Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

For me, Welles says, it’s like shitting. It really is. To pretend otherwise is stupid. Shit is fertilizer, of course. And shit is prima materia . But to the shitter, it is simply shit. Properly construed, the distance of which I spoke between the writer and the reader — the deferred pleasure — is no impediment to the success of a poem. The poem depends on it, in fact. I imagine, to my great chagrin, that you are learning this even now. You read my book, and in some way it excited your imagination. But when you found its author, you discovered him to be a fat bourgeois, a pompous blowhard, and you realized that he is — as the expression goes — full of shit. The book cannot help but be diminished by this encounter. How much happier for you if I had remained a mystery! How much better if the book could go on existing only as you’d imagined it! Isn’t it the case that the works which most move and inspire us are the most formless — the most irredeemably fecal — that we stumble upon? Because they leave to us the task of completing them, of wringing meaning from them. Because, in so doing, we always encounter ourselves. Their degraded chaos resolves gradually into our own image, projected and made strange. It is ever thus. The reader — not the poet — is the alchemist.

Stanley’s nose and throat are clear now. The night smells sweeter and sharper. He can’t remember the last time he cried like that. Not when his father died, or his grandfather. Maybe when his dad left for Korea. Even then it was only later, alone, when nobody could see. What I want, Stanley says, is to get inside your book. All the way in. I want to tear it apart. I want to know everything Crivano knows, whether you know it yourself or not. I want you to tell me how to figure it out. Where to get started.

Welles turns around, folds his arms, leans back on the rail; it creaks and bows with his weight. For a second Stanley thinks he’ll fall through, but he doesn’t. Welles fixes his eyes on the deck, creases his brow in half-interested concentration, like he’s trying to recall the names of old friends from grade-school.

Then he slips a hand inside his cardigan, into his shirt’s breast pocket, and comes out with his pipe. You’ll have to do a lot of reading, he says. The Corpus Hermeticum , of course, in its entirety. Also the Picatrix , and the Tabula Smaragdina . Plato and Plotinus, in order to situate the tradition in proper context: Crivano certainly would have read both of them. Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola are major figures. Who else? Abulafia, I suppose. Llull. Reuchlin. Trithemius. Agrippa. Cardano. Paracelsus, certainly. You may wish to explore John Dee and Robert Fludd, as well, although they were contemporaneous with Crivano, and he would not have been aware of them.

All that stuff is old, Stanley says. Right?

Quite. Crivano, remember, was active in the waning years of the Sixteenth Century. I should warn you that many of the key writings I mentioned may not be available in reliable English translation, but only in Latin, or in various German and Italian dialects. Some may not be widely available at all.

Is there anybody who does this sort of stuff now? Magic, I mean?

Welles has withdrawn his tobacco tin from his trouser pocket; he’s slowly packing the bowl of his pipe. When he’s finished, he lights it, tamps it out, and packs it again, aerating it with a needlelike tool.

Oh yes, he says. People still do it.

Stanley stares hard at his face. The treefrogs are almost deafening; they sound like the string-orchestra piece that was playing downstairs when he and Claudio first arrived. Who? he asks. Who does it?

Another match flares, tripled in Welles’s spectacles, and a stinking cloud rises over his head. Here in Southern California, he says, you can locate them without a great deal of effort. You can readily find Theosophists and Rosicrucians, as well — along with adherents of Dianetics, and the New Thought, and the Science of Mind — although I do not recommend that you do so. In fact, seeking out contemporary practitioners of magic is probably unnecessary. As I discovered when I began my own research, they will find you soon enough.

But talking to ’em is a waste of time, you’re saying?

Once you have a sense of the tradition, Welles says, it will be easy for you to tell who is a charlatan, who is simply insane. There are some who are knowledgeable and serious, I suppose, but they tend to keep to themselves. Also, their interests seem to accrue around industrial abstracts and pulp science fiction, rather than musty alchemical treatises left over from the Renaissance. I worked with one of these fellows at the Aerojet Corporation, believe it or not. Jack Parsons was his name. I had no idea what sort of strange mischief he’d been engaged in until 1952, when he somewhat carelessly blew himself to kingdom come with a large quantity of fulminate of mercury. Evidently Jack spent years of evenings and weekends performing magical rites, literally trying to summon the Whore of Babylon and spawn the Antichrist. This gentleman was one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, mind you. So, yes. People still do it.

There’s a strain in Welles’s voice, a false note, but Stanley can’t think of the right question to ask to decipher it. He’s still feeling shaky, pissed off at himself for cracking up. That list of names you just gave me, he says. I’m not gonna remember it. Could I maybe get you to write ’em down?

But of course. Of course. It would be my pleasure.

Stanley picks up his beer and finishes it. His gut turns queasy as the last of it goes down. You probably think I’m a damn fool, he says. Don’t you? For wanting to do this.

Welles takes the pipestem from his mouth, slowly shakes his head. Not at all, he says. Quite the opposite, in fact. This is a difficult time for you, I can see that. I don’t know you well. But I have confidence in you. I believe in you. And I — Synnøve and I — would like to help in any way we can.

Stanley’s tearing up again, though he’s not sure why, not sure if it’s real or fake. He thinks of an armed robbery he was on a couple years ago where he and his team all wore gauze Halloween masks: he remembers how it felt to hold a pistol on the humiliated nightwatchman, to look him straight in the eye and know that he could see nothing but the crude face of a weeping clown. Stanley feels that same way now — powerful and ashamed — only this time the mask is inside him, and he can’t control it.

I gotta be straight with you, Mister Welles, he says. I don’t think about myself the way you think about yourself. About the reasons why I do things, I mean. There’s never really been a time when I didn’t know what to do, or at least have some idea. So I’ve never had to stop and just think. Sometimes I feel like it wouldn’t be bad for me do that once in a while, but I’m not even sure how. And it’s starting to scare me. Because lately I feel like I’m turning into something, and I don’t know what.

Welles is silent, puffing rapidly. Soon the pipe has burned to ash. For what it’s worth, he says, I am not worried about you.

It ain’t specifically me I’m worried about, Mister Welles. It’s everything else. I just don’t always feel like I belong in this world.

A deep chuckle rises from Welles’s gut. I daresay I know that feeling, he says.

I guess you’re about to tell me that I’m gonna grow out of it.

You might. Though I sincerely hope that you do not.

He steps forward slowly, then grips Stanley’s shoulder in his thick-fingered hand. It’s a cheap and stupid little world, the one we’re given, he says. Don’t fucking settle for it. Go out and make your own.

He straightens, puts the pipe back in his teeth. Now, he says. Did you remember to bring the book?