Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum

by eco umberto foucault

  Among the Diabolicals, I moved with the ease of a psychiatrist who becomes fond of his patients, enjoying the balmy breezes that waft from the ancient park of his private clinic. After a while he begins to write pages on delirium, then pages of delirium, unaware that his sick people have seduced him. He thinks he has become an artist. And so the idea of the Plan was born.

  Diotallevi went along with the game because, for him, it was a form of prayer. As for Jacopo Belbo, I thought he was having as much fun as I was. I realize only now that he derived no real pleasure from it. He took part in it nervously, anxiously biting his nails. Or, rather, he played along, in the hope of finding at least one of the unknown addresses, the stage without footlights, which he mentions in the file named Dream. A surrogate theology for an angel that will never appear.

  FILENAME: Dream

  I don't remember if I dreamed one dream within another, or if they followed one another in the course of the same night, or if they alternated night by night.

  I am looking for a woman, a woman I know, I have had an intense relationship with her, but cannot figure out why I let it cool, it was my fault, not keeping in touch. Inconceivable, that I could have allowed so much time to go by. I am looking for her¡Xor for them, there is more than one woman, there are many, I lost them all in the same way, through neglect¡Xand I am seized by uncertainty, because even just one would be enough for me, because I know this: in losing them, I have lost much. As a rule, in my dream, I cannot find, no longer possess, am unable to bring myself to open the address book where the phone number is written, and even if I do open it, it's as if I were farsighted, I can't read the names.

  I know where she is, or, rather, I don't know where the place is, but I know what it's like. I have the distinct memory of a stairway, a lobby, a landing. I don't rush about the city looking for the place; instead, I am frozen, blocked by anguish, I keep racking my brain for the reason I permitted¡Xor wanted¡Xthe relationship to cool, the reason I failed to show up at our last meeting. She's waiting for a call from me, I'm sure. If only I knew her name. I know perfectly well who she is, I just can't reconstruct her features.

  Sometimes, in the half-waking doze that follows, I argue with the dream. You remember everything, I say, you've settled all your scores, there's no unfinished business. There is no place you remember whose location you don't know. There is nothing to the dream.

  But the suspicion remains that I have forgotten something, left something among the folds of my eagerness, the way you forget a bank note or a paper with an important fact in some small marsupial pouch of your trousers or old jacket, and it's only later that you realize it was the most important thing of all, crucial, unique.

  Of the city I have a clearer image. It's Paris. I'm on the Left Bank. And when I cross the river, I find myself in a square that could be Place des Vosges...no, more open, because at the end stands a kind of Madeleine. Passing the square, moving behind the temple, I come to a street¡Xthere's a secondhand bookshop on the corner¡Xthat curves to the right, through a series of alleys that are unquestionably the Barrio Gotico of Barcelona. It could turn into a very broad avenue full of lights, and it's on this avenue¡Xand I remember it with the clarity of a photograph¡Xthat I see, to the right, at the end of a blind alley, the Theater.

  I'm not sure what happens in that place of pleasure, no doubt something entertaining and slightly louche, like a striptease. For this reason I don't dare make inquiries, but I know enough to want to return, full of excitement. In vain: toward Chatham Road the streets become confused.

  I wake with the taste of failure, an encounter missed. I cannot resign myself to not knowing what I've lost.

  Sometimes I'm in a country house. It's big, I know there's another wing, but I've forgotten how to reach it, as if the passage has been walled up. In that other wing there are rooms and rooms. I saw them once, and in detail, thoroughly¡Xit's impossible that I dreamed them in another dream¡Xwith old furniture and faded engravings, brackets supporting little nineteenth-century toy theaters made of punched cardboard, sofas with embroidered coverlets, and shelves filled with books, a complete set of the Illustrated Journal of Travel and of Adventures on Land and Sea. It's not true that they came apart from being read so often and that Mama gave them to the trash man. I wonder who got the corridors and stairs mixed up, because that is where I would have liked to build my buen retire, in that odor of precious junk.

  * * *

  Why can't I dream of college entrance exams like everybody else?

