The Captive
by Paul J Gies, © 1983
Sections: I, II, III, IV, V
I'd like to take a moment to point out that the mathematician is not me. When I wrote this, I was still an English major.



The Captive

The Mathematician, to Vivian


The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.
               --G. B. Shaw

Prologue

Echoes awoke me
at my desk in the night
as the rain turned to snow
some shred of evil dream
           fleeing the light.

But I am still asleep, the cat in my lap,
the misty storm only now rolling in from the bay,
for in that slumber among beer-cans and typed pages
I dreamed of my death on the highway.

There between planes of glass and asphalt
I found and used the silver key of sleep
to release my mind substantial
from the illusion of substance:

before my overtaking death
I found and fled through the body's last portal
and in the clay of the soul

remade all things within myself immortal.


I

 I am the captive of my captive,
prisoner of the key I hold.

The death that waited on the road
I have swallowed, and now I have
my death inside me, burning beside my heart.

Because I loved all beauty, or because
I hated truth--because I loved the lie--

Oh do not ask the root of all this evil,
why I made my world perfect only
to give it flaws--do not ask why,
my creation finished, I must die.

As obvious and true as wind in trees,
as certain as my birth, as constant as
the summer sun at noon, as clear as in
a well, far down, reflections of the clouds,
as circumscribed as leaves upon a pool

I saw my corpse beside the highway,
cooling blood upon the sand

and so to stay my death within the world
I made the world anew: in its design
I am the seam, the one and only flaw.

Because I knew the truth that was my death:

spoked wheels spinning out like steel galaxies
doomed in starless night, unread signs
chuckling in the void, and the universe's edge
an asphalt road with no center line.

Because I knew the truth and had to lie:

leather boot on a field of shattered glass knowing
no salvation, glasses and cigarettes and teeth
brought together like a jury, blood
everywhere, like pointless tears, pooling and streaming,

my open eyes staring into darkness
as dead as a stillborn child.

The world is a mote of light
in the dark universe of my mind.

The light is the light because of the darkness.
Let me tell you about the world.
It is a little ball, a mere
8000-mile sphere of rock and water,
a toy in the childhood of the gods,
form in chaos, the rule's exception.
Island of hope? So much desire
has weighted this earth that it would sink
if only there were anything beneath it--and every
hope, each love, each living thing has known
that it must die despairing and alone.

The light is the light because of the darkness,
night that stands like a dull colossus
between me and the unending road.

Try to forget the cross upon the lawn,
the tomb in the afternoon, go down
to the fields of today, work on your projects,
call a friend or go for a spin in the car--
forget the subtle change of cancer, the tug
of the bursting heart, the icy street,
the bullet hanging in the ionized air,
the mushroom cloud at the end of history.

The mind cannot paint death's blackness white.
No music can drown the cries of distant anguish.

So turning by back on the half-lit world
I made the darkness my clay, I the Mathematician,
set number on number, took Euklid to the power of Russell
and integrated the result over Heisenberg's interval
until I had made a cloak of signs,
a tapestry of numbers, wading through
a swamp of dangling proofs and propositional pools

and in the moment of my death,
in the darkness of the edge
of the bursting bubble of the light,
the expanding screech of the universe,
in the second of twilight before
the darkness invaded the light's core
I wove the walls of darkness with my breath

and built a new world around me
in the long moment of my death.


II

 Ah, Vivian, my love, my key, I know you
so well I would destroy you, my pet, my toy,
but you grew in the making--I put more
into your whole than all your parts combined,
and so I must hold you beneath my hand--for your
open door is the crack in my creation,

your sun rises in the window to my darkness.

I could have made instead a little room
of six blank sides, some paper and a pen,
played hooky from the world and from its end--
ah, Vivian, eternity to spend
to work a challenge to Godel's pesky proof,

but worlds will not be bounded by white walls.

Ambition does not cower from conquest
even as remembered shadows
rake and maul the heart recovering.
The power-lust blossomed in my veins
even as the cold wind raised
the hair on my back like a surrender flag.

I found the colorless void of my inner space,
dark mind that surrounds this lump of rock
a vast storeroom full of props
from old plays and childhood histories.

