Endless Things (17 page)

For it was a cult he had grown up in, as he later understood, as he had understood in the simplest terms of specialness and exclusivity even when he was a kid: a small, a practically infinitesimal cult, but an old one, he was amazed when he learned how old, a thin but unbreakable dark thread unwound through the world for ages. The complex equations of suffering and scheming abstractions that his mother's friends talked of, and which Dr. Pons would in his serene whisper school him in, were an ancient answer to the truly hardest question of all:
why is there anything at all, and not just nothing?

Once, before the beginning of anything, a number of great beings, angels with limitless, inconceivable powers, gathered together, driven by restless dissatisfaction that they could not account for. To distract themselves, they began to play a game of their own invention. They divided themselves into the various players, constructed parts and appendages for themselves by which they might play.

Though it never wholly assuaged their profound boredom, they became caught up in the game they had invented. The rules, continually elaborated to make the play more interesting, entangled them in limitless possibilities. They played on, forgetting why they played, forgetting themselves, their origins, forgetting finally that they played a game. They came to take their own idle construction—which we call Time and Space—for actuality; they forgot they had themselves devised the rules, and came to assume they had always been subject to them.

So the game has gone on being played, Dr. Pons said, from that time-before-time down to this; except that now and then some subdivided entity, some mirror fragment or mask piece of the original players, a pawn in the game, will stop in his tracks, seized by a restless dissatisfaction he can't account for: longing, boredom, and a certainty of belonging elsewhere. For those great beings who invented the game of time and space, the Archons: what they had done was simply to reduplicate themselves and their quandary over and over, dividing and redividing their infinite substances into all the things that are, animal vegetable mineral, and all the representations of those things, in an effort to fill their own emptiness.

That was to begin the story
in medias res
, but in fact there was nowhere else to begin except
in medias res
. For what was being told was not so much a story as a situation, a circumstance endlessly elaborating itself without ever unfolding any further, like an infinite carpet in which the central figure is surrounded by the same figure in a larger size, and that by the same figure in a still larger size, over and over.

And all those figures, Dr. Pons taught him, earthly and heavenly and above the heavens, are wrapped around a single infinitesimal spark of light at the center of being, like the layers and layers of pearl with which an oyster coats the grain of sand that irritates him so. That grain of light, irreducible, eternal, infinite even in being infinitesimal, is simply the centermost point of your heart.

Here Dr. Pons touched the corduroy above the boy's own heart.

And not until the last grim furious Archon remembers this, not until she surrenders her stake and tosses in her cards—and with them the hopeless delusion she has labored under (that she is ruler, that there is something to rule)—will that vast game board be folded up at last and put away, and the Players, knowing themselves to be incomplete, turn again toward the Pleroma, the Fullness, God: whose lack is all they really are.

God. Who is like a mother whose child has decided to run away from home, a child who packs his paper sack with lunch and his knapsack with things and then sets out never to return, and gets farther than he ever has before, the borders of lands so large and far he can't comprehend them; and thereupon forgets why he got so sad or angry or disgusted or impatient, and remembers his mother at home; and so he turns, and goes back, to find his mother in the kitchen, who only smiles at him and takes his hat from his head and tells him to wash up, unaware that he was ever gone, so long gone.

"We,” Dr. Pons would say (and the boy he spoke to thought he meant
you and I
, and then later on he thought that Dr. Pons meant
we human persons
, and lastly he knew he meant
we few, our kind
): “We are the ones who remember. We are the latest and littlest of the replications of divine forgetfulness: and yet in our remembrance lies the salvation of all. For as we are the lowest and the last, farthest from the light, so we are also closest to the center, and the spark of light is near within us: the spark that, once awakened, we can fan into a flame."

Well. Kraft could recite the weird catechism still today, though he could only in the briefest moments (reminded by a smell of coal smoke, or the feel underfoot of cinders on ice) experience the drama Dr. Pons told of, and the limitless darkness in which as a boy he had always imagined it taking place.

