The Eternal Office

The seven pieces gathered in this volume are Brantley’s apocrypha: invented books, recovered voices, visionary and liturgical texts, the archaeology of libraries that never existed.

The book opens at a writing desk and ends at a furnace. “On Ων” begins with Arthur Machen’s lament for “the dreamed, intended book” that the actual book never becomes – and everything that follows may be read as an answer to that lament: a sequence of dreamed, intended books made briefly actual. From the war god’s eternal office the sequence passes to the torn singer of “Orpheos Agonautika,” then to the vast central mandala of “A Corpus,” through the Blakean apocrypha of “Apollyon” and the hermetic “House of the Holy Light”, and closes with “A Dead Man’s House”, in which a widow gives a final tour of a library of impossible books before committing them to the fire. A collection of invented books that ends by burning a library of them: I do not believe Avy would have objected to the arrangement.

Two pieces require particular comment. “The Apocrypha of Apollyon” survives in three files of the estate – a fuller redaction, an earlier parallel draft, and a sheaf of working notes – and is printed here deliberately as a workshop text: a collated master with its sigla, its bracketed descriptions of Blake’s invented plates, its textual apparatus of variants, and its appendix of raw notes. The reader who wants to see the gilt-dappled stars of the MT Geniture or the burnt sienna of “The Honey Song” must paint them in imagination, from descriptions of pictures that were never painted, in a text that was never finished, attributed to plates Blake never made. To smooth this into a clean reading text would have been to destroy precisely the vertigo it was built to produce. The apparatus records, among other things, one decision I have declined to make: whether “The Honey Song” is inked in yellowish ochre or in burnt sienna. Both are true; the manuscripts disagree.

The piece here titled “The House of the Holy Light” is untitled in the manuscript; the title is mine, and it points at the work's model. In 1904 Arthur Machen and A. E. Waite privately printed a cryptic hermetic book called “The House of the Hidden Light” – in an edition of just three copies: a real book that is itself nearly a phantom. Brantley’s piece is an apocryphon upon it: partly pastiche, partly séance, a lodge-ritual conducted in Machen’s and Waite’s cadences. Machen thus stands at both doors of this volume, in the epigraph of the first piece and the fabric of the last but one. Both he and Waite have long since entered the public domain; the ghosts, as far as I can determine, have raised no objection.