Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (2 page)

Wee haue divers curious Clocks; And other like
Motions of Return...Wee haue also Houses of Deceits of the Senses,
where we represent all manner of Feats of Juggling, False
Apparitions, Impostures, and Illusions...These are (my sonne) the
Riches of Salomon's House.

¡XFrancis Bacon, The New Atlantis, ed. Rawley,
London, 1627, pp. 41-42

I gained control of my nerves, my imagination.
I had to play this ironically, as I had been playing it until a few
days before, not letting myself become involved. I was in a museum
and had to be dramatically clever and clearheaded.

I looked at the now-familiar planes above me: I
could climb into the fuselage of a biplane, to await the night as
if I were flying over the Channel, anticipating the Legion of
Honor. The names of the automobiles on the ground had an
affectionately nostalgic ring. The 1932 Hispano-Suiza was handsome,
welcoming, but too close to the front desk. I might have slipped
past the attendant if I had turned up in plus fours and Norfolk
jacket, stepping aside for a lady in a cream-colored suit, with a
long scarf wound around her slender neck, a cloche pulled over her
bobbed hair. The 1931 Citroen C6G was shown only in cross section,
an excellent educational display but a ridiculous hiding place.
Cugnot's enormous steam automobile, all boiler, or cauldron, was
out of the question. I looked to the right, where velocipedes with
huge art-nouveau wheels and draisiennes with their flat,
scooterlike bars evoked gentlemen in stovepipe hats, knights of
progress pedaling through the Bois de Boulogne.

Across from the velocipedes were cars with
bodies intact, ample receptacles. Perhaps not the 1945 Panhard
Dynavia, too open and narrow in its aerodynamic sleekness; but the
tall 1909 Peugeot¡Xan attic, a boudoir¡Xwas definitely worth
considering. Once I was inside, deep in its leather divan, no one
would suspect a thing. But the car would not be easy to get into;
one of the guards was sitting on a bench directly opposite, his
back to the bicycles. I pictured myself stepping onto the running
board, clumsy in my fur-collared coat, while he, calves sheathed in
leather leggings, doffed his visored cap and obsequiously opened
the door...

I concentrated for a moment on the
twelve-passenger Obeis-sante, 1872, the first French vehicle with
gears. If the Peugeot was an apartment, this was a building. But
there was no hope of boarding it without attracting everyone's
attention. Difficult to hide when the hiding places are pictures at
an exhibition.

I crossed the hall again, and there was the
Statue of Liberty, "eclairant le monde" from a pedestal at least
two meters high in the shape of a prow with a sharp beak. Inside
the pedestal was a kind of sentry box, from which you could look
through a porthole at a diorama of New York harbor. A good
observation point at midnight, because through the darkness it
would be possible to see into the choir to the left and the nave to
the right, your back protected by a great stone statue of Gramme,
which faced other corridors from the transept where it stood. In
daylight, however, you could look into the sentry box from outside,
and once the visitors were gone, a guard would probably make a
routine check and peer in, just to be on the safe side.

I didn't have much time: they closed at
five-thirty. I took another quick look at the ambulatory. None of
the engines would serve the purpose. Nor would the great ship
machinery on the right, relics of some Lusitania engulfed by the
waves, nor Le-noir's immense gas engine with its variety of
cogwheels. In fact, now that the light was fading, watery through
the gray window-panes, I felt fear again at the prospect of hiding
among these animals, for I dreaded seeing them come to life in the
darkness, reborn in the shadows in the glow of my flashlight. I
dreaded their panting, their heavy, telluric breath, skinless
bones, viscera creaking and fetid with black-grease drool. How
could I endure in the midst of that foul concatenation of diesel
genitals and turbine-driven vaginas, the inorganic throats that
once had flamed, steamed, and hissed, and might again that very
night? Or maybe they would buzz like stag beetles or chirr like
cicadas amid those skeletal incarnations of pure, abstract
functionality, automata able to crush, saw, shift, break, slice,
accelerate, ram, and gulp fuel, their cylinders sobbing. Or they
would jerk like sinister marionettes, making drums turn, converting
frequencies, transforming energies, spinning flywheels. How could I
fight them if they came after me, instigated by the Masters of the
World, who used them as proof¡Xuseless devices, idols only of the
bosses of the lower universe¡Xof the error of creation?

I had to leave, get away; this was madness. I
was falling into the same trap, the same game that had driven
Jacopo Belbo out of his mind, I, the doubter...