Within the scattered museum of my head,
beneath the fading boughs of remembered trees,
rough winds of nights that shook my childhood bed,
there crawl the creatures of my undisciplined soul
that walk unheeding all my late decrees--
my own creations, ere I learned the trick
of fashioning from my darkness figures whole.

Ah, Vivian, lock of my bright cell,
first flawed work of my long labor,
such secrets you could learn could you but walk
those vaults, or fathom my heart's cold well.

I could have made you perfect, there was time
between the ebbing light and the dark garden
between the sun's last glimmer and the night wind
between that hard gravel earth hanging in vacuum,
those spinning galaxies of my wheels, that shattered glass sky

and the emptiness without mind
the "undiscovered country", of neither
           light nor darkness

but as the second hand paused
as the minutes slowed to hours and I slipped
the world up my sleeve like a bad jewel
and pulled myself up over the frigid universe
            like a cloak

growing to contain what had contained me,

you took shape before my eyes,
smiling daughter, sly sorceress, I saw you
knowing me for the first time, I
the first thought you ever had,

A fallow land of dawn grew at your feet,
"new heavens and a new earth".

You the pallet from which
I painted the blankness,

you, the spirit's source that proceeded,
that breathed the wind to life over new oceans
            ex patre filiaque:

"annuit coeptis
novus ordo seclorum."

Dream in darkness, form in void,
faint lines imposed upon nullity's nightmare

I knew you,

knew you and yet
in my dictatorial folly I thought you my own,
daughter of my purpose, vicar
of my will in the land

where under new constellations
grey children by twilit pools awakened
bedded in fresh mosses,

as one bold sapling reached
to the edge of a dark mere,
looked down upon its image and
did not notice my eyes over its shoulder.

Long symmetry of leafy gardens
under the eye of dawn:

I spelled my name a hundred times
in the bend of rivers.

I was "going to and fro in the earth"
concentrating on great issues.

Behind my back the mice were in revolt,
ants, tree-roots undermining my roads.

Now I look for my signs
and find your fingerprints in every mess.

So upon a sea-beaten promontory
at the bitter sunless end of the last continent
rising from the sea did I decree
my haven and fortress, castle of old dreams,
tower atop the mighty oceans, and prison
of all my enemies.

Ah, Vivian, you know the riddle
of the world that we contain within the world--
for though the wind blows back your dusky hair
you have no empirical evidence of air:
you could (some do) imagine it not there.

I was born
surrounded by sight and encircled by sound,
confronted with the lie of substance
I encountered the world.
The light flooded my tiny windows
slicing the night inside.

I watched the world, I played in it,
got my little fingers dirty with it.

I stayed the same--it was the world that grew
from a room and a few faces to a house,
a yard, a street, a neighborhood, a town,
while ever outside reality's infant light
lay grey imagination and then night.

I met the world on my terms, and beyond
its farthest shores more of me waited,
as circumscribed as leaves upon a pool--
finite universe within my infinite empty mind,
galaxy wheeling in the perilous void
between my skull's walls.
Was I in the world, or did I
make the world in me?

My Vivian, if I believed
that dream and fantasy were any less real
than substance and sunlight and the clock's ticking
then not for Hamlet's pain would I have wept,
nor mourned Ulysses' thirty wasted years,
but for myself, quite lost, would I have shed
such tears as would a path wear to the sea,
born but to die beneath the tyrant clock,

but never was I fooled by this
shaky semblance of a world, whose own logic
fails to explain either itself or me.

In dream I saw death's bony hand
pointing the hour.

Out of many matters, dream and memory,
I cannot remember being born.

The clock ticked loud and slow like an old reptile:
and so I hid in the calendar's pages.

I saw a tower there on a promontory:
I have made the emptiness my home.

I created the world
and there you were, with a gold watch in your hand.

I thought myself immortal, but I saw
a motorcycle on the pavement, its mirrors
shattered on the ground, reflecting
meaningless stars, constellations orderless.
I thought I had bought my life back
for that worthless plug-nickel of a planet,
but there was death in your sea-green eyes

and so I took you back
into the sunless tower, I so wise,
to save this world, my prison walled with lies.


