Masks of the Illuminati

Crowley crossed the cinnamonred room and handed the champagne to Einstein. Now that our merry little carnival draws to its close, he said blandly, I bring a gift of Dionysus and suggest that we celebrate. You must all be dreadfully thirsty by now.

Babcock arose, trembling slightly. Russet sunset shadows turned his face gold and dark.

You absolute swine, he said coldly to Crowley. How dare you treat this whole cruel affair as a practical joke?

Crowley was opening the bottle. The universe itself, he replied offhandedly, is an enormous practical joke by the general at the expense of the particular.

Babcock controlled himself with effort. You tormented and deceived me for months, he said. You drove me to extremes of terror that threatened my sanity. You rotten bastard.

You came to us seeking Illumination, Crowley answered. You are still receiving it. Did you imagine that Truth was a dog that will come when you whistle? Did not I.N.R.I, warn you what the alchemical transformation costs? Were you not aware from the beginning that you would be required to face everything you fear?

Deny it? he said. Lieber Al, I insist upon it. For I am like a refiner’s fire.

Ah, Babcock, Crowley said distributing the champagne again, you still have spirit. I like that. You may be remembered someday as the disciple Crowley loved. After all, Whom the Lord loveth, He chastizeth.

I imagine, Einstein said staring fixedly at his pipe ash glittering, that your original plan for Sir John’s rite of passage had some dramatic climax. I hope we haven’t ruined it by explaining the tricks to him prematurely.

Have some more wine, Babcock, Crowley said pouring. As a matter of fact, the climax of the drama will be much as I planned except of course that there will be three candidates instead of one.

That was queer, Fox Joyce said. For a moment it was as if I understood Plato. As if the moving image in time stopped and I saw the worldline in four dimensions, eternally there. Damned odd. As if the great muddy river of consciousness froze.

I hear no buzzing, Joyce stated calmly. But I say, Babcock, are you well? You appear to be turning green.

Babcock turned vaginal purple. This is strange, he said carefully. I actually never felt better in my life.

The bookshelf in the corner began to shrink. Joyce stared at it bemusedly as the faint buzzing purrceptibly increased.

The strangest thing of all, Crowley crowed, is that no matter how many soldiers you march out in phalanx, the number of hunchbacks is always one greater.

Yes yes said Einstein an angry ruby-red Lion pacing. For every insight the universe gives me a new riddle. Usually by next Tuesday after lunch. But that’s the whole fun of the game.

Crowley watched detached as the oak-brown bookcase shrank. For you and me and a few others, yes, he said. But most people want the soldiers to exactly equal the hunchbacks. An answer for every question.

The bookcase turned into the Zürich express roaring: Overnight overnight overnight.

The bookcase became an altar. Crowley suddenly robed in scarlet raised the flaming Wand and the moving image stopped again quite clearly this time.

Many civic monsters danced around Joyce. You are telling me the truth drifting down a shrinking street, they chanted. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Largest fraternal order in Europe. Cuckoo!

Hear me Crowley said IEOU PUR IOU PUR IOATH IAEO IOOU ABRASAX SABRIAM OO OO ADONAI EDE EDU ANGELOS TON THEON LAI GAIA AEPE DIATHARNA THORON! Indwelling sun of myself Thou fire Thou sixfold star initiator compassed about with force and fire Indwelling soul of myself Sunlionserpent Hail all Hail thou great wild beast Thou IAO Lust of my soul Lust of mine angel Ho for the grail Ho for the cup of Babalon Ho for mine angel pouring himself forth within my soul Thou goat exalted upon earth in lust Thou snake extended upon earth in life Spirit most holy Seed most wise Innocent babe Inviolate maid Begetter of being Soul of all souls Come forth most hidden light

Would you repeat that last bit Crowley? Joyce asked. I’m not sure I got it all what’s happening in this room, anyway

Sir John pushed open the door of M.M.M. and passed through the Parthenon, Saint Peter’s, the Eiffel Tower, Oriental pagodas, grim Gothic-faced banks, the order of chondrichthyes, the order of cyclostomata, sea lampreys, the order of Knights Templar, the order of Memphis and Mizraim, academies, laboratories, nunneries, bakeries, cathedrals, the mighty headwaters of the Amazon, the Centipede Gang. The larger can be inside the smaller: it’s a fried egg and it loves me. Drooling farmboys waving signs saying BESTIALITY LIBERATION charge into a line of Police Constables down a windy crimson indigo Easteregg street.

