The Anachronist

At its poetic core, The Anachronist yearns to lash together Reformation England and the Mughals’ confluence of the two seas to pursue some Baha’i commixture of contrasts, digressionally compressing a polyphony of thoughts into “the moment of encounter between contrasting objects” which can “through deliberate thought and intentional cooperation … create coherent new structures out of the contrasts that they observed”, allowing generative tensions to tesselate the plane discretions of the possibility space: “a finite number of fundamental principles are accessible to the human brain. These principles can only be combined in a finite number of composites. Name a principle or a composite of principles: that is a god. Bring that god into conflict with another: that is a story. A list of all the myths of the known world would be a compendium of the fundamental concepts and interactions that are possible to conceive.” This convergence is not so unprecedented, and Levine cannily invokes Avicenna’s innate heat as a plausible locus for the fever narrative firewhirling round the pyre til one’s “whole form is burning like a dry autumn branch.”

The lashing proves too loose to loosen what binds our ashing on two ties. The first is the knotting is mostly in the nodding. When finally our winding our way through thoughts waywarding leads Ajita before the Abrahamites and their gentiles diversiform, we seek the altar of the unknown god in the discursus long promised: “The Jesuit cited Saint Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God; Ajita countered with Brihaspati’s argument that the soul was really the body because we cannot perceive the self. The Jesuit said that nothing can come from nothing, so the universe must have a creator. Ajita countered that there never was nothing; the universe has always been.” Well, that does sound like an interesting argument, would have been nice to have heard it. Gesturing at names doesn’t make an argument so much as provide a bibliography. At one point, we’re given an image of Derrida’s notations on Barthes’ On Racine, which is probably genius, if you spend seventy hours meditating on its seventy times seven implications. This superfluity undermines the integrity of the welds on which so ambitious a structure relies: a nod to Marlowe goes wasted without the totalizing thread of Tamburlaine; a long attempt to recapitulate the peasants’ revolt, John Ball and all, all the way to the Thames Valley Police stutters so thoroughly that the author sheepishly scrawls in the margins the intent: “This whole section echoes the Oxen of the Sun episode from Joyce's Ulysses (1918-20).”

The second is that the itchiness to always be onto the next thing simply cuts the gordian. A fascinating reconciliation of mystic conviction and the reformational theological complexity erupting a millennium of doctrinaire esotericisms into passionate public debate skips too quickly to a sparse declination: “She had burned to live in the days of Luther and Calvin, when individuals could advance the designs of providence with great public acts of conscience founded on their own erudition … Of course, great public acts could never be appropriate for women; and sooner or later, Anna would have to revert to being one.” Surely St Catherine disagrees? Could we not resolve this more remarkably with an attempt at Margery Kempe? The Ajita poem, genuflections towards the majestic, hazards up the closest call for the digressions to enchance upon thesis: “For it is / a miracle that when we multiply, / manipulate, and analyze our figures, / we can return safely to where / we started, just by applying your rules – / or can achieve the same answer / by many routes. There are infinite paths, / and you have put them all in order.” And yet in the fumbling of figures dithyrambic, the poem loses its mythic purpose in its prances rococo: “There is deep meaning in our holy myth, / but also quite a lot of senseless sound: / articles, particles that waste the breath” in various nudities, play pieties, and the archaism proprieties presumably due a legend.

So if we don’t quite get there, let us celebrate the journey. The spiritual urgency strikes a plainting chord, as in this sinner’s Gethsemane: “if those flames are merely a foretaste of endless hellfire, Thy will be done.” This tensive vividry culminates magnificently in an inspirationally inverse martyrdom: “The highest form of faith was to die at the hands of the very Church that you loved and served with all your being. It was to die utterly alone, condemned by the entire communion as a traitorous heretic, because you had ministered better to the Church community than any inquisitor or cardinal did. It was to die in doubt that your own visions and beliefs were true, because they were personal inspirations and they might be diabolical. It was to die in hope, and in love, and by choice, but without any arrogant certainties.” One only wishes a whole chapter of this negaweil!

The writing turns its briskness into athleticism by dressing the sets with a hurried Holbein’s eye for detail: “books laid flat on shelves, polished sea-turtle shells, antlers from numerous species that he has arranged in order of size, pendulum clocks, globes and celestial spheres, small antique marble busts, stuffed birds, a camera obscura, a lute, mirrors, retorts and beakers of blown glass, porcelain from the orient, a cabinet of dark wood carved to resemble a palace façade, a pot of rosemary, for remembrance, crude beads strung on leather, a Saxon inscription, an abacus and an astrolabe, a human skull, three prisms hung from the rafter that turn slowly in the air, a table covered with a Persian carpet, a matched pair of rusted iron statuettes showing Hermes Trismegistus, and a printed portrait of the Queen after Nicholas Hilliard.” When the writing does redouble its impressions impasto, we get a lovely little triad that tangles us up to announce us tangled: “In the forest, we seem to see numerous imperfect objects, superfluous duplicates of one another, blended and crowded and heaped together in an indiscriminate tangle.” Though the philosophies philosophically peregrinate, we do get distinct distillations to savor: “To occupy a body is to have one maniera—one place in time and space, one way of representing what is reflected on the back of one’s retina, all driven by one set of desires. Imagination and compassion offer some freedom from this embodiment, for we can enter other minds by understanding them. With each style that we adopt sympathetically, our attachment to our original manner lessens, for it seems a narrow, arbitrary thing. A perfect imagination would be bodiless.” I almost want to argue some reverse, starting with Husserlian intersubjectivity and reinventing Merleau-Ponty by rapturously relitigating Plato/Artistotle extramission/intromission to no one’s benefit, which is the award of any Idea, to infuriate your interlocutor to their own.

Which, in our roundabout way, reorbits The Anachronist’s poetic core confident in “belief as a force that directs and gives meaning to human life, rather like language, clan, or caste.” Perhaps the tapestry adumbrates the tale, still we Tintoretically marvel at “the way just a few bold brushstrokes conjured yards of drapery” suitable for so grand a stage as these histories.