CHAPTER FOUR
It often happens that a man cannot
recall at the moment, but can search
for what he wants and find it….
For this reason some use places for the
purposes of recollecting. The reason
for this is that men pass rapidly from
one step to the next: for instance
from milk to white, from white to air,
from air to damp; after which one
recollects autumn, supposing that one
is trying to recollect that season.
—Aristotle, De anima
Ariel Hawksquill, greatest mage of this age of the world (and a match, she was not too modest to think, of many great ones of the so-called past, with whom she now and then discoursed), possessed no crystal ball; judicial astrology she knew to be a fraud, though she had uses for the old pictured heavens; she disdained spells and geomancies of all kinds, except at great need, and the sleeping dead and their secrets she let sleep. Her one Great Art, and it was all she needed, was the highest Art of all, and required no vulgar tools, no Book, no Wand, no Word. It could be practiced (as, on a certain rainy afternoon of the winter in which Auberon came to Old Law Farm, she was practicing it) before the fire, with feet up, and tea and toast at hand. It required nothing but the interior of her skull: that and a concentration and an acceptance of impossibility which saints would have found admirable and chess masters difficult.
The Art of Memory, as it is described by ancient writers, is a method by which the Natural Memory we are born with can be improved tremendously, beyond recognition in fact. The ancients agreed that vivid pictures in a strict order were the most easily remembered. Therefore, in order to construct an Artificial Memory of great power, the first step (Quintillian and other authorities agree on this, though they diverge at other points) is to choose a Place: a temple, for instance, or a city street of shops and doorways, or the interior of a house—any place that has parts which occur in a regular order. This Place is committed to memory carefully and well, so well that the rememberer can scurry around it backwards, forwards, any which way at will. The next step is to create vivid symbols or images for the things one wishes to remember—the more shocking and highly-colored the better, according to the experts: a ravished nun, say, for the idea of Sacrilege, or a cloaked figure with a bomb for Revolution. These symbols are then cast onto the various parts of the memory Place, its doors, niches, forecourts, windows, closets, and other spaces; and then the rememberer has simply to go around his memory Place, in any order he wishes, and take from each spot the Thing which symbolizes the Notion which he wishes to remember. The more one wishes to remember, of course, the larger the house of memory must be; it usually ceases to be an actual place, as actual places tend to be too plain and incommodious, and becomes an imaginary place, as large and varied as the rememberer can make it. Wings can be added at will (and with practice); architectural styles can vary with the subject-matter they are meant to contain. There were even refinements of the system whereby not Notions but actual words were to be remembered by complex symbols, and finally individual letters: so that a collection of sickle, millstone, and hacksaw instantly brings the word God to mind when gathered from the appropriate mental nook. The whole process was immensely complicated and tedious and was for the most part rendered obsolete by the invention of the filing-cabinet.
The Art of Memory
But the greatest practitioners of the old art discovered some odd things about their memory houses the longer they lived in them, and modern practitioners (or practitioner, really, there being only one of any skill, and she keeps it to herself) have improved on and even further complicated the system for reasons of their own.
It was discovered, for instance, that the symbolic figures with vivid expressions, once installed in their proper places, are subject to subtle change as they stand waiting to be called forth. That ravished nun who meant Sacrilege might, when one passes her again, have acquired a depraved air about the mouth and eyes one hadn’t thought he had bestowed on her, and something wanton about her deshabille that looks Somehow purposeful rather than forced: and Sacrilege changes to Hypocrisy, or at least borrows some of its aspects, and thus the memory she symbolizes alters perhaps in instructive ways. Also: as a memory house grows, it makes conjunctions and vistas that its builder can’t conceive of beforehand. When out of necessity he throws up a new wing, it must abut the original place in some way; so a door in the original house that previously opened on a weedy garden might suddenly blow open in a draught and show its astonished owner his grand new gallery full of just-installed memories from the backside, so to speak, at a left-hand turning, facing in the wrong direction—also instructive; and that new gallery might also turn out to be a shortcut to the ice-house where he had put a distant winter once and then forgot.
Yes, forgot: because another thing about a memory house is that its builder and occupier can lose things in it just as you can in any house—the ball of string which you were certain you kept either with the stamps and the tape in the desk-drawer or in the hall closet with the tackhammer and the picture-wire, but which isn’t in either place when you go to look for it. In the ordinary or Natural Memory such things can simply vanish; you don’t even remember you forgot them. The advantage of a memory house is that you know it’s in there somewhere.
So it was that Ariel Hawksquill was rooting around in one of the oldest attics of her memory mansions, looking for something she had forgotten but knew was there.
She had been re-reading an ars memorativa of Giordano Bruno’s called De umbris idearum, a huge treatise on symbols and seals and signs to be used in the highest forms of the art. Her first-edition copy had marginal notes in a neat Italic hand, often illuminating but more often puzzling. On a page here Bruno treats of the various orders of symbols one might use for various purposes, the commentator had noted: “As in ye cartes of ye returne of R.C. are iiiij Personnes, Places, Thynges &c., which emblemes or cartes are for remembering or foretelling, and discoverie of smalle worldes.” Now this “R.C.” could stand for “Roman Church”, or—just possibly—”Rosicrucian.” But it was the persons and places and things that had rung a distant bell: a bell here, she thought, where she had stored her distant childhood long ago.
