Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (6 page)

Do not expect too much
of the end of the world.

¡XStanislaw J. Lee,
Aforyzmy. Fraszki, Krakow, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977, "Mysli
nieuczesane"

To enter a university a
year or two after 1968 was like being admitted to the Academic de
Saint-Cyr in 1793: you felt your birth date was wrong. Jacopo
Belbo, who was almost fifteen years older than I, later convinced
me that every generation feels this way. You are always born under
the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to
rewrite your own horoscope day by day.

I believe that what we
become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when
they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of
wisdom. When I was ten, I asked my parents to subscribe to a weekly
magazine that was publishing comic-strip versions of the great
classics of literature. My father, not because he was stingy, but
because he was suspicious of comic strips, tried to beg off. "The
purpose of this magazine," I pontificated, quoting the ad, "is to
educate the reader in an entertaining way." "The purpose of your
magazine," my father replied without looking up from his paper, "is
the purpose of every magazine: to sell as many copies as it
can."

That day, I began to be
incredulous.

Or, rather, I regretted
having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be
borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.

Not that the incredulous
person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't
believe in everything. Or he believes in one thing at a time. He
believes a second thing only if it somehow follows from the first
thing. He is nearsighted and methodical, avoiding wide horizons. If
two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that
somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them,
that's credulity.

Incredulity doesn't kill
curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains
of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don't
believe in them, the collision of two ideas¡X both false¡Xcan
create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no
respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on,
but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a
nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the
better.

"You live on the
surface," Lia told me years later. "You sometimes seem profound,
but it's only because you piece a lot of surfaces together to
create the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would
collapse if you tried to stand it up."

"Are you saying I'm
superficial?"

"No," she answered.
"What others call profundity is only a tesseract, a
four-dimensional cube. You walk in one side and come out another,
and you're in their universe, which can't coexist with
yours."

(Lia, now that They have
walked into the cube and invaded our world, I don't know if I'll
ever see you again. And it was all my fault: I made Them believe
there was a depth, a depth that They, in their weakness,
desired.)

What did I really think
fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all
those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the
right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an
aspirin: It can't hurt, and you might get better.

So there I was, in the
midst of the Revolution, or at least in the most stupendous
imitation of it, seeking an honorable faith. It was honorable, for
example, to take part in rallies and marches. I chanted "Fascist
scum, your time has come!" with everybody else. I never threw
paving stones or ball bearings, out of fear that others might do
unto me as I did unto them, but I experienced a kind of moral
excitement escaping along narrow downtown streets when the police
charged. I would come home with the sense of having performed a
duty. In the meetings I remained untouched by the disagreements
that divided the various groups: I always had the feeling that if
you substituted the right phrase for another phrase, you could move
from group to group. I amused myself by finding the right phrases.
I modulated.

At the demonstrations, I
would fall in behind one banner or another, drawn by a girl who had
aroused my interest, so I came to the conclusion that for many of
my companions political activism was a sexual thing. But sex was a
passion. I wanted only curiosity. True, in the course of my reading
about the Templars and the various atrocities attributed to them, I
had come across Carpocrates's assertion that to escape the tyranny
of the angels, the masters of the cosmos, every possible ignominy
should be perpetrated, that you should discharge all debts to the
world and to your own body, for only by committing every act can
the soul be freed of its passions and return to its original
purity. When we were inventing the Plan, I found that many addicts
of the occult pursued that path in their search for enlightenment.
According to his biographers, Aleister Crowley, who has been called
the most perverted man of all time and who did everything that
could be done with his worshipers, both men and women, chose only
the ugliest partners of either sex. I have the nagging suspicion,
however, that his lovemaking was incomplete.

There must be a
connection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. I
liked Marx, I was sure that he and his Jenny had made love merrily.
You can feel it in the easy pace of his prose and in his humor. On
the other hand, I remember remarking one day in the corridors of
the university that if you screwed Krupskaya all the time, you'd
end up writing a lousy book like Materialism and Empiriocriticism.
I was almost clubbed. A tall guy with a Tartar mustache said I was
a fascist. I'll never forget him. He later shaved his head and now
belongs to a commune where they weave baskets.

I evoke the mood of
those days only to reconstruct my state of mind when I began to
visit Garamond Press and made friends with Jacopo Belbo. I was the
type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view
toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I
am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where
to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.

That's why I wisely
chose philology. The University of Milan was the place to be in
those years. Everywhere else in the country students were taking
over classrooms and telling the professors they should teach only
proletarian sciences, but at our university, except for a few
incidents, a constitutional pact¡Xor, rather, a territorial
compromise¡Xheld. The Revolution occupied the grounds, the
auditorium, and the main halls, while traditional Culture,
protected, withdrew to the inner corridors and upper floors, where
it went on talking as if nothing had happened.

The result was that I
could spend the morning debating proletarian matters downstairs and
the afternoon pursuing aristocratic knowledge upstairs. In these
two parallel universes I lived comfortably and felt no
contradiction. I firmly believed that an egalitarian society was
dawning, but I also thought that the trains, for example, in this
better society ought to run better, and the militants around me
were not learning how to shovel coal into the furnace, work the
switches, or draw up timetables. Somebody had to be ready to
operate the trains.

I felt like a kind of
Stalin laughing to himself, somewhat remorsefully, and thinking:
"Go ahead, you poor Bolsheviks. I'm going to study in this seminary
in Tiflis, and we'll see which one of us gets to draft the
Five-Year Plan."

