Aegypt Read online

  A timid guess, usually from a girl: ‘It’s very religiously inspired . . .’

  ‘No no no,’ Pierce would say, grinning, ‘no, the very first thing we notice.’ And grabbing up his copy of Dante, still grinning, flourishing it at them: ‘It’s not true! It’s not true. There isn’t any hell in the middle of the earth with the Devil stuck in it. False. Not so. There is not a seven-story mountain in the empty southern sea, or an empty southern sea either.’ He regarded his picture again, pointing out its features.

  His students had begun to dare to chuckle. ‘The earth, ladies and gentlemen, is not in the center of the universe, or even of the solar system. Sun, planets, stars going around it: not the case. About God outside it all I give no opinion, but he’s difficult to believe in in exactly this form. I would think.

  ‘So.’ Turning to them again, fun over: ‘It’s not true. This is not a true story and does not take place in the universe we live in. Whatever it is about this book that is important, and I think it is important,’ eyes lowered here reverently for a moment, ‘it’s not that it is informative about the world we live on or in. What we are going to have to discover is how it can be important to us anyway. In other words, why it is a Classic.’

  And then it was on, easily or at least more easily, into the dark wood, the sages and the lovers, the burning popes, the shit and spew, the dark journey downward and the light journey upward. It was a good trick, and Pierce had perfected it over two or three semesters when, one late autumn day, he turned from the completed picture to ask: ‘Now what is the first thing we notice about this picture of the universe?’ And found himself regarded by a pirate band (with its captives) which made up his Intro to World Lit class, their eyes dully alive, mouths slightly open, at peace and fascinated.

  ‘What,’ he said, without his wonted vigor, ‘is the first thing we notice about this picture of the universe?’

  They seemed to stir, noticing many things but uncertain which was first; they seemed, some of them, beguiled by his mandala, as though he had drawn it to entrance them. Others seemed asleep, or elsewhere, their abandoned bodies breathing softly. Those who took a hectic interest giggled at a joke or a game different from the one Pierce was playing. And Pierce felt grow within him the horripilating conviction that the distinction he was about to make would not be understood; that he did not, after all, wholly understand it himself any longer.

  ‘It’s not true,’ he said, gently, as to sleepwalkers he was afraid to wake. ‘It’s really really not true.’

  Making his way out of the building that day, past the squatting groups of beggars and the pamphleteers’ tables, Pierce found himself wondering how Frank Walker Barr was getting on with his classes these days. Old Barr, kind Barr, gently, tentatively suggesting that there might remain in this cold and clinker-built world some pockets yet of mystery, some outlying villages that had not yet been pacified, perhaps never to be reduced; Barr telling stories, insisting on the worth of stories, always with that saving chuckle – well it was coals to Newcastle now, it was worse than that, time had turned around and brought in a new sign, these kids believed the stories they were told.

  ‘Well it makes a lot of sense,’ Julie said to him. ‘Astronomically there might be a long time to wait; but if we were in the cusp we could feel it, and be influenced by it, and see the signs; and we do – I do.’ Sitting cross-legged on his bed – their bed – she was coating, with dreamy care, her nails in bright lacquers, attempting a suite of symbols, star, moon, eye, sun, crown. ‘The cusp might be this blank time, anything can happen, the old age of one world and beginning of another; you’re poised right at the change, and all things that were are now going to be different, everything conceivable is just for a second possible, and you see, like coming toward you out of the future, the next people, and you’re watching them come forward, beautiful, and you’re waiting to hear what they’ll say, and wondering if you’ll understand them when they speak.’ She held up her mystic hand to Pierce. ‘It makes a lot of sense,’ she said.

  They’re just going to dream their new world-age into being, Pierce marveled; but how otherwise did new world-ages come to be? You have to be on their side, he thought, you have to be: a pity and a love welled up in him for the children, the ragged ranks on pilgrimage along the only way there was to go, after all, making up the future as they went. And in the thought-cloud over every head a single question mark.