She moved carefully but with increasing impatience through the miscellany there, her dog Spark, a trip to Rockaway, her first kiss; she became intrigued with the contents of chests and went off down useless corridors of reminiscence. In one place she had put a battered cowbell, why she at first had no idea. Then she rang it tentatively. It was the bell she had heard, and instantly she remembered her grandfather (whom the cowbell was—of course!—to represent, since he had been a farm laborer in England till he emigrated to this vast and cowless city). She saw him distinctly now, where she had put him, below the mantel with the Toby jugs on it which resembled him, in a battered armchair; he turned the cowbell in his hands as he had used to turn his pipe.
“Did you,” she questioned him, “tell me once about cards, with persons and places and things?”
“I might have.”
“In what connection?”
Silence. “Well, small worlds then.”
It grew clearer in that attic, lit with a past sun, and she sat at Grandpa’s feet in the old apartment. “It was the only thing I ever found had any value, like,” he said, “and I threw it away on a silly girl. Would’ve brought twenty bob in any dealer’s, I can tell you that, they were that old and fine. I found them in an old cottage that the squire wanted pulled down. And she was a girl who said she saw fairies and pixies and such, and her father was another like her. Violet her name was. And I said, ‘Tell my fortune then with these if you can.’ And she like riffled through them—there were pictures on them of persons and places and things—and she laughed and said I’d die a lonely old man on a fourth storey. And wouldn’t give me back the cards I’d found.”
There it was then. She put t
he cowbell back in its place in the order of her childhood (put it next to a well-thumbed deck of Old Maid cards from the same year, just to keep the connection clear) and shut up that room.
Small worlds, she thought, staring out the rain-crazed window of her parlor. To discover small worlds. In no other connection had she ever heard of these cards. The persons and places and things were reminiscent of the Art of Memory, in which a place is established, and a vivid person imagined, holding his emblematic things. And “the return of R. C.”: if that meant the “Brother R. C.” of the Rosicrucians, it would place the cards in the first flush of Rosicrucian enthusiasms; which—she pushed away the tray of tea and toast, and wiped her fingers—might make some sense of the small worlds, too. The arcane thought of those years knew of many.
The athenor of the alchemists, for instance, the Philosopher’s Egg within which the transformation from base to gold took place—was it not a microcosm, a small world? When the black-books said that the Work was to be begun in the sign of Aquarius and completed in Scorpio, they meant not those signs as they occurred in the heavens, but as they occurred in the universe of the world-shaped, world-containing Egg itself. The Work was not other than Genesis; the Red Man and the White Lady, when they appeared, microscopic in the Egg, were the soul of the Philosopher himself, as an object of the Philosopher’s thought, itself a product of his soul, and so on, regressus ad infinitum, and in both directions too. And the Art of Memory: had not the Art introjected into the finite circle of her, Hawksquill’s, skull the mighty circles of the heavens? And did not that cosmic engine within then order her memory, thus her perception, of things sublunar, celestial, and infinite? The immense laughter of Bruno when he understood that Copernicus had inverted the universe—what was it but joy in the confirmation of his knowledge that Mind, in the center of all, contains within it all that it is the center of? If the Earth, the old center, now was seen truly to revolve somewhere halfway between the center and the outside; and the Sun, which before had revolved on a path halfway to the outside, were now the center, then a half-turn like that in a Möbius strip was thrown into the belt of the stars: and what then became of the old circumference? It was, strictly, unimaginable: the Universe exploded into infinitude, a circle of which Mind, the center, was everywhere and the circumference nowhere. The trick-mirror of finitude was smashed, Bruno laughed, the starry realms were a jewelled bracelet in the hand.
Well, all that was old. Every schoolboy (in the schools that had schooled Hawksquill) knew small worlds were great. If these cards were in her hands, she had no doubt she could quickly learn just what small worlds they were intended to discover: had little doubt that she herself had traveled in them. But were these cards the cards her grandfather had found and lost? And were they as well the cards Russell Eigenblick claimed to be in? A coincidence of that magnitude didn’t seem inherently unlikely to Hawksquill; there was no chance in her universe. But she had no idea how further to search for them, and learn. In fact that alley seemed just at the moment so blind that she decided to walk no further up it. Eigenblick was no Roman Catholic, and the Rosicrucians, as everybody knows, were invisible—and whatever else Russell Eigenblick was, he was very visible. “The hell with it,” she was saying under her breath when the doorbell rang.
She consulted her watch. The Maid of Stone still slept, though the day was already as dark as night. She went to the hall, took a heavy stick from the umbrella-stand, and opened the door.
Overcoated and broad-hatted, windblown and rain-swept, the black figure on her doorstep momentarily frightened her.
“Wingéd Messenger Service,” he said. “Hello, lady.”
“Hello, Fred,” Hawksquill said. “You gave me a start.” For the first time she had understood the pejorative “spook.” “Come in, come in.”