III

 Meanwhile in my universe
gods and empresses rose and fell
and borders swayed like grasses in the wind.

Across the continents the elves ebbed and flowed
and where I touched the surface, they fled
in spreading waves.

The elves I made without thinking,
grey to wander between sky and soil, swords gleaming,
green to grow with the woods they patrolled,
and then the high kindred, the children of Odflor
I made to write nice poems and get drunk.

The elves I made without thinking
by dark pools to awaken
under the swinging stars
to discover that the planets
shone like lovers' eyes
that the trees whispered
to those who listened long
to find the wind and sea comparing notes
in their long friendship
and at long last to see
the sun newborn of the horizon
and look upon the fallow fields of dawn.

But as they grew, immortal adolescents,
I was off on some project in the wasteland.

I did not see Neorin
the priestess of the ocean strand
who used to have Vivian over for tea:

it was not long before they went to the elves.

I made many princes, many wizards
of lands so lost in the folds of time
that even my shears that cut the world's edge
cannot prune them from History's branches:

wizards and saints, heroes and knights,
walking time and space till they saturated the world,
popping up in every age of every timestream,
playing hide-and-seek and capture the flag
but with knives and arrows, genuine spells
and real demons summoned from real abysses:
they loved and parted, killed and fled,
as dangerous as six-year-olds with machine guns.

I came back from vacation
in the grey regions, where still
the half-formed land awaits its maker's hand,
returned to find all my naughty children
in the middle of their mess.

In my dictatorial folly, I decreed
a secret order to rule the vagrant powers:
the "Warriors of Time" they proudly called themselves.

The members were the wisest of the rabble;
nine seemed a nice round number, each one with
a seat in council and a special ring.

Why shouldn't I have rings? Kelebrimbor
made rings for Sauron, Tolkien's creature;
Kurtz made Kelson of Gwynedd and his ring;
in the reality of fancy, the ring has proved
more useful than the wheels of the ordinary world.

The ring: particularly well-fit
for magical use--always at hand, as it were,
an easy source of power, made of materials
precious but abundant, easily forged and shaped,
the perfect carrier of small sorceries.
The elves and dwarves made wonderful rings--
Odflor himself oversaw the making of my nine.
No doubt Vivian knew this when she found
that with a little magic, such a ring
was easily and cheaply mass-produced.

Before I turned around there were at least
a thousand of them. Every conjuror,
each minor monk dubbed himself Time Warrior.
Children played with them in the streets, and I'm sure
I saw a dog with one once in Semvov.

I had made a mistake. For some reason
that surprised me.

In my confusion I let myself make
an even greater mistake.

Twelve I called, a better count than nine,
my loyal subjects all, and this time left
Vivian and her friends out in the cold.

Twelve rings I forged,
a better model than my first attempt,
immune to imitation--each unique,
with its own spell and stone and special magic:

timesight to scan the map of history,
time travel, and resistence to the spells
of any but the most profound of powers,
and deathlessness, not mere immortality.

The Time Lords they were,
residing in my palace in the waste
in Time's remotest desert continent.

Commanding faith
has never been one of my virtues.

It was apparent
my dissident warriors, led by my own child
Vivian and her elvish friends,
would foolishly attempt to thwart me.

Foolishly, they broke
into my palace in the waste
in Time's remotest desert continent,
destroyed two Time Lords and stole
two of the twelve and disappeared.

My palace in shambles, my servants
fighting amongst themselves,

the power of the world's creator
distributed among its citizens,

I learned at last the cruel history
that I had created from my soul's darkness:

for Vivian, my beauty, the only one
that I could not destroy, had decided she
            could destroy me.

Fog walking the lowlands, mists
overflowing the valleys of the mountains,
            surrounding and questioning the traveller.

Through storm I saw
Vivian, serene, framed by lightning.

The door of sleep
is lost behind the scenery I erected:

a thousand flats and props
overrunning the stage.....and still there is

broken glass on the nighted highway.


IV

 The creation wound on like a muddy road.
The leaves returned, different each season
over the meandering river, the brown stream
of my conception of destiny, and then
it all happened at once.

The alarm went off.

Strange words in the palace.

Two timelords, vaporized and interdicted.