The Secret Chiefs began to file solemnly silently spectrally into the room. Elias Ashmole, Secret Master, Perfect Master, Elect of Fifteen, Knight of the Triangle; Thomas Vaughan, Sovereign Grand Inspector of the 33rd Degree of and the Ancient and Accepted Polish Rite; Sir Edward Kelly, Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret; Dr. Johannes Dee, Prince of Mercy, Knight of Pnath, Secret Perfect Master; Roderic Borgia, Pope Alessandro VI, Grand Knight of Lot and the Phoenix; Michael Maier, Sage of Elia, Sage of Delphi, Master of the Triple Tau; Paracelsus, Grand Sublime Knight of St. Andrew; Adam Weishaupt, Knight of Palestine, Grand Elected Knight Kadosch Hurhausdirektorpresident; Christian Rosenkreuz, Ancient Master of the Royal Arch; Wolfgang von Goethe, True Master Adept of the Symbolic Lodges; Jacobus Burgundus Molensis the Martyr, Knight of Jerusalem, Knight of Palestine, Knight of Wands, Sublime Scottish Architect of Heredom, Grand Knight of Sodom; Rex Frederic of Hohenstaufen, Sublime Knight of Knepth; Ludovicus Rex Bavariae, Supreme Commander of the Stars, Discreet of Chaos, Sublime Philosopher Noachite; King Kong, Primate of Skull Island; Carl Kellner, Sovereign Prince Rose Croix of Kilwinning and Heredom; Carolus Magnus, Doctor of the Izeds; Valentinus, Patriarch of Memphis and St. Joe; Sir Richard Burton, Sovereign Commander of the Temple and Prince of Jerusalem; Basilides, Grand Pontiff of the College of the Gnosis; Pythagoras, Knight of the Lybic Chain; Sir Richard Payne Knight, Commander of the Red Eagle; Manes, Patriarch of the Planispheres, Very Perfect Architect, Knight of Israel; Atilla the Hun, Valiant Master, Most Worshipful Master, Elect of the Unknown; Ludwig van Beethoven, Perfect Illustrious Elect of Nine, Order of the Peacock Angel, Master of the Triangle; Simon Magus, Knight of the Golden Branch of Eleusis; P.D.Q. Bach, Knight of the Horn and Hardart; Apollonius Tyanaeis, Grand Consecrator Architect of the Hidden City; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart of the Magic Flute, Prussian Knight, Knight of the Temple, Supreme Master Knight of the Eagle; Benjamin Franklin, Grand Axe of the Royal Arch, Sublime Knight of Choice; F. X. Preserved Coppinger, Beneficent Knight, Knight of the Rainbow, Knight of the Pelican; Vlad the Impaler, Secret Master, Knight of the Pelican and Eagle, Sovereign Prince of the Rose Croix of Heredom; Hugh Boylan, Knight of Banuka, Prince of the Pantagruelian Pike; Thomas Jefferson, Architect in Light and Perfection, Sublime of Heredom; Catullus, Sage of the Labyrinth, Knight of the High Odiamor; McIntosh Anonymoses, Sovereign Prince of the 78th, 79th and 80th Degrees of the Esoteric Order of Cranston and Bourbaki; Malechizedeck, Knight Kadosh, Knight Grand Inspector, Knight of the Royal Mystery of the Sky Chariots; Osiris, Sublime Aletophilote and Knight of Libanus; Tahuti, Knight of the Sacred Arch, Knight of the Secret Vault; Buddha, Master Pastrophoris, Elect Neocoris, Grand Melanophoris, Perfect Master Balahate; Lao-Tse, 90th and Last Degree Supreme Grand Conservator and Absolute Grand Sovereign and Patriarch of the Order of Mizriam; Malaclypse the Younger, Omnibenevolent Polyfather of Virginity in Gold; Don Quixote de la Mancha, Knight of Jerusalem, Knight of Malta, Knight of the Mournful Countenance; Miguel Cossack, Supremest Pontificator de Kiernansis, Grand Master Constituent of the Order of the Second Geometrical Series; Walter Mitty, Secret Master, Perfect Master, Provost Judge, Intendant of Buildings, Elect of Nine, Elect of Fifteen, Sublime Elect, Companion of the Royal Arch of Enoch, Scottish Knight of Perfection, Sublime Master, Knight of the Secret Vault, Knight of the Iris, Sovereign Grand Inspector, Supreme Illustrious Honorificabilitudinatatibus of the Rose Croix, Grand Elected Knight Kadosch Praetertranssubstantiationalist, True Master Elect of the Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Arcanum, College of the Holy Ghost, Knight of Israel, Knight of Jerusalem, Knight of Memphis and Mizriam, Honorable Illustrious Grand Master Pontiff Mega-Ipssisimus Maximus Antipericatametaanparcircumvolutiorectumgustipoops of the Copoofied, 33rd degree Scottish Rite, 10th degree Ordo Templi Orientis, 97th degree Rite of Memphis and Mizriam, ROYAL SUPREME GRAND ILLUSTRIOUS MASTER of the Gnostic Catholic Church, EPOPT OF THE ILLU-MINATI; and diverse highly distinguished apes, swine, rhinoceri, fish and Advanced Vertebrates, together with notable representatives of the orders of bees, roaches, silverfish, ants, termites, sea lampreys, arachnids, locusts u.s.w and the most intelligent amoebas known to science. In a way it is pleasant to be back in the cradle again, Joyce said bashfully. When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. But now I’m drowning in it. No, I can swim. Where did all these jellyfish come from?

I know, I know! Joyce cried. We’re experiencing the dawn of consciousness. But is it personal consciousness or … oh, no …

Some of the breasts are big and some are small some are conic some discoid some hemispheric some elongated there are full Earthmother breasts and moderate Gibsongirl breasts and exuberantly high Frenchwhore breasts and small flat Oriental breasts some are firm some are soft and some are flabby milk begins to drip from all of them an endless white stream like the gentle rain from heaven and all have the same parabolic loop as a suspension bridge the influence of gravity the same on both engineering and biology the upside down rainbow curve repeated endlessly almost like a cosine wave on an oscilloscope but now by God it has peppermint stripes and they are all mermaids

I am Einstein I am Babcock I am Crowley my God I am the pipeash Soul of all souls yes I am the chair Jesus Howling Christ am I still James Joyce yes I think I am yes am I?

Einstein looked down Bahnhofstrasse the railroad tracks shrinking in the distance past the horizon orbiting earth whoooshing about the solar system in orbit zooooming around the galaxy in orbit circling the universe passing all possible universes in orbit returning to Bahnhofstrasse as the sky filled with white globs and globes of light million upon million pearls and opals and turquoise and amber slow shiftings of crystal and molecular growth into the great Rose with the cross of light in its center tickticktocking as each petal moistened and glimmered in cuntlike tenderness

Hawk-like man, Joyce reflects. Ascending from the labyrinth old father old artificer the moocow in the beginning the Goat

Merde, said General Canbronne. A toil telled of shame and scorn. In the family he was known as Mr. Harris.