He would come no further than the vestibule, because he dripped; he stood dripping while Hawksquill fetched him a wine-glass of whiskey.
“Dark days,” he said, taking it.
“St. Lucy’s,” Hawksquill said. “Darkest of all.”
He chuckled, knowing very well she knew he meant more than the weather. He drained his glass at a gulp, and drew from his plastic-sheathed carrier a thick envelope for her. It bore no sender’s address. She signed Fred Savage’s book.
“Bad day to be working,” she said.
“Neither rain nor sleet nor snow,” said Fred, “and the owl for all his feathers was a-cold.”
“You won’t stay a moment?” she said. “The fire’s lit.”
“If I stayed a moment,” Fred Savage said, leaning to one side, “I’d stay an hour,” leaning to the other side, rain running from his hat; “and thad be that.” He straightened, and bowed out.
No man more faithful, when he was working, which wasn’t often. Hawksquill shut the door on him (thinking of him as a dark shuttle or bobbin stitching up the rainy City) and returned to her parlor.
The fat envelope contained a deck of new bills in large denominations, and a brief note on the stationery of the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club: “Payment per agreement in the matter of R. E. Have you come to any conclusions?” It was unsigned.
She dropped this note on the open folio of Bruno she had been studying, and was going back to the fire, counting her huge and as yet unearned fee, when a lurking connection was made within her consciousness. She went to the table, turned on a strong light, and looked closely at the marginal note which had originally stoked this long train of thought, a train which had just been shunted by the note from the Club.
The Italic hand is notable for its legibility. Yet now and then the swash capitals, if written quickly, can confuse. And yes: looked at closely there was no doubt that what she had read as “the return of R. C.” should be read “the return of R. E.”.
Where on earth, if on earth at all, were those cards?
A Geography
As she grew older, Nora Cloud seemed to those around her to take on greater mass and solidity. To herself also—though she gained no physical weight—she seemed to grow great. As her age reached toward three digits and she moved slowly through Edgewood on two canes to support her massy years, she bent—so it seemed—less from weakness than to accommodate herself in the narrow corridors of the house.
She came with four-footed deliberateness down from her room toward the drum-table in the many-sided music-room, where beneath a brass and green glass lamp the cards in their bag in their box waited for her—and where Sophie, these several years her student, waited too.
Cloud let herself down into her chair, her sticks rattling and the bones of her knees popping. She lit a brown cigarette and placed it in a saucer beside her, where its smoke rose ribbony and curling like thought. “What’s our question?” she asked.
“Like yesterday,” Sophie said. “Just to continue.” “No question,” Cloud said. “All right.” They were silent awhile together. A moment of silent prayer, Cloud had been delighted and surprised to hear Smoky describe this as; a moment for considering the question, or no question, as today.
Sophie with her long soft hand over her eyes thought of no question. She thought of the cards, dark in their bag in their box. She didn’t think of them as units, as individual pieces of paper, could no longer think of them that way even if she chose to. She didn’t think of them either as notions, as persons, places, things. She thought of them as one thing, like a story or an interior, something made of space and time, lengthy and vast but compact; jointed, dimensional, ever-unfolding.
“Well,” Cloud said with gentle finality. Her brown-spotted hand hovered over the box. “Shall I lay out a Rose?”
“May I?” Sophie asked. Cloud withdrew her hand before it touched the box, which might spoil Sophie’s control. Attempting Cloud’s wasteless gestures, her calm attention, Sophie laid out a Rose.
Six of cups and four of wands, the Knot, the Sportsman, ace of cups, the Cousin, four of coins and queen of coins. The Rose grew out across the drum-table with an iron yet an organic force. I
f there was no question, as today, the question always was: what is this Rose the answer to? Sophie laid down the central card.
“The Fool again,” Cloud said.
“Contention with the Cousin,” Sophie said.
“Yes,” Cloud said. “But whose cousin? His own, or ours?”
The Fool card in the center of the Rose showed a full-bearded man in armor crossing a brook. Like the White Knight he was in the act of pitching head-first and straight-legged from his brawny horse. His expression was mild, and he looked not into the shallow stream he fell toward, but outward at the viewer, as though what he was doing were intentional, a trick, or possibly an example of something: gravity? In one hand he held a scallop-shell; in the other, some links of sausage.
Before interpretation of any fall could be considered, Cloud had taught Sophie, they must decide how the cards themselves must at this moment be construed. “You can think of them as a story, and then you must find the beginning, middle, and end; or a sentence, and you must parse it; or a piece of music, and you must find the tonic and signature; or anything at all that has parts and makes sense.”
“It may be,” she said, looking down now at this Rose with a Fool in the middle, “that what we have here isn’t a story or an interior, but a Geography.”
Sophie asked her what she meant by that, and Cloud said she wasn’t at all sure. Her cheek was in her hand. Not a map, or a view, but a Geography. Sophie’s cheek was in her hand too, and for a long time she gazed down at the Rose she had made and only wondered; she thought, a Geography, and wondered if it might be that here, that this, that—but then she closed her eyes and paused a moment, no, there was no question today, please, and not that question of any one.