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Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum

Page 23

by eco umberto foucault


  There was homeopathic wisdom in that advice. I struck the agogo, trying to fall in with the beat of the drums, and gradually I became part of the event, and, becoming part of it, I controlled it. I found relief by moving my legs and feet, I freed myself from what surrounded me, I challenged it, I embraced it. Later, Aglie was to talk to me about the diiference between the man who knows and the man who undergoes.

  As the mediums fell into trances, the cambones led them to the sides of the room, sat them down, offered them cigars and pipes. Those of the faithful who had been denied possession ran and knelt at their feet, whispered in their ears, listened to their advice, received their beneficent influence, poured out confessions, and drew comfort from them. Some hovered at the edges of trance, and the cambones gently encouraged them, leading them, now more relaxed, back among the crowd.

  In the dancing area many aspirants to ecstasy were still moving. The German woman twitched unnaturally, waiting to be visited¡Xin vain. Others had been taken over by Exu and were making wicked faces, sly, astute, as they moved in jerks.

  It was then that I saw Amparo.

  Now I know that Hesed is not only the Sefirah of grace and love. As Diotallevi said, it is also the moment of expansion of the divine substance, which spreads out to the edge of infinity. It is the care of the living for the dead, but someone also must have observed that it is the care of the dead for the living.

  Striking the agogd, I no longer followed what was happening in the hall, focused as I was on my own control, letting myself be led by the music. Amparo must have come in at least ten minutes before, and surely she had felt the same effect I had experienced earlier. But no one had given her an agogo, and by now she probably wouldn't have wanted one. Called by deep voices, she had stripped herself of all defenses, of all will.

  I saw her fling herself into the midst of the dancing, stop, her abnormally tense face looking upward, her neck rigid. Then, oblivious, she launched into a lewd saraband, her hands miming the offer of her own body. "A Pomba Gira, a Pomba Gira!" some shouted, delighted by the miracle, since until then the she-devil had not made her presence known. O seu manto 6 de veludo, rebordado todo em ouro, o seu garfo 6 de prata, muito grande e seu tesouri...Pomba Gira das Almas, vein toma cho cho...

  I didn't dare intervene. I may have accelerated the strokes of my little bar, trying to join carnally with my woman, or with the indigenous spirit she now incarnated.

  The cambones went to her, had her put on the ritual vestment, and held her up as she came out of her brief but intense trance. They led her to a chair. She was soaked with sweat and breathed with difficulty. She refused to welcome those who rushed over to beg for oracles. Instead, she started crying.

  The gira was coming to an end. I left the platform and ran to Amparo. Aglie was already there, delicately massaging her temples.

  "How embarrassing!" Amparo said. "I don't believe in it, I didn't want to. How could I have done this?"

  "It happens," Aglie said softly, "it happens."

  "But then there's no hope," Amparo cried. "I'm still a slave. Go away," she said to me angrily. "I'm a poor dirty black girl. Give me a master; I deserve it!"

  "It happens to blond Achaeans, too," Aglie consoled her. "It's human nature..."

  Amparo asked the way to the toilet. The rite was ending. The German woman was still dancing, alone in the middle of the hall, ostentatious but now listless. She had followed Amparo's experience with envious eyes.

  Amparo came back about ten minutes later, as we were taking our leave of the pai-de-santo, who congratulated us on the splendid success of our first contact with the world of the dead.

  Aglie drove in silence through the night. When he stopped outside our house, Amparo said she wanted to go upstairs alone. "Why don't you take a little walk," she said to me. "Come back when I'm asleep. I'll take a pill. Excuse me, both of you. I really must have eaten something I shouldn't have. All those women tonight must have. I hate my country. Good night."

  Aglie understood my uneasiness and suggested we go to an all-night bar in Cppacabana.

  At the bar I didn't speak. Aglie waited until I had started sipping my batida before he broke the silence.

