Endless Things (21 page)

—Ah, said the Ass; so it must.

—Others say that there are certain unfortunate souls formed in the last Year but still persisting in this one, where they wander in dissatisfaction, never at home, and not knowing why.

The Ass pondered this, and his own state.

—Perhaps, he said then, they are the greatest scholars, as well as the greatest fools. Searching for the sense that they remember, or expect, but that has changed forever.

The rabbi walked silently for a moment, as though testing against his inward understandings this remark, to see if it could be so.

—In any case, he said at last, those tales are false. There is but one age, one world, one Torah, one soul for each man.

The Ass didn't dispute the Great Rabbi, wise enough to know better, patient enough to wait. That he himself was the proof that a man could have more than one soul made for him in the bosom of Amphitrite he forbore to say. He only paused and parted his hind legs, and sent a stream of urine into the gutter, while the rabbi tactfully went on ahead, and paid no attention.

The work was long: the rabbi said it would be. The
Giordanisti
took rooms in a house in the castle district named after the Three Kings,
die Heilige drei Königen
(where one day in another world Franz Kafka would live, and dream about metamorphosis). To make their daily bread and board they put on plays once again, safer in this city than anywhere in the Empire. They acted, besides Onorius and Lucius, a new play of Johannes Faustus, like the ones the
Pragerei
loved—only in theirs the devil with whom Faust negotiates the sale of his soul was not a
schwarze Pudel
but a well-spoken Ass.

Meanwhile, every day if he could, the Ass traveled to the Jewish quarter, to the rabbi's house, to learn and hope.

He studied the nine chief methods of calculation or
gematria
, as Moses Cordovero lists them. Every letter by which the world was first called into being has a numeric equivalent, and gimetry is but the substitution of one name with another of the same numerological value—which value can however be calculated in an endless number of ways, for the letters of the names of the letters—the aleph of
aleph
, the beth of
beth
—have their own numerical values that can be drawn on too, and this being so no two numerically identical words are ever exactly identical, since their identity derives from different calculations.

He learned—indeed he already knew it, as he seemed already to have known everything he had learned as an ass, except how to sleep standing up and bear loads as large as himself—that all the names of the deity, the potent
semhamaphoræ
, which are the shadows of ideas, are all hidden in the letters that compose the scripture's tales and truths and laws. The whole of the Hebrew scripture is not other than the one Great Name, expressed in the quasi-endless vicissitudes of alphabetic calculation.

But for that to be so, then mustn't each of the stories that the scripture contains have been made to happen in the first place only so that it could be written down in certain words, having the value of certain numbers? If Samson had picked up not the jawbone of an ass but the thighbone of a tiger, one name of God would not be able to be read from the story.

—Are they all nothing but fables then? he asked the rabbi.

They sat (at least the rabbi and his secretary sat) studying in the inner court of the
bet ha-midrash
. The Ass, still an ass after many lessons, watched the rabbi's blunt quill dip in the inkhorn his secretary held, and make vermiform letters one after another.

—No, said the rabbi. Those events did occur, and they also have the hidden meanings that they have. The Almighty favored Abraham not because he was a good man, but because he was Abraham: and yet Abraham would not have been Abraham if he had not striven to be a good man. It is the same for all of us.

—The same for all of us, said the rabbi's secretary in Latin
. Idem ac omnibus.

Was it, though, was it the same for all of us, the same as for Abraham? The Ass thought, as they studied, of his own story: a story he could not have imagined in advance of its coming to be, the story that had plucked him as a brand from the burning, marked him as the bearer of a knowledge he could no longer apprehend, brought him here to this land, to this city, to this crowded and odorous quarter. With how much farther to go, in what form, for what end.

We try to choose the good, he thought, and darkling and ignorant, to be wise: and in doing so we make the choices that will spell the stories, the stories that will body forth or contain or clothe the thousand- and ten-thousand-letter names of God. Those names—the skeleton of the made World, of the Year we inhabit, of the Soul we recognize within—all come to be in the stories we make. But the stories cannot be known before our labors make them; therefore neither can the names; therefore neither can the ending of the world we make.

—We are not required to complete the work, the rabbi said to the little beast. But neither are we free to desist from it.

A year passed before the Ass discovered the solution to his quandary, and when he did it was all on his own.

The stories that great Moses told, of the making of the world and the coming to be of men and beasts, angels and demons, fathers and heroes, sinners and journeys and judgments: they contained all the names of God in the permutations of the numbers of the letters of their words. So the rabbi said. But then, the Ass concluded, it must be that all those sacred histories could be exactly substituted by
other
stories about
other
journeys, judgments, heroes,
et cætera
, and—so long as they were told in words that had exactly the same numerical values—those stories would yield up the same names and numbers, indeed the same Great Name and Number. When he expressed this discovery to the rabbi, the rabbi at last sent him away, scandalized.

But it was so, and he knew it. And, finally and therefore, his own little name and its number, the number of his whole tale, could be reversed, construed, inverted, reduced, multiplied, and divided, and then made to spell out a new name, the name of a new being different from but exactly equivalent to the old, with a new tale, a tale both having been and still coming to be.

And into or onto that name and tale he could press or tack or strap or infuse or pour or discover his self and soul, as he had once before infused the same self and soul into the body and heart of an ass, and by similar means perhaps, only not numerological ones. (What ones, then? How had he done it? He couldn't remember.)

So he took the gold he had made as a comedian, and he caused to be made (by the same instrument maker then serving Johannes Kepler up in the castle on the hill) a vast set of interlocking brass wheels, which were etched and numbered like an astrolabe, or like the proportional compass of Fabricio Mordente, with the Hebrew letters, and the letters of Latin and Greek, and the lettered Divine Qualities of Raimundus Lullus for good measure. For the
signacula
of Moses were wonderful, and the hieroglyphs of Ægypt are wonderful, but all letters and the images made from them are finally just as wonderful and eternal, and are equally the world.