Einstein looks down the tunnel of consciousness remembers swinging through trees with other primates: recalls the billion-odd flights from predators as equine, rhinoceros, zebra and tapir; relives the evolution of the pig, the peccary, the hippopotamus, the camel, the deer, the giraffe, the antelope; suffers and rejoices as seal, walrus, wolf and giant panda; collapses and implodes inward as perissodactylan, ariodactylan and carnivorous experiences flood consciousness; know himself again as muskrat, beaver, fieldmouse always fetful, squirrel and kangaroo rat; floats down genetic rivers of lagomorpha caught in heroic moments as owsla chief of the snowshoe rabbits, leaps back to pika: sings to the stars (and groks their returning song) as blue whale and bottle-nosed porpoise; whizzes through caves as fruit bat: becomes mole, shrew, hedgehog: is at one with molecular memories of insectivora, marsupalia and monotremata: sings again as sparrow, robin and nightingale; lounges in sunny rockpools as snapping turtle: crosses deserts as sidewinder: croaks as bullfrog; descends into the whirpool of nucleic acid information as lives of osteichthyes, trout, chondrichthyes, cyclostomata, sea lampreys, craniata, acraniata, myriapodoa and arachnida are lived again; loops the loop into arthropoda, crustacea, annelida: hurtling back, back, back into echinodermata, aschelminthes, coelenterata and protozoa: becoming at last one battered beatup bedraggled halfblind scarred scratched starving dirty filthy disgraceful old alley-cat singing

wotthehell archy wotthehell
there’s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai is my motto

It is most interesting, Einstein replied. Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren’t even mammals.

Bad Cock Babcock he finds the Door at the end of the tunnel. He open. A million blue garters with white satins on them fall out.

Causes curvature of the spine, said Dr. Bostick Bentley Babcock from a platform in space. Paleness … lack of concentration … hair on the palms like a werewolf … eventual total idiocy. Self-control is the answer. I never did it. No proper Englishman would.

Depart from me ye cursed, said God the Goat, into the everlasting bonfire that was prepared for Satan and his angels. I saw what you did in that closet. Your own mother’s garters.

Einstein looked at Babcock anxiously. Is he going to be all right, he asked Crowley.

The ants came marching one by one. The ants came marching two by two. The ants came marching three by three.

It’s all right, Babcock, Joyce said. Merely an overdose of empathy, I imagine.

And part of you is still a fieldmouse, Crowley added. Just as part is a shark …

Evolution is not a theory here, Einstein said quietly. It is an experienced fact.

Crow Crowley became Ravenrend Verey, hunchbacked whitefaced mad. The clock slowly somberly sonorously chimed thirteen.

Frogs and mice, Falcon Verey cried. Bestiality? Perversion? I would that all men were as myself, but it is better to marry than pope to the butcher. For now we see through a glass darkly but then fizz to fizz. Fuzz to fuzz. Sacks of dung. Abomination. Monthly filth. Moon madness. Illegal entry.

Redorange fucksweet menstrual blood dripped from the moon, falling on Babcock’s cheek.

The blood turned to gold on his handkerchief as he rubbed it. Reproducing it became goldbars stacked in a pyramid. The snake is reborn and I’m blushing.

We must be approaching the speed of light, Einstein suggested. The mathematics is only in your timid sins of puberty.

I nearly reached India, said the Imaginary Mongoose. It was made of olive skin drifting down a windy hall past troglodytes, dwarfs, cavemen, night-gaunts, crabs, giant sunflowers, ticktockticktock trembling.

5 days after the flow begins, Crowley said. The male cycle is 23 days and the female 28. They figured it all out in Bengal two thousand years ago. 23 plus 5 is 28.

Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem, said Babcock crucified upside down in ecstasy. Visit the interior parts of the Earth; by rectification find the Stone of the Wise. And it says it is found in the most contemptible and despised of all things. Codes, hints, ambiguities … and yet it’s right in front of us all the time. The nine months: the nine moon goddesses …

Merde, said General Canbronne with Napoleon’s face and Uncle Sam’s hat with the three stars in the belt of Orion.

The excremental Hell of the alchemists, said Joyce Ankh Khonsu. The glowing orange scarlet interior parts. The dark uterine call, Jesus God. The whole Western world has gone mad because Saint Paul had a phobia about the vagina dentata.

The love that dare not speak its name, said Masoch in Nora’s petticoats. Frighten me to death!

A little discipline is needed, said Sade in Gestapo unifrom. Crawl on your belly, you cur. People’s minds are nothing but a huge self.

They say I am not a gentleman, said Moorish Sheikespaere. Just because in front of my house, in front of my house, my far far father had, O God! The injustice of it! In front of the house. It was made of skin loss that is death.

Merde, said General Canbronne with infinite pity. Who bulkily shaped the rouge on germinals.

Rectificando, said the Zürich express. Rectificando, rectificando, rectificando …

Physics is psychology, Einstein lectured to the bookcase which he evidently mistook for a freshman class. Forward and back is just the sadistmasochist dimension: aggression or timidity, right? And up and down is the pack hierarchy—who eats first and that sort of thing. And right and left … Aristotelian logic, you know … goes back to the game of guess-which-hand-it’s-in. And the fourth dimension …

I don’t understand that part myself, Einstein confessed. It has something to do with the seed as a vector in time … genetics as the negation of entropy.

