by Umberto Eco
"Yes, Mama."
"Yes indeed, my child. The sun is good because it does the body good, and because it has the sense to reappear every day; therefore, whatever returns is good, not what passes and is done with. The easiest way to return from where you've been without retracing your steps is to walk in a circle. The animal that coils in a circle is the serpent; that's why so many cults and myths of the serpent exist, because it's hard to represent the return of the sun by the coiling of a hippopotamus. Furthermore, if you have to make a ceremony to invoke the sun, it's best to move in a circle, because if you go in a straight line, you move away from home, which means the ceremony will have to be kept short. The circle is the most convenient arrangement for any rite, even the fire-eaters in the marketplace know this, because in a circle everybody can see the one who's in the center, whereas if a whole tribe formed a straight line, like a squad of soldiers, the people at the ends wouldn't see. And that's why the circle and rotary-motion and cyclic return are fundamental to every cult and every rite."
"Yes, Mama."
"We move on to the magic numbers your authors are so fond of. You are one and not two, your cock is one and my cunt is one, and we have one nose and one heart; so you see how many important things come in ones. But we have two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, my breasts, your balls, legs, arms, buttocks. Three is the most magical of all, because our body doesn't know that number; we don't have three of anything, and it should be a very mysterious number that we attribute to God, wherever we live. But if you think about it, I have one cunt and you have one cock—shut up and don't joke—and if we put these two together, a new thing is made, and we become three. So you don't have to be a university professor or use a computer to discover that all cultures on earth have ternary structures, trinities.
"But two arms and two legs make four, and four is a beautiful number when you consider that animals have four legs and little children go on all fours, as the Sphinx knew. We hardly have to discuss five, the fingers of the hand, and then with both hands you get that other sacred number, ten. There have to be ten commandments because, if there were twelve, when the priest counts one, two, three, holding up his fingers, and comes to the last two, he'd have to borrow a hand from the sacristan.
"Now, if you take the body and count all the things that grow from the trunk, arms, legs, head, and cock, you get six; but for women it's seven. For this reason, it seems to me that among your authors six is never taken seriously, except as the double of three, because it's familiar to the males, who don't have any seven. So when the males rule, they prefer to see seven as the mysterious sacred number, forgetting about women's tits, but what the hell.
"Eight ... eight ... give me a minute....If arms and legs don't count as one apiece but two, because of elbows and knees, you have eight parts that move; add the torso and you have nine, add the head and you have ten. Just sticking with the body, you can get all the numbers you want. The orifices, for example."
"The orifices?"
"Yes. How many holes does the body have?"
I counted. "Eyes, nostrils, ears, mouth, ass: eight."
"You see? Another reason eight is a beautiful number. But I have nine! And with that ninth I bring you into the world, therefore nine is holier than eight! Or, if you like, take the anatomy of your menhir, which your authors are always talking about. Standing up during the day, lying down at night—your thing, too. No, don't tell me what it does at night. The fact is that erect it works and prone it rests. So the vertical position is life, pointing sunward, and obelisks stand as trees stand, while the horizontal position and night are sleep, death. All cultures worship menhirs, monoliths, pyramids, columns, but nobody bows down to balconies and railings. Did you ever hear of an archaic cult of the sacred banister? You see? And another point: if you worship a vertical stone, even if there are a lot of you, you can all see it; but if you worship, instead, a horizontal stone, only those in the front row can see it, and the others start pushing, me too, me too, which is not a fitting sight for a magical ceremony...."
"But rivers..."
"Rivers are worshiped not because they're horizontal, but because there's water in them, and you don't need me to explain to you the relation between water and the body.... Anyway, that's how we're put together, all of us, and that's why we work out the same symbols millions of kilometers apart, and naturally they all resemble one another. Thus you see that people with a brain in their head, if they're shown an alchemist's oven, all shut up and warm inside, think of the belly of the mama making a baby, and only your Diabolicals think that the Madonna about to have the Child is a reference to the alchemist's oven. They spent thousands of years looking for a message, and it was there all the time: they just had to look at themselves in the mirror."
"You always tell me the truth. You are my Mirrored Me, my Self seen by You. I want to discover all the secret archetypes of the body." That evening we inaugurated the expression "discovering archetypes" to indicate our moments of greatest intimacy.
I was half-asleep when Lia touched my shoulder. "I almost forgot," she said. "I'm pregnant."
I should have listened to Lia. She spoke with the wisdom of life and birth. Venturing into the underground passages of Agarttha, into the pyramid of Isis Unveiled, we had entered Gevurah, the Sefirah of fear, the moment in which wrath manifests itself in the world. I had let myself be seduced by the thought of Sophia. Moses Cordovero says that the Female is to the left, and all her attributes point to Gevurah ... unless the Male, using these attributes, adorns his Bride, and causes her to move to the right, toward good. Every desire must remain within its limits. Otherwise Gevurah becomes Judgment, the dark appearance, the universe of demons.
To discipline desire ... This I had done in the tenda de umbanda. I had played the agogo, I had taken an active part in the spectacle, and I had escaped the trance. I had done the same with Lia: I had regulated desire out of homage to the Bride, and I had been rewarded in the depths of my loins; my seed had been blessed.
But I was not to persevere. I was to be seduced by the beauty of Tiferet.
TIFERET
64
To dream of living in a new and unknown city means imminent death. In fact, the dead live elsewhere, nor is it known where.
—Gerolamo Cardano, Somniorum Synesiorum, Basel, 1562, 1, 58
While Gevurah is the Sefirah of awe and evil, Tiferet is the Sefirah of beauty and harmony. As Diotallevi said: It is the light of understanding, the tree of life; it is pleasure, hale appearance. It is the concord of Law and Freedom.
And that year was for us the year of pleasure, of the joyful subversion of the great text of the universe, in which we celebrated the nuptials of Tradition and the Electronic Machine. We created, and we delighted in our creation. It was the year in which we invented the Plan.
For me at least, it was truly a happy year. Lia's pregnancy proceeded tranquilly, and between Garamond and my agency I was beginning to make a comfortable living. I kept my office in the old factory building, but we remodeled Lia's apartment.
The wonderful adventure of metals was now in the hands of the compositors and proofreaders. That was when Signor Garamond had his brainstorm: "An illustrated history of magic and the hermetic sciences. With the material that comes in from the Diabolicals, with the expertise you three have acquired, with the advice of that incredible man Agliè, we can put together a big volume, four hundred pages, dazzling full-color plates, in less than a year. Reusing some of the graphics from the history of metals."
"But the subject matter is so different," I said. "What can I do with a photograph of a cyclotron?"
"What can you do with it? Imagination, Casaubon, use your imagination! What happens in those atomic machines, in those megatronic positrons or whatever they're called? Matter is broken down; you put in Swiss cheese and out come quarks, black holes, churned uranium! It's magic made flesh, Hermes and Hermès. Here on the left, the engraving of Paracelsus, old Abracadabra with his alembics, against a gold
background, and on the right, quasars, the Cuisinart of heavy water, gravitational galactic antimatter, et cetera. Don't you see? The real magician isn't the bleary-eyed guy who doesn't understand a thing; it's the scientist who has grasped the hidden secrets of the universe. Discover the miraculous all around us! Hint that at Mount Palomar they know more than they're letting on...."
To encourage me, he gave me a raise, almost perceptible. I concentrated on the miniatures of the Liber Solis of Trismosin, the Mutus Liber of Pseudo-Lullus; I filled folders with pentacles, sefirotic trees, decans, talismans; I combed the loneliest rooms of libraries; I bought dozens of volumes from booksellers who in the old days had peddled the cultural revolution.
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—or for them, there is more than one woman, there are many, I lost them all in the same way, through neglect—and 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—or wanted—the relationship to cool, the reason I failed to show up at our last meeting. She's waiting for a call from mc, 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 vou 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—there's a secondhand bookshop on the corner—that curves to the right, through a scries 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—and I remember it with the clarity of a photograph—that I sec, 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 re-sign 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—it's impossible that I dreamed them in another dream—with 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 retiro, 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....
—Jonathan 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—if it ever existed—the 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 victor.
And the linden trees quiver,
I count the nights, the sistrum sounds,
The hoopoe awaits me,
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—what's the term?—to randomize, it would perform some authentic temurah, recombining the verses of the Book?"