  "Race¡Xor culture, if you prefer¡Xis part of our unconscious mind. And in another part of that unconscious dwell archetypes, figures identical for all men and in all centuries. This evening, the atmosphere, the surroundings lulled our vigilance. It happened to all of us; you felt it yourself. Amparo discovered that the orixas, whom she has destroyed in her heart, still live in her womb. You must not think I consider this a positive thing. You have heard me speak respectfully of the supernatural energies that vibrate around us in this country. But I have no special fondness for the practices of possession. An initiate is not the same as a mystic. Being an initiate¡Xhaving an intuitive comprehension of what reason cannot explain¡Xis a very deep process; it is a slow transformation of the spirit and of the body, and it can lead to the exercise of superior abilities, even to immortality. But it is secret, intimate; it does not show itself externally; it is modest, lucid, detached. That is why the Masters of the World, initiates, do not indulge in mysticism. For them, a mystic is a slave, a site of the manifestation of the numinous, through which site the signs of a secret can be observed. The initiate encourages the mystic and uses him as you might use a telephone, to establish long-distance contact, or as a chemist might use litmus paper, to detect the action of a particular substance. The mystic is useful, because he is conspicuous. He broadcasts himself. Initiates, on the contrary, are recognizable only to one another. It is they who control the forces that mystics undergo. In this sense there is no difference between the possession experienced by the cavalos and the ecstasies of Saint Theresa of Avila or Saint John of the Cross. Mysticism is a degenerate form of contact with the divine, whereas initiation is the fruit of long askesis of mind and heart. Mysticism is a democratic, if not demagogic, phenomenon; initiation is aristocratic."

  "It is mental as opposed to carnal?"

  "In a sense. Your Amparo was guarding her mind tenaciously, but she was not on guard against her body. The lay person is weaker than we are."

  It was late. Aglie informed me that he was leaving Brazil. He gave me his Milan address.

  I went home and found Amparo asleep. I lay down beside her in silence, in the dark, and spent a sleepless night. It was as if there were an unknown being next to me.

  In the morning Amparo told me that she was going to Petrdp-olis to visit a girlfriend. We said good-bye awkwardly.

  She left with a canvas bag, a volume of political economy under her arm.

  For two months she sent me no word, and I made no attempt to seek her out. Then she wrote me a brief, evasive letter, telling me she needed time to think. I didn't answer.

  I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.

  I stayed in Brazil for another year, with the constant feeling that I was on the brink of departure. I didn't see Aglie again, I didn't see any of Amparo's friends. I spent long, long hours on the beach, sunbathing.

  I flew kites, which down there are very beautiful.

  GEVURAH

  34

  Beydelus, Demeymes, Adulex, Matucgayn, Atine, Ffex, Uquizuz, Ga-dix, Sol, Veni cito cum tuis spiritibus.

  ¡XPicatrix, Sloane Ms. 1305, 152, verso

  The Breaking of the Vessels. Diotallevi was to talk to us often about the late cabalism of Isaac Luria, in which the orderly articulation of the Sefirot was lost. Creation, Luria held, was a process of divine inhalation and exhalation, like anxious breathing or the action of the bellows.

  "God's asthma," Belbo glossed.

  "You try creating from nothing. It's something you do once in your life. God blows the world as you would blow a glass bubble, and to do that He takes a deep breath, holds it, and emits the long luminous hiss of the ten Sefirot."

  "A hiss of light?"

  "God hissed, and there was l
ight."

  "Multimedia."

  "But the lights of the Sefirot must be gathered in vessels that can contain their splendor without shattering. The vessels destined to receive Keter, Hokhmah, and Binah withstood their magnificence, but for the lower Sefirot, from Hesed to Yesod, light was exhaled too strongly in a single burst, and the vessels broke. Fragments of light were spilled into the universe, and gross matter was thus born."

  The breaking of the vessels was a catastrophe, Diotallevi said. What could be more unbearable than an aborted world? There must have been some defect in the cosmos from the beginning, and not even the most learned rabbis had been able to explain it completely. Perhaps at the moment God exhaled and was emptied, a few drops of oil lay in the first receptacle, a material residue, the reshimu, thus adulterating God's essence. Or perhaps the seashells^the qelippot, the beginnings of ruin¡Xwere slyly waiting in ambush somewhere.

