Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (41 page)

¡¥What does the fish
remind you of?" ¡¥Other fish."

¡¥And what do other fish
remind you of?" ¡¥Other fish."

¡XJoseph Heller,
Catch-22, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1961, xxvii

I came back from
Piedmont with much guilt. But as soon as I saw Lia again, I forgot
the desires that had grazed me.

Still, our expedition
left other marks on me, and now it troubles me that at the time I
wasn't troubled by them. I was putting in final order, chapter by
chapter, the illustrations for the wonderful adventure of metals,
but once again I could not elude the demon of resemblance, any more
than I had been able to in Rio. How was this Reaumur cylindrical
stove, 1750, different from this incubation chamber for eggs, or
from this seventeenth-century athanor, maternal womb, dark uterus
for the creation of God knows what mystic metals? It was as if they
had installed the Deutsches Museum in the Piedmont castle I had
visited the week before.

It was becoming harder
for me to keep apart the world of magic and what today we call the
world of facts. Men I had studied in school as bearers of
mathematical and physical enlightenment now turned up amid the murk
of superstition, for I discovered they had worked with one foot in
cabala and the other in the laboratory. Or was I rereading all
history through the eyes of our Diabolicals? But then I would find
texts above all suspicion that told me how in the time of
positivism physicists barely out of the university dabbled in
stances and astrological cena-cles, and how Newton had arrived at
the law of gravity because he believed in the existence of occult
forces, which recalled his investigations into Rosicrucian
cosmology.

I had always thought
that doubting was a scientific duty, but now I came to distrust the
very masters who had taught me to doubt.

I said to myself: I'm
like Amparo; I don't believe in it, yet I surrender to it. Yes, I
caught myself marveling over the fact that the height of the Great
Pyramid really was one-billionth of the distance between the earth
and the sun, and that you really could draw striking parallels
between Celtic and Amerind mythologies. And I began to question
everything around me: the houses, die shop signs, the clouds in the
sky, and the engravings in the library, asking them to tell me not
their superficial story but another, deeper story, which they
surely were hiding¡Xbut finally would reveal thanks to the
principle of mystic resemblances.

Lia saved me, at least
temporarily.

I told her
everything¡Xor almost¡Xabout the trip to Piedmont, and evening
after evening I came home with curious new bits of information to
add to my file of cross references. She said, "Eat. You're thin as
a rail." One evening, she sat beside me at the desk. With her hair
parted in the middle of her brow, she could now look straight into
my eyes. She had her hands in her lap: a housewifely pose. I had
never seen her sit like that before, her legs wide, skirt taut from
knee to knee. An inelegant position, I thought. But then I saw her
face: radiant, slightly flushed. I listened to her¡Xthough I didn't
yet know why¡Xwith respect.

"Pow," she said, "I
don't like what's happening to you with this Manutius business.
First you collected facts the way people collect seashells. Now
it's as if you were marking down lottery numbers."

"I just enjoy myself
more, with the Diabolicals."

"It's not enjoyment;
it's passion. There's a difference. Be careful: they'll make you
sick."

"Now, don't exaggerate.
They're the sick ones, not I. You don't go crazy because you work
in an asylum."

"That remains to be
seen."

"You know, I've always
been suspicious of analogies. But now I find myself at a great
feast of analogies, a Coney Island, a Moscow May Day, a Jubilee
Year of analogies, and I'm beginning to wonder if by any chance
there isn't a reason."

"I've seen your files,
Pow," Lia said to me, "because I have to keep them in order.
Whatever your Diabolicals have discovered is already here: take a
good look." And she patted her belly, her thighs, her forehead;
with her spread legs drawing her skirt tight, she sat like a wet
nurse, solid and healthy¡Xshe so slim and supple¡Xwith a serene
wisdom that illuminated her and gave her a matriarchal
authority.

"Pow, archetypes don't
exist; the body exists. The belly inside is beautiful, because the
baby grows there, because your sweet cock, all bright and jolly,
thrusts there, and good, tasty food descends there, and for this
reason the cavern, the grotto, the tunnel are beautiful and
important, and the labyrinth, too, which is made in the image of
our wonderful intestines. When somebody wants to invent something
beautiful and important, it has to come from there, because you
also came from there the day you were born, because fertility
always comes from inside a cavity, where first something rots and
then, lo and behold, there's a little man, a date, a
baobab.

"And high is better than
low, because if you have your head down, the blood goes to your
brain, because feet stink and hair doesn't stink as much, because
it's better to climb a tree and pick fruit than end up underground,
food for worms, and because you rarely hurt yourself hitting
something above¡Xyou really have to be in an attic¡Xwhile you often
hurt yourself falling. That's why up is angelic and down
devilish.

"But because what I said
before, about my belly, is also true, both things are true, down
and inside are beautiful, and up and outside are beautiful, and the
spirit of Mercury and Manichean-ism have nothing to do with it.
Fire keeps you warm and cold gives you bronchial pneumonia,
especially if you're a scholar four thousand years ago, and
therefore fire has mysterious virtues besides its ability to cook
your chicken. But cold preserves that same chicken, and fire, if
you touch it, gives you a blister this big; therefore, if you think
of something preserved for millennia, like wisdom, you have to
think of it on a mountain, up, high (and high is good), but also in
a cavern (which is good, too) and in the eternal cold of the
Tibetan snows (best of all). And if you then want to know why
wisdom comes from the Orient and not from the Swiss Alps, it's
because the body of your ancestors in the morning, when it woke and
there was still darkness, looked to the east hoping the sun would
rise and there wouldn't be rain."

"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¡Xshut up and don't joke¡Xand 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¡Xyour 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 see 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 Agart-tha, 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 um-banda. I had played
the agogd, 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
desite 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.

To dream of living in a
new and unknown city means imminent death. In fact, the dead live
elsewhere, nor is it known where.

¡XGerolamo Cardano,
Somniorum Synesiorum, Basel, 1562, 1, p. 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 Aglie, 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 Hermes. 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 Pal-omar 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¡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?