I don't know if I did the right thing two
nights ago, hiding in that museum. If I hadn't, I would know the
beginning of the story but not the end. Nor would I be here now,
alone on this hill, while dogs bark in the distance, in the valley
below, as I wonder: Was that really the end, or is the end yet to
come?

I decided to move on. I abandoned the chapel,
turned left at the statue of Gramme, and entered a gallery. It was
the railroad section, and the multicolored model locomotives and
cars looked like reassuring playthings out of a Toyland, Madurodam,
or Disney World. By now I had grown accustomed to alternating
surges of anxiety and self-confidence, terror and skepticism (is
that, perhaps, how illness starts?), and I told myself that the
things seen in the church upset me because I was there under the
spell of Jacopo Belbo's writings, writings I had used so many
tricks to decipher, even though I knew they were all
inventions.

This was a museum of technology, after all.
You're in a museum of technology, I told myself, an honest place, a
little dull perhaps, but the dead here are harmless. You know what
museums are, no one's ever been devoured by the Mona Lisa¡Xan
androgynous Medusa only for esthetes¡Xand you are even less likely
to be devoured by Watt's engine, a bugbear only for Os-sianic and
Neo-Gothic gentlemen, a pathetic compromise, really, between
function and Corinthian elegance, handle and capital, boiler and
column, wheel and tympanum. Jacopo Belbo, though he was far away,
was trying to draw me into the hallucinations that had undone him.
You must behave like a scientist, I told myself. A vulcanologist
does not burn like Empedocles. Frazer did not flee, hounded, into
the wood of Nemi. Come, you're supposed to be Sam Spade. Exploring
the mean streets¡X that's your job. The woman who catches you has
to die in the end, and if possible by your own hand. So long,
Emily, it was great while it lasted, but you were a robot, you had
no heart.

The transportation section happened to be right
next to the Lavoisier atrium, facing a grand stairway that led to
the upper floor.

The arrangement of glass cases along the sides,
the alchemical altar in the center, the liturgy of a civilized
eighteenth-century macumba¡Xthis was not accidental but symbolic, a
stratagem.

First, all those mirrors. Whenever you see a
mirror¡Xit's only human¡Xyou want to look at yourself. But here you
can't. You look at the position in space where the mirror will say
"You are here, and you are you," you look, craning, twisting, but
nothing works, because Lavoisier's mirrors, whether concave or
convex, disappoint you, mock you. You step back, find yourself for
a moment, but move a little and you are lost. This catoptric
theater was contrived to take away your identity and make you feel
unsure not only of yourself but also of the very objects standing
between you and the mirrors. As if to say: You are not the Pendulum
or even near it. And you feel uncertain, not only about yourself,
but also about the objects set there between you and another
mirror. Granted, physics can explain how and why a concave mirror
collects the light from an object¡Xin this case, an alembic in a
copper holder¡Xthen returns the rays in such a way that you see the
object not within the mirror but outside it, ghostlike, upside down
in midair, and if you shift even slightly, the image, evanescent,
disappears.

Then suddenly I saw myself upside down in a
mirror.

Intolerable.

What was Lavoisier trying to say, and what were
the designers of the Conservatoire hinting at? We've known about
the magic of mirrors since the Middle Ages, since Alhazen. Was it
worth the trouble of going through the Encyclopedic, the
Enlightenment, and the Revolution to be able to state that merely
curving a mirror's surface can plunge a man into an imagined world?
For that matter, a normal mirror, too, is an illusion. Consider the
individual looking back at you, condemned to perpetual
left-handedness, every morning when you shave. Was it worth the
trouble of setting up this hall just to tell us this? Or is the
message really that we should look at everything in a different
way, including the glass cases and the instruments that supposedly
celebrated the birth of physics and enlightened chemistry?

A copper mask for protection in calcination
experiments. Hard to believe that the gentleman with the candles
under the glass bell actually wore that thing that looks like a
sewer rat's head or a space invader's helmet, just to avoid
irritating his eyes. Quelle delicatesse, M. Lavoisier! If you
really wanted to study the kinetic theory of gases, why did you
reconstruct so painstakingly the eolopile¡Xa little spouted sphere
that, when heated, spins, spewing steam¡Xa device first built by
Heron in the days of the Gnostics to assist the speaking statues
and other wonders of the Egyptian priests?

