Empire Dreams (27 page)

Yet for all his embracing of the two principles, the natural ease with which the people lived them eluded him. Unable to reach down to the root of the Tree of Life, he turned instead to the sap, the vital juice which coursed vigorously through it. Drink. Drink. The City of Vibrant Souls floated upon a quagmire of alcohol: the drunkard was a national hero, the public alehouse a national institution, and the national beverage (a black, velvety glass, seductive and subtle, brewed close to the ancient River Gate of St. James, in, of course, the largest brewery in the world) a national asset of stellar proportions. It had long been mooted by pundits and wags that it was impossible to cross the city without passing tavern or alehouse. The traveler, in his Dantesque descent into the amber underworld of the empty glass, learned the truth of this sad observation. Glass after glass poured down his throat in a kind of latter-day water-torture while around him the five A.M. voices raised loud in song and scandal. Wives bemoaned husbands, husbands bewailed wives, misunderstood adolescents begrudged everyone, on and on and on and on and on until his hurdy-gurdy head spun like the merry-go-round in the Phoenix Gardens and the friendly constables, incongruous angels of merciful deliverance, came banging nightsticks on the roof beams and calling, “Home, home, everybody home, morning comes early and there’s time a-plenty then: everyone sup up and get out, ladies and gentlemen, come now, have you no homes to go to?”

One winter morning a-wander amidst the animate sculpture of the eccentrics of Pearce Park, he discovered he could not remember how he came to be there. This was not the blessed amnesia of inebriation, with subsequent hangover, mortification, and final expiation; whole pieces of his self felt as if they were slip-sliding away like crumbling cliffs; crashing, cascading, dissolving into the salt sea of subjectivity. He was losing himself. He could not remember who he was. The city had driven him mad, and he cowered beneath the suddenly terrifying sky, a crazy man among crazy conductors of invisible orchestras, crazy women with cubes painted on their faces, crazy men, bare-chested in the frosty morning, eager to converse upon whatever highbrow issue might take their fancy. And he was no different. All that he had been had flowed away; he had melted and re-formed: his speech, his gestures, his facial expressions, deportment, mannerisms, all had melted into a creature of the City of Vibrant Souls. He had attained his desire, he had become a limb of the city, and in so doing had lost himself. For the deadly truth was that through centuries of playing the world’s clowns, the world’s characters, the world’s individuals, the people of the City of Vibrant Souls had been cracked open by this relentless striving to be something they were not, and their personalities had all run out and drained away into the sewers. Personalityless, the people therefore took on those stereotyped personas which the visitors (not tourists,
never
tourists) expected of them: the drunkard, the brawler, the lover, the rakehell, the eccentric, the street-poet, the whore, the hurdy-gurdy man. Each day, each soul rose a featureless blank to be stamped with the mold of others’ expectations, stamped and re-stamped and re-stamped and re-stamped and re-stamped, five, ten, twenty brief lives, until at last sleep relieved them of the burden of being. And now he would be like this: each day live and die a dozen times, each night be washed clean of the remembrance of what he had been. And he saw it all as if touched with the glowing wand of a Lorarch. He gave then a great cry, a despairing cry, that made even the eccentrics forget the self-absorbtion of their roles. Madman, lover, streetbrawler, drunkard, itinerant, fortuneteller, he would run and run and run and still the ground would slip away from beneath him as the forgetting took away all he had ever been and ever known. One step forward, one step back. Straightaway he departed the City of Vibrant Souls, never speaking a word, never catching an eye, for fear that the slightest spark of communication might draw another phantom life into being, light a blank face with animation. He left, and never returned there, for there is a spiritual death more terrible than that when the illusion is too much more than the truth, it is the death when the illusion is too much less than the truth.

* * * *

Then into the firelight spoke the fourth traveler, a mousy man coiled like a stock whip, bright with tension and quiet anger. And this was the tale he told.

* * * *

THE CITY OF DIVINE LOVE

THE CITY WHEREOF
he spoke he gave the name Great Theosophilus, which, being translated from his native tongue, meant “The City of Divine Love.” It is a city, he explained, of wide and luminous boulevards, of columns and architraves, of soaring spires and exalted domes, of cavernous grottoes and arcades of noble statuary. But beyond all its architectural graces, Great Theosophilus is a city of bells. Endless bells. There is never an hour of the day when the bells are still and silent in their campaniles and pele towers, not even in the wee wee hours of the morning when Death is accustomed to come stealing through the broad avenues of the City of Divine Love; even then the curfew bell tolls the demis and quarters, and the halberdiers of the Civic Guard set their timepieces and pray, huddled in their cloaks against the night chill, that slinking Death may slip them by this night. Matins, lauds, primes, sexts: the bells ring out across the steeples and cupolas of the city, and rising with their notes, like flocks of singing birds, the prayers of the populace aspire heavenward.

