Welles is at the rail again, leaning on his elbows. His slippered foot taps the base of the woodstained slats. Stanley can tell that he’s not done yet, so he waits, drying his face with the yellow sleeve of his new shirt.
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.