Love and Sleep (40 page)

Third Partition, Section Two, Member One, Subsection One. Heroical love causing melancholy. His Pedigree, Power, and Extent. No power on earth found stronger than love. The part affected in men is the liver, and therefore called heroical, because commonly Gallants, Noblemen, and the most generous spirits are possessed with it.

Nice, but a doubtful etymology.

Heroical love,
Amor hereos,
that disease of the mind and members that melancholic Saturnian natures take for love itself, unable to hatch any other kind in their cold dry hearts. Doctors of the sixteenth century, medieval monks too, were quite sure you could die of heroical love.

Member Two, Subsection One. The causes of heroical love: Temperature, full Diet, Idleness, Place, Climate, &c. Of all causes the remotest are the stars. When Venus and Mercury are in conjunction, Mercury in the ascendant, I am so urged with thoughts of love that I cannot rest—so far Cardan of himself, confessing what use he made of the time allotted to study. Yet some hold with Brunus his opinion, that Saturn in the nativity, by making for melancholy, most inclines to these thoughts of lust; such spirits are endowed with imagination in overplus, and can readily conceive all sorts of delights, of which they never tire; yet they pursue the pleasures of lust for their own sake, and give no thought to propagation.

Which about hit the nail on the head.

Brunus his opinion
: that was Giordano Bruno, very likely, who bragged once that he had coupled with a hundred women, who knows how truthfully.

The part affected, meanwhile (back to Burton), is the former part of the head, for want of moisture. Gordonius will have the testicles an immediate subject or cause, the liver an antecedent. Fracastorius agrees in this with Gordonius: from thence originally come the images of desire, erection, &c.; it calls for an exceeding titillation of the part, so that until the seed is put forth there is no end of frisking voluptuousness and continual remembrance of venery.

He underlined that lightly in pencil:
continual remembrance of venery
.

Of course (as Austin saith) the stars do but incline us. Saturn in the ascendant might also make for dark solitary genius, coupled especially with Sagittarian clarity and aim; Bruno knew that too. Heroical love not for phantasms of flesh but for the lasting realities perceived by the questing intellect. That was the morning view. Antisocial squalor, introspection, geezerhood,
eremita masturbans
: the evening.

He pushed Burton from his lap.

Say the telephone rings now. The unanswered phone call he had made in the city returning to him tonight. Okay.

Ring, phone.

It wasn't far from where he lay on the bed, he could pull himself roughly together and pick it up before the caller quit.

"Hello?"

Hi there.
With a faintly shamefaced air of peek-a-boo.

"Oh,” he said. “Well. Hello."

You busy?

"Christ no. I was just,” he said, “thinking of you."

Small world
, she said. He heard a jangle of bracelets as perhaps she shifted the receiver from ear to ear.
So how are you. How's the new life.

"The new life is good."

The country bumpkin
, she said.

"Haylofts,” he said. “Milkmaids."

You
, she said.

"And how ‘bout you?” he said.

Well you know
, she said, reflecting.
It's summer. It gets so crazy.

"Hot,” he said.

It's hot as hell right now
, she said.
I'm sitting n-k-d with the window open.

He could actually hear the summer city in the street below the window of her apartment, that apartment he knew, cross between a Cornell box and the Watts Towers. She on the bed.

"So,” he said. “You've been good?"

I've been bad
, she said, resigned to her nature, as he was not to his.
So bad.

"Tell me."

Crazy
, she said, softly, as though pondering to what extent she should indulge him.
Eduardo
, she said.
Did I tell you about Eduardo?

"No."

I've been seeing him. Eduardo
, she said, her voice lower, imparting the delightful secret,
is the first person I have ever picked up on the street. Just, you know, got the eye, gave it back—stopped to talk—oh man.

"Good for you."

But—oh it's so. I can't tell you.

"Tell me.” For he had conceived a shameful plan, which if he kept his voice level and his air insouciant, he might execute. “You can."

Well
, she said.
He's fifteen years old.
Her hand shifted on the instrument.
And oh God. So sweet too. I didn't realize at first, but Pierce I think I got a cherry. I mean you just can't imagine.

But he wouldn't need to imagine. With his gentle hints he would nudge her toward the revelations she wanted to make anyway, occupied for all he knew as he was himself; and the long telephone line would grow warm with the passage of her words toward him and his encouragements, like the wire of a busy appliance.