  What they needed – what he was coming to need himself, for that matter – was not more stories so much as an account: an account, an explanation of why these world-tales, exactly these and not others, should be now abroad again, after long sleep, and why, though they could not on the face of it be true, they could just now seem to be true, or to be coming true. An account; a model; some means by which those who fed on notions as on bread might be able to tell which ones were really news and which were the old dreams still being dreamed, were stories inside which the human race had never completely awakened from, or did not know it had awakened from: for those who do not know they have awakened from a dream are condemned to go on dreaming it unaware.

  Because the Age of Aquarius, no, it was fatuous, wasn’t it? Surely it was not the age but the heart, it wasn’t even all hearts, that turned from gold to lead and back to gold again; Moses had horns because of some error in translation from Hebrew to Latin or Latin to English, Jesus was as much Lamb or Lion as he was Fish, and the world turned on a bent tree for reasons of its own, which had nothing to do with us. To start assenting to one of these huge stories or another – well, what did you do with all the other stories, for one thing, just as big and just as compelling, that appeared in the fabric of history if the fabric (a shot silk, a changeable taffeta) were looked at in a different light? No, surely Barr had only wanted to suggest that economic and social forces could not by themselves generate the bizarre facts of human history, and that to be unable to experience the titanic shuffling on and off stage of windswept allegories was to miss not only half the fun of history but to exclude yourself from how history, man’s long life on earth, has been actually experienced by those who were creating it, which is just as much the historian’s subject, after all, as the in-fact material conditions and discoverable actions are.

  Let’s just not be too hasty: that’s all Barr was telling his students, his gray-suited and crew-cut students back at the end of the Age of Reason. Let’s recognize – though it surprises and confuses us, it’s so – that the facts are not finally extricable from the stories. Outside our stories, outside ourselves, is the historyless, inhuman, utterly other physical world; and within our human lives within that world are our stories, our ramparts, without which we would go mad, as a man prevented from dreaming in the end goes mad. Not true, no: only necessary.

  But the Age of Reason was a shuttered mansion; what Pierce heard constantly now was how the real world that had seemed so clinker-built to Barr was beginning to come apart under investigation. Relativity. Synchronicity. Uncertainty. Telepathy, clairvoyance, gymnosophists of the East levitating, turning their skins to gold by thought alone. Wishing maybe made it so, for the skilled wisher trained long enough in the right arts, arts so long suppressed by the Holy Office of imperial Reason that they had atrophied, languishing in prison. Strong acids, though, might dissolve those bonds, cleanse the doors of the senses, let the light of far real heavens in. That’s what Pierce heard.

  So what if Barr was wrong? What if inside and outside were not such exclusive categories, nor all the truth on one side of the equation? Because Moses did have horns, in some sense; Jesus was a fish; if those were only stories inside, like a dream, still they were outside any individual; nor could dreaming make them match the in-fact behavior of the constellations, which apparently they did. How come? How did that come to be? How for that matter had the centuries come in Pierce’s mind to be colored panels which nothing he learned about could not be fitted instantly into, and from where came his certainty that the more highly colored and complete his
crowded canvases became, the more he grasped history in its fullness? If he really did grasp history in its fullness, then were his colors inside or outside?

  What if – made of its stuff after all, made of its not-so-solid atoms and electrons, woven utterly into its space-time continuum, its Ecology (new word found lying on the age’s doorstep to be adopted and brought up) – what if man, and man’s thought, and man’s stories, embodied not only man’s truth but truths about outside too, truths about how not only the human world but the whole great world as well goes on? What if those old, oft-told, eternally returning, so-compelling stories were compelling because they contained a coded secret about how the physical (or ‘so-called’ physical) world operates, how it came to cast up man, and thus thought, and thus meaning, in the first place?

  None of them were true, none of those stories! Not a single one of them. All right. But what if they were all true? The universe is a safe, a safe with a combination lock, and the combination of the lock is locked up inside the safe: that chestnut had given him an enormous comfort as an existentialist at Noate, a bitter pleasure. But we are the safe! We are made of dust: all right: then dust can think, dust can know. The combination is, must be, locked inside our hearts, our own pumping blood, our spinning brains and the stories they weave.

  Could it be, could it be? How did he know? Almost with disdain, a shrinking as from the touch of something loathly, he had always avoided all systematic knowledge of the physical universe; he had carefully just-barely-not-failed every science course he had been made to take at Noate, and had forgotten their boring and ghastly contents as soon as he closed the last lab door behind him. Astronomy had been one of them. He remembered nothing of it except the fact, congenial to him at the time, that comets (those old omens) were actually nothing but large balls of dirty snow. What he knew of how the investigation into the nature of things was going in his time was confined to what he read in the papers or saw on television; only that, and the notions he was now receiving as though through the charged air, Julie’s rumors of terrific revelations about to break that never quite did. Starships from Elsewhere were landing as the moon drew closer to the earth; powerful mages hidden till now in Tibet were about to announce themselves the true governors of the planet; scientists had fallen through self-made gaps in the fabric of space and time and the matter was being hushed up: Pierce would hear, with a shiver of wonder, news that if true would transform the whole account of time and life forevermore – and in the next moment, laughing with relief, would recognize in the news an old story, a story that had been old at the turn of the last millennium, had perhaps been one of those told around the old original campfire where stories had first been heard in the world.

  And from where then had come his shiver of wonder?

  He shivered; he opened the window to the night, and rested his elbows on the sill. He put his long chin in the cup of his hands, and stood thus looking out, like a gargoyle.

  Did the world have a plot? Did it, after all? He had not ever believed himself to have one, no not even in those days when he had lived within stories; but did the world?

  They out there believed it did. His students, hungering for stories as a man deprived of sleep hungers to dream. For sure Julie would look at the same street corner at the same time of day for another five-dollar bill; at the same phase of the moon, perhaps, the same five-dollar-yielding turn of the wheel. Julie believed that Gypsies could tell fortunes.

  Did the world have a plot? Had it only seemed to lack one because he had forgotten his own?

  On a crystal May morning, after everyone else seemed to have departed, he and Julie sat opposite each other at the scarred kitchen table, ready to go: between them now stood a tall glass of water and, in a saucer, two blue-stained cubes of sugar which their upstairs neighbor – gentle-eyed, hirsute – had acquired for them, tickets to Elsewhere. In after years he would sometimes wonder if at that moment he did not pass out through a sort of side door of existence, abandoning forever the main course his life would otherwise have taken; but it didn’t matter, for there was to be no going back through to find out, no going back along the unrolling path that soon came to be beneath their feet. Not seemed-to-come-to-be: it was no metaphor, or if it was a metaphor it was one that was so intensely so that the tenor and the vehicle of it, not identical, might just as well have been. In fact it became evident sometime during that endless morning that truth itself was a metaphor, no not even a metaphor, only a direction, a direction toward the most revelatory metaphor of all, never ever to be reached. Life is a journey; it is only one journey; there is along it only one road, one dark wood, one hill, one river to cross, one city to come to; one dawn, one evening. Each is only encountered again and again, apprehended, understood, recounted, forgotten, lost, and found again. And at the same time – Pierce standing gasping in the winds of Time felt it with the shocked conviction of a Bruno discovering Copernicus, of the first man in history to perceive it – the universe extends out infinitely in every direction you can look in or think about, at every instant.

  Oh I see, he said, Oh I see, I get it, listening to the falling into place, one by one, of infinite tumblers that were tiny enough to fit inside the turnings of his own minute chemistries. He learned that day where heaven is, and where hell, and where the seven-story mountain; and he laughed aloud to know the simple truth. He learned the answers to a hundred other questions, and then forgot them, and then forgot the questions too: but for some years after – not often but now and then – he would receive, like a wave that reaches far up a dry shingle and then recedes, a dash of that day’s understanding: and for a moment taste its certainty like salt.