And what about this contraption for the study
of necrotic fermentation, 1789? A fine allusion, really, to the
putrid, reeking bastards of the Demiurge. A series of glass tubes
that connect two ampules and lead through a bubble uterus, through
spheres and conduits perched on forked pins, to transmit an essence
to coils that spill into the void...Balneum Mariae, sublimation of
hydrargyrum, mysterium conjunctionis, the Elixir!

Or this apparatus for the study of the
fermentation of wine. A maze of crystal arches leading from athanor
to athanor, from alembic to alembic. Those little spectacles, the
tiny hourglass, the electroscope, the lens. Or the laboratory knife
that looks like a cuneiform character, the spatula with the release
lever, the glass blade, and the tiny, three-centimeter clay
crucible for making a gnome-size homunculus¡Xinfinitesimal womb for
the most minuscule clonings. Or the acajou boxes filled with little
white packets like a village apothecary's cachets, wrapped in
parchment covered with untranslatable ciphers, with mineral
specimens that in reality are fragments of the Holy Shroud of
Basilides, reliquaries containing the foreskin of Hermes
Tris-megistus. Or the long, thin upholsterer's hammer, a gavel for
opening a brief judgment day, an auction of quintessences to be
held among the Elfs of Avalon. Or the delightful little apparatus
for analyzing the combustion of oil, and the glass globules arrayed
like quatrefoil petals, with other quatrefoils connected by golden
tubes, and quatrefoils attached to other, crystal, tubes leading
first to a copper cylinder, then to the gold-and-glass cylinder
below it, then to other tubes, lower still, pendulous appendages,
testicles, glands, goiters, crests...This is modern chemistry? For
this the author had to be guillotined, though truly nothing is
created or destroyed? Or was he killed to silence what his fraud
revealed?

The Salle Lavoisier in the Conservatoire is
actually a confession, a confession in code, and an emblem of the
whole museum, for it mocks the arrogance of the Age of Reason and
murmurs of other mysteries. Jacopo Belbo was reasonably right;
Reason was wrong.

I had to hurry; time was pressing now. I walked
past the meter, the kilogram, the other measures, all false
guarantees. I had learned from Aglie that the secret of the
pyramids is revealed if you don't calculate in meters but in
ancient cubits. Then, the counting machines that proclaimed the
triumph of the quantitative but in truth pointed to the occult
qualities of numbers, a return to the roots of the notarikon the
rabbis carried with them as they fled through the plains of Europe.
Astronomy and clocks and robots. Dangerous to linger among these
new revelations. I was penetrating to the heart of a secret message
in the form of a rationalist theatrum. But I had to hurry. Later,
between closing time and midnight, I could explore them, objects
that in the slanted light of sunset assumed their true
aspect¡Xsymbols, not instruments.

I went upstairs, walked through the halls of
the crafts, of energy, electricity. No place to hide here, not in
these cases. I began to guess their meaning, but suddenly I was
gripped by the fear that there would not be time to find a place
from which I could witness the nocturnal revelation of their secret
purpose. Now I moved like a man pursued¡Xpursued by the clock, by
the ghastly advance of numbers. The earth turned, inexorably, the
hour was approaching. In a little while I would be kicked out.

Crossing the exhibit of electrical devices, I
came to the hall of glass. By what logic had they decided that the
most advanced and expensive gadgetry of the modern mind should be
followed by a section devoted to an art known to the Phoenicians
thousands of years ago? A jumble of a room, Chinese porcelain
alongside androgynous vases of Lalique, poteries, majolica,
faience, and Murano, and in an enormous case in the rear, life-size
and three-dimensional, a lion attacked by a serpent. The apparent
reason for this piece was its medium, that it was made entirely of
glass; but there had to be a deeper reason. Where had I seen this
figure before? Then I remembered that the Demiurge, Yaldabaoth, the
first Archon, odious creation of Sophia, who was responsible for
the world and its fatal flaw, had the form of a serpent and of a
lion, and that his eyes cast fire. Perhaps the whole Conservatoire
was an image of the vile process by which, through the eons, the
fullness of the first principle, the Pendulum, and the splendor of
the Plerome give way, by which the Ogdoades crumbles and Evil rules
in the cosmic realm. If so, then the serpent and lion were telling
me that my initiatory journey¡Xa rebours, alas¡Xwas already over,
and that soon I would see the world anew, not as it should be, but
as it is.