  "Slippery folk, those qelippot," Belbo said. "Agents of the diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu. And then what happened?"

  And then, Diotallevi patiently explained, in the light of Severe Judgment, or Gevurah¡Xalso known as Pachad, or Terror¡Xthe Sefirah in which, according to Isaac the Blind, Evil first shows itself, the seashells acquired a real existence.

  "Then the seashells are in our midst," Belbo said.

  "Just look around you," Diotallevi said.

  "But is there no way out?"

  "There's a way back in, actually," Diotallevi said. "All emanates from God, in the contraction of simsum. The problem is to bring about tikkun, the restoration of Adam Qadmon. Then we will rebuild everything in the balanced structure of the par-zufim, the faces¡Xor, rather, forms¡Xthat will take the place of the Sefirot. The ascension of the soul is like a cord of silk that enables devout intention, groping in the darkness, to find the path to the light. And so the world constantly strives, by combining the letters of the Torah, to regain its natural form, to emerge from its horrible confusion."

  And this is what I am doing now, in the middle of the night, in the unnatural calm of these hills. The other evening in the periscope, however, I was still mired in the slime of the seashells I felt afl around me, of the slugs trapped in the crystal cases of the Conservatoire, among the barometers and rusted clockworks, in deaf hibernation. I thought then that if there had been a breaking of the vessels, the first crack probably appeared that evening in Rio, during the rite, but it was on my return to my native country that the shattering occurred. It happened slowly, soundlessly, so that we all found ourselves caught in the morass of gross matter, where noxious vermin emerge by spontaneous generation.

  When I returned from Brazil, I hardly knew who I was anymore. I was approaching thirty. At that age, my father was a father; he knew who he was and where he lived.

  I had been too far from my country while prodigious things were happening. I had lived in a world swollen with the incredible, where events in Italy wore a halo of legend. Shortly before leaving the other hemisphere¡Xit was near the end of my stay and I was treating myself to an airplane ride over the forests of Amazonia¡XI picked up a local newspaper during a stopover in Fortaleza. On the front page was a prominent photograph of someone I recognized: I had seen him sipping white wine at Pilade's for years. The caption read: "O homem que matou Moro."

  When I got back, I found out that, of course, he wasn't the man who killed Moro. Handed a loaded pistol, he would have shot himself in the ear when checking to see if it worked. What had happened was simply that an antiterrorist squad had burst in on him and found three pistols and two packs of explosives hidden under the bed. He was lying on the bed, since it was the only piece of furniture in that one-room apartment, whose rent was shared by a group of survivors of ¡¥68 who used it as a place to satisfy the demands of the flesh. If its sole decoration hadn't been a poster of Che, the place could have been taken for any bachelor's pied-a-terre. But one of the tenants belonged to an armed group, and the others had no idea that they were financing the group's safe house. They all ended up in jail for a year.

  I understood very little of what had happened in Italy over the past few years. The country had been on the brink of great changes when I left¡Xleft guiltily, feeling almost that I was running away at the moment of the settling of scores. Before I left, I could tell a man's ideology just by the tone of his voice. I was back and now could not figure out who was on whose side. No one was talking about revolution; the new thing was the unconscious. People who claimed to be leftists quoted Nietzsche and Celine, while right-wing magazines hailed revolution in the Third World.

  I went back to Pilade's, but I felt I was on foreign soil. The billiard table was still there, and more or less the same painters, but the young fauna had changed. I learned that some of the old customers had opened schools of transcendental meditation or macrobiotic restaurants. Apparently nobody had thought of a tenda de umbanda yet. Maybe I was ahead of the times.

  To appease the historic hard core, Pilade still had one of those old-fashioned pinball machines, the kind that now seemed copied from a Lichtenstein painting and were bought up wholesale by antique dealers. Next to it, however, the younger customers crowded around other machines, machines with fluorescent screens on which stylized hawks or kamikazes from Planet X hovered, or frogs jumped around grunting in Japanese. Pilade's was an arcade of sinister flashing lights, and couriers from the Red Brigades on recruiting missions may well have been taking their turn at the Space Invaders screen. But they couldn't play the pinball; you can't play pinball with a pistol stuck in your belt.

