Kenelm Digby and the Liquid Empire

Kenelm Digby and the Liquid Empire John Sutton

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KENELM DIGBY AND THE LIQUID EMPIRE

John Sutton

John Sutton [email protected] This version performed three times in Newtown, Sydney, July 2002 in a professional performance partly funded by Stephen Gaukroger’s conference on early modern intellectual history The Origins of Modernity: European Thought 1543-1789. Previous versions were performed in Newtown in 2000, and in a reading in Washington DC in 2001.

This philosophy play is now online and open access. Please adapt and perform this play as you wish. Please credit John Sutton as author, and please let me know! [email protected]

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The Characters Aubrey Master of Ceremonies.

A seedy freelance hack with a constant hangover. Kenelm Digby Versatile, doomed, gigantic, loquacious, furiously active. Venetia Stanley Gambler, mother, salon hostess, patron, charitable matron;

courageous, changeable, obsessed with her skin. Also: Pirate 1. Rene Descartes Masked psychotherapist, anatomist, philosopher. Solitary, paranoid.

Grieving his dead daughter, obsessed with mechanics, medicine, & plans for prolonging life.

Also: Apothecary; Marie de Medici; A Mysterious Brahmin; Pirate 2. # # # # # #


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KENELM DIGBY AND THE LIQUID EMPIRE

DIGBY [through audience, huge]: My father was still alive when they disembowelled him. They carved open his body, let the guts slip, plucked out his heart. I was two years old. AUBREY [following, hurrying along]: Sir Kenelm Digby, Knight, a Gentleman absolute in all numbers, was the eldest son of Sir Everard Digby, who was accounted the handomest Gentleman in England. Sir Everard suffered as a Traitor in the Romish Gunpowder-Treason. He resolved to neglect his estate, his life, his name, his memory, and all worldly felicity whatsoever, for the restoring of the Catholic religion in England. DIGBY: My father was the first of all the conspirators to mount the scaffold. He was hung only a very short time. The stumpy executioner - whose hellish torments may I gleefully observe in my eternal ecstasy - lifted his dagger high, shouted 'Here is the heart of a traitor!'. And my father, dying, answered - shouted, whispered? - Sir Francis Bacon told me this - answered with his oozing spirits, 'You lie!'. AUBREY: Attorney-General Coke recommended: "Let his Catholic wife be a widow, and his children vagabonds, let his Catholic posterity be destroyed, and in the next generation let his name be entirely put out." But King James restored his estate to his son and heir, Kenelm Digby. [AUBREY sets Digby down. A change.] I needed a subject. I knew the vast ebony tomb had been utterly consumed in the Fire. The black marble and copper bust of Venetia, straining, panting for eternity, the miniatures by van Dyck ... [starting again, wilder-eyed] I’ve brought them back. [introducing himself] Aubrey, John Aubrey – writer, designer, programmer, journalist ... Popular science, biography, memoirs, romance, virtual reality, loose fantasies, strange phenomena … Prodigious births, comets, hurricanes and echoes, exorcisms – you’ve got to make a living - ancient monuments, petrified cities, subterranean people! Now Digby and Venetia – well … ointments and machines, wow - it’s not just wounded dogs and sympathetic powder, you know. They believed in the resurrection of the body. No-one’s got a clue. Listen! [Reads, more pompous, from his index cards … or opening a bookmarked page]. "Sir Kenelm Digby, 1603 to 1665, although not himself an original thinker, at least appreciated original thought." [smiling at the naivete] So, we have stories to tell, yes, trust me. I had no idea. Right … [now introducing Digby, dressing and readying him for action] Sir Kenelm Digby! Biologist and buccaneer, lover and librarian, philosopher and poet, alchemist and secret agent, bibliophile and powerbroker, English patriot and European intellectual, country naturalist and political strategist, theologian, cook, and brewer of strong beer. Yes, all of these, and more. Before he died, in agony with the bladder-stone, Digby read to the new Royal Society his discourse of the Vegetation of Plants, and was desired to publish it, and to leave the original in the Society’s custody.


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[He prompts Digby] DIGBY: I have showed the life and death of a Vegetable, driven by its inner fire, AUBREY: You claim there is in the air some hidden food of life! DIGBY: I reach further, with my ointments and machines - AUBREY: You dream of reviving a dying plant as it dissolves into the general magazine of matter … DIGBY: I presently have in my view, the reparation of a decaying life, and the reproduction of a faded one. I am engulfed in the mysterious contemplation of dissipated bodies, how they may be again the same identical body, after many strange changes … AUBREY: The resurrection of the dead! [Sets Digby down again.] [Another index card. With some distaste] "Whenever one takes a cross-section of this extraordinary age, there is Sir Kenelm Digby. He flashes forth in unexpected places. But modern science and modern philosophy dismiss him with contemptuous disregard; his versatility was his doom." Sir Kenelm Digby, the great Catholic atomist Aristotelian mechanist of the mid-17

th century!

[No-one reacts.] His great work, DIGBY [taking it]: Two Treatises, in the one of which, the nature of bodies, in the other, the nature of

man's soul, is looked into, AUBREY [when this doesn’t produce wild recognition either]: The young Sir Kenelm Digby stopped in 1628 on the Greek island of Milo, taking a break from dumb piratical escapades, to write Loose Fantasies, an erotic memoir with lies. People love this stuff … ! Well - I’m a ghost writer. There had to be a sequel ... Who were Sir Kenelm Digby's friends? [takes a deep breath, fast] Francis Bacon, DIGBY: politician. AUBREY: Richard Napier, DIGBY: physician, a fine astrologer, his knees horny with praying to the angel Raphael, AUBREY: Henrietta Maria,


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DIGBY: Queen - widow of Charles I. AUBREY: Marin Mersenne, DIGBY: musicologist. AUBREY: Thomas Hobbes, DIGBY: materialist. AUBREY: Oliver Cromwell, DIGBY: soldier! AUBREY: Robert Boyle, DIGBY: chemist. AUBREY: Christopher Wren, DIGBY: architect. Yes, all of these, AUBREY: and more. [Now setting up the story again, happy, encouraging the telling]: Sir Kenelm Digby was held to be the most accomplished Cavalier of his time. DIGBY [opening up, huge]: You are welcome. We have stories to tell, yes, trust me. My house, Gothurst, Goathurst, Gayhurst, my mother Mary's family seat, with its symmetries on the surface, with its trapdoors for priests on the run, whisperings in the wood of meetings held by persons unknown, for purposes not disclosed. AUBREY: May Eve, 1633, flowers in the village, Ben Jonson on his way from London, DIGBY: I am to publish his poems after his death. AUBREY: The news is of Galileo under house arrest in Rome, DIGBY: no more demons yet possessing the nuns at Loudun, AUBREY: so Digby must postpone his trip to test if they can read his mind.


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DIGBY: We have roasted a boar, we have killed the chickens fed on vipers. I have appointed much business, parcels to Italy, there will be gaming. The beer is brewed, join us! [Venetia appears, with ointments] [calls] Venetia! [explains] She is half my self, and all the considerable actions of my life are directed to her. AUBREY: "He married, much against his Mother's consent, that celebrated Beauty and Courtesan, Venetia Stanley." DIGBY: Van Dyck has finished the portraits. We are fixed, we are a settled family, we are to live in his colours. AUBREY: "Venetia Stanley was a most beautiful desireable Creature. She had a most lovely and sweet turn'd face, delicate dark-brown haire. She had a perfect healthy constitution; strong; good skin; well-proportioned. Her face, a short oval; dark-brown eye-brow about which much sweetness, as also in the opening of her eye-lids. The colour of her cheeks was neither too hot nor too pale." DIGBY: We will tell our lives, yes, in this season when tempers are so depraved, to teach the world what it has long forgotten, of a man and a woman whose wills are drowned in one another. VENETIA [to herself]: I hate those paintings. We just had to have van Dyck, I know, he’s so now. I am grown fat, since the children. My hair is only just grown back after lying in of the stillborn twins.

DIGBY [now to her]: Every time I return, I feel streaming from the depth of this house in the sun only your body, films of matter are laced through every room, corpuscles still dancing after your motions. VENETIA [to herself]: I know. We were children in this house, and I will die here.

Your mother lurks in the East Wing, spitting from the top windows, growing so old, still hating me more, and more. But I age so much faster, you feed me the snails and the broth of snakes, you concoct my viper's wine to keep me fresh, but each day, in the long afternoons of empty prayer, the skin dies, I sense it leaking out into eternity with my devotions.

DIGBY [to Aubrey]: The painters fail to satisfy, they can’t express upon a flat board or cloth the exact symmetry of her features, or the shape and loveliness of her parts. VENETIA: They are up again from London, your mob, they sing me their poems, Ben with his drunken tribe. Jonson competes with van Dyck to frame my body and then draw my mind … DIGBY: Her face is not extremely winning at the first sight, for its life and spirits appear only in every little motion.


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VENETIA: Neither poet nor painter can catch this mind, if only, yes, thus stuck in clay here, all in a flood, I yearn with extreme passion, yes, to stay its winds, for some releasing ointment that will lift me free from time and place, like spirits left behind upon a bank, or field of flowers. [A sudden anger] I am nearly out. More viper’s wine!

DIGBY: When she rides on horseback, she seems an other woman than when upon the ground. Her eyes shift and mix sky-blue with greenish at the least motion, beyond all that ever I looked upon. AUBREY: White, even, and pure teeth DIGBY: designed for a long life; AUBREY: admirable little ears; DIGBY: her whole head of so even and uncornered a dimension, and of so just a quantity as it is a fit lodging for the noble brain that it encloses. VENETIA: I believe in the resurrection of the body. In this flesh will I see God, this shell which you often abandon here, which survives, gasping, still, save for a tendency to boredom, and weeping alone in the best bedroom. [to Apothecary] Here! APOTHECARY: Viper-wine is made thus. It is of extraordinary virtue for the purifying of the blood, flesh, and skin. Take of the best fat snakes, adders, or vipers which you can get in June or July. Cut off their heads, take off their skins, and unbowel them. Then put them into your best Canary wine, four or six vipers according to their bigness into a gallon. Let them stand two or three months. Then draw off your wine as you desire to drink it. It also cures the falling sickness, strengthens the brain, and preserves from grey hairs, renews youth, preserves women from abortion, prevents preoccupation with the mind, and is very good in and against pestilential infections. It also provokes the flesh to lust, and cures the leprosy. VENETIA [now applying her ointments]: I have disposed of all things, even to the last toy. The wedding dress to my sister Petronella. My jewels to be sold for the children. DIGBY [to Aubrey]: We are renovating, becoming fat. I have fitted out a laboratory … to experiment on life. Watch a dirty stick in a hot moist place In time grow a rude little head. After a while, where the wood used to be, You'll see little legs instead. The creature complete, it creeps from the log, And scuttles away to get lost in the trees. So spontaneous life generates from a bog, As corpuscles roam free.


