Endless Things (25 page)

Through the deepening snows Frederick and Elizabeth struggled toward home. Everyone says they were remarkably brave, clear eyed but calm, all happiness gone, everything lost, spoiled, and themselves to blame: especially Elizabeth.
Her mind
, said the English ambassador,
could not be brought under fortune.

Home slipped out of reach. The Spanish general Spinola, the Spider, left Flanders with his army and moved toward the Rhine and the Palatinate. Soon Mainz had fallen to him (in stories of war, cities fall at the advance of generals, but it's not so; metonymy and synecdoche don't do the fighting and dying, the soldiers and the townspeople do, one at a time, and not in a sentence but for hours and days). Celadon, now with the Protestant forces trying to regroup, wrote to Elizabeth:
Voilà, my poor Heidelberg is taken. They have used all sorts of cruelties, pillaged the whole town, burnt all the suburbs, which were the chief beauty of the place
. The invaders seized the vast
Bibliotheca palatina
, which was sent off to Rome; the great librarian Gruter saw all his own lifetime's collection of books and papers thrown into the street and yard where horses were stabled, to be irremediably fouled. It always happens, a calculated insult, endlessly repeated: Protestant soldiery stable their horses in the chapels of saints, Catholics in the courtyards of schools or libraries. What was in poor Gruter's papers?
A whole world vanished here,
says Dame Yates. What story was lost in that street? None? This one?

There exist a number of broadsides mocking the runaway Winter King, political cartoons as dense with symbols as alchemical texts, let him who does not understand be silent, or learn. In many of them the king is shown with one stocking falling down—he has lost his garter, or Garter, which means his English father-in-law's support. And in one he stands uneasily, fearfully, upon a Y; the Y stands on a Z; the Z, on a wooden ball. Saturn with glass and wings and scythe looks on, old Kronos or Chronos, and he declares:

The wooden ball's this world of mine

Whereon the Bohemians wedded the Palatine.

They thought they'd teach the states anew,

Reform the schools, church, law courts too,

Return us to that blessed state

Before the apple Adam ate,

Or even Saturn's days of old

Which all men call my Age of Gold.

For this, those Rosicrucians yearn

The mountains into gold to turn.

So Y leads nowhere but to Z, the last letter, the end, the fall.

In Bohemia and Moravia the Czech Brethren were harshly suppressed; their chapels and houses despoiled, their ministers and bishops hunted down, driven away, hanged if they resisted. Their last bishop was Jan Andreas Comenius, who was driven from his home and his congregation with only what he could carry—papers, of course, mostly. He wrote then in despair or hope:
When the wrath of the nations has passed, the rule of thy country will return to thee, O Czech people
. It was not a time he himself would live to see; he would never see Moravia again. His wife and two of her children died of hardships on the way to shelter with a sympathetic lord in Brandeis; there he wrote
The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart
.

In that story—it would become a classic of Czech literature, until it became unreadable again—a pilgrim wanders in the dark maze of a city, which is divided into many quarters and streets, a multiplex of arches squares palaces and churches whereon he sees all arts and sciences laid out as in a Memory City. His foolish or obtuse companions insist on the wonder and worth of all that they see, though the pilgrim can only question. And a trumpet on high gathers all the seekers together, to the central square, where a robed brother offers Rosicrucian secrets for sale, in boxes with names like
Portae sapientae, Gymnasium universitatis, Bonum Micro-macro-cosmicon, Pyramis triumphalis
. They mustn't be opened, the hawker says, they will work by auto-penetration of the box, but some buyers do open them, to see the wondrous thing inside, and of course the boxes are empty, all empty, every one. Finally, despairing, the pilgrim hears a voice call to him:
Return whence you came, into the house of your heart, and close the doors.

In Tübingen, Johann Valentin Andreae (Comenius's friend in a former age) opened his own old, old allegory,
The Chemical Wedding: by Christian Rosencreutz
, which he wanted no one any longer to read. But there was no way to call back every one of the little winged things and send them into the flames. Andreae (one of those authors who can't resist reading their own prose, their old prose, when they come upon it) read the title page and the last page and the scene he loved the best, the one where Christian is induced by the wicked or reckless page to waken Venus before her time. He read from there to the end, when the brothers board their ships, the sign of Cancer painted upon the crimson sails, to go out into the world and make it new.