  I realized this one night when I followed Belbo's gaze and saw Lorenza Pellegrini at the machine. Or, rather, when I later read one of his files. Lorenza isn't named, but it's obviously about her. She was the only one who played pinball like that.

  FILENAME: Pinball

  You don't play pinball with just your hands, you play it with the groin too. The pinball problem is not to stop the ball before it's swallowed by the mouth at the bottom, or to kick it back to midfield like a halfback. The problem is to make it stay up where the lighted targets are more numerous and have it bounce from one to another, wandering, confused, delirious, but still a free agent. And you achieve this not by jolting the ball but by transmitting vibrations to the case, the frame, but gently, so the machine won't catch on and say Tilt. You can only do it with the groin, or with a play of the hips that makes the groin not so much bump, as slither, keeping you on this side of an orgasm. And if the hips move according to nature, it's the buttocks that supply the forward thrust, but gracefully, so that when the thrust reaches the pelvic area, it is softened, as in homeopathy, where the more you shake a solution and the more the drug dissolves in the water added gradually, until the drug has almost entirely disappeared, the more medically effective and potent it is. Thus from the groin an infinitesimal pulse is transmitted to the case, and the machine obeys, the ball moves against nature, against inertia, against gravity, against the laws of dynamics, and against the cleverness of its constructor, who wanted it disobedient. The ball is intoxicated with vis movendi, remaining in play for memorable and immemorial lengths of time. But a female groin is required, one that interposes no spongy body between the ileum and the machine, and there must be no erectile matter in between, only skin, nerves, padded bone sheathed in a pair of jeans, and a sublimated erotic fury, a sly frigidity, a disinterested adaptability to the partner's response, a taste for arousing desire without suffering the excess of one's own: the Amazon must drive the pinball crazy and savor the thought that she will then abandon it.

  * * *

  That, I believe, was when Belbo fell in love with Lorenza Pellegrini: when he realized that she could promise him an unattainable happiness. But I also believe it was through her that he began to be aware of the erotic nature of automated universes, the machine as metaphor of the cosmic body, the mechanical game as talismanic evocation. He was already hooked on Abu-lafia and perhaps had entered, even then, into the spirit of Project Hermes. Certainly he had seen the P
endulum. Somehow, Lorenza Pellegrini held out the promise of the Pendulum.

  I had trouble readjusting to Pilade's. Little by little, but not every evening, in the forest of alien faces, I was rediscovering familiar ones, the faces of survivors, though they were blurred by my effort of recognition. This one was a copywriter in an advertising agency; this one, a tax consultant; and this one sold books on the installment plan¡Xin the old days he peddled the works of Che, but now he was offering herbals, Buddhism, astrology. They had gained a little weight and some gray in their hair, but I felt that the Scotch-on-the-rocks in their hands was the same one they had held ten years ago. They were sipping slowly, one drop every six months.

  "What are you up to? Why don't you come by and see us?" one of them asked me.

  "Who's M* nowadays?"

  He looked at me as if I'd been away for a century. "The Cultural Commission at City Hall, of course."

  I had skipped too many beats.

  I decided to invent a job for myself. I knew a lot of things, unconnected things, but I wanted to be able to connect them after a few hours at a library. I once thought it was necessary to have a theory, and that my problem was that I didn't. But nowadays all you needed was information; everybody was greedy for information, especially if it was out of date. I dropped in at the university, to see if I could fit in somewhere. The lecture halls were quiet; the students glided along the corridors like ghosts, lending one another badly made bibliographies. I knew how to make a good bibliography.

  One day, a doctoral candidate, mistaking me for faculty (the teachers now were the same age as the students, or vice versa), asked me what this Lord Chandos they were talking about in an economics course on cyclical crises had written. I told him Chandos was a character in Hofmannsthal, not an economist.

 

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