The Mirror Thief(85)
Gentlemen! A voice rises from beside the hearth, speaking a clear and reedy Latin. Members of the Uranian Academy! it says. Distinguished guests! On behalf of our hosts, the generous Andreas and Nicolaus Morosini, I thank you for your attention. As always, I am Fabius Paolini, and tonight I am pleased to welcome Philotheus Iordanus Brunus Nolanus to the convocation of this assembly. This is not the first time that Doctor Brunus has addressed us. This chamber was full on the occasion of his previous visit, and all those who were here surely recall as vividly as do I the spirited debate that arose. I shall therefore assume that our speaker is known to most of you—from your familiarity with his famous publications on philosophy, cosmology, memory, and magic, if not from my earlier long-winded introduction—and I shall therefore forego a second one. Tonight Doctor Brunus will, I believe, lecture us on the art of memory, a subject of considerable interest to many in this room. Doctor, I gratefully surrender the floor to you.
The Nolan moves into the space that Paolini has vacated; he makes a slow circle, as if testing the soundness of the floor. His gait is feline, or viverrine, not quite human. He walks with bent knees, on the balls of his feet; his small deep-set eyes scour the room with raw contempt. Crivano recalls a torch-bearing dervish in Tiflis who made a run at their powder store; the janissary archers shot him so full of arrows that when he finally died their shafts kept his limp corpse off the dirt. The dervish’s face as he charged bore an expression identical to the one the Nolan wears now. The world, Crivano thinks, is a poor container for such men.
When at last he speaks, the friar’s voice is rough and shrill, as though coarsened by frequent shouting. My thanks, Doctor Paolini, he says. In fact, I will not be speaking on memory tonight. I have done so before in this room, and to raise the subject here again would cheapen it. Those still unconvinced will remain so, regardless of how I argue. Tonight, rather than lecturing on the art of memory, I will demonstrate it. Perhaps this exercise will quiet those who say that the art is a sham, a waste, a fancy. Gentlemen, I invite you to name my topic for me. We are all learned men, are we not? Choose whatever subject pleases you, and I, extempore, shall engage it.
A startled silence ensues. The Nolan faces his audience with a cool sneer. The quiet collapses into soft grumbles, a few snickers, the shuffle of nervous feet. Paolini clears his throat.
Oh, come now, audience! the Nolan says. Wherefore this reluctance? Choose! Be bold! You are scholars, are you not? Each of you has a favored subject, held always close to heart. Name it! I may not match the erudition you command while ensconced in your bookish chambers, but note that I will speak with recourse to no library save that resident within my own mind. Doctor Paolini, you have written knowledgably on occult themes in Virgil, have you not? Shall I speak on that? Or mathematics, perhaps? Have we a geometer among us who will demonstrate his acumen?
The Nolan shoots a pointed glace at the lutenist, and receives a melancholy smile in response. The derision rustling through the crowd grows louder, the embarrassed tension more palpable. The German boy crosses his pale arms and takes a protective step toward the friar. Crivano and Ciotti swap bemused shrugs.
But no, the Nolan continues. All too easily I could have prepared myself in advance to confront those subjects. My desire is only to be challenged, for it is by such challenges that truth becomes clear. Stipulate, someone, beyond these suggestions of mine! If the Nolan is to be taken, it must be by surprise!
The mirror, Trist?o says. Address the issue of the mirror.
His smooth limpid voice bears a sudden edge that silences the room. The Nolan seems confused: he squints, his eyes spring from face to face. Who speaks? he says. Who has spoken?
Trist?o doesn’t respond. His face is blank, dispassionate; his attitude that of a gambler who has placed his wager and now awaits the revelation of the dice. Every eye present has unmoored itself from the Nolan and drifted to him.
After a long moment, Ciotti answers on his behalf. My friend Dottore de Nis, he says, has asked that you discourse upon the mirror.
The Nolan scowls. The mirror, he says. I must confess that this request leaves me somewhat at a loss. At a loss, that is, to judge why your friend would ask a scholar like myself to address that topic, and not seek the expertise of an unlettered tradesman. I had understood this forum to be concerned with higher things.
A familiar voice rises from the room’s opposite end: that of the second musician, the Servite friar. Crivano suddenly remembers where he’s heard it before: it’s the voice of the mountebank alchemist he saw yesterday in Campo San Luca, shortly before the plaguedoctor appeared. But this can hardly be. Friars donning masks to play satire in the streets?
Hold, please, the Servite says. I beg your pardon, Doctor Brunus, but if you will dismiss the mirror—its construction and its function—as a subject devoid of science, suitable only for debate by the guilds, then I grant you will find many who agree with you, but I cannot place myself among them. Philosophers may long for a world in which the artifex’s technique proceeds always from the application of reason, but more often we find that methods simply arise, and it falls to us thinkers to scurry after them, to wring significance from industry and accident. The flat mirrors lately turned out by the Murano craftsmen may indeed present such a case. Who among us has gazed into one of these without the symptoms of wonderment and disturbance?
Now Paolini speaks, his voice quickened with zeal. In the Phaedrus of Plato, he says, as I’m sure Doctor Brunus recalls, we read King Thamus’s remark to the god Thoth: the parent of an art is not always the best judge of its utility. As Brother Sarpi has just suggested, with the mirror this may well be so. Thamus refers, of course, to Thoth’s invention of writing—so this strikes close to your own scholarship, Doctor Brunus, for Thamus’s complaint is that the invention of letters aids not the memory of the Egyptians, but instead causes it to atrophy. Writing promotes not recollection, but reminiscence; it delivers not truth, but only a semblance of truth. In your previous lecture to us, you described the picture-writing of the Egyptians as superior to the alphabets of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Hebrews, for it evokes pure sense, not mere sound. You delineated for us your system of memory based on figures and patterns, which you say will enable the disciplined magus to assemble in his imagination a picture of the universe entire, thereby to gain power over its most hidden correspondences. And now Dottore de Nis has raised the issue of a simple invention which precisely, if fleetingly, captures the images of particular objects placed before it. Should we fear the ubiquity of this device in our dwelling-chambers? Will the image-making capacity of our imaginations sicken in its presence? Surely these are not inconsequential concerns for a philosopher.