Endless Things

I have sometimes thought the appropriate metaphor for my own life's eternal return is the piece of paper that in the original is a joke directed at an ethnicity. In my version, the paper contains the words on the front and repeated on the back, "How do you keep a fool occupied forever? See other side."

I have long maintained that give or take a few gnostic jeux d'esprit, the Ægypt cycle is one of the great realist novels of our time. The majority of the impossibilities are part of the novel ascribed to Fellowes Kraft, and not all of the other seeming impossibilities are impossibilities. (Some are more impossible than others.)

Given the pivotal scene in which, if the novelist has not deigned to descend into his own creation, he has sent a pretty good simulacrum of himself as his representative, it has occurred to me that the only person other than John Crowley who could write screenplays of the four novels might be Charlie Kaufman. Which is a thought so unsettling that I want everyone to write comments lambasting me for even imagining such an unwieldy marriage of sensibilities.

eppur si muove

I have encountered more than one person for whom I am the matter to their antimatter, or the other way round, I suppose. We mirror each other's intellectual and aesthetic research interests exactly, except with opposite charges (not necessarily opposite opinions), and the results of a collision are invariably explosive.

I was thinking of this recently in terms of some of the individuals I have known whose lives could not possibly be put into a novel because to do so would be to violate all the rules of verisimilitude.

hermetically seales

With my fondness for Freudian typographical errors, I must leave the mistyped subject heading that aimed for a pun and hit something else instead.

If God, the universe, and my long-term financial anxieties and preference for procrastination will permit, I plan to start posting my more egregiously autobiographical musings to thethirdblog.tumblr.com but right now there is nothing there except an admission that I can’t make the site work right and will have to take the simple tutorial someday.

But the stories contained in this post are so entwined with recently arrived books that I cannot figure out a way to recount them separately, though I could certainly discuss the books separately and perhaps someday will.

The more or less concurrent arrival of John Crowley’s Endless Things (in which Frances Yates and the Warburg Institute make cameo appearances) and Marjorie G. Jones’ Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition have stirred recollections of how I came to encounter Yates and the Warburg Institute almost two-thirds of a lifetime ago.

When I enrolled in the M.A. program in history of religions at University of California Santa Barbara, Professor (later U.S. Congressman) Walter Capps was on sabbatical, studying at the Warburg Institute. He returned for my second year of a one-year M.A. program with news that the Warburg Institute offered some hard-nosed historical methods indeed: “The old art historians would say that such-and-such painters filled up their spaces with clouds because they wanted to express the changing beliefs about heaven and ascension and all that. But no, [and I here refrain from saying which Warburg-related art historian Capps said it was, because I might get it wrong], ***** says it was because somebody figured out a new way to paint clouds.”

So we read Edgar Wind, and E. H. Gombrich, and Erwin Panofsky, and Frances Yates and others, not for their content but for their methods of approach. I think the seminar was half on scholars discovering Hermetic mysteries in the Renaissance and half on motif analysts in Sweden contributing their unreadably dry insights to contemporary Protestant theology, but I don’t remember Capps’ exact approach. Maybe we never got round to the Swedes, because I never read their book, which I still own.

No, of course it could not have been that way. So the real story will have to wait until the third blog. If then.

Yates was the only one of the Warburg group that didn’t quite hold my interest, just as I didn’t quite understand Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities when I read it at more or less the same time, acting on a different professor’s recommendation. (It didn’t help that the only volume of Musil available gave, if I recall correctly, no clue that one was reading only the first of four volumes.)

But thus did I come to have on my shelves the books I would need most desperately ten years later (plus a few others that I have never, ever needed—so far).

And thus did I make, on my second trip to England a year or so later, a bemused visit to the Warburg Institute, not quite sure what I should ask to see, and finding nothing of interest except a highly suspect set of photographic parallelisms illustrating Jungian archetypal strands in world culture. (I had already written my M.A. thesis on Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God the previous year.)

These were also the years when I kept encountering and passing up the almost repellently designed City Lights edition of René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, but that surely is a story to be told on The Third Blog (otherwise known to Tumblr as Untitled).

Anyway, I am still trying to figure out how to write more about Endless Things than I did at the time of the publication of the hardcover edition without having to preface the post with “WARNING: contains spoilers.” (I need to get to the Emory library and see how Rodger Cunningham handled the problem in his essay on Dæmonomania.)

Jones’ biography of Frances Yates looks to be creditable, and readable. Opening at random, I find a discussion of Yates’ relationship to previous female scholars of Bruno and the Renaissance that summarizes their books, and sometimes their friendship with Yates, with the sensible prefatory question, “What was it about the Renaissance—and Bruno—that attracted so many of them?”

Jones went back to graduate school later in life, and studied with Eric Hobsbawm and Margaret Jacob…so she starts with the right stuff, and cites the right lines of intellectual descent, mentioning Robert Evans’ 1973 study of Rudolf II and His World as a beginning fulfillment of Yates’ wish to Hugh Trevor-Roper that someone else pursue “the German end of things,” which she wrote to him that she could not pursue because “(1) my German is not good enough, and (2) I am too old to do the traveling.”

Friends who have read Crowley’s Ægypt novels closely will understand my bemusement (that word again) on finding that Jones’ biography begins with a chronological mystery that Jones seems not to notice, and certainly doesn’t explain. Her “Preface” is actually more of an extended epigraph, the only diary entry written by Frances Yates in a blank book originally bought for another purpose. Yates writes, “Now there is a crisis—December 17, 1979, I have been alone all day with my little cat, very wretched rock bottom—alone old, failing, blind, it has come to this. Yet there are new things, the seminar ended in a glow, Spitzer, new friend in Israel, Margaret Phillips and Virginia Callahan, England joined to New England by a little cat. … So it is time to put out new feelers towards something else—what? Christian Cabala, and Goethe, something unlocked in the psyche, something poured out in poetry which will fit with us now, new mediums, new physics, striving for the whole man in the nuclear age. Now I am only a historian, don’t forget about that. [new paragraph:] It is now early morning, December 17. I read yesterday, December 17 [sic] book about occult Templarism in 18th century Freemasonry — one of the dreadful history of Freemasonry books, Templarism, alchemy, Masonry, etc, occult means hidden. Then a book about Goethe and the Philosopher’s stone—Goethe read Agrippa and magico-cabalistic books.”

There is more, though not much more, of this brief entry “thinking thinking worrying worrying in these last days of this old dreadful year.” And it is then identified by Jones as “Frances Yates, 1980.”

1980? Turning to the footnote, I read, in its entirety: “These words appear as the only entry in a small blank green leather notebook currently held in the Warburg archives. They were written in 1980 in a shaky hand while Yates waited for help to come after she had fallen in her home in Claygate.” Turning to the relevant page of Jones’ biography, we find that “Alone at home on 17 July, she fell but was not taken to the hospital until she was discovered several hours later by the Esher police, who were alerted by a friend.”

This seems to be taken directly from a newspaper story written the following day, after which Jones returns to primary sources (she was given full access to Yates’ journals, which she quotes at length, supplemented by interviews with Yates’ surviving friends and fellow scholars). It is the only fall mentioned for the years 1979-1980.

How on earth did the Warburg Institute come to believe that Yates could have written a discussion of what she did on December 17 while she was waiting to be rescued on July 17? It seems a rather strange pastime to recopy something that one wrote seven months earlier, but more peculiar things have happened. I just want to see a footnote of the footnote, since Jones is otherwise so meticulous in assembling her sources. I’ve only paged around in the book, so perhaps the mystery will resolve itself.

I've e-mailed Jones with the query, which may not resolve the question.