  65

  ....the frame....was twenty foot square, placed in the middle of the room. The superficies was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered on every square with paper pasted on them, and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions, but without any order...The pupils at his command took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the lads to read the several lines softly as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys...

  ¡XJonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, III, 5

  I believe that in embellishing his dream, Belbo returned once again to the idea of lost opportunity and his vow of renunciation, to his life's failure to seize¡Xif it ever existed¡Xthe Moment. The Plan began because Belbo had now resigned himself to creating private, fictitious moments.

  I asked him for some text or other, and he rummaged through the papers on his desk, where there was a heap of manuscripts perilously piled one on top of the other, with no concern for weight or size. He found the one he was looking for and tried to slip it out, thus causing the others to spill to the floor. Folders came open; pages escaped their flimsy containers.

  "Couldn't you have moved the top half first?" I asked. Wasting my breath: this was how he always did it.

  He replied, as he always did: "Gudrun will pick them up this evening. She has to have a mission in life; otherwise she loses her identity."

  But this time I had a personal stake in the safety of the manuscripts, because I was now part of the firm. "Gudrun won't be able to put them back together," I said. "She'll put the wrong pages in the wrong folders."

  "If Diotallevi heard you, he'd rejoice. A way of producing different books, eclectic, random books. It's part of the logic of the Diabolicals."

  "But we'd find ourselves in the situation of the cabalists: taking millennia to discover the right combination. You're simply using Gudrun in place of the monkey that spends an eternity at the typewriter. As far as evolution goes, we've made no progress. Unless there's some program in Abulafia to do this work."

  Meanwhile Diotallevi had come in.

  "Of course there is," Belbo said, "and in theory you could have up to two thousand entries. All that's needed is the data and the desire. Take, for example, poetry. The program asks you how many lines you want in the poem, and you decide: ten, twenty, a hundred. Then the program randomizes the line numbers. In other words, a new arrangement each time. With ten lines you can make thousands and thousands of random poems. Yesterday I entered such lines as ¡¥And the linden trees quiver,"Thou sinister albatross,"The rubber plant is free,"I offer thee my life,' and so on. Here are some of my better efforts."

  I count the nights, the sistrum sounds....

  Death, thy victory,

  Death, thy victory....

  The rubber plant is free.

  From the heart of dawn

  Thou sinister albatross.

  (The rubber plant is free...)

  Death, thy victory.

  And the linden trees quiver,

  I count the nights, the sistrum sounds,

  The hoopoe awaits me,
r />   And the linden trees quiver.

  "It's repetitive, yes, but repetitions can make poetic sense." "Interesting," Diotallevi said. "This reconciles me to your machine. So if we fed it the entire Torah and told it¡Xwhat's the term?¡Xto randomize, it would perform some authentic temurah, recombining the verses of the Book?" "Yes, but it's a question of time. That would take centuries." I said: "What if, instead, you fed it a few dozen notions taken from the works of the Diabolicals¡Xfor example, the Templars fled to Scotland, or the Corpus Hermeticum arrived in Florence in 1460¡Xand threw in a few connective phrases like ¡¥It's obvious that' and ¡¥This proves that'? We might end up with something revelatory. Then we fill in the gaps, call the repetitions prophecies, and¡Xvoila¡Xa hitherto unpublished chapter of the history of magic, at the very least!" "An idea of genius," Belbo said. "Let's start right away."

  "No. It's seven o'clock. Tomorrow."

  "I'm starting tonight. Help me, just for a minute. Pick up, say, twenty of those pages on the floor, at random, glance at the first sentence of each, and that will be an entry."

  I bent over, picked up, and read: "Joseph of Arimathea carries the Grail into France."

  "Excellent...I've written it. Go on."

  "According to the Templar Tradition, Godefroy de Bouillon founded the Grand Priory of Zion in Jerusalem."

  And "Debussy was a Rosicrucian."

  "Excuse me," Diotallevi said, "but you also have to include some neutral data¡Xfor example, the koala lives in Australia, or Papin invented the pressure cooker."

  "Minnie Mouse is Mickey's fiancee."

  "We mustn't overdo it."

