Love and Sleep (58 page)
She left at first light, unwilling to have her car seen in front of his building by day. At the bottom of the stairs she closed the door behind her, not firmly for fear of waking sleepers elsewhere in the house; so it opened again in the dawnwind, and cool air tumbled up the stairs, into the bedroom where Pierce smelled in it the coming day.
She climbed into the Asp's embrace and powered up, feeling the thudding of the drivetrain through her seat as though for the first time; guilty, sated, at once full and empty. At the streetlight in the center of town she paused for a moment staring at its red. She brushed her mouth with the back of her hand, and then looked at it, as though her lip might have been flecked with blood; then she drove through against the light.
It was going to be a clear day, blue and green and already filling with things, with houses and tall yellow signs and the cars of early risers. She drove out across the bridge and turned up the Shadow River road and into the darkness of the firs.
The hunter ActAEon steps into the forest, unafraid however dark it appears; he sends his sharp-set dogs before him, whippets and greyhounds, far-ranging, keen-nosed, as unafraid as their master of the forest's depths, the mountain's height. Soon they recognize their prey nearby, the Stag; they give voice, and make pursuit. A thousand stags before have fallen to them and to the arrows of their Master; what though this one lead them deeper and farther than any has before, they will bring him down.
But see where his pursuit has led ActAEon: in the heart of the heart of the forest darkness, a brilliant lucent pool reflects the blue and gold of Apollo and the sky; and in the pool—surrounded by her chaste nymphs, white as cloud, clear as day, naked as a needle, alabaster and purple—Diana bathes.
Look away, Mortal! No human eye can look upon that terrible chastity. The hounds recoil in fear and confusion, and ActAEon falls to his knees: but he will not look away. The Stag he pursued has escaped, it is of no consequence, there is only one thing he has ever pursued in his incessant hunting, and it is this sight: he did not know it and he knows it now. She who is both Goddess of the hunt and its object. He will not look away.
O pitiless chaste eyes regarding him, she whom no god has touched. ActAEon senses the soul within him, satisfied and ravenous at once, leap from his own eyes to dissolve in hers, even as her gaze pierces him. He has already lost his own form, unwanted anyway, and grown another. He feels the heavy horns like a crown spring from his fortunate brow. And the hounds that once coursed for him turn on him, knowing their duty, and set upon him to rend him. For ActAEon has become what he pursued.
Cast an emblem, or a seal; carve a statue, paint a picture, and mount it in the central chamber, the inmost circle of the maze of Memory: ActAEon, the Philosopher, sending his sharp-set Thoughts in pursuit of swift-flying Truth, comes at last on Beauty bare: the untouched unknown flame of intelligential fire burning at the center of the dark world of material shadows. And on seeing it the Philosopher becomes what he pursued: dies to himself, and lives in Her.
Trembling slightly, for no reason he recognized, Giordano Bruno Nolano stood awaiting the return of Diana from her park.
The huntsmen came first, with the stag she has shot trundled on a leafy branch between them. Light applause and murmurs of approval came from the guests and the courtiers. The deer's tongue lolled from its fallen head, and its bright blood, bluer than Bruno's own, dripped thickly on the dewy grass. Next the handmaidens, all in white as they always were, he had never bothered to distinguish among them or give them names.
Last, she came out from the park on her foot-cloth horse, led by the Earl of Leicester, who carried her little crossbow too. Not naked, no, encased even for the hunt in all her manifold coverings, her redingote, forepart, cloak; petticoat, round gown, slashed sleeves; ruff, gloves, hose, and boots.
Within, though, within, past the white smallclothes, she was naked, and untouched. They have all thought it.
She dismounted. His sponsors brought the Nolan forward—they were Sir Walter Raleigh and Edward Dyer, poets, devotees of Diana. She offered him her hand in its figured glove (black kid, worked with small flowers: strawberry, pansy, violet, almost too small to see, only when her hand was kissed did the eye come close enough to see the gilded fly, pismire, polished beetle in amid the thicket, where the jewels of her rings were cast away). He did not touch his lips to her person. Once he had kissed the Pope's ring so, warned not to touch it, osculation would wear it away in a thousand years.
—The gentleman wishes to offer Your Majesty a work of his own composition.