The hot wind in our faces: the door to the sun's core
wide open.

Vivian was gone, with two rings.

I felt for my heart, I had thought
it would stop, even in this
my well-made dream.

I am alive, comforted and chilled
in my continued breathing.

As obvious and true as wind in trees,
as certain as my birth, as constant as
the summer sun at noon, as clear as in
a well, far down, reflections of the clouds,
as circumscribed as leaves upon a pool:

as certain as a certain dream I've had
which returned to me that night as in
my palace in the waste sleep came at last
while Vivian was learning all the tricks
of her newly stolen devices.

Darkness on the highway

between streetlamps I fly

wheels skidding across wet tar

headlights, twin suns on collision course

with my eyes reflecting

wheels, turning galaxies, spirals slowing
toward entropy over the shattered glass of light.

I tossed and turned in shallow sleep as on
Highway 30 the motorcycle spun out and slid:
I came awake with a chill and the memory
of round lights, of spinning wheels, of bright rings,
turning rings glowing in time's starless night.

I leapt from my armchair, called
Lakanth and Photius, Finaf and Ririen,
and over dark wine and strong tobacco
I set down the blueprint of a counterstroke.

There was an hour--night as are all hours
in that half-created land where lies my keep--
when the sea chewed on the marrow of the rocks,
when the wind bit at the shutters, when
we set forth upon the storm,
rings gleaming in the light of the faint horizon.

We walked the strand of Efling,
found only Eamond's shadow: we went on
across the plateau of Rek and the gleaming deserts
of Sarok in an endless continent:
we trod the swampland of Kotomo, found
the gate to Eitan's stair, and thence approached
the long corridors and voids of Anti-Time.

On the other side of the light
beyond the Spiral Arch in emptiness,
in a small room at the edge of nonentity
sat Vivian in a mirror.

Her reflection I left in a broken glass.
The small room I simply moved a few feet
into nearby nothingness.

Imprisoned in a gem: I looked on her
for the first time unmoved.
I could not kill her, that would
loosen my hold on this world that keeps me from death.
No, I must be rational, that is
how I got here, sort of.

I could not
let her out, she would quickly
have turned me out into the rainy night
on Highway 30 by Cedar Rapids--no,
I must be rational--there is no other method.

She would stay in the stone,
in a little crystal room
hanging as an ornament in a high window.
I would send my greatest wizards
on a foray against the elves and the dissidents
and so occupy those difficult princes with the struggle
against my great ones, the Eleven, even though
I knew that Rosflor and his cousin
Flenon the Troublesome, most persistent of them all,
would conquer my poor wizards in the end:

but in the time that they bought
I all but cut the bonds that tied my castle
to what I had created, all but sealed
my sanctuary from unauthorized access,
almost no pesky Amazon or heroic elf
could bash and bang their way into my house.

It was almost certain
that Flenon and Daphne could not rescue Vivian.

Yet he wore an armor
lacked by my blood-handed princes.

When Odflor demanded payment for his rings
I offered him a maker's guarantee
that he would live forever unmolested.
He seemed to scorn such status for himself
but made me grant one of his heirs safe-passage
through my world--Odflor himself reminded me

when Antor his son, his wayward heir, was slain
at Despre, and Elturri and Telvir and Felacon
all fell, and my wizards had the world by the throat,
held the continent in the clench of four dark castles,
Ipre and Serres, Laton and lofty Sinafror

and Odflor on his island
quit all association with the fate
of those heirs I'd not killed or turned against him:
Odflor in exile, dead to the living world

demanded that I grant his eldest son,
Elturri clean and brave, new deathlessness.
He pleaded and he goaded as none could
with me but Vivian--an exile he,
and she a hopeless prisoner, caught in spell
like a fly in amber--

                    Odflor demanded
as his last request before silence
that I assure myself an implacable enemy,
his existence a condition of the world.

"You'll get your pay," I told the insolent prince,
"but not Elturri will I so protect,
who soon would flog me with his gift of life.
I said one of your offspring, and I swear
your twenty-seventh heir will be my ward,
whichever of your brats that chance to be."