The orations of the guilded craftsmen in their Guild Chapels, the rosaries of the washerwomen bowing and bobbing among piles of white laundry on the Florinthian river-steps, the catechisms of the children at their desks beneath the rods of the Teaching Brothers, the lections from the Books of Hours of the wayside faithful felled to their knees by the tolling of the iron Angelus bell: all these spell one shining word—Constancy.

Constancy, this is the watchword of the City of Divine Love; constancy equated by eclogues and theosophists with Continuity. The City of Divine Love has been designed in its every facet to be a continuous hymn of praise, a never-ceasing ever-ascending paean from basilica and chaptery, conventicle and cathedral, minster and sacraria to God the Panarchic. And God the Panarchic in turn shines His Divine Favor (after His Unique Fashion) upon the city of Great Theosophilus for its great faithfulness. For while the Divine Person is, by definition, Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnipresent, He has nevertheless deigned to be slightly more Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnipresent in certain places or objects than others, namely, the mortified flesh of His Dear Saints. So that the Divine Light might not be lost with the expiration of these Dear Saints’ Immortal Spirits, the bodies of this Blessed Number are reduced to their component members, hallowed, canonized, and laid to rest in elaborately constructed shrines, grottoes, and holy wells, provided and maintained by the munificence of certain wealthy individuals and trade guilds.

Thus enshrined, the relics are venerated and offered solemn concelebrations of Mass Lofty and Mass Lesser: the Novena of St. Anthonius’s Foot (Dexter); the Perogation of the Head of the Blessed Mandy, the Solemn Mass of Peter’s Part … The corpse of the saint may rest in dismembered disarray in a dozen churches and subchapels; here a heart, there a hand, here a head, there a torso, and together Priesthood Elect and Great Laity bow down to worship in frenzies of religious ecstasies. Not even the corruptible flesh of the Christic Salvator Himself has been spared this process of dissemination and devotion: Christic eyeballs, Christic fingernails. Christic spleens, even Christic prepuces (of which there are three, each claiming ultimate authenticity), are numbered among the most sacred of relics. Certain mystagogues have calculated that there are sufficient pieces of the Christic Salvator to assemble one and a third human beings. And there are sufficient fragments of the True Crucifix (upon which the Christic Salvator bore the transgressions of mankind) to fill a small basilica.

So that the pattern of stale custom and thus vain observance may never be established, the parishes, deaneries, and sees regularly exchange their objects of veneration. Ensconced within caskets of consummate craftsmanship, heavy with jewels, precious metals, and costly brocades, these holy relics are borne shoulder-high in solemn procession through the avenues and boulevards. Borne aloft by brothers of the trade guilds which have taken corporate and various vows of obedience to the particular relic—the Shoemakers the Foot of St. Basil (Sinister), the Optometrists St. Charleroi’s Eyeball (Dexter), the Amalgamated Guilds of Civil Servants and Revenue Employees the Hand of St. Matthias Tax Collector (open, palm up)—the reliquaries are taken to their new, temporary resting place in some St. Xevious Innocens or Blessed Johann the Sacrist or Basilica of the Sacred Molar (Federated Guild of Orthodontists and Dental Employees ‘86).

How the thronging populace cheer and sing and fill the air with shouts of sacred delight as the golden reliquaries are processed past them! How they press forward against the protecting ranks of Civic Guards to touch finger to casket, jewel, tassel, or golden casket-cloth and so carry away some blessing, some healing, some prayer hastened into the presence of God the Panarchic.

Yet, as God the Panarchic has, after His Own Unique Fashion, chosen to shine His Divine Light upon Great Theosophilus, so He has, according to His Will (which no man may discern, for to do so would be to become God Himself), also chosen to hide part of Himself from the rude gaze of humanity. This is the manner of God’s self-concealment.

