For Martin Crookall, An Apologia (2015)


Martin -- 

Of course I can’t change your mind about things in the book you actively disliked, such as the transformation of Bruno or the character of Roo: these things will have to remain a matter of taste.  All I can do is describe how I intended it to work, and give some reasons why (therefore) it is what it is. 

First of all, though the book may give to you an air of falling-off or failure of imagination, it is in fact the ending which in my own view was being prepared for throughout the book or at least throughout the third volume.  (I had actually planned an even shorter final volume than now exists, and perhaps if I had been braver it would have been very short, eliminating (for instance) the majority of Pierce’s travels in a non-magical Europe.)  Even Harold Bloom, a great champion of the book, felt on a first reading that something had gone very wrong and all the promises of the earlier parts hadn’t been fulfilled.  I am guessing that you (and he) expected a picture of a world beyond the change of ages that would be like the vision at the end of Chapter 5 of “Benefacta”, a new world, remarkable and rich; and instead it’s simply our ordinary world with all its compromises and inadequacies.

 But if it’s true (as it is, within the ethos of the series) that our wishes and our knowledge and our rebellion against the powers make the world, then this is the world that the series wishes for: in the person of Pierce Moffett, anyway.  When at the end of Daemonomania, and just before Beau and Cliff rescue Sam and save the world from turning that way, Pierce climbs that purgatorial mountain and finds himself with his nine-year-old God, he asks for the world you’ll get in Endless Things: 

I would like, Pierce said, and the hard lump in his throat hurt just as though he spoke aloud; I would like the earth back.  I would like it to be first, not last.  I would like it to be final.  Just earth. 

            How so? she asked, so grown up, but perhaps understanding less than she seemed.  He wanted to say that if it was up to him, well he wanted it to be not up to him.  He wanted to come last, he and all his kind, latest children of a billion ancestors; he wanted not to have come from elsewhere but to know he arose here, where he would lie down at last.  That’s all.  He wanted to resign his commission or decline his duty.  This sick plague of Meaning he was caught in, or of no meaning, which seemed to be the same thing,a world of no meaning but many acts, where intentions had random effects unrelated to desire or need and yet produced by them, like the dishes a madman breaks trying to fight off his pursuers: he wanted it to stop.  That’s all.

            If that’s what you want, she said, that’s what you’ll have to make.

            I did what I thought I was supposed to do, he said, and I failed.  I would like to be freed.

            Up to you, she said.  Nunc dimittis. Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new. 

The discoveries and possibilities that opened up in the course of the first three volumes were premised on the changeability of the world (however defined) by human desire (and fear).  All the rapid changes and improvisations (like those involved in Pierce’s trip to visit Rose in Conurbana) are human willing either gone awry or purposefully deployed (as in Beau’s rescue of Sam.)  This is the characteristic of a period of transition.  When things settle down the world’s rules will harden.  But Pierce finally renounces this power to make a world – or rather he waishes for a world whose laws he has no power to change, where (unklike the Gnostic’s vision of human spirits superior to “natural” (i.e. Archon-imposed) laws) he is among Earth’s children.  

And this is the renunciation that Bruno makes, too, that ends the world of magic and changeability in the moment of transition in which he occurs.  He renounces the salvation or escape proffered by his interlocutor, perhaps because the world in which that transformation was possiblem and in which the world of Benefacta 5 could come to be, is simply too thin, too absurd – as his asinine transformation is absurd.  With his renunciation those possibilities come to an end, and his interlocutor (a kindly god) is reduced to a painting in a painted door for Pierce to find. 

The Gnostic sensibility and the Gnostic vision that pervade the first three books is one I have been drawn to for its tragic power – the idea that we are lost in a world not ours, that we discover our powers through suffering – but this vision (in Ægypt) is also to be left behind, as Fellowes Kraft sees in the end: that his writing can’t truly limn the world that is, it can only transform it into “gold – spophic, wonderful – that can’t be spent.”  So he is like Bruno and Pierce, or they are like him – Bruno being his creation and Pierce’s, of course. Prospero too is the same: giving up magic, which can’t be used in a world of actualities and duties:   Which is why Prospero has to drown his book and break his staff:  when the world has gone on, you must live in it without magic.  Or there will, at last and in the end, be no world for you to live in. 

The character who represents this change in the world not as a rejection but as a relief – as Pierce does – is Hurd Hope Welkin, a demon-battler who is awakened from a dream-world through love and the natural world.  (I think this chapter my be my favorite in the book.) 

Harold Bloom has asserted that I’m writing a Commedia like Dante’s but backward: it began with Paradiso (Little, Big) and went on to Purgatorio (Ægypt)  – which leaves me an Inferno still to write.  (I believe I’ve just finished it.)  You’ll notice how many purgatorial mountains are climbed, including the one in the tropics where Pierce at last confesses his weaknesses and sins, and the very last, where the music is just wind and human ingenuity, and from which the humans will depart.  It’s Milton’s Shepherd in “Lycidas” of course, but also Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost:

 

Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon;

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:

They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.

  I don’t at all want to impose my structures and plans on your reading of a book which is now more yours than mine, and I’m afraid that my schemata may be undiscoverable even by good readers.  But I do feel a need (and am grateful for an opportunity) to explain, now and then.  (It may be of course you understood all this, and were still dismayed and annoyed – no help for that.) 

JC


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