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VENETIA: In the mornings I scold the boy-children, too dull to be loved by their father, and I win money at cards from the horsey locals. The slavering Covent Garden poets say I am both lucky and judicious. DIGBY: Van Dyck cannot stay to eat. VENETIA: What I win at play, without eagerness or passion, furnishes a certain and large revenue for my charity and my recreation. I ride, fast, down to the far bridge, to the unhappy village, I give my winnings away, so pious, so attentive. DIGBY: He must return to London, the King to be painted, VENETIA: on horseback DIGBY, VENETIA: Again! VENETIA: I hate those paintings. DIGBY: Oh.

VENETIA: But I am already thirty-two, and [to Aubrey] ready to be mythologized. [Change.] AUBREY [moving it along, fast]: Omens and portents, and plagues of frogs. Digby was born in high summer, at dawn. Sun in the twelfth house, sextile to Saturn: large and varied enterprises. Mercury square to Saturn: great enterprises thwarted. His teaching was by wizards: maths, music, mechanics, magnets. DIGBY: Our love is older than our memories. VENETIA [picking up the tale, all alive]: My mother, Lucy Percy, in sudden dying, left me her infant daughter only her goodness … AUBREY [pacy, documentary]: … and the beauty of her body, in both which she surpassed all others of her time. This babe was sent by her sad father to live with kinsfolk near the house of the recently widowed Mary, Lady Digby. VENETIA: They were glad to satisfy my yet childish desires, as in [smiling] a fondness of walking out. AUBREY: So that in the frequent interchanging visits between the households, the young Venetia and the younger Kenelm would spend the day in looking upon each other's face.


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VENETIA: Where other children did delight in fond plays and light toys, we would mingle serious kisses among our innocent sports. AUBREY: Venetia Stanley was a most beautiful desireable Creature, and was left by her father to live with a tenant and servants in a private place. But it seems her Beauty could not lie hid. The young Eagles had espied her, and she was tractable. VENETIA: I first met Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, when I was thirteen. It was at that awful Royal Wedding, Elizabeth and Frederick, Bohemians everywhere, I was so light at the ball, after we'd had to sit through that dire new play, The Tempest? AUBREY: Venetia the debutante dances, her motions so composed of awful majesty and graceful agility that her excellence would brook no partner. VENETIA: I resisted this hot Earl, my heart was not my own. [high (melo)drama] 'No suit can make me false to that affection that in respect of me had no beginning, for my memory reaches not to that time.' AUBREY: Richard Earl of Dorset told her not to care for Digby, who has hardly escaped, by his mother's extreme industry, with the scant relics of a shipwrecked estate, and from his father hath inherited nothing but a foul stain in his blood for making a fatal revolution in the state. VENETIA [quick-witted]: But if the son deserve esteem, he shall be cherished by his own merit, in which the father's offence is then drowned. AUBREY: Her unhappy father allowed her to move to London. She lived alone. DIGBY: There are many sins worse than unchastity. Indeed it is no greater a fault in women than in men. AUBREY: At Oxford, Digby learned even less than the rest of us. DIGBY: I talked with the Mathematician Thomas Allen, best astrologer of his time. AUBREY: Allen was considered a Conjuror, for he used a watch. His man, to impose on Freshmen and simple people, would tell them that sometimes he would meet the Spirits swarming up his staircase like Bees. DIGBY: He gave me his manuscripts of the old learning. I read the alchemists, I read Aristotle, the oracle of nature, and his perverters. I am the mathematicians' pet, they dedicate to me their every logarithm. AUBREY: They said his mind was somewhat too much taken up with his mind.


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DIGBY: Emanations flow from every object, little copies, corpuscles flowing mixing tiny images through the air, each penetrating every body, each of us in each other, every thing in each of us. Spirits, we call them, these picture-atoms in motion through time. AUBREY: The currish fellows of the university understood not mankind, for they were generally ignorant of Arithmetic and Geometry. Things were not then studied. DIGBY: Let any one read Aristotle his book Of Generation and Corruption, and say whether he does not expressly teach, that mixture and proper blending is done by the least parts - or atoms - of the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire. We must retrieve Aristotle from the lazy schools, and make his indivisible particles the building blocks of a new atomical philosophy, a doctrine truly Catholic, truly English. AUBREY: Digby's mother did with watchful eyes, armed with longing, hatred, and jealousy, continually observe all passages between her son and the unsuitable Venetia. VENETIA: She sent him to Europe, on the great 'Grand Tour', the dumb Overseas Experience of every English yob. DIGBY: We found bare moments before the ship sailed. Venetia opened her coral lips, like the opening of Heaven, and we swore fidelity. "All I do, all I think henceforth is yours." VENETIA [fierce]: I shall find out sundry ways to death, if you attempt any thing against our love in the tempting of time, or distance, or other beauties, or all the conspiracies of the damned. Then my injured ghost shall be a perpetual terror to your guilty soul, which I will so pursue, that I will make you fly to hell to save you from my more tormenting vengeance. AUBREY: But then, joining his lips fast to hers, all other language was stopped between them both, whilst their souls, ascending to the very extremities of their tongues, began a mystical discourse. DIGBY: A lock of her hair bound my arm, a precious relic to which I prayed in six languages across Europe. Smallpox in Siena, reading Galileo and puzzling at the sun. AUBREY: Elected to the learned academy of Florence, Digby gave ornate speeches about secret modes of writing among the ancients. DIGBY: Long wars of religion all across the zone, I started seeking the true philosophy to dissolve the horror. Months of negotiation in Madrid, trying to fix up Prince Charles with a nice Catholic bride. Drinking, fighting with the lads in boredom over Donna Anna Maria, paragon of the Spanish court, until she believed my devotions and ended in a nunnery. AUBREY: The dashing Sackville, Earl of Dorset, meanwhile, was not put off by one denial of a scornful beauty.