Over the City of Divine Love is suspended a cloud of permanent gray which hides the light of the sun so that for all the grace-bright lauds of the populace, the gilded domes and mosaicked architraves are dull and lifeless, the arcades of bronze saints dim with a dismal, green patina, and through the great rose windows and ancient lights no ray of sun ever shines to illumine the faithful at prayer within. The theologians and theosophists have a name for this cloud: the Cloud of Mystery. In the manner of theologians and theosophists, they consider it a metaphor for the Cloud of Transgression which separates the spirit of man from the Divine Primacy. The endless cycles of bells, prayers, and concelebrations are, in that same metaphor, the necessary tools whereby spiritual purity may be attained. Then the Cloud of Mystery will be penetrated, and as the true sun shines in the streets and upon the multitudinous temples of the Divine Presence, so will each heart be warmed by the undiluted Divine Affection when God the Panarchic is revealed face to face at last with man.

However, a differing college of thought maintains a differing theology: The Cloud of Mystery does indeed conceal God from man (this much is agreed upon), but the cloud is of man’s making rather than Divine quarantine, being composed of nothing more (and nothing less) then the accumulation of year upon year, century upon century, of prayer, devotion, and bells. With every prayer, every grace, every vesper sent heavenward, the cloud grows denser and more impenetrable. The cloud will only be pierced, these scholars argue, when human voices cease and in the universal silence God’s own voice may be heard, speaking in still, small syllables.

There is yet a third school of opinion. It too has a name for this cloud, a name not spoken aloud on the boulevards and avenues of Great Theosophilus. This name they have derived from close and careful study of the people of the city, their religious practices, their everyday pieties, their venerations of shrines and relics, and this, coupled with the scholars’ own knowledge of the nature of the Divine Self (as revealed uniquely in the Chapbooks of the Panarch), gives them their third name for the cloud. The name they have given it is Superstition.

* * * *

After a respectful silence the third traveler spoke. He was older than the others and wore his years of experience about his shoulders like a warm coat. He lifted his hands to the dancing flames and said, “In my years I have traveled further than any of you could imagine and I have seen so many cities that if I were to describe them to you we would be sitting here until the year’s turning. I could tell you of the City of Romantic Exiles, perhaps, its once-glorious avenues weed-choked and deserted, starved by mismanagement and famine so that today only a handful of civil servants and administrators remain on the principle that while the government persists the city will not be dead. Or perhaps the City of Persistent History, where every instant of the present is merely the past happening over and over and over again. But I will not, because those cities, though real, do not exist, no more than the cities you described; though real, they do not exist either.”

“But I heard the words!” said the red-haired bear of a man who had traveled from out of the north, the Lands of Ever-Winter and the Great Northern Ice Sea.

“And I smelled the black roses of corruption,” said he who had traveled out of the furthest place of the sunrise, from which the dead, it is said, will rise in place of the sun on the dawning day of Resurrection.

“I saw the wax faces of the people of the City of Vibrant Souls,” said the pale man of illusions who had flown so many time zones eastward that he had been severely jet-lagged for many days.

“And I touched the caskets of the holy saints,” said he who had passed out from beneath the Cloud of Mystery, out from the southernmost ends of the world.

“Of course you did, of course you did!” exclaimed the old traveler. “But what you saw, heard, smelled, touched, were only parts of the whole. Do you not see, gentlemen, that in describing these cities, each so different and alien, you are describing the same city? I tell you, there is only one city, there has only ever been one city, and that is the City of Man. This city, like all human institutions, is at its heart paradoxical, so that though there is only one City of Man, every city is the City of Man. In that city every pursuit devised by human wit may be found and a million million unique lives studied by he who has eyes to see. So immeasurably rich and varied is the stream of life that no one man can comprehend it all, therefore each traveler who visits there takes only what he can hold and sees only what he wants to see. Likewise you, gentlemen: out of the staggering variety and color of the City of Man you saw what you wanted to see and so thought you had seen the city entire. But the City of Man is so very much more than our perceptions of it that a man may return time and again and never visit the same city twice. Gentlemen, you have seen the part and called it the whole. Go back, again, I would say, and again, and again, until you have seen the whole. Then teach others what you have seen. But lest you should become too arrogant in your knowledge, consider this: if one city, all cities, hold such a multiplicity of other cities within them that a man may spend an entire lifetime in studying, how many more lifetimes must he spend before he comprehends one fingernail’s breadth of the infinite universe?”