Did he think that his book had helped to bring about the ruin all around? Was he sorry? He was also one of those authors who believe their works do bring about things, and indeed he was sorry, he was. And yet surely, surely they should have known, he thought, those who had read it; they should have seen Andreae's smile, seen through him and his book. Look: just below the title and the false date he'd put on it (1459!) there was the motto
Arcana publicata vilescunt, et gratiam prophanata amissunt. Ergo: ne Margaritas objice porcis, seu Asino substernere rosas
. Secrets told to all are spoiled, things made common have no power; therefore do not throw pearls before swine, nor proffer roses to an ass.

It's true: it said that, and it says that still.

After his very interesting journeys René Descartes returned to Paris. Just at that time placards were appearing everywhere in the city to announce the appearance there of the Brothers of the Rose-Cross.
We are making a visible and invisible stay in this city through the grace of the Most High. We show and teach, without books or marks, how to speak all languages and how to draw men away from error and death
. Or perhaps there weren't any placards, maybe people only heard rumors that there were placards, or had been placards, and what they said or warned
. From invisible we will become visible, and from visible, invisible
. Were they witches, were they promising powers only granted to the Devil's followers—invisibility, flight, purses never emptied, eloquence to draw all men to them so that they would forsake the church and the prophets? René's friend Marin Mersenne was among those who denounced all such appeals, empty or wicked or both. But it was well known that Descartes had in Germany gone looking for the Rosicrucian brothers and returning as he did just now, when those brothers were said to be circulating invisibly among the people—Father Mersenne feared for him. So René, rather than hide or return to his solitude, went around town, showed himself, visited his friends, took their hands. In this way he demonstrated that he was visible, and therefore not a Rosicrucian. QED. In any case no Rosicrucians appeared to change the course of things or work wonders; the panic passed. Descartes resumed his meditations: a method for deciding what we can know with absolute certainty; how to strip thought of words entirely; how pure mind can know mindless matter.

A long time afterward—Frederick was dead by then, of the plague, in some German town, following another army—René Descartes came to know Elizabeth of Bohemia (as she continued to be called) at her little court in exile in the Hague; he became attached to her daughter, yet another Elizabeth, and dedicated his
Principles of Philosophy
to her. When she went to take the waters at Spa, he wrote to her that to get any benefit from them she should free her mind from all sorts of sad thoughts and even from serious reflections because those who look long on the green of the forest, the colors of a flower, the flight of a bird, can beguile themselves into not thinking, or thinking of nothing. “Which is not wasting time but using it well."

Once, Descartes met Comenius, still dragging over Europe his store of manuscripts and plans for a Polity of Universal Wisdom. The two thinkers had little to say to each other. For Comenius, Descartes was himself the
laceratio scientiarum
, the wound suffered by Knowledge. For Descartes, Comenius was the past. His Universal Language (
Panglottia
), Universal Dawning
(Panaugia
), Universal Education (
Pampaedia
), Universal Reform (
Panorthosia
) were actually no bigger than the paper they were written on. What he praised the older man for was the little primer he had written, the
Orbis pictus sensualium
or picture book of the physical world. But everyone loved the
Orbis pictus
; it really
was
universal; for a century and more boys and girls would learn language from it, in classrooms from Russia to the Massachusetts Bay, following along with the book's pupil and his Master (who's sometimes pictured in the Frontispiece as a Pilgrim with hat and staff) as they went along the forking paths and climbed the mountains of the real world.

Come, boy! Learn to be wise.

What doth this mean, to be wise?

To understand rightly, to do rightly, and to speak out rightly, all that is necessary.

But before all things, thou oughtest to learn the plain sounds, of which man's speech consisteth;

which living creatures know how to make, and thy tongue knoweth how to imitate, and thy hand can picture out.