  "No, we must overdo it. If we admit that in the whole universe there is even a single fact that does not reveal a mystery, then we violate hermetic thought."

  "That's true. Minnie's in. And, if you'll allow me, I'll add a fundamental axiom: The Templars have something to do with everything."

  "That goes without saying," Diotallevi agreed.

  We went on for a while, but then it was really late. Belbo told us not to worry, he'd continue on his own. When Gudrun came in and told us she was locking up, he said he'd be staying to do some work and asked her to pick up the papers on the floor. Gudrun made sounds that could have belonged either to Latin sine flexione or to Chermish but that clearly expressed indignation and dismay, which demonstrated the universal kinship of all languages, descendants branched from a single, Adamic root. She obeyed, randomizing better than any computer.

  The next morning, Belbo was radiant. "It works," he said. "It works beyond anything we could have hoped for." He handed us the printout.

  The Templars have something to do with everything

  What follows is not true

  Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate

  The sage Omus founded the Rosy Cross in Egypt

  There are cabalists in Provence

  Who was married at the feast of Cana?

  Minnie Mouse is Mickey's fiancee

  It logically follows that

  If

  The Druids venerated black virgins

  Then

  Simon Magus identifies Sophia as a prostitute of Tyre

  Who was married at the feast of Cana?

  The Merovingians proclaim themselves kings by divine right

  The Templars have something to do with everything

  "A bit obscure," Diotallevi said.

  "Because you don't see the connections. And you don't give due importance to the question that recurs twice: Who was married at the feast of Cana? Repetitions are magic keys. Of course, I've compiled; but compiling the truth is the initiate's right. Here is my interpretation: Jesus was not crucified, and for that reason the Templars denied the Crucifix. The legend of Joseph of Arimathea covers a deeper truth: Jesus, not the Grail, landed in France, among the cabalists of Provence. Jesus is the metaphor of the King of the World, the true founder of the Rosicrucians. And who landed with Jesus? His wife. In the Gospels why aren't we told who was married at Cana? It was the wedding of Jesus, and it was a wedding that could not be discussed, because the bride was a public sinner, Mary Magdalene. That's why, ever since, all the Illuminati from Simon Magus to Postel seek the principle of the eternal feminine in a brothel. And Jesus, meanwhile, was the founder of the royal line of France."

  66

  If our hypothesis is correct, the Holy Grail....was the breed and descendant of Jesus, the "Sang real" of which the Templars were the guardians...At the same time, the Holy Grail must have been, literally, the vessel that had received and contained the blood of Jesus. In other words it must have been the womb of the Magdalene.

  ¡XM. Baigent, R. Leigh, H. Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, 1982, London, Cape, xiv

  "Nobody would take that seriously," Diotallevi said.

  "On the contrary, it would sell a few hundred thousand copies," I said grimly. "The story has already been written, with slight variations, in a book on the mystery of the Grail and the secrets of Rennes-le-Chateau. Instead of reading only manuscripts, you should look at what other publishers are printing."

  "Ye Holy Seraphim!" Diotallevi said. "Then this machine says only what we already know." And he went out, dejected.

  Belbo was piqued. ¡¥"What is he saying¡Xthat my idea is an idea others have had? So what? It's called literary polygenesis. Signer Garamond would say that means I'm telling the truth. It must have taken years for the others to come up with it, whereas the machine and I solved the problem in one evening."

  "I'm with you. The machine's useful. But I believe we should feed in more statements that don't come from the Diabolicals. The challenge isn't to find occult links between Debussy and the Templars. Everybody does that. The problem is to find occult links between, for example, cabala and the spark plugs of a car."

  I was speaking oif the top of my head, but I had given Belbo an idea. He talked to me about it a few mornings later.

  "You were right. Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us of a Secret. The rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect. You can read subtexts even in a traffic sign that says ¡¥No littering.' "

  "Of course. Catharist moralism. The horror of fornication."

  "Last night I happened to come across a driver's manual. Maybe it was the semidarkness, or what you had said to me, but I began to imagine that those pages were saying Something Else. Suppose the automobile existed only to serve as metaphor of creation? And we mustn't confine ourselves to the exterior, or to the surface reality of the dashboard; we must learn to see what only the Maker sees, what lies beneath. What lies beneath and what lies above. It is the Tree of the Sefirot."

