Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (42 page)

....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,

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."

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..."

"Then the meaning of
Shell is qelippot? We'd better not use it anymore. From now on,
only Virgin's Milk..."

"We'll check. It could
be a trick of the Seven Sisters, lower emanations trying to control
the process of creation...In any case, after expansion, behold the
great divine release, the exhaust. The piston rises again to the
upper neutral position and expels the formless matter, now
combusted. Only if this process of purification succeeds can the
new cycle begin. Which, if you think about it, is also the
Neoplatonic mechanism of Exodus and Parodos, miraculous dialectic
of the Way Up and the Way Down."

"Quantum mortalia
pectora ceacae noctis habent! And the sons of matter never realized
it!"

"They never saw the
connection between the philosopher's stone and
Firestone."

"For tomorrow, I'll
prepare a mystical interpretation of the phone book."

"Ever ambitious, our
Casaubon. Mind you, there you'll have to solve the unfathomable
problem of the One and the Many. Better succeed slowly. Start,
instead, with the washing machine."

"That's too easy. The
alchemistic transformation from black to whiter than
white."