His mother called it Knowing, but as he got older it seemed to him that it wasn't Knowing so much as it was Knowing Better, a kind of universal I-told-you-so that could be astonished by nothing. Mocking, cynical about human sentiment, except that what she mocked was not human pretensions but human humility: human trust in the goodness of life and the giver of life, human groveling before contemptible and shoddy nature. Ma always acted as though there were some metaphysical guarantee that a thing would do or be just what its name said it would do or be: if glue didn't stick two things together satisfactorily, she took it not as a sign that the things and the glue weren't suited or that the weather was damp; she saw (with mixed disgust and triumph) that the universe had (once more) failed to act on its promises, proving (once again) that it was not the place it purported to be. She was a tourist in a shoddy tourist cabin, only willing to put up with the inconvenience for the length of a brief vacation, and the weather turning wet.

"Son,” she wrote to him, the year the Second War ended. “I read all the time now about the new Einstein bomb made out of atoms. They talk about how this terrible responsibility has fallen into our hands, that we can misuse this power, and blow up the world. And we will all have to control ourselves because of it. As though this bomb were the fault of people, when it isn't at all. The fault is in those atoms, isn't it. Going off in our faces like a trick cigar, or like that gimcrack Japanese jewelry box I had, that nipped my finger every time I opened it."

She no more credited human science with discoveries about the world than she would credit a man who fell down a well with having discovered it. She thought the duty of science was to provide us with a guidebook for getting safely around nature, a guidebook that could never be complete: there were always nasty surprises awaiting. Ma certainly had no conception of physics and assumed the rules could suddenly change in subtle ways, water at any time begin to flow uphill. He remembered how not long before she died, she had seen put up somewhere, inscribed on a pseudorustic board in comical lettering, what was called Murphy's Law:
If Something CAN Go Wrong, IT WILL!!!
How she had laughed, who hadn't laughed in a long year of sickness and pain. If something can go wrong, it will: the only law she would recognize in a lawless universe.

Somehow, despite her, he had himself grown up an optimist, expecting and even assuming the best would come to him, or at least a fair deal. He could remember a day lying, high up on a hill, looking over the city cleft by its busy waterway, whose distant reaches fought free of the city and wound far through autumn haze into pale imaginary hills: how he had understood that day for the first time that he loved the world, loved his own sensations of it, its weathers and its sights and tastes. He felt a deep pleasure in the discovery, and did not yet know that his consciousness of his pleasure in things was the beginning of his division from them. The pleasure could diminish, but the division, once begun, could never be healed.

Not such an optimist then after all, maybe possibly. Autumn too now outside his windows, outside his house from which he did not often venture.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
. His mother couldn't abide Keats.

He hadn't often seen it at the time, but he came to see his mother's efforts to bring him up alone as a great heroism; strange and nearly mad as she was, she had apparently got up every day and willed herself to make a life for him that was not wholly unlike the lives lived by others, not so wholly unlike anyway that he would never find a place among them, and have only her. Clothes cleaned and pressed. Nourishing meals got up. Manners inculcated, cautions and reassurances made, his achievements and fears and hopes taken seriously if with some bafflement. He in turn had avoided, just barely, breaking her heart and emptying her life entirely in his struggle to climb up or down into the rooms and streets and public places where most of life was lived; even now, she dead many years, he could groan aloud or feel sweat break on his brow when (in the vacant middle of the night, reviewing his life, as he must now do) he thought how close he had come.

She had got him through high school—there he was in the class photograph in cap and gown; then she put on her hat and coat and was gone for a day, and returned haggard and proud, able to tell him that he would be able to go to the college that had accepted his smudgy application, she had got some concession out of Guess Who, and so if he worked and lived frugally. And he had gone, and stepped into Western Civilization as though it were the family firm, where a place had all along been waiting for him, which wasn't the case at all.

At college he turned to the past with hope and appetite, as though it were the future; and soon after he graduated he set out to make a living from it. The only residue left in him (he thought) from the peculiar childhood he had been subject to was the conviction, which only came to him rarely over the years but which was unrefusable when it came, that it is
not
unreasonable after all to believe that one's own subjectivity is bound up in the nature of things; that really we have no independent evidence of how the world is; that if our consciousness contributes to making the world, then our consciousness can alter it. Suddenly, in an Italian garden, on a winter day, knowing that it made perfect sense to think so, and feeling himself grow in an instant into a being inconceivably huge.

"Guess who's dead,” Ma had written to him on September 1, 1930, here was the date, she usually dispensed with that. He knew by then a little more about his father and her relations with him: he was her mother's sister's husband, into whose house she had come as an orphaned girl of seventeen, to be something between adopted daughter and servant, and starting (by her sublime inattention partly, her son imagined, partly by her freedom) a foolish passion in her uncle's heart. Which he then thrust upon her apparently, repeatedly, taking dreadful chances, hand over her mouth in the pantry (so Kraft imagined it) and always reproachful of her afterward. Rich enough, though, to pay for the eventual consequence, which was a son, Kraft himself. Able too, it seemed, to bear a lifetime load of secret guilt, which, like fascination, she seemed to have generated in his heart by her almost inhuman indifference.

Poor man. She never felt sorry for him either.

The money he left his son, passed to him by discreet and disapproving lawyers, was enough to get Kraft to Europe and allow him to live in a kind of penurious luxury inconceivable at home, and spend something on treats for friends who were even poorer than he, in order to receive their gratitude—he would later learn better ways of winning them but still would never entirely trust his own charms. Before the money ran out he had written his first book, a life of Bruno.

Bruno, who really knew the world was made of one stuff everywhere, whether you called it Atoms or Soul or Meaning or Hylos; Bruno who proved there was no Down, no Up, no Inside, no Outside; whose gods were Lucianic bumblers, and the history of the universe the record of their crimes, follies, and misfortunes, and yet we love them, our love conquers them in its lover's welcome of every manifestation of their endless, pointless creativity.
The gods take pleasure in the multiform representation of multiform things, in the multiform fruits of all talents; for they have as great pleasure in all the things that are, and in all representations made of them, as in taking care that they be, and giving order and permission that they be made
.

Going down drunk to the Campo dei Fiori the July day he wrote the last pages of that book, where there stood a bronze statue of the man, incongruously robed in the Dominican habit he had long before discarded, hood shadowing his gaunt martyr's face. Buying roses from the flower sellers there to put before this effigy anyway, as the boys and girls courting and kidding on the fountain's lip watched him curiously.

The book—
Bruno's Journey
—was on his shelves now here, more than one edition, each though retaining the original's photograph of himself on the back. A pretty ephebe if he did say so himself, shock of pale golden hair and cheekbones bronzed by the Neapolitan sun, a look at once self-satisfied and sly. It was a young man's book, aphoristic and smart, not really wrong maybe but so insufficient it might as well have been.

The first man in Western history to have imagined that the universe is infinite, he wrote to his mother, sending her a copy from the city; and here was the letter that she had written back (he was never sure if she actually read the book). Her letter was mostly a quotation, copied from one of the slim and atrociously printed little tracts that passed for scripture in her sect, though actually rarely consulted: “Ialdabaoth desired to make a Creation like the Eternal and Infinite Pleroma, under the delusion that such a thing could be created, that he could copy Eternity by vast lengths of time ever lengthened, and Infinity by vast spaces continually multiplied. Thus he followed the Lie and the Darkness, proud in his unwisdom."

Well, didn't bomb-man Einstein agree, as far as Kraft could tell anyway, didn't he say that the universe was unbounded but not therefore infinite, and that a man setting out in a straight line from earth would never reach its frontiers, but would eventually, though still traveling his straight line, come back to the place from which he started?