THE APOSTLES
MEMORY OF A BRIEF JOURNEY
AN EXCERPT FROM THE MAGICIAN AWAKES
The object of travel is to get lost.
Lin Yutang
“…the universe is infinite; beyond the visible world there is an infinity of other worlds, each of which is inhabited…”
Catholic Encyclopedia, describing the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, the Church’s greatest heretic.
I confess, I do not believe in time.
Vladimir Nabokov
JUNE 5, 2011. My ongoing book, THE MAGICIAN AWAKES, is not only about multiple and simultaneous dimensions, it is itself taking place in such dimensions—paintings, poems, audio, text, lost text (computer crash some months back), dialogue, articles, and so on. It’s not a novel anymore, although that’s how it started out. It’s a hybrid. Right now, I don’t bother to keep track of it all. I just know I’m inventing it.
This is a non-form that works and satisfies me.
The word magic has been used in so many ridiculous ways. In fact, as I go along, I discover more and more ridiculousities.
As I’ve said and written many times by now, magic occurs as a side effect of wide open and proliferating imagination in action. The direct and straight-line approach is at best, a very minor pocket in an infinite coat.
Beginning, middle, and end is an addiction.
In an email, an old friend, a college professor, described his philosophy of life: “A golf ball is a golf ball and a steak is a steak.”
“So,” I said, “you know what you’re eating and you know what you’re hitting.”
He asked me what I’d been up to. It had been a long time since we’d been in touch. I sent him the following story, which I wrote in an airport, waiting out a surreal flight delay:
In Florence six years ago, I walked into a dim church and sat down. Next to me on the bench was a round gray stone. I picked it up and held it.
I dozed off. A voice came to me and explained matters that had long been puzzling:
Peter, John, Philip, Bartholomew, James, Andrew, et al, lived in Judea, followed Jesus, and were his apostles.
Philip’s father worked at the British embassy in Jerusalem. Bartholomew was a stock trader who’d flown from London to hear the Sermon on the Mount. James and Andrew were setting up a string of men’s shops along the West Bank.
The apostles’ names were part of the culture of miracles, because other people in that neck of the woods were Moishe, Sol, Marty, Jake, Al, Dov, Ish, and Zaide.
The Brit apostles could say shalom, but otherwise they knew no Hebrew. They learned to shrug, and made do with that.
Peter, Paul, and Mary formed a singing group in Tel Aviv.
When Jesus turned five loaves and two fish into food for 5000, Andrew asked if he could have a small jar of Marmite, and a Cadbury’s, but they were not available that day.
As illustrated in the painting of Piero Della Francesca, Jesus was actually flagellated in the courtyard of an upscale Roman villa.
I woke up.
I found the grim interior geometry of the Duomo again…a soul in here would decide he needed saving, even if that hadn’t been on his mind when he entered from the street. I thought about what a few De Koonings and Picassos would accomplish.
A short fat man in a gray suit walked up to me.
“Go to another universe?” he said.
I was still holding the stone.
“How much?” I said.
“Fifty Euros for the basic ticket. Insurance, mandatory. Ten dollars a day. But they have the best corned beef this side of the Carnegie.”
“You a priest?”
“A travel agent.”
He evaporated in the gloom.
A light snow began falling from the high dome.
It formed a shroud around my shoulders.
Give me your happiest hours,
We will make a template for the rest of your nights.
Who said that?
A man dragging his seared leg hobbled out of the shadows and smiled at me. What a face of pain and joy! It was the astronomer and poet, Giordano Bruno, who, in the winter of 1600, had died in flames in the garden of flowers, in Rome, after his seven-year trial. The apogee of heresy in Church history.
He whispered, “Infinite souls of infinite extension, overlapping, and yet not merged…”
He took my hand in his and sent a bolt of electricity through my brain.
I was suddenly hovering above the dome, in the late afternoon, and looking down at the plaza, I saw my wife walking among the stalls of merchandise. She glanced up at me, nodded, and smiled—enveloping the world map.
…Later that night, eating supper in a small restaurant facing an alley, we toasted Bruno, warrior of deep space. His telescope, his heraldic cosmos, his poems about immortality.
Trip the light fantastic, my friend, they built as far as they could go and hit the wall.
Gaspara Seigos was dying in his cabin in the Andes. His last book, Salvaje Silvestre, half-finished, lay on a sagging table next to the sink.
People from nearby settlements brought him light meals, and local healers arrived with their brews. A young doctor from Burma carried medicines in his bag.
Seigos told them, “Don’t bother.” To the doctor, he said, “I’m in touch with a nothing that is something, and if it can, it will heal me. The situation is cutting it close. We’ll see. I relax as far as I can, and then natural functioning takes over.”
Once, the doctor thought Seigos was dead. He could detect no pulse, no heartbeat. But then the writer’s eyes opened. He looked at the hazy light coming through the window by the door, nodded, and went to sleep.
A month later, he was up and walking around the cabin. He went outside and a dog ran up to him and smelled his hand.
At the little stream, he bent down and picked up a handful of pebbles and took them back to the cabin and threw them on the floor.
Every day he went out and found stones and brought them home. Eventually, he returned from his walks with large rocks.
A few months later, the cabin was piled high with boulders. Most of the space was gone. Seigos slept at night among the rocks. At that point, the villagers, the healers, and the doctor left him alone.
Seigos lived this way for almost a year. He passed into stone and stayed in that state for weeks. Then he returned, and walked out of his cabin and went into the mountain passes and disappeared.
In Lima, Salvaje Silvestre appeared on the shelves of bookstores. Some copies were missing pages. Not all copies were identical.
One night, along the Higuerta Roundabout, a parade of children walked silently. Above them, bicycles and urns and lamps and stoves catapulted and burned on the ground. At dawn, feral dogs gathered there and chewed the ashes.
That day, naked figures were seen walking on low clouds. A group of them clutched at the blue sky and tore it open at a seam. Behind the sky—the prow of a sailing ship. The sky continued to tear on its own, until the whole ship was visible. The crew took down the large and small sails and then stood silently on the deck as the ship passed across out of view.
The entire sky over the city fell away, exposing terraces of wild gardens and roving patrols of soldiers.
It rained heavily for the next month: extraviado. The terraces were still there, but extraviado. Snow fell, and in it people heard intricate music from the mouths of dead relatives. The soldier patrols fell back and staggered and crawled into a bruised cloud.
I brought the stone home with me from Florence. I placed it in a bowl of water for a few days. It gradually dissolved. The water turned blue.
…There was a scratching at our front door. I opened it, and a sleek brown dog trotted past me and went into the kitchen. I took the bowl off the counter and put it on the floor. The dog glanced at me and then drank the water. He ran out of the kitchen into the living room and through the back wall into the yard. He sat down, looked up at the sky, and barked. I looked at the sky.
When I looked back at the dog, only his head remained, floating above the grass. Then it faded out. My cell phone rang.
“This is the Pope’s appointment secretary, “ a voice said. “We’re defecting. Can you put us up for a few days? Ha-ha, just kidding. But we do have a question. Security cameras caught you in the Duomo with a man who looked very much like Giordono Bruno. Anything you can tell us about that?”
“Well,” I said, “did cameras also catch me hovering above the dome?”
Pause.
“I’m afraid we missed that one,” he said.
“Can’t help you locate him,” I said.
“He comes back now and then.”
“Good luck.”
“We try to maintain our seal on things,” he said. “But after fifteen hundred years or so, it develops cracks.”
“No big surprise there.”
JON RAPPOPORT