—The gentleman pays to your Majesty and her realm and people many sincere and well-wrought compliments in it.
Her smile was instant and genuine, enlisting him at once and forever in a gay army, hers. He permitted it. There was enough of himself; he could give her much, as much as she would take.
—Well let us see, she said. She took the book he proffered, and lifted him up. What is your subject?
—My subject is Love, he said in Italian. She answered him in the same language:
—Do you praise him?
—I must. There is no force on earth found greater than Love.
She laughed, as at an extravagance that pleased her, and her eye regarded him more critically. He would not look away abashed, his spirit rose to his eyes to meet hers looking in, though it was confusing to look at her in the midst of the thousand potent jewels that surrounded and protected her, cold milky pearls, hot rubies, liquid emeralds, gold, silver, adamant.
—
Eroici furores
, she said. Do you mean the frenzy of lovers? Men say they are slain by their love's eyes, that they die of love. Do you feign that? In our country we say: men may die, and worms may eat them, but not of love.
—Madam, he said. The love of which I have written is not the common love of men and women. Not even that more noble love of your courtiers and servants—of whom I name myself one—for your Majesty's sacred person.
—No?
—No. I have written, under the figures of ActAEon and Diana, Phyllis and Clorinda, he and she, eyes and stars and darts and hearts, of another love than these.
—Ah, said the Queen. Does it become our servant to tell us he has another love?
For a moment Bruno (caught in a sort of stoop, so as to keep his head lower than the Queen's) felt checked. The skirt of her gown, he observed (his eyes being pointed that way) was a sea: rocks, ships, great fish coming forth, seed-pearl foam on satin waves, drowned men, treasure, pearls cast up on golden sands.
—For your sake, Madam, he said, a servant might with a flaming heart pursue Truth. Knowledge. Love himself. To bring him finally to bend the knee before Your Majesty.
Cautiously she smiled. Her forepart was worked with a forest, fountains, stubs of dead trees, moss of deep velvet pile; a forest fire too, astonishing, and animals fleeing it, ermine, squirrel, fox and hart. Water earth air and fire.
Your master, the Ambassador, returns to France soon, she said to him. Will you go with him?
—Sadly. Unwillingly.
—In other of your books, we are told, you speak highly of our cousin of France. Henri. You promise him service, and wish more crowns for him. Is it so?
—His Majesty has favored me. I do what I can. What little.
—Yet you would serve us.
She smiled, and laid her gloved hand lightly on his wrist.
—Be our servant still when you return. Speak well of us to our cousin there. Tell him we desire his friendship against all intolerant and unjust powers whatever. Tell him that.
He could only bow. She granted him a last long entangling look, and glanced again at his book as she turned away.
—Love, she said. Love.
Love is the cause of life; no power on Earth is found stronger than love. Eros is the Great DAEmon, the little lord of this world; the strongest bond of the will is Venus's loose girdle.
Even in the Animal Kingdom Eros rules: no male will tolerate a rival, no female either; the lowliest beast will forgo food, drink, and every other pleasure, even risk life itself, for love, how often we see.
Love drives old and young; it drives hot youths into one another's arms against every prohibition of priests and elders, kings and kin, drives them into love-sickness, madness, even death. Love surprises grave senators and abbesses, tormenting their old flesh with young heats, making them dance and caper to his tune.
Gigantic love turns the Earth in her socket; love for the Sun's beauty constrains her to circle forever around that lamp like a deathless moth; self-love alone, and the desire to prolong pleasure forever, keeps Earth from plunging into the beloved body and being lost in it; and even so, with every century she grows a measure closer to her love.
Love in God is endless fecundity, the continual, generous, unstinting production of things; love in Man is the endless hunger for the products of Infinity, never satisfied.
Love is magic: able to fascinate and capture the unwary, able to make a man or a woman see what is not there and fail to see what everyone else sees, able to transform the stunted and beetle-browed swain to Hermes, the cowpoxed maid to Phyllis.
Magic is love: nothing but the power of love in the heart of the operator can move the souls of others; nothing but love can command the intelligences of the air. Magic and love will carry the hunter after truth beyond the chock-full caves and dens of Memory into the austere mountaintops, will allow him at last to look on Intelligential Beauty bare. Her kiss exiles his own meager soul, replacing it with her own image, material reflection of the single ultimate reality; he has ceased to be a man, he has become a God.