Continual remembrance of venery. Once upon a time back in their New York life together they had been in bed, just commencing, when the phone rang; and to his exasperation she answered it; and he had decided to proceed anyway. It was her friend Lou, the Denver cowgirl. Lou this isn't such a good time. Really really, Lou. Well do you want me to tell you what's going on? And she had laughed her deep small laugh of satisfaction, had settled down watching Pierce at work and talking meanwhile softly to Lou, telling her more, going on telling her, while Lou cooed audibly on the other end; he even spoke to her himself, Hi Lou, wish you were here.

Wish you were here. He wondered if she and Lou had ever. She always hinted. Wish I could if she did. Wish I. I wish. I wish. I wish.

He fell momentarily thereupon into a shocked slumber, until his own ferocious snore awoke him.

Ugh what a mess.

The telephone squatted torpid and cold in the far corner; it had not in fact rung for days.

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

That she should have become so deeply incised on his spirit, sole focus of his one-eyed Sagittarian attention, sole object of his melancholic's extravagant forebrain lust—that was no surprise; what star was it though, he wondered, what complication of the melancholic condition, which caused this tendency—he had only recently come to notice it, how entrenched it had become—to erase himself from his own imaginings? Since she did not want to be with him, he imagined her with others; and in the brief instant when he believed he could feel what she felt with another, a bright shadow of what she actually might feel or have felt, then he came.

What slippery slope had he stepped on, when? Why could he not make himself afraid of what had become of him?

The summer bloom hadn't yet left the sky, though it was after nine o'clock by the moonface of his clock. From his bed he could see the yellow oblong of his friend and neighbor Beau Brachman's window, across and down the street, alone alight in the black cutout of Beau's house. Beau the renunciatory mystagogue, who whatever he was up to would not be occupied as Pierce was.

Pierce had, himself, turned on no lights, and so needed to turn none off; he only stretched out in his shirt, pulled up the sheet, turned his face away from the kitchen where the day's dishes implored him, and fell asleep.

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Beau Brachman had in fact been imagining a coupling, too: blind, humid, and hot, hot enough to turn the Androgyne inside out, and make him all male.

Beneath the lamp lit in his monkish upstairs apartment two books lay, one closed volume atop another open one, the two bound alike in maroon cloth that some tiny tropical mite had attacked, consuming the glue in speckled measle patterns all over, the consumption only stopped by the cold climate to which Beau had brought them. They had been published together by the Theosophical Publishing House in Benares, and that's where Beau had found them:
Thrice-greatest Hermes
, by G.R.S. Mead.

He had read in them for a long time this fragrant night, after not having opened them in years; the sight of the familiar print of the pages and the familiar disposition of the paragraphs on them, the little black marginal glosses like wayside shrines along a rocky path, returned him to the hot nights and days when he had read them first.

He was not reading now, though. If Pierce could have looked into, instead of merely at, Beau's window, he would have seen Beau motionless and shirtless in his armchair, a pair of headphones over his ears by which he was connected to a massy old tube amplifier (Fisher) and a turntable. He was hearing an oceanic Mahler symphony, or rather was borne on its tides without exactly hearing it, letting himself be taken up again and again by its pseudo-endless
coitus prolongatus
into or out of his own movie, for which the Mahler was the music. The script was the
Poimandres
of Hermes, thrice-great, as retold by Dr. Mead long ago.

COME UP ON: a bright roiling chaos of light, infinite mild and good, pouring itself forth out of its own unplaceable center, like the clouds that lead to or compose movie heavens.

A ROLL OF DARK DRUMS and out from the same placeless center a shadow begins to form, a darkness visible, oily and thick, the smoke of movie infernos. The white withdraws from it. It grows.

SFX: Indescribable unintelligible cries, moans, shrieks, mad laughter, gasps of horror.

A BIG VOICE speaking, not loud but large, made out of oboes and trombones:

THE LIGHT IS I MIND POIMANDRES SHEPHERD-OF-MAN WHO WAS BEFORE THE DARK WATERS.

THEN out from the agitated white cloudbreast shoots a fulmination, whiter than the white. MEANING. With the whizbang of movie lightning, MEANING shoots into the heart of the dark seethe.

The BIG VOICE:

THE MEANING THAT COMES FORTH FROM THE LIGHT IS MY SON I AM HIS FATHER WE ARE NOT DIFFERENT.

