"Cosmopoeia,” said Barr. “World-making."
"Um yes."
"That poeia being the root of our word poetry, of course. Poets being makers. Makers of poems, and of the worlds in them.” He sipped the martini he held. “So I'd guess you're embarked on a piece of poetry too. And that your taking this metaphor literally is itself a species of metaphor."
Pierce said nothing in response to this, tried to smile inscrutably, knowing he could not himself have thought of that formula, and wondering if it was so.
Taffy was now stripping the skin from tiny blood oranges and dropping the sections in a cut-glass bowl. “I'd need an example,” she said. “An instance."
"That's what I mean,” Pierce said. “I mean that's where the question led me. To Egypt, which is where Gypsies come from, and where magic was invented, and the gods first worshipped."
"Oh?"
"Only of course they don't,” Pierce said. “They were believed to come from there. But the place they were believed to come from wasn't the Egypt we know. It was another Egypt."
"Ah yes,” said Frank Walker Barr.
"Another Egypt,” said his wife. “Well, now."
Pierce began to explain about the ancient writings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, priest and king of Egypt, and the error that Renaissance thinkers had made, to suppose that these late-antique Greek metaphysical vaporings were authentic Egyptian beliefs; and Barr put in that at that time hieroglyphics of course couldn't be read, and were interpreted as mystic signs when mystic signs were all the rage; and Taffy went on working, raising her eyes now and then to one or the other of them; and Pierce had the impression that she actually knew all this already, and that Barr knew she knew it, and they were both at work eliciting it from him, Pierce, like cops at an interrogation, or parents listening to a child's story, not news to them.
"Ægypt,” he said. “A land that never existed. Where Hermes was king, where magic worked; and the memory of it descends to us to this day, and we can remember it even though the land ceased to exist, and now never existed. We made a new one to replace it. Egypt."
"'When I was a king in Egypt,'” Taffy declaimed, “'and you were a Christian slave.’”
"Babylon,” said her husband.
"I'm not babbling,” she said. “It's a poem."
She had enough oranges now in her bowl, it seemed, and to them she added a bag of tiny marshmallows. She noticed Pierce watching her preparations.
"Ambrosia,” she said. She poured honey over it from a jar. Sue Bee. “That's what it's called. I don't know why. Frank loves it."
Frank smiled, in fact he beamed, and the beam fell upon Pierce. “Want some?” he asked.
"Oh no,” Pierce said. “Oh no. None for me, thanks. None for me."
* * * *
That wasn't all that befell Pierce there in the Sunshine State that week. It was then that he discovered something he had once promised he could find but had never actually believed existed, a thing he had told Julie Rosengarten would be disclosed in the last pages of his book, a thing—maybe the only thing—that had survived from a former age when things were not as they are now but worked in a different way, something that really still worked that way, the way things once did. He found it in the place where he should have known it was, but had not before been able to see into; down a different passage, in the deep dark, and yet not far away at all. That's all been told; the story's still there to be discovered in at least a few libraries and in those blessed stores that keep unwanted books until their time at last comes around, if it does, or at least until they catch someone's eye or stir someone's heart, unless their paper yellows and crumbles into illegibility first: the whole story of how Pierce found the thing that he had sought for, right in his own backyard. Not that it mattered then, really, materially, since Pierce was never going to write that book nor any other like it; and this he confessed to Barr in the Olympic Club at JFK.
"That's too bad,” Barr said. “Too bad. Because of course there's been some remarkable new thinking on the subject lately. Egypt and Greek wisdom. You must have been following. Major controversy."
Pierce nodded cautiously. He hadn't been following.
"I'm guessing,” Barr said, “that you got your grounding in this matter largely from Frances Yates. Dame Frances Yates."
Pierce was vaguely shocked, hearing the name said aloud, a cloudlet of actuality emitted on the stale false air. A sort of category error. No one should speak that name but him, in his heart.
"Wonderful woman. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. It's where we all got it, isn't it? You're going to London? You should look her up. She's at the Warburg Institute, you know."
"Yes."
"Wonderful woman. Major influence. Give her my regards when you see her. She could be wrong, though."
"Wrong in what way?"
"Well, centrally, her thesis—it's hardly hers alone—is that the Renaissance made this colossal mistake in the dating of the pseudo-Egyptian manuscripts that they attributed to a single author, this semidivine Hermes Trismegistus; that what they had were in fact Hellenistic writings that had been given a false provenance by their author, or authors, as was so common in that time. So the wonderful mystical Egyptian world they depicted was in fact post-Plato, even post-Christian. A dream."
"Yes."
"That's the consensus view. All the scholars. But what if they're wrong? They were the latest word when you were at school, but that was some time ago.” Twinkle. “I think a case can be made—well, it is being made—that those writings, the so-called Hermetic Corpus, go back well before Christianity."
"Really?"
"Half a millennium before. Not all of them, of course, maybe not even all of any one, but large parts of them. It may be that some of them date to a time when the temples of Egypt were still standing, the priesthood still functioning."
"But everybody says. Not just Yates. Everybody agrees."
"Well, of course there's good philological evidence that the writings as we have them are late Greek. But that doesn't mean they don't contain older materials. Much older.” He drank. “Anyway, everybody doesn't agree. Flinders Petrie didn't agree."
That impossible name, a name for an archæologist in a comic book, breaker of stones, studier of fragments, Flinders Petrie. Pierce had got Petrie's books from the State Library in Kentucky, back when he had himself first set out for those realms. In childhood: that long ago. The sand-colored photographs, sand-colored man in pith helmet and wrinkled shorts.
"Petrie thought that the writings, the core writings, dated to the fifth century BCE. And because the Egyptian religion was so insular—remember, the Greeks held the Egyptians in high regard, but the Egyptians didn't have much regard for the Greeks—you could at that date still have found remote temples in Upper Egypt where the scribes were writing in hieroglyphics, copying magical and theological papyri, ‘writings of Thoth,’ as some are described in Greek. Kom Ombo. The Temple of Isis at Philæ. And the Hermetic manuscripts we know, even if they were written in Greek and collected in the first centuries AD, might have been based on what was still a living tradition. Might well."
"But don't they incorporate a lot of Platonic philosophy? Or stuff that sounds like Plato, or even the Gospel of John?"