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VENETIA: He kidnapped and drugged me. I woke in darkness, locked in a tower, in a walled garden. He kept me prisoner for days. To escape, in the end, I tied my sheets and my garters together, down the tower, onto the summerhouse roof, vaulted the wall. AUBREY: Then, wandering in horrid woods, a hungry wolf came rushing, and ran at her with open mouth. But a young nobleman that was hunting nearby, hearing her doleful cries, ran speedily thither and quickly made an end of the unhappy beast. Almost dead with fear, and with wounds in several places, she was taken home. DIGBY: I met trouble in France. AUBREY: Marie de Medici, the king's mother, saw him dance. MARIE DE MEDICI: A secret heat creeps through my veins, which grows so violent that I forget my greatness. AUBREY Retired into her chamber, languishing so in melting desires, she almost dies announcing what happiness it would be to die a loving death in the arms of him whose name she yet knows not. Digby remains in confusion at her unlooked-for language. He must kneel, kiss her hand, and delay, calculating what can be said. MARIE DE MEDICI: If you be resolved to struggle with me, this bed is a fitter field for our wars, where after a short conflict you shall see me yield. AUBREY: So Digby reveals the shocking truth. DIGBY: Know then, great Lady, that my heart is not mine own, nay, it is so long that it hath lived in another breast (and beyond my memory) that I cannot tell whether it were born with me or no. AUBREY: Marie's love turns to anger. MARIE DE MEDICI [vast and scary]: No woman certainly was thy mother, nor didst thou ever suck milk from human breast; but Nature, gathering all her seeds of horror, sent thee, a dire prodigy, into the world; and then thou wert nourished with the milk of tigers upon some desert rock. DIGBY: I escaped while she cursed, and bumped straight into mad soldiery sent by King Louis to capture his scary mother. In case she came after me, I got my friends to say I'd been killed in the skirmish, while I wrote to Venetia to explain. AUBREY: But his private letters are intercepted and suppressed by his industrious mother. So Venetia hears only of his death. VENETIA: My senses locked up in lethargy, I became insensible of grief. It took weeks for my doleful nerves to wake as from a dream. All unmixed, I returned to [smiling] Society and there I met that same noble hunter who had saved my life.


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AUBREY: The fellow revealed that, when she lay at the mercy of the merciless wolf, at the first sight of her, he drank into his bowels the secret flames of a deep affection. VENETIA: I gave a half constrained consent to his suit. Why postpone nuptials, when life is over? DIGBY: Nuptials!! My shrunken heart grows thin in cursing all of womankind, for Venetia's sake. I was so possessed with anger and disdain, that if nature had been in my power, I'd have turned the world again into a dark chaos. AUBREY: He cast the lock of her hair into the fire. DIGBY Let it be consumed, and turn into ashes, and let its lighter and aery atoms to mingle into the wind, and disperse into the world, and let those atoms trace her out, and tell her from me that my ghostly shadow shall be everywhere present to her, and so affright her guilty conscience, that she shall gladly run to death to shelter her from my plaguing. AUBREY: In despair Digby practises at piracy, not very well. Once ashore for the winter, yet his heart still adrift, he happened upon a mysterious Brahmin sage lately sallied forth from the Indies and Persia, travelling into the western parts of the world to partake of any sciences which might flourish there. MYSTERIOUS BRAHMIN: Worthy youth, I detect a sadness and deep grief in your brow. Know, sir, that no accident can be so bad in this life, but that the celestial bodies have power to turn it to good. DIGBY: Yes, Reverend Sir, it is blind chance that governs the world, which mingles and shuffles our actions, and retributions, and distributes them with promiscuous error. MYSTERIOUS BRAHMIN: You are not competent, man. It is not chance, but the heavens and stars that govern this world, whose secret characters and influence but few can read. DIGBY: Hmm, sir, but if the stars are the books of fate this implies such a necessity in human actions as in natural ones, that it quite overthrows the freedom of the will. MYSTERIOUS BRAHMIN: But our liberty is entire, for we resonate with the atoms issuing from the sun. When the glancing rays bounce off us, like tennis balls rebounding from a moist wall, they carry off some small particles, sucking us into the wind's great river of impetuous atoms. Know you not, sir, how streams of detectable corpuscles are attracted to particular passages of air, so that a sudden hint of rosemary or some decaying flower halts us in our business, and vultures trace from afar the rotten atoms of a vile carcass? DIGBY: I will not deny that the planets, and the meaner meteors, influence the elements and cause alterations in the humours of the body, and several seasons of the year. And a dog, it's true, scents out the one stone in a heap touched by its master long before. But in this marvellous mixture of all things in all things, we must probe and order the torrential emanations of bodies, to filter and direct our spongy imaginations.