Without love even the simplest Art of Memory could not operate; without attraction and revulsion, what attaches the soul to images?
Poor Dicson: his little book on Memory had been fallen upon by the pedant doctors, just as he had feared it would be,
i Puritani
as he called them; one of them had issued a pamphlet showing how Dicson's Art of Memory was not only useless, it was impious, too. Just as Dicson had said: because it set up false gods within, Statues, Images. This man (he was a fellow of the other college, not the one Bruno had been evicted from) advocated instead the memory methods of Peter Ramus, arch-pedant of France, which used a schoolboy system of Specials and Generals set out on a written page, numbered and lettered.
And not only that: this ass of Cambridge had caught Dicson advising that, since the images used in memory must be of a kind to excite the feelings, the image of a beautiful woman would be very effective if established in a Memory House. Outrage and pious horror: there it was, the only sin more horrifying to those strange half-men than idolatry.
Dicson—a man of their country himself, Scotland, after all—was shocked and affronted by this charge of licentiousness, lewdness, hotness. But of course the man was right. Bruno had asked Dicson: Do your memory images make your heart beat, your breast warm, do they make your male part stand? They should; they must. If we dare not use Love ourselves, Love will use us, there is no escaping him; hate too, revulsion, disgust, they are only the obverse of his coin, let us use them too, let us capture and not be captured.
The English gentlemen of Bruno's acquaintance—Sidney, Dyer, Fulke Greville—had laughed at the Cambridge dominie and his strictures against the Art of Memory, they seemed to think such men comical, Bruno knew better; but still they were quite capable of talking with great seriousness and wrinkled brows of Ramus and his trivialities, they could be moved by what they called Reformed Religion and the new plain style. Bruno cast in his mind the emblem: nursemaid Thames, shelterer of many orphaned children, suckles unwittingly a wolf.
The memory controversy, Bruno said to them, was easily settled. Let the gentlemen sponsor a great Tourney of Memory or Remembering Contest, in which a champion of the Great Art handed down from AEgypt through the Greeks to Albertus, Aquinas, and the present would be set against a champion of the new anti-pictorial method of the Frenchman. The best man to bear away the palm. Bruno projected it to them vividly: the amphitheater, decked with myrtle and rosemary (for Apollo and Venus) and cloths of solarian blue and gold; high seats for the nobility, and one, the highest, for the Judge herself, Justice, AstrAEa. In the center the two lecterns, water or wine beside them; the Ramist to have reams of paper and sharpened goose-feather pens and a jug of ink if he likes. The Brunist needing nothing but heart and mind.
First problem set, the names of the inventors of all human arts and useful things. The Ramist slowly starts his cart's wheels with a General—Agriculture. A Special beneath that, Grain; a more special Special, Sowing of; and at length the name of the inventor of sowing, Triptolemus. Meanwhile the Brunist sheds the light of an inner sun out through the spheres of the planets, to the elements they inform, to the life of man on Earth, to the inventors of things rank on rank in their places, colored by the planets’ colors, each holding the sign of his Art: in the circle of Saturn alone were Chiron inventor of surgery, Zoroaster of magic, Pharphacon of necromancy, Circe of fascination; under Sol Apollo there was Mirchanes who first made figures of wax, Giges who first painted pictures, Amphion who invented the musical notes; Mercury had Theut who invented writing, patron of the scribbler at the next lectern; Prometheus, Hipparchus, Atlas, dozens more, the ladies and gentlemen stare and murmur in awe; and the Brunist allows himself here one pretty jest, the name of the inventor of Remembering by Seals and Shadows—Giordano.
The struggle goes on for hours. In the
examen
Latin histories are read, the Ramist scribbling Specials and Generals and watching his outline press relentlessly toward the right-hand margin while the Brunist only opens his great heart. Repeats the matter backward and forward while the Ramist hems and haws, searching for the gist. The Ramist does better in the
ad-libitum,
with all the propositions of Euclid, though the listeners grow restless; the Brunist summons to his aid the Century of Friends, and has them repeat in their galliards and gallops all the names of the ladies present, in the order of their entrance (impressed upon his memory by means of the Century as they entered and took their seats), and the crowd murmurs in delight.