Flenon that chanced to be, just then a boy,
the second child of Flenath of Indelnar,
your typical elf, bisexual alcoholic,
immortal sentimentalist, eternal
seven-year-old playing army in the woods.

He had good teachers, and it was not long
before in dreamtime Vivian returned
instructing him in symbol from afar.

My house invaded, my servants killed,
my own first child rebellious, my names,
my many names reviled, my life threatened,
my life threatened--

I must be rational, for emotion only says
that the end steals upon me from behind,
even from the darkness of my mind.


V

 Lakanth was my servant, Gahan my foe,
and Televin I crushed like an acorn.

Daphne swore to slay me
as I led her by the hand.

It was such as these
I was supposed to fear.

They died or lived: and all the while
you were in my power.

Elves, Amazons, wizards, saints--
what would they do if ever they ran into me?

And yet Flenon in his elven wood
is but a warrior with a bright sword,
a name on a page or a few bytes
in one corner of a brain cell

except that he is in my world, I am
in my world, we will be together and
I do not know what will happen.

The death of friends, the fall
of kingdoms: just the punctuation of life.

A Time Lord: a guy
in blue jeans or a business suit.

Does it matter what you wear when
everyone wants to kill you but no one can?

The demise of alliances, the rise and decline
of large and little conceptions of my world.

At the beginning and end of the circle
a young man dozes over a book.

I don't know what will happen, but I think
that logic isn't helping especially,
that straight lines will cross in a closed surface,
that the body, given time, will cut out its own heart,
that Godel said numbers are not the world.

I think, therefore
I have rejected the Zen art
of ignoring the difference between different things,
Bosch's St Anthony enduring life's deviltries,
I have struggled and succeeded
in controlling my inner horizon, the candle
at the borders of the world,
leaving my body's clocks suspended between seconds

while a calendar on the wall
shows only a few more pages.

When I awake will I remember
or glimpse again only scattered dream-images
and conclude it was no more than
another nightmare?

And in another part of the scene
Flenon walks his castle, already grey,
Daphne rides her high fields, her daughters around her.
In another part of the scene
Vivian waits in her shadowy chains
in her priceless crystalline cell.

Pictures on monitors
brief moments of sight
but somewhere in the glass bead game
of names and faces and times and coordinates
and DNA and galaxies and gluons
superimposed as a pattern on the whole
are the hieroglyphs of the message where
there was a solution for zero over zero:

all I could read were numbers
but I thought I glimpsed headlights
and felt rain on my forehead.

All the darkness of my house
will not hide me as the universe converges
and the life it has breathed out roars back
like a tide of light upon the void.

See? They come. I'm not
crazy. I've been logical.
I only did what was necessary, found
the loophole in the system.
The Amazon is with him. Ah, the knife! to cut
me loose from my mind.

So I doze in my chair,
stars exploding within a few dozen light years,
death and resurrection and second damnation,
a hundred billion passions, a trillion trillion
bugs rising from leafy canopies to
give life and die--

so I sleep while the captive steals my keys.
As obvious and true as wind in trees,
as definite as Godel's theorem, as secure
as Russell's or anybody's complete number theory.

Because I loved all beauty or because
I learned the truth that waits at the end of roads,
because I was veguely aware of the end
            "as through a glass, darkly"

I clawed at my inner landscape, sought to control it,
but it was too vast for my arms to hoold, too
dense to be measured by my tools.

I made myself immortal, but I found
that gods and men walk ordinary ground.

I made the world anew: in its design
I am the flaw, perhaps

the true signature of its maker.

So I am the captive of my captive.
In the sunless tower
waits Vivian, bright stone of my creation,
water of tears, unsounded pool of thought, wind
of storm in the afternoon,

fire out of control at the world's edge,
where at the spiral center and limit
of this my mind, the skull's dark ocean,
I hoold it back with temporary walls--
there is no other kind of wall.

The death that waited on the road
I have swallowed. Now I have
my death inside me, burning beside my heart.

Because I hated truth, or longed to sleep,
because the clock ticked on...

Echoes, though, woke me
at my desk in the night
as the rain turned to snow in my window
and the evil dream was forgotten.


                        Paul J Gies © 1983, revised July 1996

Back to Gies-land