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MYSTERIOUS BRAHMIN: You answer solidly, sharp Englishman, and so to prove of the knot between bodies and spirits, by lively and undeniable experience, I will boldly shape for you what you most desire to be informed of. For after much labour and art I got a real and obedient apparition as I desired, which then I bound into a hallowed book. AUBREY: Though nervous at having commerce with infernal spirits, Digby's anxious mind inflamed his restless thoughts. DIGBY: If you will communicate with me the most recluse mysteries of your profound sciences, I will tell my remediless grief. The malevolent stars engaged my affections to the fairest lady. In her I lived, and she awhile in me. And now in a wild and imperfect relation, I hear she is to marry another. I wish to know, to end my suspended thoughts. AUBREY: The Brahmin drew out of his bosom a little book with pages made of the thin membranes and skins of unborn lambs, inscribed with coloured figures. Which opening, he murmured, and pointed to that object which now stays their steps. The spirit shifts shapes into the sad form of Venetia's dishevelled beauty. [She appears.] Digby doubted it were a goddess or a human creature there sighing and overclouded with grief, his greedy eyes reaping her swelling breast of miraculous snow, the envious vest covering her hard and round paps, where love, though he were frozen, would recover heat again. He repents his angers, runs to take her snowy hand, to find he grasps nothing but air, which discourteously flees from his embraces. MYSTERIOUS BRAHMIN: You two must be joined in one sacred knot. AUBREY: With that he shut his book and suddenly vanished out of Digby's sight. Digby rushes home, forlorn, his bowels even torn in pieces between a sad constancy and tender pity for Venetia's misery. They meet; they challenge each other of much unkindness; they each discharge themselves and fasten the blame upon the other; but soon see more misfortune in it than fault on either side. DIGBY: I challenged the unnecessary hunter in mortal duel, but the coward refused, AUBREY: and conveniently lost interest in Venetia. But her heart is still deadened, and her affections remain at a distance from Digby … until her maids admit him to her chamber one morning as he takes his leave for a journey to the country. The servants retired, he perceives Venetia still fast asleep. DIGBY: I remained awhile in a trance, cursing my fortune that made me see so near the happiness I cannot attain. AUBREY: But at length being transported beyond himself, he concluded not to omit that opportunity, which chance gave him, of laying himself in the same bed by her naked side, which he was sure he could never gain by her consent. DIGBY: So then I made myself unready with the greatest haste and the least noise that might be,


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AUBREY: and put himself between the sheets in the gentlest manner that he could. Venetia half waked with the stirring of the clothes, and turned about to the other side, which made him remain immoveable, whilst his eyes were blessed with the rich sight of the perfectest work that ever Nature brought forth. DIGBY: For as she rolled herself about, the clothes left that part of the bed where she now lay wholly uncovered, and her smock twisted about her fair body, so all her legs and the best part of her thighs were naked, that lay so one over the other… Her paps were like two globes, the uppermost yielding downwards as she lay upon her side, overshadowing a darkness out of which did glisten a few drops of sweat like the diamond sparks of a liquid empire, and from between her coral lips came out a gentle breath, which not smelling of any thing, was yet more fragrant than the morning air. VENETIA: And that was when you did not contain yourself, DIGBY: but growing envious at those coral lips so close kissing one another, made my lips share in the happiness, VENETIA: and I woke up DIGBY: ashamed and angry, a chaste goddess surprised, VENETIA: while you sought to pardon your bold and presumptuous attempt, DIGBY: and you continued to chide as angerly as so sweet a creature could, until VENETIA [fast comic switch]: we decided to get married, DIGBY: in secret, for we still hoped to exact some fortune from my mother VENETIA: and my father, both implacably opposed to the match, and while we settled some business …, though you don't want to believe the gutter press. AUBREY "He married, much against his Mother's consent, that celebrated Beautie and Courtesan, Venetia Stanley, whom Richard Earl of Dorset kept as his Concubine, and had children by her, and settled on her an Annuity of 500 pounds per annum, which after Sir K.D. married was unpaid by the Earle; and for which Annuity Sir Kenelm sued the Earle, after marriage, and recovered it." DIGBY: Radiant women are due a little Indulgency. VENETIA: So we must live with whispers, man and wife in fact only, while I move back to my father's house,


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DIGBY: and we maintain the fresh appetite and ardour of new lovers, VENETIA [complicitous]: free from the inconveniences that necessarily attend upon a settled family, which yet seems a kind of servitude, DIGBY: and too bitter an alloy to the sweetness of the other marriage joys. AUBREY: "He would say that a handsome lusty man that was discreet might make an honest woman out of a Brothell-house." VENETIA [suddenly pregnant]: We made long and discreet preparations, I would stay at my father's house in the country all the time that my newly swelling burden might betray me to strangers' curious eyes, until by coach I could come to London and a private and fit place, with due attendance, for my lying-in. DIGBY: But the day before I am to fetch her, a messenger with exceeding haste tells how Venetia, on horseback by night as is her constant pleasure, to take the air, has by a fall received sore bruises, and being brought speechless home into her chamber, fallen suddenly into labour of childbirth, wanting yet some days of her expected time. VENETIA: With him galumphing away to reach me, with the only one servant I have who is privy to my state, one fearful and inexperienced maid, DIGBY: after a long and dangerous labour, AUBREY: which she bore with such a strange resolution, that, being troubled by times with the visits of her careful father, she never betrayed any part of her pain by weak crying, or so much as any languishing sighs, DIGBY: until she was delivered of a fair son … Kenelm! AUBREY: Digby arrives at last, provides discreetly for the due carriage of all things DIGBY: (wherein I had no easy task) AUBREY: so that the cause of her sickness was not so much as suspected. DIGBY: I remained till you were perfectly reestablished in health, VENETIA: and straight decided to go pirating again, AUBREY: to roar the Mediterranean,


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DIGBY: to give testimony to the world how my affections have nothing abated the edge of my active and vigorous spirits. The King doth much desire me to advance his liquid empire, though he cannot himself this time offer nor funds nor men, nor power of martial law, nor a commission under the Great Seal, so that I must sail as a bold and private adventurer. ALL [this is a fast, carousing, overlapping list]: "Thirteen Short Curiosities, Interruptions, and Obstacles to Piracy" [DIGBY] 1. Having hired the Samuel, a ship of 200 tons, she was burned down to the water by drying

her Bread Room when she was almost ready. [PIRATE 1] 2. The first ship we were able to catch, was laden with salt. [DIGBY] 3. A gunner with several insufficiencies. [PIRATE 2] (He kept missing.) [PIRATE 1] 4. Waiting for scouts to return from the city deep in Africa which had been turned to stone with all in it, men women and children, by a catastrophic wind. [PIRATE 2] 5. The failure of these scouts in their mission. [DIGBY] 6. Long disputes with Sir Edward Stradling, being my Vice-Admiral, touching the indissoluble riddle of a passage in Spenser's noble book the Faerie Queene, the 22