  SIX

  Those were the days when Pierce became a popular teacher at Barnabas; then that he came to seem to his students to have a secret he could impart, a secret that had cost him something in the learning. The stack of books bought, borrowed, and stolen grew tall beside his street-salvaged plush armchair; the exotic goods he plundered there he came freighted with into class, there were not enough minutes in an hour or hours in a semester to unload them all.

  Meanwhile the great parade wound on, turning in on itself, darkened by waste and penury; the ones who came irregularly to sit on Pierce’s classroom floor and listen to his stories had ever less acquaintance with Western Civilization, they seemed to be beings who had come from far places, who were headed for other far places unimaginable to him, and to be only resting before him momentarily, exhausted and dusty.

  Still Pierce worked at his account; while far away in the Midwest, Rosie Rasmussen and her Mike set up housekeeping in a gray Vetville beyond a huge and restless university, and while Spofford sat silent and tense in a Harlem hospital rec room with six others who could not forget a certain far-off beach at dawn, a certain green hill, Pierce read on: he read Barr and he read Vico and he read the Steganography of Lois Rose; he read the stories of Grimm and Frobenius, and the Stories of the Flowers and the High History of the Holy Graal and the History of the Royal Society, by Sprat; he read George Santayana (no, no) and Giorgio di Santillana (yes! yes!) and a dozen texts he might have read at Noate and never had; he read The Golden Bough and The Golden Legend and The Golden Ass of Apuleius. While uptown the fledgling Sphinx, a schoolchild still, went through Effie’s pills looking for something she might take, while Beau Brachman on a Colorado mountaintop awaited starships from Elsewhere to appear and touch down, Pierce stood on his rooftop with an illustrated Hyginus in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and discerned for the first time the moon rise into the polluted sky in a sign, the sign of Pisces, two fishes bow-tied at the tail.

  One question, Barr had said; one question leads to another, and that one to another, and that one to others, and so on, unfinishably, a life’s work. Pierce learned where the four corners of the earth are, for they are not the four points of the compass; he learned why there are nine choirs of angels and not ten or eight, and where Jamshyd’s seven-ring’d cup that was lost can every night
be found. He didn’t learn why people think that Gypsies can tell fortunes, but he learned why there are twenty-four hours in a day, and twelve signs of the zodiac, and twelve Apostles too. It began to seem that there is not any numbered thing in the human story that has its number by chance; if any band of heroes, or measurements of a ship, or days of a march, or hills a city was built on, did not add up to a satisfying figure, then time and ingenuity and dreaming would eventually wear away or build up the facts, until it too acquired one of the small set of whole numbers and regular geometrical figures which inhabit the human breast, the combination of the safe.

  He began to think that even though magic, and science, and religion did not all mean the same thing, they all meant in the same way. In fact perhaps Meaning was purely an ingredient of certain items which the world put forth and not of others, perhaps it arose just in the way flavor arises out of a conjunction of spices and herbs and long cooking and a sensitive palate, and yet is not reducible to any of those things; was a name only for the nameless conjunction, the slight clutch in his throat, the hum in his ears, Oh I see, I get it.

  Whatever it was, he had acquired a taste for it. To the matched set of Barr’s speculations and the weirdly compelling tales out of his childhood and the little life of Bruno, still unread, were added books on celestial mechanics and the workings of the senses and the insides of the atom; on the history of Christian iconography and witchcraft and on the learning processes of children. A lane had opened up within these books, a path glimpsed within their bibliographies, and Pierce, though darkling at times, bored and repelled sometimes, was led on, from footnote to text, from glossy paperback filled with notions to shabby leatherback filled only with print, pausing only to gather courage to go on, to shade his eyes and see, if he could see, what pioneers had been before him along this way, if any had; and picking up as he went the oddest facts and bright bits of this and that.