MEANING's effect on Chaos is to order it: Great bands of colored light coalesce out of the fuliginous fires, leaving the thick black stuff behind; in a great surge of strings and a big stroke of cymbals the lights begin to wheel in a rainbow race.

ANDROGYNOUS NEEDING NO PARTNER I GAVE BIRTH TO A MAKER.

A great muscle-bound inhuman, Jove or Jehovah, with knitted brow of power, big hands for shaping. Bends over the race of lights with tools: compass, stylus, mallet.

MAKER AND MEANING WORKED TOGETHER SET THE CIRCLES OF THE ARCHONS.

The lights slow, bind themselves up, take spherical form; each chooses a single color (black, red, blue, white). Seven of them. Far below their gigantic courses the elements of the chaos settle. Cold, dark, wanting, heaving.

EARTH NATURE SHE HAD NO MEANING LEFT WITH HER SHE BROUGHT FORTH HER COUNTLESS YOUNG WITHOUT MEANING.

MONTAGE: Birds of the air, fish of the sea; volcanoes, storm-clouds, wind-lashed trees; blind mole digs, tiger's cubs roll in the dirt, caribou stampede; flamingoes arise in millions from a blue lake, blocking the sun. Deer walk on the mountain, eating fallen apples; lift their heads to smell the air. Centuries pass.

Quiet.

FADE TO BLACK.

The needle ticks in the groove between movements.

CUT TO:

Far away, infinitely far away, in the sphere of Mind outside materiality. A Being discovered in the bosom of God: Michelangelo's Adam, huge and strong, pink as a baby, idle.

The BIG VOICE is gentler:

THE FATHER OF ALL GAVE BIRTH TO
MAN
A BEING LIKE HIMSELF AND HE TOOK DELIGHT IN MAN AS HIS OWN CHILD.

Rising, testing his wings, taking his place in the Father's sphere (huge consonance of violins, bass-powered, satisfying). Looking down through the sounding nesting rings of the planets. The weary MAKER down there resting after his labors, dusting his hands together.

MAN ASKED FOR PERMISSION TO CREATE SOMETHING FOR HIMSELF AND HIS FATHER PERMITTED IT.

PAN DOWN WITH the MAN tumbling happily down through the spheres, accepting from the doting Archons the gifts each has to give, laughing though the gifts burden him absurdly, he has strength to spare. Breaking harmlessly through the orbits of Destiny, which do not apply to him. He reaches the startled Moon's sphere, accepts her gift of labile humidity.

NOW EARTH LOOK UP.

Earth looks up. Sees the beauty and form of MAN. Falls instantly, wholly, insatiably in love forever with him. She turns her swollen seas upward yearning toward the Moon's sphere. MAN sees in the mirror of the water his own divine beauty; sees the shadow of his perfect form on her lands; and falls in love himself with the form he sees, insatiably, wholly, and forever. He must dwell there with that beauty.

Down through the great clinging nets of matter he plunges, hot as hell, through fire first, through air to water and to earth; ithyphallic, arms outstretched uncaring, into the brown green blue bosom, lap, limbs of Earth. And when she has him she wraps herself around him, limbs over limbs, breast to breast. The spheres draw back in astonishment and hide their lamps. Orchestra laboring, ceaseless mounting chords, no climax large enough though, disappointment coming, modulation, withdrawal, rearousal, no end either.

PULL BACK modestly from the gigantic intercourse.

SO
MAN
WHO WAS ONE BOTH MORTAL AND IMMORTAL FORE-EXISTING THE HEAVENS YET SUBJECT TO THEM BECAME TWOFOLD.

HE WHO WAS ANDROGYNOUS LIKE HIS FATHER IS NEVER AGAIN WHOLE BUT IS NOW ONLY MALE OR FEMALE.

HE WHO WAS SLEEPLESS AS HIS FATHER IS SLEEPLESS COMES TO BE BOUND UP IN LOVE & SLEEP.

Now PULL BACK, PULL BACK over seas, through mountain valleys, down silver rivers, through night groves, back through the windows of a chamber, a chamber like this one where Beau watches and listens but not this one, windows on four sides full of stars; and a sleeper, or one anyway whose body is still, in his armchair; head thrown back, eyes closed, mouth open.

The BIG VOICE has become a
small voice
, nearly a whisper, just as large as before though; a Messenger, the last and only Messenger, secreted from the bosom of God before the beginning of the story, and arriving at last, now, just now.