nd section of the 9

th

canto of the 2nd

book, upon which mystical subject to set him right, while anchored in Greece, I took the pains to pen an entire and perfect interpretation. [PIRATE 2] 7. The disgraceful state of our English beef, which I hope the merchants did put up ignorantly, but they drew not the bloodie pickle from it. [DIGBY] 8. In Italy a certain Princess, and in me a certain Devil raining in the blood. God save me that ever I was false. [PIRATE 1] 9. The great Venetian gallions we faced at the heroic battle of Scanderoon, from ten until nightfall, the like of which had never before been beaten. [PIRATE 2] 10. The unfortunate fact that we were not at war with Venice. [DIGBY] 11. The English consul who told us after the great sea victory that our guns had shaken his best wine glasses that stood upon shelves, ashore, [PIRATE 1] and spoiled and cracked all the eggs that his pigeons were then sitting upon, which loss he lamented exceedingly. [PIRATE 2] 12. The price of beefs and hogs on Zante and Cephalonia.


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[DIGBY] 13. The great difficulty at Delos and Mykonos of hauling down the Greek antiquities to take on ship, when one huge statue of Apollo, a brave noble piece, broken a little around the waist, with the yieldings of the flesh and musculous partes visible, took us 300 men a day about it to bring it down and load it and bring it home, to England … AUBREY: Digby returns in triumph. At his knighthood, the King nearly pokes out his eye, and is forced to reveal memories of a severe birth trauma involving his mother’s imagination and a violent sword fight. [That's so weird!] Digby and his mates are granted land in Lancashire and Angola, he’s made commissioner to New England, and gets a monopoly on all trade with Canada for 30 years. There's talk he might be appointed Admiral of the Narrow Seas, or even the next Secretary of State. Quite coincidentally, he converts to the Church of England. DIGBY: I must unweave from my cumbersome affairs a little. Venetia directs all things at home with as much calmness and discretion as if none of it concerned her. Her talk even on May Eve is of the violent ecstasy and transport of the soul in shooting itself forth to its desired object. VENETIA: I pray, my motions vigorous and violent towards God, I am possessed by my soul, to sit whole days poring, as on a map, to find the ways to an eternal rest.

DIGBY: She rarely ventures out of late. She believes, with me, that the urgent path out of this maze of fleeting matter, and into the permanent joys of the spiritual body, can with trial and skill be reproduced. VENETIA: I yearn with a dull percussion to be hammered out and altered into a glorified state, as different from these heavy walls of rotten flesh as is my dry husk from the unlicked form of a vile abortive embryon. DIGBY: She is become a machine of resurrection. AUBREY: Digby is "This Age's Wonder for his Noble Parts, Skilled in six Tongues, and learned in all the Arts."

Digby works on his metals, to change them to gold. If he fails, it's not his fault. The Philosopher's Stone is rare and strange, Colour of poppy, scent of salt. DIGBY: How do we mould our lives to a new form? VENETIA: Between our sittings van Dyck would run with him, tiny on my man's arm, into the new laboratory. But the sulphur is contaminated, or the fire is too hot, or the beech wood is from the wrong corner of Yorkshire. They try to plug themselves in to nature, mimicking and attracting, passionate, while I long to be released, to find the perfect quintessence, not the vipers', some ointment that will lift me free from time and place, so I need desire no more … to be drowned in this present thought … Tonight I am only tired … DIGBY: Chymical processes are violent: boiling, distilling, refining, coagulating, pulverizing, fermenting, congealing, condensing.


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Chymical processes are gentle: encouraging, attracting, dissolving, and wooing with curses and prayers. The balance is fine, we are always on the edge of it, reducing to prime matter, scrubbing away at the characterless essence, and we are always losing it, on the brink of horrid explosion, terrible calamity. [Blackout.] Venetia! AUBREY: "She dyed in her bed, suddenly." She was 32. # # # # # # AUBREY: Eight years after Venetia's death, Digby is still in mourning … [He shifts focus] I needed an angle, so I drove to Gothurst – [exasperated] Goathurst, Gayhurst - to seek him out, zigzagging under the M1 between Digby's and Venetia's childhood homes, a fox suckling five cubs in the middle of the country road. The house stands as it did, with its symmetries on the surface, now divided into apartments, BMWs on the gravel, cows with no memory on the fat English land … I didn’t find this Digby by industriously staring at the vacant portraits by van Dyck, or by falling asleep on rare books in dying libraries. You can follow his chemical recipes, you know, piece together what he ordered to go with him into the tomb … [Back on track] Eight years after Venetia's death, Digby is still in mourning, unable to escape the troubled fancies of reeking sense, a Catholic again. He corresponds with a brilliant French virtuoso, now living in an isolated cottage on a windswept Dutch beach. As civil war brews in England, Digby raises Catholic funds for the Queen. With a Puritan mob at the door of Digby's London house, he's harried into exile, in the times of confusion, his son Kenelm dies in battle for the Royalist cause. Digby tracks down this French philosopher and anatomist, they talk for a week, in loose fantasy. Digby, unkempt, in black, unshaven, hurried, is about to knock on Descartes' door. He has to strike a pose, to compose himself. He knocks, enters immediately, begins talking. DIGBY: Monsieur, you know of course that the imagination is a physical organ, and operates by the mechanical powers of attraction. You have no doubt heard of my powder of sympathy? DESCARTES [masked; interested]: This must be the famous Monsieur D'Igby. DIGBY [so gallant]: Monsieur, if you were not the illustrious Monsieur Des Cartes, you would not have seen me come in haste from England to have the pleasure of seeing you. DESCARTES [curt]: I hear you are excessively fond of Aristotle! DIGBY [pacifying]: Never any one man, it is true, looked so far as Aristotle into the bowels of nature. But sir, your book Discourse on the Method is the production of a most vigorous and strong brain, in its