  "You don't say."

  "I am not the one who says; it is the thing itself that says. The drive shaft is the trunk of the tree. Count the parts: engine, two front wheels, clutch, transmission, two axles, differential, and two rear wheels. Ten parts, ten Sefirot."

  "But the positions don't coincide."

  "Who says they don't? Diotallevi's explained to us that in certain versions Tiferet isn't the sixth Sefirah, but the eighth, below Nezah and Hod. My axle-tree is the tree of Belboth."

  "Fiat."

  "But let's pursue the dialectic of the tree. At the summit is the engine, Omnia Movens, of which more later: this is the Creative Source. The engine communicates its creative energy to the two front or higher wheels: the Wheel of Intelligence and the Wheel of Knowledge."

  "If the car has front-wheel drive."

  "The good thing about the Belboth tree is that it allows metaphysical alternatives. So we have the image of a spiritual cosmos with front-wheel-drive, where the engine, in front, transmits its wishes to the higher wheels, whereas in the materialistic version we have a degenerate cosmos in which motion is imparted by the engine to the two lower wheels: from the depths, the cosmic emanation releases the
base forces of matter."

  "What about an engine in back, rear-wheel drive?"

  "Satanic. Higher and lower coincide. God is identified with the motion of crude matter. God as an eternally frustrated aspiration to divinity. The result of th Breaking of the Vessels."

  "Not the Breaking of the Muffler?"

  "That occurs in aborted universes, where the noxious breath of the Archons spreads through the ether. But we mustn't digress. After the engine and two wheels comes the clutch, the Sefirah of grace that establishes or interrupts the flow of love that binds the rest of the tree of the Supernal Energy. A disk, a mandala that caresses another mandala. Then the coffer of change¡Xthe gear box, or transmission, as the positivists call it, which is the principle of Evil, because it allows human will to speed up or slow down the constant process of emanation. For this reason, an automatic transmission costs more, for there it is the tree itself that decides, in accordance with its own Sovereign Equilibrium. Then comes the universal joint, the axle, the drive shaft, the differential¡Xnote the opposition/repetition of the quaternion of cylinders in the engine, because the differential (Minor Keter) transmits motion to the earthly wheels. Here the function of the Sefirah of difference is obvious, as, with a majestic sense of beauty, it distributes the cosmic forces to the Wheel of Glory and the Wheel of Victory, which in an unaborted universe (front-wheel drive) are subordinate to the motion imparted by the higher wheels."

  "A coherent exegesis. And the heart of the engine, seat of the One, the Crown?"

  "You have but to look with the eyes of an initiate. The supreme engine lives by an alternation of intake and exhaust. A complex, divine respiration, a cycle initially based on two units called cylinders (an obvious geometrical archetype), which then generate a third, and finally gaze upon one another in mutual love and bring forth the glory of a fourth. In the cycle of the first cylinder (none is first hierarchically, but only through the miraculous alternation of position), the piston (etymology: Pistis Sophia) descends from the upper neutral position to the lower neutral position as the cylinder fills with energy in the pure state. I'm simplifying, because here angelic hierarchies come into play, the valves, which, as my handbook says, ¡¥allow the opening and closing of the apertures that link the interior of the cylinders to the induction pipes leading out of the carburetor.' The inner seat of the engine can communicate with the rest of the cosmos only through this mediation, and here I believe is revealed¡XI am reluctant to utter heresy¡Xthe original limit of the One, which, in order to create, somehow depends on the Great Eccentrics. A closer reading of the text may be required here. The cylinder fills with energy, the piston returns to the upper neutral position and achieves maximum compression¡Xthe sim-sun. And lo, the glory of the Big Bang: combustion, expansion. A spark flies, the mixture of fuel flares and blazes, and this the handbook calls the active phase of the cycle. And woe, woe if in the mixture of fuel the Shells intrude, the qelippot, drops of impure matter like water or Coca-Cola. Then expansion does not take place or occurs in abortive starts..."