But why is so much of it so pleasant, Joyce asked. If our brains are merely operating differently, that explains why we sense more … but why the pleasure all over the skin?

Did you think evolution was over and done with, Crowley asked rhetorically. Did you really believe that the conditions of pain and discomfort were our lot forever?

You mean, Einstein said, the brain can learn to convert any sensation into eroticism? That’s hard to believe.

The brain does process all sensation, Crowley said. If the brain is fully awake and conscious of what it is doing, why on earth should it treat any sensation as a less than orgasmic experience?

And that, Babcock sighed sensually, is the Alchemical gold? Why did it take me so long to understand?

Maybe we’re just drunk, Joyce said, feeling his penis turning into a cactus a peyote bud a shamrock a giant sunflower a fir a spruce of titanic redwood a perfect rose a moving van inscribed INTERNATIONAL COCAINE INC a comet in orbit endless caves of seacoral in purple and indigo and violet 358 the Serpent the Messiah LORD OF LORDS and BARD OF BARDS For He Shall Reign Forever and EVER a piston a pistol a limp floating flower

Since I created strife, cried Bertrán de Born leaping headless from the fireplace, you see me torn asunder from myself: two in one and one in two. Anne Boleyn was ’enry’s wife, King ’enry’s wife was she …

Whakty whakty whakty whakty boom boom, said the Hidden Variable. Hagios Hagios Hagios IAO. Thermogo thermogo thermogo.

Illegal and impossible entry, Joyce mused amused. Every child wants to know what happens behind that locked door. The forbidden room puzzle.

Adam Weishaupt wearing Uncle Sam’s red white blue hat with the three stars in the Belt of Orion appeared behind the altar masturbating.

I invoke thee said Weishaupt the terrible and invisible god who dwellest in the void places of the spirit AROGOGOUABRAO SOTOU MUDORIO PHALARTHA OOO AEPE thou spiritual sun thou eye thou lust cry aloud whirl the wheel o my father o sun thou selfcaused most hight the bornless one

I am the flame that burns but consumes not said the second spermatozoon with the face of the Sun.

Now you see me now you don’t said the third spermatozoon with the face of Schrôdinger’s Cat. Punishment shall be inflicted on three crows and a wren.

Crowds cheered: Babcock Manor was looted: the Royal Family assassinated: Mongolian clusterfucking in the streets.

Oh the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are full of silver
That the farmer sweated for

I proclaim the dictatorship of the proleteriat, Lenin said heaving a brick at Schrödinger’s Cat. Beethoven is verboten. Everyone must learn to play chess at once. Capitalist schweinerei not permitted. Post no bills. No petit bourgeois subjectivism decadent imperialistic idealism or predialectical empiriocriticism. Overnight overnight overnight. All power to the Soviets.

Eat it with catsup, said Lenin. I proclaim the Five Year Plan. The tractor is the march of God through the world. Do not pass Go. Report to the Central Committee. The first day of the rest of the nitrogen cycle. Less power to the Soviets.

The uneatable pursued by the unspeakable, said Edward III crowned with thorns a goldyellow buttercup in his hand with dark blue garter on left thigh. The love that dares not speak its name. Paris is an expensive place to die.

The ants came marching hundred by hundred. The door to Chapel Perilous swung open again and the buzzing increased. All power to the Soviets: a vagina dentata myth. It was the Aklo chants being howled and gibbered and shrieked and grunted by thousands of dholes and shoggoths. There are sacraments of evil as well as of good: only the madman is absolutely sure. Azathoth, the Demon-Sultan who is the primal Chaos at the center of Infinity, howled: I know all about those garters, you two perverts! The ants came marching thousand by thousand.

The accordionist started a new tune: Die Lorelei. Joyce watched dim shadows ambiguously move, starting at the bookcase. “Flowers,” he muttered. “Blume.”

The White Light of the Void from which everything comes, Babcock said. It is not just a metaphor. I have seen it.

Oh, that, Einstein said. It’s just the atomic accelerations that control the electrochemical processes that make up your separate brain functions. The Hidden Variable.

Do you mean, Joyce cried, that we have become so slowed down or speeded up or whatever that we are actually experiencing the physical process by which our brains create form?

Certainly, Einstein said. All this jumpiness, for instance, is just quantum discontinuity.

Well, Joyce said, at least that’s a theory. I suppose it’s better than no theory at all. Do you really believe it?

I do right now, Einstein said. I doubt that I will still believe it in the morning. It may take me thirty more years of mathematical dickering before I can convince myself again that such bridges exist….

You mean, Crowley asked excitedly, that this part of the transformation actually takes us to atomic levels?

To sub-atomic levels, Einstein said. To the bridges across super-space through which the Hidden Variable controls the quantum symphony. Don’t assume I know what I’m talking about. As I said, it will take thirty years or more to get it into the right math. In the meanwhile, Beethoven probably explains it better than physics.

How long have we been in this cave, asked worried Einstein. The fire is getting low.

Return all three forms in triplicate, said Lenin with Stalin’s face. The Secret Police is the march of God through the world. See your dentist twice a year. No unauthorized orgasms. Overnight overnight overnight. No power to the Soviets.