Afterward we will go into the world,

and we will view all things.

Come, let us learn the words. Afterward we will go into the world, and view all things. Pierce Moffett alone in Baroque Rome walked the maze of streets, and went in and out of buildings built in the centuries of its triumph. The Fountain of the Four Rivers represents the Ganges, the Danube, the Plata, and the Nile, who hides her eternally hidden head. The Obelisk is a later addition. The right foot of the statue of the Magdalene has been polished smooth by the kisses of the devout. Pushing aside the heavy leather curtain, we enter the Basilica. Scarcely distinguishable in the shadows is Giotto's mosaic of the
Navicella,
Peter's fishing boat. The Santa Scala is linked with the stairs to Pilate's palace that Jesus went up. The papal chapel at the top into which only the pope can enter. We can discern through the screen a (covered) painting of the Virgin made by no one, or by itself (archeipoieton).
Non est in toto sanctior orbe locus,
no more sacred spot in all the world. Pierce wrote in his red journal:

Old women and children and nuns on their knees and aged men with whiskery jowls and canes trying to get up these steps one at a time, steep and narrow too, and I was at last overcome, why do we have to do this to ourselves, why do we spend our treasure and our time and our tears like this, why does it have to be so? A place into which you can't go, but only peer, led to by stairs you crawl up on your knees. Ah no, no. When the Labyrinth of the World
comes disguised as
the Paradise of the Heart, that's when it becomes terrible.

His last morning in the city, Pierce woke late, the desk at the
pensione
had forgotten his wake-up call or he hadn't made himself clear; then it was a long way across the crowded and complex city to the Stazione Termini, and the cab, one of those that had always seemed so fleet, so crazily speedy in the circling streets, was held back as though in some thick substance or gum and unable to make lights, get across intersections, through indifferent and clotted crowds. When Pierce at last got out, thrusting into the hairy outstretched hand the remains of his tens of thousands of lire, he found that he wasn't exactly in front of the station, and began walking, circling the great building. Like half the city it was scaffolded, clothed in great blue billowing plastic sails; the way around it narrowed to muddy paths, duckboards, then debouched into open areas without fingerboards or any help.

Somehow he found his way within. Vast dark dome like the Pantheon's. Crowds eddying around the great central clock, gilded and eagle-topped. Gentle loudspeaker giving admonitions and advice, whose echoes canceled each other out. And the signs and notices in an unfamiliar font, something European and proprietary, he couldn't read it though he could guess at meanings. He guessed he could sit and wait. He turned, orientating. A man coming toward him stooped to pick up something from the floor, examined it, dropped it again, his lips moving slightly in private speech. It was his father.

"Axel."

"Pierce. Oh wonderful. Wonderful. This is what I hoped. Just what I hoped and prayed for."

"Axel."

"Wonderful wonderful and again wonderful,” Axel said. Pierce supposed he was drunk. “Here. Here in the Eternal City. They say Rome fell. Rome never fell. That thug Mussolini tried to pretend he had resurrected it. But its spirit. Its
spirit
."

"Axel,” Pierce could only say. Axel went on talking, seeming to be unaware of the scandalous impossibility of this, which was all that Pierce could think of. “How do you come to be here?"

"Well, it was the Chief,” Axel said. “He's right around. He went to the pissoir, I believe. Oh, Pierce. Rome."

"What do you mean? The Chief? Is he here?"

"He brought me. A birthday present. Because you see we're doing so well. You know it was always my dream. Oh son."

"What do you mean, doing well?"

"Pierce, the most remarkable thing. The boys found something. You know, fishing around in their buildings there. Well, you know they bring me these things, pretty things, some of them quite valuable. Oh but this. This."

"Axel, are you okay?"

"It's all all right now. From now on."

"Axel."

"You see, you didn't have to go at all,” Axel said. He was white and obviously ill, unshaven gray bristles on his cheeks. “Oh you did the right thing, setting out, and you've learned so much. Yes. But you don't have to go on farther. Because it's found. All along it was right there in Brooklyn."