Forbidden Knowledge (1)

A wild dream the other night -- I move into a tall row house in Boston (“northern” city), taking over the house from my aunt & uncle (distaff connection). We are visiting, we are renting, we are buying, we are inheriting: the terms of tenure is fused that way, tentative, uncertain.

My room is on the very top floor, a dark sort of attic space though hugely roomy, more than enough space for all of my stuff. I eye a long wall space that would be wonderful for shelving all of my books (which in the waking world are too plentiful to shelve, are boxed in the far reaches of the upstairs crawl space & in are piled in the closet of this study). My father and I walk around the room, dreaming of possibilities.

We are supposed to come down to the first floor for dinner soon, but I want to explore further dark crooks above & in the perimeter which intimate more spaces even higher. I poke my head through a hole in the ceiling at the south end of the room, peering into a huge dark space above -- a whole another floor, a super-attic! Who would have thought? No one, it seems, not for a long time.

Then I realize that floor can be accessed from dusty forgotten stairs at the north end of the house. I head up there alone (my father disappears from the dream). I climb around detritus and clutter and trash into a small room filled with books, a library of sorts. I want to pore over the volumes but time is short and there’s another room ahead, so I explore on. The next room is furnished along a theme -- exquisite bedroom furniture including a bureau of mohagany inlaid with jade. In the next room there are shelves of self-help books for every personal mania and malaise. Again I want to pore over the titles but there’s yet another room ahead, who would have thought? a bedroom suite antimacassared with white chenille (geez, I think, my wife would love this, and am sorry she didn’t come on this trip with me).

The rooms thus unscroll with wonder and tension (always I’m expecting that cry to dinner, or maybe the pinging of the alarm clock), each with a Theme -- an art nouveau room willed with exquisite small books of prints and fin de siecle typography proclaiming the devastating primacy of Art, then a room that is wall-to-wall Nazi memorabilia, a perfect German flag, lamps with skin-sewn shades, riding whips, laminated posters crying Raus or Maus (apparently arranged by Jews in vicious memory of the Holocaust) ... another room filled with books of poetry, titles I would desperately love. My hands tremble as I open them, read ancient titles of stuff by Shakespeare (original printing), wondering how much of the canon is lost in this room; I take as many as I can, piling them along my arm from palm to shoulder.

I am travelling a circuit of rooms beyond the known top of this house, as from some outermost last knowable through a labyrinthine meander of rooms piled with old lost or forgotten stuff, my eyes greedy for the next sight, my heart pounding, wondering what the next room will reveal, feeling the meander will never end--when I hear my voice called from far below. Dinner.

***

I wonder about that quest for lost or forbidden knowledge. Columba wanted to know about that Celtic otherworld; he queries the skull of sacrificed Oran. But the news is catastrophic, antithetical, apostasy, heretical -- a refutation of every fibre of the saint’s mission. One derivation of Oran is jodras or “query,” and it is ever dangerous to query the dead. Knowledge of this world is one thing -- the names of every creature -- but knowledge of the Other is damnable, hence most delightful, hence my Theme today of Secret Knowledge.

***

From Roger Shattuck’s Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography:

(A) haunting cluster of ancient stories from both Hebrew scripture and pagan myth concerns a ... prohibition laid upon the human faculty of sight. In these tales, sigh stands for the human need for evidence of the senses to bolster a flagging faith. The results are often fatal. Lot’s wife, escaping the destruction of Sodom, hears the injunction, “Look not behind thee.” (Genesis 19:17). When she turns to look at the horrible scene of fire and brimstone, “she became a pillar of salt.” (Genesis 19:26)

... Told not to look at the horrible Gorgon’s head of Medusa, Perseus obeys orders, escapes petrification by looking only at Medusa’s reflection on his shield, and uses other magic accouterments to behead the monster. He can contain whatever curiosity he feels to behold Medusa’s ultimate ugliness directly, a temptation that might lead others of us to meet the fate of Lot’s wife.

.... (In Apulieus’ tale of Eros and Psyche in The Golden Ass, Psyche is married to Eros under the condition that she never look upon his face. When she betrays the ban and holds a candle over his sleeping form, a drop of wax falls and scorches the god’s shoulder. He flees, murmuring, “Love cannot last without trust.” She then seeks him everywhere, “submitting to and surviving (with the help of nature’s creatures” the cruel trials imposed on her by Cupid’s still-jealous mother, Venus. The last trial sends Psyche to the underworld to fetch a box containing a token of Proserpina’s beauty in order to restore Venus’ splendor. Told not to pry into the box, Psyche again cannot repress her curiosity and she peeps into the box and is immediately overcome by a Stygian sleep. The story ends happily when Cupid rescues Psyche, intervenes with Jupiter to have her immortalized into a goddess, and establishes their union in the heavens. Psyche twice destroys her potential happiness by wishing to know more than she should.

... Banished from the turbulent public life of 14th century Florence and immersed in the theological disputes of the waning Middle Ages, Dante gave in the Divine Comedy an imaginary account of himself a an upstart pilgrim accorded a specially authorized tour of the most restricted zones of Hell and Purgatory and Heaven. The horrors and marvels that Dante/Pilgrim beholds nudge him toward disbelief. But first Virgil and then Beatrice keep him on the path of faith, and he miraculously survives the lengthy journey through territory forbidden to mortals.

... (In Paradiso Dante comes “blindingly near his final goal,” boldly asking a man who had descended a golden ladder to receive him. When Dante asks why this man -- a humble sinner who became a reforming cardinal -- has been chosen for the task of welcoming him, the secret of Providence is suddenly cut short of being revealed “by some disciplinary fireworks” and Peter Damien sends Dante back to earth “with a preemptory message about forbidden knowledge:”

The truth you seek to fathom lies so deep
in the abyss of the eternal law,
it is cut off from every creature’s sight.

And tell the mortal world when you return
what I told you, to that no man presume
to try to reach a goal as high as this.