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empirical part at least. I have told to the English your excellent mechanical philosophy, your meteors, your subtle fluids, and your system of the cosmos by the whirling vortex. [Descartes is pacified, removes mask, welcoming, puzzled at what Digby wants] I believe you, sir, are the master of forgetting. And like me you are intimate with grief? Monsieur, you believe there are remedies for all our passions? DESCARTES [recovering his composure]: I do. You can control your own brain. Monsieur D'Igby - what habits must you industriously undo? You are not still bewitched by memories of past sweetness and of death? DIGBY [acknowledging that he is, telling the story with difficulty]: The morning we found her dead, I had appointed much business, for sending a parcel of excellent English black cloth to Florence and such, and lay that night apart in another chamber, and that was the cause we came so late to the knowledge, when we came in, we found her almost cold and stiff. DESCARTES: Death is not due to the soul leaving the body. Death is only the decay of the organs. DIGBY: I grew as senseless almost as the body I had in my arms, amazement for a while replacing sorrow, and for four days together I did nothing but weep without intermission. DESCARTES [in passing, as psychotherapist]: Indeed this is unnaturally etched in your brain. [He begins to take notes on the case.] AUBREY: Digby had van Dyck back to paint her the day after she died. Then her hair was all cut off, to be kept, and he caused her face to be moulded of as she lay dead, and cast in metal. DIGBY: After two days still she looked if it were possible with more loveliness than while she lived, only paler than the sprightliness of her beauty: but no sinking or smelling or contortion or falling of the lips. I carry her miniature constantly, in it I look death in the face. The last day her body began somewhat to swell up; which the surgeons said they wondered she did not more and sooner, being so fat as afterwards upon opening she appeared to be, and lying in so warm a room. AUBREY: Some suspected that she was poisoned. The King ordered an autopsy. When her head was opened there was found but little brain, much putrefied and corrupted, which spiteful women imputed to her drinking of viper-wine. DIGBY: I never knew a stronger brained woman than she was, and it is strange it should be so with her, who had her brain in such admirable manner consumed as it was found to be when she was opened. AUBREY: All the cerebellum was rotten, and retained not the form of brain but was mere pus and corrupted matter.


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DIGBY: For to impute any cause of her death to viper-wine is without any ground at all. She hath drunke it (as physicke) any time these nine years and ever found it wonderful good. For my own part, I never did not drink any, for I love not the relish of it and need it not. DESCARTES [diagnosing]: The brain might exercise its powers even until the last night, as long as it hung together and gave free passage to the animal spirits … but when all was rotten, it fell of a lump together … the most sudden and least painful death that ever happened. DIGBY: So I can now reverence her as a Saint, already clothed again in the same body immortalized, there where past and future meet in one centre. Even my mother (who was ever most averse to her in show) can say as much, who had resolved at her next meeting to have expressed some kindness, which came too late. AUBREY: She was buried in London, by night funeral, after many hundreds had viewed and kissed her body. Never was woman more lamented, such a throng in the Covent Garden house … DIGBY: … where we had so much company, so much jollity, there since reigneth desolation, loneliness, and sadness. The very walls seem still to mourn. DESCARTES [no-nonsense advice]: You will not scratch out these ill-digested ruminations with building of great black monuments to your Venetia, with carrying of pictures. DIGBY [unabashed]: Wait, Monsieur. I can sometimes fancy to myself particular passages between my wife and me so strongly that me thinks they are even then present with me; I see her and I talk with her. Then my thoughts tumble every corner of her grave, and dwell on that fair body's putrefaction, her lovely face covered over with slime and worms, and her heart has some presumptuous worm feeding on the middle of it. DESCARTES [trying to be knowledgeable]: Many people feel the dread of death at the touch of an earthworm, the sound of a rustling leaf, or their own shadow. Sir are you not comforted in knowing you will join her in a sweeter and more tranquil life than ours? DIGBY: I yearn with extreme passion, yes, for the state of eternity. But I credit in it there is no variety. Souls or angels in that condition do not so much as change a thought. I need forgetfulness now! DESCARTES: Is your memory mingled with guilt? DIGBY: The crookedness and badness that rained in my nature made me contented sometimes to steal an hour's delight with other women; but in my affections, by heaven, I was never false to her, for though sometimes others have been the objects of my desire, yet never any was of my love but only she. And of that, she was fully satisfied. DESCARTES: The spirits of the brain are directly connected to the testicles. This is, as you know Monsieur D'Igby, why men who weary their imagination in books are less suitable for procreation, while those who dissipate their spirits debauching women cannot apply themselves to serious study.