As the
Giordanisti
turned and turned these wheels at his instruction, he combined and transliterated and reflected the resulting nonsense in the mirror of his heart of hearts. His soul studied it in that mirror, where of course it appeared backward, upside down too like the reflection in a silver spoon's bowl; studied and read until it all ran backward again, that is forward, and so at last made sense, sweet sense, which raced through his fibers and his sinews and the macaroni of his veins and nerves, remaking him as it went.

He was a tabby kitten; then he was a stick of elmwood; a silvery trout with a rainbow belly wriggling in air; a live coal, shedding sparks; a gray pigeon, drop of ruby blood at its beak. For an infinitesimal instant he was an infinite number of things, and then for an endless moment he was one thing eternally.

Then he was a man. A small naked man, though not smaller or more naked than he had been in the Campo dei Fiori. His name was Philip à Gabella. Instead of hooves he had ten fingers—no, nine fingers, one
minimus
lost somewhere along the way or failing to be produced in metamorphosis. Big headed, exophthalmic, with large yellow teeth. A large
membrum virile
too: that and his loud and horripilating laugh being marks he would henceforward keep hidden, for he remembered how, long ago, they had frightened off the giants in their revolt against the gods—that is, the powers and the principalities. He remembered the tale, and the names of those gods and powers, and the names of the giants too. It was a well-known tale; its occurrence in many authors ancient and modern unrolled within him. The strong image of the ithyphallic Ass up on his hind legs displaying was one that he possessed; here it was.

And he laughed his terrible laugh then, right then, unable not to, laughed and laughed as the brothers covered their ears. Because he remembered.

He remembered. The great gates of the many-linked memory palaces he had built over the whole of his life before his death were flung open with a bang, for his new man's brain was large enough for them to unfold at last into, and they did unfold, they opened like the damp wings of butterflies just come from their cocoons, like folding game boards of a thousand inlaid panels, like cunts, like caves, like dreams suddenly remembered backward from their terminus at waking,
oh yes
! ever backward till their infinities can be glimpsed, distances where one day we will go, or might go.

He remembered all the writings he had written and all those that remained unwritten. He remembered the lands he had crossed, the languages he had mastered, the shoes he had worn out, the meals he had eaten or refused, the women he had coupled with, Venetian, Savoyard, Genevan, Picard, Walloon, English. He remembered the faces in all the crowds in all the squares of all the cities he had added to his own Memory City in the time he had walked the earth.

He remembered the prison in Rome where he had lain for so many years, and all the places he had traveled to while he lay there, on earth, under the earth, in the heavens: he remembered even the small window above, by which he had used to go out. He remembered all those he had summoned to sit with him there, and all the conversations he had had with them, the answers he had got from them. And also the questions they had asked, that he had answered. And lastly he remembered how he had learned from one of them, and from the instructions of his own soul, the means by which he had been able to run away, again.

Freed by his grandfather Hermes, who had told him the plan that he, Giordano, had already known before he was told it. Step by step. And who then said to him:
Now go, and free all men
.

And so he had gone from Rome and crossed the mountains and the plains and come to this golden city on four legs. Now again he had two, and a new or an old Work to accomplish, in consequence of all that he had been given; a Work he had been saved to do. And if he was not able to accomplish it all to the end, that was no reason not to begin.

—Let's begin, he said to the players gathered around him. He had clothed his nakedness in Faust's scholar's robe from their play, its hem somewhat cinder bitten from the squibs and firecrackers the demons threw on poor Faust at the play's ending. Tom tapped idly on the drum as they spoke. It was midnight in the
Heilige drei Königen
.

—What is it we are to begin?

—The unbinding of all men from their limits, said the Ass. Since we have begun with ourselves—with myself, I mean—let's continue.

Tap tap.

—And how are we to do such a thing as that?

—I have a plan, said the Ass, the former Ass.

Men can be freed from their bonds, he told them, but not from all bonds, for that would leave men beasts: it is in what binds them that they are men. To decide which of those bonds most leads to happiness is the goal of the
sapiens
who knows how binding is accomplished. He will give—or seem to give, in this matter there is no real difference, the sign is the thing—to every person what he or she most wants.
Unicuique suum,
to each his own: and to all as to each, for though every man and every woman is more or less different, the mass of men and women are more or less the same. And what do they want? Stories that end in happiness, weddings after adversity, triumphs of righteousness. Wonders and signs fulfilled. Then Adam returns refreshed and renewed; all is forgiven. Mercy, Pity, Peace. The Golden Age begins again, and lasts forever, until it ends.

—And how, said doubting Tom, are we to seem to give to all men what they most want? How are we to speak to the mass of men and women all at once, and yet give
unicuique suum
?

—How? said Philip à Gabella, the Ass made Man. We do it every day and twice on holidays. We will (here he lifted his new hands to them, his large gray eyes alight; it was hilarious and sad how they could still recognize in him their former companion), we will put on a play.

—A
play?

—Let's, he said clapping, put on a play. A
ludibrium
, a show, a jest in all seriousness, a seriousness in all jest. Not in one place only but across the world, across this Europe at least. Such a play as has never in the history of the world been seen, a play that will force them all to
suspend their disbelief
, and not only watch and laugh and weep, but take part as well, and be themselves our actors.

—Who?

—Anyone who can hear. Kings, bishops, knights, magi, ploughmen, wives, nuns, wise men, fools, young, old, not yet born, already dead. All. The kingdom will be our stage, sun our lights, night our curtain.

—A kingdom for a stage! one player cried, and strutted and lifted his hand to raise the eyes and spirits of an imaginary audience. A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene!