William Vollmann - The Atlas

Now you know the secret. Each crystal of sea-ice already sends up an essence to its own pale planet. The blood of a bat, they say, mixed with saffron and other ingredients, then brought to a boil upon a grave, will call out of moldy darkness a quorum of demons. But why trouble yourself? The bat already has a bat-star, and the corpse in the grave its star, too; everything is controlled by those maddening rays! The known antipathy between lignum aloes and frankincense, the astrological rules of ascendants, trines and sextiles — all these phenomena can be derived from the characters of the stars which pull them hither and thither.

Sometimes (I admit) I gaze into the night sky longing to blot away those hateful masters of our destiny. Were I to awake inside my coffin, my consolation would be to find no lethal dimples of light to interrupt the lid — foolish solace, I grant, because the stellar rays can pass with easy malignance through earth and stone any quantity of infinities thick, to link whatever they choose with their significators in that eerie Sphere of Stars. Even in the day of Jupiter one cannot hide the evil; the rite of the burial of scorpions cannot forestall it; the conjuration of vegetable souls cannot delay it. Always those horrible stars! When I see a cliff so tightly bulging with ferns as to resemble an immense palmhead; when I find a land swollen with leafy treetops, fringed with plantations and bananas, tunneled with jungle-walled lava-paved creeks, I grow dizzy in contemplation of the immensity of that hideous Sphere above, for whose tyranny every pebble in the water has been wrought; every fruit ripens in accordance with the commands of its celestial orb; each darkness between leaves corresponds to the space between two stars, the dark and waxy ether of the firmament, the mass of anguish that calls for evil to come.

In the desert I once met cracked and banded cliffs in grand profusion, and I knew that behind heat and tree-stillness they too were starcrossed to the depths of their pink dirt. I sweated and squinted in the sun (which I liked to think was the Star that ordered me), and ascended a hill of salmon-colored sand, slipping back, digging in my heels. Boulders like the shells of turtles stirred uneasily against my knees. I touched the yellow flowers and grey shrubs, greeted the hundred-foot spruce tree and climbed the white, black and red wall that shook me with its starry silence. With that I'd gained the rim, thereby mastering the tidy distant trees; for a moment I forgot that each and all of these entities were likewise ruled from above; then I saw the meteorite sunken in the sand, the awesome matter of a star, and I pressed my face against the scorching sulphurousness of it to reaffirm my bondage. Let no one deny the sacred correspondence. Better to acknowledge the wisely baleful Star that rules you.

It was thus for eminently fine reasons that while in Rangoon I felt impelled to make submission to the astrologers. My goal was to help somebody escape from Burma, just as if I were to release more sparrows from a cage for five kyats* apiece, feeling each tiny brown life beat so weakly in my palm, and then opening my fingers to see the bird go upward. The idea was to gain merit (for we all believe that Papal indulgences can be sold). I once bought a whole cageful of the little things and sent them into the air one by one, feeling so happy and good that I plain forgot they were only bird-puppets being retracted upwards on their star-pulled strings. What can their Heaven be but one of those dark stale restaurants on the second floor of some unpainted building? So I surmise, since all birds come down again, and when they do the bird-sellers catch them in order to sell their freedom again. After all, why should there be intermittence for sparrows? So they flutter busily down from the Sphere of Stars, and what do they see? — It was at Sule Pagoda that I usually bought my prisoners; and they did not fly far. That is why I know that they first saw how Sule's narrow gold spires grew from widening layers of silver roofs whose festoonings were as masses and strings of lichens; these guarded gold figures grew progressively larger as the sparrows neared the ground, then ended in steep wide red roof-plateaus comprised of long slats. Below this was the raised polygon on which all the towers and Buddhas were set (at the Buddhas' knees, offerings of leaves, flowers and bananas). The people walked barefoot on the wet white marble tiles. So many Buddhas! And I wondered this: If the Buddhas outnumbered the stars, could evil destinies be neutralized by calmness? I prayed at the first shrine roofed with silver leafery (darkness in between like ashes), and my prayer ascended those tapering gold towers which were strung between stars. I prayed at the second and the third, where I was kept company by a nine-year-old shavepate, a novice monk in scarlet robes. Passing a skinny old lady shaking a pair of joss sticks, I came to the place of glass hexagonal heads like giant lampshades inset with fringed and brassy bells. In a niche of compound mirrors were two Buddhas. I chose the left hand, the lesser, and prayed that I might do good for someone. Could the stars be appeased or tricked? Past me the sparrows flew down the tunnelled stain of lukewarm slippery marble where beautiful girls sat among strings of their blossoms and mounds of fresh leafy flowers like the treasures of vegetable stands, looking out at the warm rain and spitting flowers on long peeled sticks. They had sold me a bouquet for Buddha. They sat bare-brownfooted, wearing flower dresses, assembling votive umbrellas of all colors, and white thanakah-paste was smeared on their throats and faces. Below them the temple was encircled by puddled pavement around which trucks and buses slowly crept; there were stair-tunnels on every facet of the pagoda; and in that zone the sparrow-sellers waited with their cages. There, too, ranged around the base of the pagoda, were the fortune-tellers' booths.

Some made elaborate calculations on a notebook page before they pronounced, while others used a silver pencil on a slate, and still others saw everything through the immense metal-rimmed magnifying glasses that gave them power.

There was a fortune-teller with a tight brown face like a skull, shaved, with a long black goatee, a black-and-silver moustache, and thick black glasses. His skinny brown-veined fingers grappled my palm. The skull peered with deep concentration through an immense magnifying glass.

Eisenhower's palm was on the wall, seven times life-size. Other giant hands were continents of horses, elephants, towers, knives and flowers. The cell smelled like incense from the temple above.

You try to help others, to be of service to others, he said.

The skull's eyes were also magnified by his glasses. He wanted to know on what day of the week I had been born, and when I could not say he found it in a hundred-year calendar.

You have a strong lifeline, he whispered. You will not die a bad death. But you must be careful of your stomach.

In his pale gray jacket, which matched his dust-colored beard, his elbow on an immense black book with red pages, he sold me knowledge as sweet and plentiful as the smoke from one of those Burmese cheroots whose green cross-section contains a hundred chambers of fragrance.

You are not married?

I had to think about this.

No, I said finally.

Long brown fingertips probed the palm of the hand, seeking to align me with the wisdom that he kept in his narrow glass cabinet filled with books in gold wrappers.

You must meet a woman older than you who was born on a Wednesday or a Friday.

When he asked me if I had any questions I said: How can I help the people in Burma?

From a child you have been interested in Buddhism, he said. You must not try to help by any other means, but through study and religious concentration. You will have great difficulties, but you will overcome them after the seventeenth of September.