, who looks for clues to human behavior in evolutionary biology.

The Welkin monument includes a massive harp through which the wind plays in "perfect concord." It marks the closest Pierce and his loved ones can get to heaven.

"They had come up as far as it was possible to go."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Words as magic; the writer as alchemist

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of The AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part IV

A wind rises -- a counter-wind to John Dee's -- that shifts the spirit of the age from the word-drunk relativist Giordano to the orthodox Rene Descartes. The young Decartes has a number of vivid dreams -- one of a "great deforming wind" that blows him toward a chapel and a school -- and determines to join the bloody siege of Prague.

The wind blows through the military ranks arrayed before Prague; a light wind at first, but finally one that "sweeps away" the "various unearthly powers" ranked behind Frederick's forces. Their heavenly supporters gone, the soldiers feel "their warm mammalian breath condensed on the cold damp air. They thought how short life is, and of how little worth is the promise of heaven."
The wind blows across the world hardly noticed, but neverethess "rattling the windows of the present and scattering the dealt cards of the past, pushing closed the doors of open books and scrambling the sense of their indexes and prolegomena. Finally its baby breath . . . separated the a from the e in every word where they were joined, or suppressed one and left only the other."

Walking through, but hardly noticing, the bloody devastastion of Prague, Decartes begins to formulate "a way to reduce all kinds of physical problems to mathematical equations." He seeks "a method for deciding what we can know with absolute certainty; how to strip thought of words entirely."

In the failure of Rosicrucianism as a political force, a lesson from the epigraph to the "Chemical Wedding," perhaps, Crowley half-suggests, one that only appeared there with the end of that old world: "Secrets told to all are spoiled, things made common have no power; therefore do not throw pearls before swine, nor proffer roses to an ass." [Thus, Bruno's metamorphosis into ass is philosophically undone as is the mythic transformation of Apuleus's "Golden Ass" returned to human form by eating roses].

Following Bruno, following Kraft, Pierce has the sense ("a dream-sure certainty") that the secret item, the surviving token of AEgypt, for which he is searching is still in Prague. He has a vivid dream in which his father, Axel, brings it to him, only to have it snatched away by spirits with "horripilating hands."

Fellowes Kraft's first book (one thinks here of the similarly dillitantish Ralph Roeder) was on Catherine de Medici and the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre. His brand of whisky, inevitably, is Four Roses.

When traveling, Kraft prefers antique sepia postcards "as though he could not only see the colored present before him full of busy young people and shiny cars and advertising, but remember this old brown past as well, the cars few and black, the trees ungrown or uncut"

As Kraft feels death approaching, he consults Boney -- he addresses him, as habitually, "Mon Emperor" -- on how to keep his papers from falling into the wrong hands. Boney suggests that Kraft could burn the sensitive papers himself, to which the novelist replies: "It would be a little like putting an end to my own messy and overstuffed consciousness. I have a profound horror of suicide."

Kraft's lifelong quest is for what the Cabbalists call the "Shekhinah," the stone from the hollow of God's heart that transforms matter to spirit: "it is the lapis exulus, the gem of lost home, and gutters and ash heaps are as likely a place for it as any. When he was a boy walking those streets Kraft used to keep an eye out for it, going up the town and back again; looking for its telltale gleam in vacant lots, kicking cans that might conceal it. Once he kicked a can of yellow jackets, and was badly stung."

Kraft's trips to Prague are just prior to Hitler's invasion and during the Russian suppression of Czech freedom in 1968. He thinks of the Adamite sects that lived in Bohemia prior to the wars of religion and reflects that similar groups are said to exist in the Faraway Hills where he lives.

Revisiting Prague on the brink of the Russian invasion, Kraft meditates on the local tradition of political change through defeneatestion and thinks of how "the sources of certain events lay not in their antecedent causes but in mirror or shadow events that lay far in the past r future; as though by chance a secret lever on a clockwork could be pressed that made it go after being long still, or as though a wind blowing up in one age could tear leaves and being down steeples in another."

Similarly, he sees how one masters history in order to "impose [its] irrefutable Laws on Time's body . . . to eliminate or hide away anything that confounds or flouts them. It is thus in any age that the Archons rule; the rule of the Archons in heaven being contiguous with that of their epigones on earth."

Thus, the way to defeat power is to propose new laws of history: "laws of desire and hope, which are not fixed but endlessly mutible, and unimposible on anyone else. They are the laws of another history of the world, one's own."

Kraft finds not the magic relic that Boney sent him in search of but, perhaps inevitably, another novel. The unfinished manuscript Pierce has been charged with editing contains the secret of that departed world. It is, Kraft reflects, "a book that even if he finished it would be too long for anyone to read, and would still have to be read twice to be understood."