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DIGBY: You must help me! You are skilled in instruments - why can we not order and possess our own interior organs with more profitable machinery? You must build me, Monsieur, an engine of forgetting! Prescribe for me some prosthesis or some healing poison, to snake along the coils of my memory, to forcibly get into the porousness of it and pass with violence between part and part. DESCARTES: [Trying to explain] Sir, you know that the body is porous, full of fluids, full of animal spirits, which never stop in any place? All bodies change, ceaseless motion. What seems to be solid is really fluid, what seems to be empty is really full. It is thus that past things sometimes return to thought as if by chance without being excited by reason or by reality, by the will or by the world. DIGBY: No – my memories are not motions but real bodies, tiny emanations carrying my history, in the caves of the brain wheeling and swimming about, then sliding through my fantasy. Even when I seek and tumble in my own memory, I cannot yet tame this multitude of little inhabitants in my liquid empire. DESCARTES: This is indeed a melancholic doctrine of total recall, and I do wish I could repair you, for these are sad wounds to the brain. But I have not yet the invention which you seek. You can't just decide to forget. DIGBY: [Still hopeful, changing tack.] I hold no faith in your individual intellectual memory, which you say is entirely separated from body. I believe in the resurrection of the flesh, and work always now toward stirring her up again who loved me so extremely. Listen! I run experiments to revivify birds, or flowers, or nettles, from their ashes. All the living creatures of all time were not stored up preformed inside their first parents in the Garden of Eden, but they grow little by little when moulded from their atomical elements. An animal may regenerate without a parent of its own kind: how else could vermin breed out of living bodies, or out of sheer mud and corruption? How else could rats come to fill ships, into which never any were brought? How could frogs be engendered in the air? Eels generated from dewy turfs? Toads born of ducks? Fish, of hens? DESCARTES: And sir what success have you had? DIGBY: I can engender crayfishes, first boiled and baked and reduced to Powder, in the sign of Cancer, and settled in a pail. When you see the new-breeding Cray-fishes as big as a small button, you must feed them with Bullocks blood, from time to time, which will make them grow to their natural bigness. DESCARTES: Your trialling of nature and poking at her edges is agreeable, for we must not spend too much time thinking. For my part, medicine is more important than philosophy, and the conservation of health has been at all times the principal goal of my studies. I hope to cure illness and live more than a hundred years. DIGBY: As you see, Monsieur, I do not wish to live as long as the patriarchs. There is too much already in this tedious and irksome life, my thoughts and desires violently run upon the liquid oceans of the next world. We need not wait! Let us work together to tap the springs and wheels and hinges of God’s plan for our future, as he has left us clues to do. With your glistening automata, and the universal spirit which by maturation and germination I will soon concoct, you can enclose all necessary apparatus in the tomb I have prepared -


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DESCARTES: [Interrupting] Sir for now you must regenerate yourself! We cannot animate our statues, yet, and I am not so well acquainted with the state of the soul as is the good Chevalier D'Igby. But my generous Englishman, your philosophic meditations are very beautiful for one who has passed his life in pursuit of love and ambition. Return if my mastery of nature advances. My teeth are still so firm and strong that I do not think I need fear death for another thirty years, unless it catches me unawares! For now, Monsieur D'Igby, beware chiefly of sadness, for it drieth the brain. [He vanishes.] DIGBY: I now leave myself wholly to God and time, and wrestle not with my afflictions, but must only bleed out some of my sad thoughts in the living. AUBREY: "In the Times of Confusion, when English men rose against their own King, the Bishop of Winchester's lodging in Southwark, being a large Pile of Building, was made a Prison for the Royalists; and here Sir Kenelm Digby wrote his Book of Bodies, and diverted himself in a new means of blowing Glass and making wine bottles, and in Chemistry, and used to make artificial precious Stones, as Rubies, Emeralds, etc, out of Flint." [Holding the book again) Two Treatises, published in Paris in 1644. Embryology, physics, hawks and foxes, DIGBY: theory of light, AUBREY: allergies, magnetism, imagination, plants, chickens, DIGBY: the immortality of the soul, AUBREY: nutrition, vision, vipers, colours, DIGBY: and the resurrection of the body, AUBREY: the powder of sympathy … DIGBY: I write of motions both natural and violent, of the dissolution of mixed bodies, of the beginnings of motion in living creatures, of pain and pleasure caused by the memory of things past, of death and sickness, of the docility of irrational animals, of their prescience and providence of some future events by way of signs and half-seen changes, of the marks of longing seen in children. AUBREY: "He was envoy from Queen Henrietta Maria, then Queen-mother, to the Pope in Rome, where at first he was mightily admired; but after some time he grew high, and Hectored with his Holiness, and gave him the Lie. The Pope said he was mad." Sir Kenelm Digby worked incessantly in his laboratories in London and Paris, travelling the wilds of northern Europe to seek out marvellous salts and nitres. He was one of the first members of the Royal Society of London.


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DIGBY September 4

th, 1661: I communicated a letter from a friend of mine in Florence, concerning a

petrified city and inhabitants, which was ordered to be registered. AUBREY: Before he died, that summer of the plague, Digby made a will. DIGBY: All the properties of this so broken and scanty an estate to my executor Cornwallis …. my debts exceed fifteen thousand pounds. I disappoint my son harshly again. Terrible expenses … costly preparations for the machine. All is ready – the ointment, the instructions - save the ignition, I know not yet the source of the wild inner fire to set the ferment blazing. AUBREY: [Pulling himself together to close his tale] "Sir Kenelm Digby, a gentleman absolute in all numbers, now willed that he should be buried by laying his body as near unto hers as may be who was his greatest worldly blessing while she lived. He laid down that no new inscription or remembrance be made for him upon the tomb, being desirous to be wholly forgotten in this world after his death who scarce did anything in his life that deserves remembering." DIGBY: I will cast myself headlong into that vast liquid Empire of Eternity, where loves are enjoyed with fullness, without intermission, and without fear. An essence free from time and place, allures me sufficiently, that I need desire no more. AUBREY: Christ Church, Newgate, was utterly consumed in the Great Fire of London a year after Digby’s death. How such curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellows as I am put them down. DIGBY: Depth without any surface. All content, all pleasure, all restless rest, all an unquietness and transport of delight, all an ecstasy of fruition. Happy forgetfulness, so may I be drowned in this present thought, and never wake again. # # # # # #

Kenelm Digby and the Liquid Empire

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