Vesalius Constellated

Note: this experimental-fiction story was originally published on 11 November 2023, on my Substack newsletter, The Traveler’s Literary Supplicant.

By Christopher Deliso

The information comes together and falls apart again, quick as if under a knife; a swift blade of discernment, yet one that cannot end the vexation of a returned aggregation of possibilities. Considered as questions, or hypotheses, they tend to cluster and multiply if untreated…

By now you will have been endured, in rapid consultations, with all the criticks and the doctors, the good physicians of the written word; and worse served, you will have been, finding no perfect future can continue much less, exist, absent a convincing explanation for the mystery of the death of Vesalius.

Surely it was the winds, you will have already thought; those October Ionian winds… but still to you this will have been stricken as insufficiently fair, or at least overly capricious a remedy… as an explanation, it lacks symmetry.

Leaving aside the anatomist’s work on the nervous system, the vascular, the optic nerve and heart, you will have been suspicious of the Inquisition and its agents, its detractors and the averred disinformation of certain diplomats; you will, perhaps, have fallen under the spell of O’Malley and explained the whole pilgrimage to Jerusalem away as a polite excuse to leave the Spanish court while awaiting a research commission- for certainly it would just have been the self-serving slander of Renaissance men, to conjecture that an imperial death-sentence had been commuted to the lesser punishment of pilgrimage, after the anatomist’s alleged dissection of a still-living body!

And you will have been poorly served at every turn, from the Swedenborg scholars who had encountered no definite connection despite the similar theory of correspondence, to the much-later (in other times) laconic authors who reveal not their sources…

And from there you will have been in rapid consultations, astonished by certain symmetrical nodes of of 1564 Zakynthos, where the physician, returning from Jerusalem in a Venetian ship, under promise (or pretense?) of a new professorship, had been scattered on the begrudging rocks; and even if he made it a few days ashore, Vesalius was left destitute and dead, though – and you will have been gratified by this –  the kindness of an anonymous local accounted for his burial in the Santa Maria Delle Grazie; and further you will have despaired at its sack and devourment by earthquakes in later times.

Although it is unknown where he himself is buried, Vesalius’ anonymous benefactor achieved much more than poetic justice; for his  name or station was erratically acquired in the act of flipping through a dictionary, some years later, bringing peace to many for all eternity; as for Vesalius, you will have already been reconciled, I think, to seeking him out not below, in archeology’s moody wet ruins, but above, in the crystalline stillness of Zakynthos night, when laying back looking up at the stars, you will have been inscribed with some inscrutable sign of the anatomist’s end, and, flooded at once with all his rediscovered ancient knowledge that was suppressed, excised and surgically removed from his scientific texts, for fear of what a healed world might yet achieve… the corresponding symmetries for you will be even-drawn.