As they watched down a windy street buildings arose: the Parthenon, Saint Peter’s, the Eiffel Tower, Oriental pagodas, the towers of Babylon, American skyscrapers, a Quatt Wunkery, geodesic Martian hives, all this frantic activity accompanied by insectoid buzzing. Roaches constructed geometric aisles and ambulatories for Gothic cathedrals, the ants came marching million by million to erect flowery arcades and architraves, centipedes and lobsters scurried through rapid design of basilicas, bays and flying buttresses under the grave supervision of wise old hermit crabs, cantilevers and capitals leaped to the skies as termites and tarantulas toiled day and night to place brick upon brick, dozens of caryatids, chancels and colonnades appeared between the stark grandeur of pyramids, mosquitoes and beetles cooperated in the implementation of columns Doric and Byzantine and Ionic and Corinthian, grass huts and teepees and igloos multiplied in myriads, Stonehenge arose, the bustling buzzing blasting building without end, rose windows and naves and posts-and-lintels arising and rising and re-arising. They saw palaces of gold, temples the color of stars, warrens of indescribable inhuman subhuman slums and ghettoes, as one generation passeth away and another generation cometh but landlords never die.

I invoke thee, chanted Ludwig, MA BARRAIO IOEL KOTHA ARTHOBELA ABRAOT O mother O truth Thou mass Thou that art Thou hollow one Thou goddess of beauty and love

Joyce looked at the lovely figure sitting on the rock in the middle of the Rhine combing Her golden hair and realized that she was in fact a female Hippopotamus.

I am Isis ineffable Queen of Nature, Babcockotamus announced more excitedly. I am the womb of all things. Sweet Jesus on a bike, I think I’m going to have a child.

The cosmic birth process repeated again and again and again my poppyred cunt on fire the pleasure the pain but I don’t have a cunt what happened to my prick who castrated me where am I but oh God the joy of motherhood again and again and again

Womb contracting. Room contracting. An elevator in outer space between verbal concepts representing Winter.

In the beginning was the Light, said Einstein in an elevator between the stars. Matter is knots in Energy.

Madam I’m Adam, said Tetragrammaton a Judeo-Creek fig merchant. A man, a plan, a canal: Panama. He goddam mad dog eh?

The bawdy hand of the clock, said Gladstone, is on the very prick of noon uh nick of prune

A parted just between twelve and one, Hostess Quickly said wearing a Victorian dress with slit skirt showing blue garter on black mesh stocking. Even at the turning of the tide. His nose was as sharp as a pen and a table of green fields.

Only a Magus and a Knight trueborn
And a Virgin unafraid
Can walk unharmed amid the dance
Of the Devil’s Masquerade

Brings the deepdown color back, said Hostess Twinky. Purity of essence. Ours in the original and genuine. Put out the light and then put out the Light. Demands an emphatic protest from lovers of literature.

Sir John crossed the heavily fogged street, pushed open the door of M.M.M.: Occult and Mystical Books of All Ages with the mindless jerkiness and currencies of the world.

With his hounds and his haunts in the gloaming, said Canon Futter. Dorter of the Garter.

Thee I invoke, Crowley chanted faster and faster. The hornless one thee that didst create the earth and heavens thee that didst create the night and day Thou art myself made perfect Thou art the truth in matter Thou art the truth in motion

I never used my dirty penis Reverend, said Jack the Ripper. Only a nice clean knife. Linked by strange coincidence where the moon doesn’t shine.

If we lived in the middle of a fireworks exhibition, Einstein lectured, everybody would understand my theory of space-time immediately, directly, sensorially. But we do live in the middle of a fireworks display: the velocity is not observed because we are moving with it. Why then do I observe it now?

My best friend in college was homosexual, Joyce told Babcock. I didn’t realize that until nearly ten years later. The arts of hypocrisy are even more highly developed in Ireland than in England. My God I will write this Hunter book and show humanity the real truth of its situation.

Now I’m a billionyearold fish and a man who will be born in 1984 and live a thousand years in a dozen galaxies, Joyce remarked happily. Man, what have you done to us?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day, Shakespeare asked lisping effeminately.

Oh why not, said Mr. W. H. camping outrageously. It would be a marvelous ripping rag.

Sodom and Gomorrah, Verey muttered. London and Paris. Illegal entry. It runs on ears of words.

Joyce knew suddenly that the four of them in Arab headgear had sat around this campfire for seventy thousand years.

There is a cruel streak in you father, said Eduard Einstein. Hiroshima … Nagasaki … New York …

You and your piggy books, Lucia Joyce said. And your garters and garters and garters.

Adam Weishaupt arose through the trapdoor wearing a Wizard’s Cap with the eye-in-triangle design. How the simple Mason plies, he chanted, Tool on Temple, see it rise! Princes of Jerusalem, How we mock and scoff at them!

I remain an eternal mystery, said Mr. W. H. The supreme desire, unknown, refined out of existence. Only my initials remain. Mr. W. H. O?

Philosophia meta pederastia, Plato intoned from Eternity. Eleutheria. Tapa kega day.

But Crowley Hierophant rapped eleven times on the floor with his Staff, reciting in plainchant:

There is no Grace; There is no Guilt;
This is the law: Do What Thou Wilt!

Split the skull, Weishaupt howled in delirium. On guard the sword! Earth be null and heaven abhorred! All’s a lie, although Divine! Give annihilation’s sign!

That wasn’t so bad after all. We’re floating in space and we’ve turned into genitals.

Joyce condensed himself into a blue book, split into atoms, refined himself out of existence, reproduced, and became incarnate in a million libraries.

Babcock laughed. Is that what I was afraid of? An illustration from a children’s book?

Go away, Joyce told Sir Talis calmly. You’re only a Freudian symbol. Eutaenia sirtalis, the common garter snake. Sir Talis, Garters—do you understand, Babcock? Also called the garden snake. Hence the Eden symbols in the dreams.

Elementary, my dear Einstein, replied Joyce with Sherlock Holmes’ face. Garters, garters everywhere.

That kind of Freudian analysis is true enough, he said, but it’s not the whole truth. The snake is the Gnostic symbol of immortality and rebirth. To the primitive racial unconscious, the snake is reborn every time it sheds its skin.

From deep ’neath the crypt at St. Giles
Came a shriek that re-echoed for miles
The vicar said “Gracious—
It’s Brother Ignatius!
He’s forgotten the Bishop has piles!”

Das Buch ist ein Schwein, Nora Barnacle said accusingly. Garters he writes about when we don’t have enough food in the house.

Half the men in England have some such fetish, Crowley said. Usually it’s Miss Birch, mistress of discipline: the psychological correlative of imperialism.

Yes … Joyce said earnestly. I have always wanted Nora to discipline me … to see her eyes flash with anger …

Joyce is mocked, slandered, outcast, condemned, rejected, despised, starved. Rumors circulate like new cases of the clap around Paris London Dublin Zürich Pola Moscow Hong Kong Nagasaki Hiroshima Sydney Honolulu Mendocino Chicago Bad Ass Texas and back to Dublin. They say he has become a hopeless cocaine addict, his mind has been destroyed by paresis, he has died of drink in New York, he suffers from seven vile dieases and delirium tremens, he makes homosexual overtures to head-waiters, he writes anonymous obscene letters to the Queen of England and an assortment of nuns and teenage girls, he is a voyeur, he is an exhibitionist, he defecates in public parks awaiting applause with an idiot grin, he is going blind from morose delectation and excessive masturbation, he wets the bed and wiggles his toes in it, he haunts finishing schools to smell the seats of girl’s bicycles, he is secretly an English German or a German Agent or a brainwashed bezombified mindless tool of the Illuminati, he has been cuckolded by his brother, his best friend, seven priests, nine rabbis, the Elect of Fifteen, the House of Rothschild, and the band at the Waldorf Astoria. His books, together with those of Sade, Masoch and Wilde are to be buried in a secret vault in the Lost Pyramid in the Hidden City in the Lost Continent of Mu. He himself is stripped, lashed, tickled, tormented, hanged, drawn, quartered and crucified.

He kicked the bucket. Sparks flew out, astral vibes shook the atmosphere, he gave up the ghost, ball lightning and unidentified flying objects dazzled all the spectators, earthquakes collapsed Dublin into the sea, the heavens shook, and he died like a dog.

Why seek ye Jim here, asked the angel, rolling back the rock. And from Joyce’s grave came flowers and each flower had seven leaves and every leaf had seven secrets and every secret had seven titles and they could read among them such poesies as Poppy Oh Popey Do You Have Cartage on Your Rhine, The Tarot Towery Connection, Left-Handed Monkey Shines, It May Be Bolt Like A Sheephorse But Do You Call It Levin, The Campbells Are Camping with Musks of Goths, God Bless You Please Mr Robinson, They Needed A Songbird In Heaven So They Took Crusoe Away On A Friday, Tinned All Us Do Part, You Kenna Get My Chests With Your St. Tomach’s View, Sit On A Potato Pan Otis, The Oyster Rising and the Clam Dever, The Hannibal Cairo Express with Huck Chum and Effrontery, Nero My Dog Has Fleas, A Grand Canyon by the Committee of the Hole, The Old Seizers and the New Cut-Ups, A Fold-In Burrow for an Ova Eggspressed, and the especially treasured Ten Spices and Twenty-Two Raisins To Turn Your Brainpan To a Fruitcake. As each goes to seed up spring such unique products of the Groves of Academe as Motive and Method in Joyce’s Voices, Method and Motive in Joyce’s Verses, Myth and Metaphor in His Comic Epic, Metaphor and Myth in His Crucified Eroticism, Night and Day He’s Got Us Under Our Skin, A Skillfully Done Key to His Finicky Work, A Skinfull Down Teeth for a Talulapalooza, The Marx in His Gripes, The Freud in His Feuds, Our Purification and Petrification for Canonization of His Excrementations and Pornographations. Who’s Who and Who Cares When Nobody is Everybody, and the exhaustingly exhaustive Myth, Metaphor, Meaning, Symbolism, Morose Delectation and Sneaky Dirty Jones in A Sample Paragraph (3 vols.)

Merde, said General Canbronne. Age of Reason. Always wear brown trousers in battle.

Don’t forget to include me in the I.N.R.I, process, he said. Landlords never die. The other side of the Devil. I never drink wine.

Eduard Einstein and Lucia Joyce were led in, wearing straitjackets, moving with the mindless jerkiness of chronic schizophrenia.

You’ll desert my mother, Eduard said accusingly to Albert. You never loved me. All you love is your goddam equations. You are a monster. You live in your head and don’t love anyone. Oh I think I shall go mad.

You see, Crowley said to Babcock. Now it’s his turn for the Nun stage of I.N.R.I. Death on a White Horse.

Go, damn you, she shouted at James. Hide under the ground. I know you’re watching us. Watching, always watching. You know everything—men women boys girls—and you see through it all don’t you? You live in your head and don’t love anyone.

It’s bloody beastly buggering bleeding hell to be the child of a genius, Eduard Einstein mourned.

I am HE, Crowley chanted suddenly drawing their attention again. The Bornless Spirit having sight in the feet Strong and immortal fire Who hate that evil should be wrought in the world He that lightning and thundereth He whose mouth ever flameth He from whom is the shower of life on Earth

Je suis Molly Bloom, Joyce said unembarrassed. The Master Masons chanted over the Neanderthal fire:

For of the Father and the Son
The Holy Spirit is the norm
Male-female, quintessential, one
Man-being veiled in womanform
Glory and worship be to Thee
Sap of the world-ash, wonder-tree!

I think, Joyce said, that we have somehow been mutated from symbolic verbal consciousness to total body awareness. Is that it?

That is certainly part of it, Einstein agreed thoughtfully. But there is an element also of direct brain consciousness, is there not? It seems to me that you should understand Relativity better now, because I certainly understand it better than I ever did.

Yes … Einstein said softly … that’s it. We’re inside It and It is inside us. There’s a bridge …

In the material universe, Einstein said happily, the smaller is always inside the larger. But in the mental universe … mein Gott … the larger can be inside the smaller. That’s what thought is…. We are as big as whatever we perceive and conceive…. It’s a mobius strip….

Two owls and a hen, said King Lear, Three crows and a wren, have all built their nests in my beard.

Nine months to get out, he said, and the rest of our fool lives trying to get back in again….

“Have we really been sitting here,” Joyce asked finally, “laughing like fools for three or four hours?”

The earth shook. Cthulhu rose from the Depths waving white-stained garters and stocks bonds currencies of all nations boards and corporations. Governments fell like bowling pins. The stock market crashed. Nameless anarchist hordes stormed the streets, shouting Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers as they executed bankers corporation presidents lawyers politicians landlords priests rabbis ministers lady-golfers and anyone with a clean white shirt. Orgies broke out in parliaments, congresses, antique shops, boutiques, business offices, butcher shops, monasteries, trolleycars, hospitals, carousels, universities, academies, laboratories, nunneries, bakeries, cathedrals, law offices, factories; huge brutal cocks were thrust into cunts, assholes, mouths of voluptuous actresses, doddering dowagers, distinguished philosophers, kings, bishops, boys, girls, soldiers, Mother Superiors, bankers, whimpering poets; cunts were fucked, sucked, chewed, licked, kissed; Queen Victoria was gangbanged by 358 Watusi warriors. Madmen defecated in wells, fountains, punchbowls, on streets and in doorways. Drooling farmboys waving signs that said Bestiality Liberation charged into pet shops to sodomize dogs, cats, monkeys, birds, tarantulas. Andre Breton walked about Paris shooting pedestrians at random. The last lawyer was strangled with the guts of the last politician. The Pope appeared in delirium on the balcony facing Saint Peter’s Square incoherently chanting Cthulhu fthagn while sodomizing himself with a twelve-inch dildo from the Yokohama Sex And Leather Corporation. Housewives murdered their husbands and rushed to the stockyards to fuck goats, howling Io Pan Io Pan Pan The Goat With a Thousand Young!’ Nihilists attacked insane asylums with automatic rifles, murdered the staffs and set the patients free to roam the streets and set fire to psychiatrists’ offices. Avant-garde poets seized the newspapers and published strange, unsettling headlines: Is It a New Electromagnetic Phenomenon or The Heart and Mind of Europe Dying?; Only the Madman Is Absolutely Free; The Star People Are Returning But I Have Lost My One True Love; Where Is God Now That We Need Him? The next day the women got organized and completed the butchery. And the sky turned into the body of Nuit, black, beautiful, the starmother: and all was changed in a moment, in the flickering of an eye. It never happened. We were just four people sitting on the floor looking past time into eternity.

[Solemnly]:    In my mad and werewolf heart
          I have howled thirtynine years away
          In laughter and rage: the bread and wine
          Of Werewolf Mass

[Liturgically]:  In my high and mountain heart
          I have laughed thirtytwo years away
          In folly and scorn: the flesh and blood
          Of werewolf Time

[Precisely]:    In my clear and limpid mind
          I have counted thirtyfive years away
          In measure and line: the skin and bones
          Of werewolf Space

[Furiously]:    And until defiance builds of its own ache
          A truth less tame than the truth of death
          My werewolf heart shall howl against
          Both werewolf God and werewolf Man

[Sadly]: Yes, until our heartache builds of its own flames
A truth more wild than the truth of Life—

[Rapt]: My werewolf heart is pierced at last
By the silver bullet of the Lady’s gaze

[Erotomaniac]:  My werewolf heart is pierced at last
          By the silver bullet of the Lady’s eyes
          I am the Beast the Lady rides
          I am the stars within her hair

[Reasoning the structure in space-time]: Unity … It’s plus one and minus one …

[Feeling the Force]: Fucking … It’s making love to itself all the time …

[The Föhn stops blowing. These our actors, as foretold, are all spirits and vanish into air, into thin air.]

The flowers come back every spring. Earth to earth, dust to dust, merde to merde. Every spring the flowers come back….

Joyce awoke first, hearing a birdsong in the garden. The newday sun on his face told him that it was mid-morning at least.

With tentative step, still coming back from infinity, he rose to look out the window. The garden was green as chemical dye, luminescent: lingering after-effect of the drug. From the street, voices: from a single lark on a birch branch, the song that had wakened him. It was a clear sunbright Swiss spring day, the air no longer stagnant with the wind of witchcraft.

“By God,” he said softly. It was the same world that Adam saw, naked and astonished: a loving presence.

“Did you see the Holy Guardian Angel?” Babcock asked, wholly awake, standing to stretch.

“I saw … many things,” Joyce said. “I saw, most certainly, how to write this new novel that has been haunting me.”

Einstein was arising from his chair now, also. “What was it Jones said about the Holy Guardian Angel, long ago?” he asked. “Something to the effect that it might come as a new scientific theory, or a work of art, or just a change of life toward compassion or religion? My God,” he added.