The writer is the true alchemist. Kraft thinks "give me the base stuff of the world, sadness and nightmare and things tortured in the black smithy of history, and I will turn it all to gold, sophic, wonderful, gold that can't be spent. . . . Transformation was what language could do. It was all it could do."

As death approaches, Kraft sees an unfamiliar car, an Olds 88, approaching (and in it, no doubt, Beau Brachman, who collects the souls of heroes and monsters to take them to the hereafter).

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Bruno's refusal

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of The AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part III

Forces gather in heaven and earth for the (or rather another) battle for the end of the world. Terestrially, it takes place in Prague where Frederick and Elizabeth -- the Winter King and Queen beloved of the Rosicrucians -- reign in Rudolf's mystical castle, in defiance of the Catholic order.

Dee's old skyrer Kelly is there, and sees the forces of heaven in array for battle: "the angel bands issuing from their watchtowers at the four corners of the universe: red as new-smitten blood, lily white, green and garlic-bladed like a dragon's skin, black as raven hair or bilberry juice, the four kinds of which the world is made, coming together in war. . . . In the lower heavens the souls of heroes, the great daemons, the tutelary spirits, the angels of the nations, were thereupon set upon one another. They couldn't know that what was being fought over in Heaven was the shape of the world to come, in which none of them would figure. Yet since the lowest of the rulers of the air are coterminous or contiguous with the highest rulers of the earth, the states and nations, princes and churches, were agitated too, and thought they were plotted against."

Inside the castle, Frederick and Elizabeth come to the tetradic chamber with Archimboldo's paintings. At its center, where Giordano had seen an absence, now lies "a humpbacked black iron trunk waiting to be opened."

In the terrestrial battle for Prague, Rabbi Lowe's Golem fights on the side of Frederick's doomed forces against the Catholics as do the werewolves who harry them at night -- Jews and pagans alike have an interest in preserving the spiritual pax of Rudolf's imaginitive reign.

In the midst of the raging battle a funeral takes place. The Rosicrucian play and tract-writer Philip a Gabella -- the transmigrated Giordano -- who no one had been able to find "to thank or burn" has, in his last sickness, reverted to Ass's form. "He had only hoped -- he had even expected -- that the atoms that composed his own soul might, in far centuries, be drawn again to one another, might seek for one another through the infinite spaces, and at length agglomerate somewhere, elsewhere, into another soul again, his own: and, in their coming together, know themselves as they had been."

In the battle, the Catholics -- the forces of repression -- are vanquished and a call goes out via astral messenger to gather "all those who had sought for the Brothers of the Rosy Cross" -- those who commune with angels, shapeshifters, nightwalkers, goldmakers, doctors of all sciences. They gather in the golden city of Prague, now transformed into the mystical capitol of AEgypt: Adocentyn. An age of learning, tolerance, and love is ushered in. The result is "a backwards revolution, a backflip of wonder performed to turn the progress of the world around like a galleon and head it again for the Age of Gold." [Which would be a defeat of Y-shaped time].

Except, in one of history's -- one of Crowley's -- reversals, none of that happens. Bruno refuses the chance proferred by his interlocutor Cardinal to escape the flames into four-legged freedom. "What happened next," Crowley writes, "was that, twenty years earlier, Giordano Bruno chose not to escape from the papal prison in Rome and go wandering forgetful on four legs into the world."

[In "Daemonomania," Bruno's escape from the stake was parallel with Sam's being freed from the Powerhouse Christian cult. End of the world events with opposite outcomes?]

Bruno refuses to recant because "were I to do that, then their small world would go on existing for centuries more, for no philosopher would dare to speak out and tell them otherwise, and in his telling make it so. If I show that they only have power over this aggregate of atoms, which they may render or discompose as they like or must, then another man may take heart. Finally they will cease. In time, men will laugh at their structures rules bulls anathemata."

Giordano sees the impossibility -- and the peril -- of attempts to remake the world, either by the forces of godly repression or by those of liberty seeking to usher in an age of "self, and ease, and peace, and complimentary love, and natural procreation." He has learned "it was not wisdom to try; ruin was far more likely than glory; give the great ball a kick and you can'th know where it will rebound, or how far it will roll."

In his cell, Bruno "sifts the days of his past and walks the roads of this future and that one" conjuring in his mind an image of the spirit (Sam?) glowing in Dee's seeing stone and of the English magus himself who "had surrendered his own magic, given it up, and by his own renunciation bade magic depart from this world. Because the time was past when even the strongest spirit could be sure he would draw only goodness out of the future for man's aid."

With Bruno's refusal to escape dissolution in the flames of the Inquisition "all the gods, angels, monsters, powers, and principalities of that age began their retreat into the subsidiary realms where they reside today, harmless and unmoving, most of them anyway, for most of us most of the time."

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry