Meeting Cosmo

One day in August 1998, still recovering from my heart attack and diligently engaged on my daily 45-minute walk, I bent down and picked up a little (maybe 2 cm x 4 cm) laminated price tag off the bike path. One side had the name of the item—"Cosmo Stone"—the other the name of the store I knew to be just a short distance away—Sole Doctor—a shoe/sandal store. Turned out that Cosmo Stone specified  a model (Cosmo) and colour (Stone) of a (quite pricey) Ecco sandal.

Cosmo exits the birth canal, August 1998

One of Cosmo's cousins. Price in 1998 US dollars 

I immediately thought that reversing the pun would make a great name for a radio serial --"Cosmo Stone, Soul Doctor" -- and then I thought it would be a great name for a sort of alter ego for me in my mysterious creative guise. (Exactly whose soul, and precisely what sort of doctoring, I would leave for Cosmo to find out.) My friend Joe, who was in on this whole mess, liked it so much he started calling me Cosmo. I joked with him that I had a LITTLE SISTER named ROSETTA. I told him I was tired of doing all this detective work and with the heart attack and all, it was probably time to delegate. Cosmo could (perhaps with Rosetta's help) track down and decode this stuff, leaving me free to live my day-to-day and pay the rent.

This was seven months BEFORE I found out that Stanga (the name from which, with the "one letter's difference" clue, I had derived "Stanza") had in fact been a 1971 single by Little Sister, the group composed of SLY STONE's backup singers and named for its leader, his little sister VAETTA (close enough to Rosetta, I thought, and the Family Stone thing worked well) .

 

The 45 with the inexplicable title.

So, name-wise, Cosmo and Rosetta Stone were all set to undertake some high-level sleuthing on my behalf. With my first name (Peter) meaning 'stone' as well, we were all one little happy family.

Our family stone.

[A decree of Ptolemy V Epiphanes in Greek, hieroglyphic Egyptian, and demotic Egyptian on the Rosetta Stone, which was used to decode the Egyptian writing systems, basalt slab from Fort Saint-Julien, Rosetta (Rashīd), Egypt, 196 bce; in the British Museum, London.]

 

Then, browsing through a movie book one day, I discovered a detective comedy from 1943 called COSMO JONES, CRIME SMASHER, apparently derived from a radio serial of the same name. My idea for a radio serial had been right on the money; here was a real one that scanned perfectly, and a comedy to boot! From  the IMDB summary: "Cosmo Jones, a correspondence-school detective from a small town, comes to the big city to offer his services to the police." And from the original poster: "NEW! HILARIOUS!"  "Radio's crack-brain criminologist stands headquarters on its head in his first raid on screen gangsters!" "I'M TELLING YOU FOLKS—HE'S NUTS!"

 

One of Cosmo's ancestors?

Clearly, I had my mojo working when I chose, or literally stumbled upon, Cosmo's name. Perhaps he actually named himself, after this Jones fellow, sort of like Bob Dylan naming himself after Dylan Thomas. (Or so the legend goes; David Hajdu, in Positively Fourth Street, has it that Bob originally started billing himself as Bob Dillon, after Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke fame, later changing it to Dylan "because it looked better.")

Around this time, I was delving into Ted Hughes's idiosyncratic and somewhat obsessive exegesis of the Bard, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. This formidable brick of a book had been a gift from my friend Alex back in 1994—the same Alex who had loaned me his fateful copy of Henry Vaughan earlier that year. And we know who jumped out of that little volume.

I was intrigued by Hughes's sketch of the Hermetic/Cabbalistic Occult Neoplatonism that became a significant strand in the Elizabethan culture of the latter decades of the 16th century, just as Shakespeare was coming into his own as a poet and playwright. A key catalyst in this movement was Giordano Bruno, a passionate and combative Italian ex-monk whose "brand of Occult Neoplatonism was a combination of ancient Egyptian religion, a Copernican universe that was also a gigantic image of the spiritual creation, and a phenomenal cultivation of memory systems." Whoa, there. This sounded like someone we should get acquainted with. What's more, his thought partook of a ladder of correspondences, a "stairway to heaven," if you will, ascending through the natural, mental, spiritual, and angelic worlds all the way to Divine Love—"The One," in Neoplatonistic terms. Then it really gets interesting:

On the way, like the Cabbalist, Bruno strove to open the "black diamond doors" of the psyche, releasing visions, revelations of divine understanding, and even supernatural intelligences and powers. This "magically animated imagination," as he described it, was the key to his teachings. He called his mnemonic images "seals," meaning "sigils," a sigil being the signature of a daemonic being. These entities of Bruno's . . . did not exist as scholastic abstractions . . . . Just as for the Cabbalist, they had personality and were open to human negotiation, accessible to the attuned mind of the magically trained adept . . . and were able, properly handled, to raise him to near god-like awareness and being. So it was claimed.

Love that deadpan "So it was claimed."

I was thinking about Cosmo, the Soul Doctor of my recent acquaintance, when I stumbled on the fact that Bruno's own term for himself was "the awakener of sleeping souls." Hmm. It wasn't that I was going to identify Cosmo with Bruno necessarily, but the "correspondence" did endow Cosmo's name and title with a little extra shimmer in my mind.

And so began an exploration, in fits and starts, of Bruno's philosophy, his vision, his magic. He was enthusiastically enrolled in my little Neoplatonist Club with the others, and from that time he's always been a well-thumbed entry in my mental Rolodex. Although little of his work, even now, is accessible in translation, he has been much written about, going way back into the 19th century, and his influence on certain strains of modern thought is persistent. Then S.J. Parris's Heresy appeared in 2010, the first of (so far) six historical detective novels featuring—you guessed it—our favourite heretic, solving crimes during his years at Oxford in the 1580s.

Giordano Bruno, Crime Smasher. I like the sound of it.

"Book him, Giordano."