9
Aseroë
IT WAS SPRINGTIME in Lausanne and I was looking for a book. I was offered the opportunity of consulting it on the condition that I wouldn’t name its owner, who was worried about greedy book dealers or crazed collectors. The book lay before me in the half-light, shielded from the jealous illumination of an overhead lamp. It was the original edition of La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper), published in London by Giordano Bruno in 1584. I’m not speaking of the octavo edition—the only one mentioned by bibliographers—but of the unique quarto edition, cited by the Polish mathematician Jósef-Maria Wronski in a letter to the banker Arson.
My host removed the book from its blue casing, put it down before me, caressing its vellum binding (which was without any ornament or title). Slowly, he turned the flyleaf and read aloud its full title, emphasizing each word: The Ash Wednesday Supper, Described in Five Dialogues by Four Interlocutors, with Three Reflections on Two Subjects.
I first had to listen to the story behind this unique book, written down by my host on a strip of grimy cardboard. Before being arrested by the Inquisition and burned alive in Rome on the Campo dei Fiori, Bruno had offered this book to Gaspar Schoppe. Later, this unique text came into the possession of the astronomer Kepler, then made its way to the Vatican Library, from which it was stolen in 1722. It resurfaced around 1800 in a shop in the Hague, which belonged to a bookseller named Jakopus Krüger. According to a chronicler of the Court of Nassau, this bookseller lost his sight from having pored over Bruno’s black plates at too great length, hoping to discover in them the traces of a celestial body that the author had neglected to indicate. In 1813, Wronski saw this same work at a bookseller’s in Berlin and praised its “unheard-of splendor, which approaches the Absolute of Numbers.”
If an alert hand had not saved it, this precious book might well have disappeared at the end of the last century in the fire that consumed the Altenburg Castle. The man who showed it to me that April claimed he had received it from an Italian collector who had, in turn, procured it in London from the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who was as much a devotee of esotericism as he was of algebra. My host had saved a strange letter of Ramanujan’s, slipped into the pages of the book, which he translated for me. In it he discussed “the dance of numbers whose enigmas, always followed by temporary solutions, in turn engender new enigmas and further solutions—each one disappearing into the other without entirely erasing them, each one observing a whirling, spiraling movement comparable to the escape of the Universe beyond the limits that the mind assigns to it….” It was at this point that I heard the following sentence which my host was kind enough to copy down for me: “The darkness of night is the index of an infinity that never ceases to expand and whose color is that of a future without origin.”
I let my eyes rest on the eight black plates of The Ash Wednesday Supper. The engraver, no doubt guided by Giordano Bruno himself, therein represents night by broad, flattened surfaces on which the pattern of the stars and the geometrical tracing of their relative distances stand out in white on a black background. The plates of the unique Lausanne edition—in contrast to those of the octavo edition (which I later consulted in the library of Chantilly)—are printed across the entire page, with no margins. The black is so dense and so velvety that I thought I was seeing—thanks to an ingenious trompe l’oeil effect—the actual night sky in the book. Its blackness might have been obtained by soot, but I doubted that a printer could have fixed soot in his ink without staining the other pages. I thought of the heliogravure prints of the end of the nineteenth century, which impart a matte quality to the tones—a depth that subsequent photography hasn’t been able to duplicate. “Burnt bone and horse-hoof glue! Burnt bone and horse-hoof glue!” exclaimed my host with a satisfied air. I shuddered as I thought of the sad end of Bruno, roasted alive for a book—this one, precisely.
I was asked to leaf through all the pages, without skipping a single one. I admired the typography of the text, each chapter head individually composed for each Dialogue—and of course the black plates. I stopped at the last page, which was immaculate. “Keep turning, keep going to the very end!” On the verso of the last page, my friend pointed out a form that was scarcely visible, a tiny figure of Vanity embossed into the white tissue of the page: a crowned skull, and these mottoes, which I read at an angle beneath the dim beam of the lamp:
Giordano Bruno was clearly connecting Death (which “levels kingdoms,” posing the funereal violence of the spade against the pride of scepters) and the eminent Eye, which sees “all high things.” The second phrase, borrowed from the Bible (Job 41:34) primarily designates the invisible gaze of the Most High, but in another (and far more disturbing) reading, DEATH becomes the subject of the infinitive TO SEE. If Death allows access to the sight of the Sublime, or indeed if Death itself constitutes this sovereign gaze, the final motto (almost lost in the fibrous white of the page) suggests to the attentive reader a meditation on the Hidden Book of Averroës.
My host affirmed that Bruno, motivated by his quest for the alchemical Great Work (for which the scepter and the holly are the emblems, as well), wanted to place the reader on the path toward the Great Secret…. This made me quite uneasy, for it seemed I suddenly was losing my ability to read and that the embossed mottoes themselves were staring at me, drawing me toward the abyss.
When I was about to close the book, my host placed his hand on mine. “François, you haven’t finished reading.” He gently withdrew from the vellum volume a sheet the size of a quarter of a page, a black plate even more admirable than the others. I noticed that its delicate white lettering was arranged like the stars of Sagittarius: NOX NOS INTUERIT—night observes us.
Rue Lucinge. That April night in Lausanne pursued me beyond my actual encounter with the book, or indeed with the plates with no margins whose black fiber opened out onto the very night sky itself. I searched out the starred letters, which might reveal Bruno’s secret to me. A disturbing sentence came to me: “Death’s gaze is swifter than Light.” If someone had such a gaze at his disposal, wouldn’t he therefore have sped back to the beginning of Time? After which, deprived of Light, wouldn’t he be then returned to the Night from whence he had emerged? He wouldn’t exist, or at least not yet….
Each time we are presented with someone whom we can love, it seems to me that the raptness of our attention snatches her away from her mortality: we are seeing her for the first time, her face smothered in kisses. Isn’t this what the onset of Time really involves? There in Lausanne, on rue Lucinge, I dismissed all these worrisome thoughts. The darkened windows, the frigid houses, the Swiss tameness of the place all struck me as fake. I had found myself there by mistake, pursuing a false illusion. But then I saw a woman passing by. She turned to me and smiled.
I remember she was very beautiful. Within myself I was singing: Let’s follow this angel, let’s finish the night.