Joyce turned from the window, his eyes huge and amused behind the thick glasses. “I think we all saw God and died,” he said. “Each in our own way.”

“Toward dawn,” Babcock said. “You two had already started to doze. I had a few words with him, I remember, while you were both already snoring.”

“Oh?” Joyce asked. “And what was the essence of that conversation, if you care to say?”

Babcock arose and smiled at the golden sunlight. “I told him about a doctor I met on the train two nights ago—the doctor you mentioned yourself a few times, named Jung. I said I would like to spend some time here, with Jung, before returning to London and the next stage of my Initiation.”

“When I am ready,” Babcock said. “When Dr. Jung thinks I am ready—that is.”

Einstein whistled, or sighed, a long astonished breath. “‘For He is like a refiner’s fire,’” he quoted.

Joyce turned. “And what did you get out of last nights entertainment?” he asked Einstein.

“It all came together,” Einstein replied simply. “I could see all of it, every piece, and how each related to the others. My papers on relativity are just the beginning. There is a unified field that I have to work on, as soon as I finish this paper on relativity of acceleration.” He grinned with pixie glee. “It may take me twenty years, or longer, but it will be worth it. Can you imagine? Our ideas about space are as primitive as the ancient ideas about Earth being flat. Space is curved, too. Every movement is a movement in orbit, around a mass: gravity and inertia are reifications of the curvature of space. And that’s only the beginning of what I’m beginning to see….”

“So you have no hard feelings about the drug and the incantations and all the other Stone Age shaman’s tricks Crowley used?” Joyce asked.

“None whatever,” Einstein said. “I think I learned more physics in those hours than in all my life before last night. How about yourself?”

“No hard feelings,” Joyce replied, “but if I ever see Crowley coming again, I’ll head in the other direction. One night in the caves of Eleusis is enough for a lifetime, as the Greeks knew.”

Einstein was pacing again, but more slowly. “It was as if our brains were washed out with soap,” he said. “As if—mein Gott—we were born again.”

“Yes,” Joyce said, “born again. That expression comes from the Eleusinian rituals I just mentioned. Digenes, the twice-born, were those who had gone through the whole night, in the cave of Demeter, being initiated. No historian claims to know what went on in there, but I think we can all make a good guess, can we not?”

“Those chants Crowley used,” Einstein said. “Could they possibly be the same after twenty-five hundred years?”

“Not the same,” Joyce said. ‘It was very bastard Greek, with Egyptian and Latin fragments here and there. They probably came down through the Gnostics and other heretical sects with a lot of distortion over the ages…. But I wouldn’t be too surprised if some of the words were not exactly those used in the Eleusinian initiations. Babcock,” he said suddenly, “I won’t ask you to break your Oath, but it would not be unethical to answer two questions that occur to me. Does the Mason Word have eight letters?”

“You need tell me no more. I believe Jones was telling the truth about this Order being forty-five hundred years old.” Joyce smiled. “Just like Dur to Turicum to Zürich. The word is the clue to everything.”

“Well,” Babcock said, picking up his briefcase. “I want to thank you two remarkable gentlemen for everything. But I really must be off to see Dr. Jung.”

“He will find you a delightful case,” Joyce said laughing. “Half of your unconscious is conscious already.”

“No,” Babcock said. “It is not that simple. ‘You can empty infinity from it, and infinity remains,’ as Crowley said—quoting the Upanishads.”

“Good luck, Sir John,” Einstein added, shaking the younger man’s hand as they went to the door.

Joyce stood alone, staring at the bookcase. “Flowers,” he muttered. “Blume. Bloom?”

Einstein returned. “Well, Jeem, what the devil do you think really happened to us?”

“I am no chemist,” Joyce said carefully, “but I will accept your metaphor about washing out the brain. I suspect that such chemicals are the universal solvents of alchemy. They dissolve the reflex arcs in the brain, so that our old ideas and old selves drown in an ocean of new signals.”

“Something like that,” Einstein said. “Well, do you really think that impossible novel of yours is finally possible?”

“It is inevitable,” Joyce said flatly. “I have at last found the structural groundplan that goes underneath everything else. Under the Odyssey, under Hamlet, under Moses in the wilderness, under the colors and arts and body organs and all the other allegorical structures. The simple basic human truth that will hold it all up.” He laughed again. “And the critics will take decades to dig it out, if they ever do.”

“The real theme of my book, the theme I’ve been trying to define for months and years while this was growing slowly in the back of my head.” Joyce smiled radiantly.

“The parable of the Good Samaritan,” Joyce said. “The simple human story that is so ordinary nobody can see it until they have their noses rubbed in it.”

“The ordinary,” Einstein said. “Of course, to you, it would have to be the ordinary.”

“Yes,” Joyce said. “Listen: we will always remember last night, because it was extraordinary. But suppose it had been ordinary. Just four men talking about this and that. And suppose one of us died this morning of a brick falling off a roof? Would not the other three remember last night, in the light of that tragedy, just as intensely as we remember the initiation we underwent? Don’t you understand? Nobody sees the ordinary until it is too late. I am—by God and by Jesus and by Allah—going to make them see it, if it takes me as long as it takes you to work out your unified field theory.”

“Well, then,” Einstein said, “we all found what we were looking for. But it was different for each of us. I suppose it always is.”

“I must be going myself,” Joyce said suddenly, “before Nora begins worrying again that I died drunk in a gutter.”

“I will, Professor.” Joyce stopped on his way to the door. “By the way, what time is it—in this system of coordinates, that is?”

Einstein removed his watch and looked at it carefully. “Exactly thirty-two minutes after eleven.”