Giordano Filippo Bruno, that implacable figure, had vagabonded across the face of Europe before he was arrested, imprisoned, inquisitioned, and burned at the stake for multiple heresies against the doctrines of the Church. It took 8 years for the inquisitorial process to consummate, lengthy in comparison to the swifter martyrships of the devout. During the 44 years spent before his detainment, Bruno accumulated a surplus of occult know-how and managed to traffick his mystical wares in as many locales as do the merchants and frequent fliers of today.
Born in Nola, Campania (he was simply, “the Nolan”) and educated in Naples, Bruno entered the Dominican Order at age 15, was ordained a priest at age 24; these 11 years were spent relatively peaceably in the monastic order, a few eccentricities intermittently setting him afoul with his brethren. Eventually, an annotated copy of Erasmus and the suspicion that Bruno shared sympathetic thought with the Arian heresy set in motion an inquisition to be prepared against him. Quick-witted and fleet-footed, Bruno fled Naples. But he had already acquired the skill that would place him apart from his contemporaries and grace him with a sustainable nomadism from court to kingdom to hovel: the art of memory.
Well-versed in the Dominican Order’s method of memory-advancement and study, he set off to Noli, then Savona, then Turin; afterwards, Venice. His wandering only increased more when he left Venice: Padua, Bergamo, then across the Alps to Chambery and Lyon; at Geneva he settled for a time with the Calvinists, who later kicked him out; back in France — in Toulouse — he was denied certain sacraments by the Jesuits; in Paris, the chief cosmopolitan city, Bruno enjoyed a freer, liberal atmosphere. 
His gift for memorization astonished his French patrons and lifted his fame as high up to Henri III‘s inspection. Taking advantage of his celebrity, he published consecutive works on mnemonics in a short span. Bruno’s fame translated to England, where he landed and stayed for 2 years, hooking up with Sir Phil Sidney and hobnobbing with John Dee‘s associates. (There were still, as always, his detractors, Oxford sneezers who believed him a short southern-blooded crank.) Political tension between England and France caused Bruno to retreat to Paris with his arch patron, the diplomat Michel de Castelnau. A quarrel in Paris with Fabrizio Mordente over the latter’s invention of a remarkable compass (on which Bruno, with his usual impudence, wrote 4 disparaging dialogues describing the inability of Mordente, a mere geometer, to comprehend the metaphysical extent of his own invention) packed Bruno off to Germany; Mordente desired police action. First stop was Marburg, then Lutheran Wittenberg, then Catholic Prague, and afterwards Helmstedt, where he was excommunicated by the Lutherans for pissing them off. Nevertheless, in Germany the prolific Bruno found the air and impetus to publish more works on magic, divination, and general hermeneutics.
At Frankfurt, through a connect with a local bookseller, Bruno came into contact with Giovanni Mocenigo, a Venetian nobleman who desired to learn memory-craft from him. He invited the Nolan over to Venice, and Bruno, despite firmly remembering the hazard his unpopularity in Venice had nearly caused him, accepted to return and teach Mocenigo privately. A short time later Bruno announced he’d be parting from Mocenigo and Venice, probably sensing the wealthy scion’s growing distaste for him: the goods, according to Mocenigo, were tainted. Evidently reaching beyond sheer memory tricks, Bruno’s otherworldly belief system sprung out and slapped the vain nobleman in the face. Mocenigo, in that prompt secretive manner of Renaissance conspirators, denounced Bruno to the local authorities, and 8 years later, Bruno was condemned to die as Joan of Arc did, by maddening licking fire, for promulgating heresies and dealing in pirated magic (non-doctrinal), among other accusations (he appeared to give credence to the Arian thought that Jesus was no more than an extraordinary wizard — maybe even the best — and hardly in scale with the monistic concept of the infinity of God). More likely, Giordano Bruno died for the same reason Joan of Arc did and other practitioners of solid-iron resolve; because he was abnormally confident of his near-messianic purpose: he believed in the immortality of his memory. The authorities were perhaps chill-stricken by fear. The man simply remembered too much and too well. This skill of his had to be something more than just stellar memory performativity; something like a diabolic machine was in that head of his, or so they imagined. He was a conjurer of a foreign and utterly artificial memory.
Xenophanes long long before Bruno authored the fragment: “I tossed about, bearing myself from city to city.” Bruno, we see, tossing and turning and freewheeling, did so too. Like Xenophanes, Bruno believed in the plurality of worlds; that is, in the multiverse, the concept of multiple and equally habitable universes occurring at once. Part and parcel of this, Bruno agreed that metempsychosis was a valid natural process. He declared to his inquisitors and executioners: “Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.” Maybe they feared he’d commit quantum suicide: he’d come back new as before, at a non-zero time when they were old and shrivel-sacked, in a shinier grander world equidistant to that in which his ashes are petalled across the Campo dei Fiori. And indeed, in a world of computer science and gargantuan databanks of memory and the increasing stretch of server-space which expands the news of man by far more than what man has to feed it, Giordano Bruno is fearlessly relevant.
One of the memory graphs that was burned in the fire that consumed him described a closed windowless room in which a hermetic figure — a man bound to a pyre — faces a table on which an hourglass and a poised flaming arrow (directed at the pyre) are set. The hourglass measures the time in which the flaming arrow will be launched, automatically, by a weight activated once the hourglass runs its course. 
The weight is only minimally held up by a cord that may give way even before the hourglass runs out; or the cord may sustain the weight, even against the hourglass’ standard operating procedure, by an equally possible anomalous malfunction. While the man, the pyre, the hourglass, and the room are to be considered fixed eternities, the thin subtle cord, representing all the tension and pressure of the scene, symbolizes the sole random element. In this scenario, hence, it is possible that the cord won’t give way, and the man will continue to live and read the news and copulate; or the cord will give way, and the arrow irrevocably sail across the monstrously small room to light up the man’s fate forever. The hermetic figure of the man thus may be alive or dead, or both at the same time, in a room inaccessible to us, because it is mythical. The physical evidence of this chart is now lost because it was placed in that circular immortal box in which Giordano Bruno kept all his vital news and quid: his head. Yet even in quantum physics the spectre of magic persists, only this time in a manner commensurable to our attention, in the folklore of scientists.
(To be continued)
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