Perhaps because I was
always surrounded by enthusiasm in the morning, in the afternoon I
came to equate learning with distrust. I wanted to study something
that confined itself to what could be documented, as opposed to
what was merely a matter of opinion.

For no particular reason
I signed up for a seminar on medieval history and chose, for my
thesis subject, the trial of the Templars. It was a story that
fascinated me from the moment I first glanced at the documents. At
that time, when we were struggling against those in power, I was
wholeheartedly outraged by the trial in which the Templars, through
evidence it would be generous to call circumstantial, were
sentenced to the stake. Then I quickly learned that, for centuries
after their execution, countless lovers of the occult persisted in
looking for them, seeking everywhere, without ever producing proof
of their existence. This visionary excess offended my incredulity,
and I resolved to waste no more time on these hunters of secrets. I
would stick to primary sources. The Templars were monastic knights;
their order was recognized by the Church. If the Church dissolved
that order, as in fact it had seven centuries ago, then the
Templars could no longer exist. Therefore, if they existed, they
weren't Templars. I drew up a bibliography of more than a hundred
books, but in the end read only about thirty of them.

It was through the
Templars that I first got to know Jacopo Belbo¡Xat Pilade's toward
the end of ¡¥72, when I was at work on my thesis.

Having come from the
light and from the gods, here I am in exile, separated from
them.

¡XFragment of TUrfa'n
M7

In those days Pilade's
Bar was a free port, a galactic tavern where alien invaders from
Ophiulco could rub elbows peaceably with the soldiers of the Empire
patrolling the Van Alien belt. It was an old bar near one of the
navigli, the Milan canals, ^with a zinc counter and a billiard
table. Local tram drivers and artisans would drop in first thing in
the morning for a glass of white wine. In ¡¥68 and in the years
that followed, Pilade's became a kind of Rick's Cafe, where
Movement activists could play cards with a reporter from the
bosses' newspaper who had come in for a whiskey after putting the
paper to bed, while the first trucks were already out distributing
the Establishment's lies to the newsstands. But at Pilade's the
reporter also felt like an exploited proletarian, a producer of
surplus value chained to an ideological assembly line, and the
students forgave him.

Between eleven at night
and two in the morning you might see a young publisher, an
architect, a crime reporter trying to work his way up to the arts
page, some Brera Academy painters, a few semisuccessful writers,
and students like me.

A minimum of alcoholic
stimulation was the rule, and old Pilade, while he still stocked
his big bottles of white for the tram drivers and the most
aristocratic customers, replaced root beer and cream soda with
petillant wines with the right labels for the intellectuals and
Johnnie Walker for the revolutionaries. I could write the political
history of those years based on how Red Label gradually gave way to
twelve-year-old Ballantine and then to single malt.

At the old billiard
table the painters and motormen still challenged each other to
games, but with the arrival of the new clientele, Pilade also put
in a pinball machine.

I was never able to make
the little balls last. At first I attributed that to
absent-mindedness or a lack of manual dexterity. I learned the
truth years later after watching Lorenza Pellegrini play. At the
beginning I hadn't noticed her, but then she came into focus one
evening when I followed the direction of Belbo's gaze.

Belbo had a way of
standing at the bar as if he were just passing through (he had been
a regular there for at least ten years). He often took part in
conversations, at the counter or at a table, but almost always he
did no more than drop some short remark that would instantly freeze
all enthusiasm, no matter what subject was being discussed. He had
another freezing technique: asking a question. Someone would be
talking about an event, the whole group would be completely
absorbed, then Belbo, turning his pale, slightly absent eyes on the
speaker, with his glass at hip level, as though he had long
forgotten he was drinking, would ask, "Is that a fact?" Or,
"Really?" At which point everyone, including the narrator, would
suddenly begin to doubt the story. Maybe it was the way Belbo's
Piedmont drawl made his statements interrogative and his
interrogatives taunting. And he had yet another Piedmont trick:
looking into his interlocutor's eyes, but as if he were avoiding
them. His gaze didn't exactly shirk dialogue, but he would suddenly
seem to concentrate on some distant convergence of parallel lines
no one had paid attention to. He made you feel that you had been
staring all this time at the one place that was
unimportant.

It wasn't just his gaze.
Belbo could dismiss you with the smallest gesture, a brief
interjection. Suppose you were trying hard to show that it was Kant
who really completed the Coper-nican revolution in modern
philosophy, suppose you were staking your whole future on that
thesis. Belbo, sitting opposite you, with his eyes half-closed,
would suddenly look down at his hands or at his knee with an
Etruscan smile. Or he would sit back with his mouth open, eyes on
the ceiling, and mumble, "Yes, Kant..." Or he would commit himself
more explicitly, in an assault on the whole system of
transcendental idealism: "You really think Kant meant all that
stuff?" Then he would look at you with solicitude, as if you, and
not he, had disturbed the spell, and he would then encourage you:
"Go ahead, go ahead. I mean, there must be something to it. The man
had a mind, after all."

But sometimes Belbo,
when he became really angry, lost his composure. Since loss of
composure was the one thing he could not tolerate in others, his
own was wholly internal¡Xand regional. He would purse his lips,
raise his eyes, then look down, tilt his head to the left, and say
in a soft voice: "Ma gavte la nata." For anyone who didn't know
that Piedmontese expression, he would occasionally explain: "Ma
gavte la nata. Take out the cork." You say it to one who is full of
himself, the idea being that what causes him to swell and strut is
the pressure of a cork stuck in his behind. Remove it, and
phsssssh, he returns to the human condition.

Belbo's remarks had a
way of making you see the vanity of things, and they delighted me.
But I drew the wrong conclusion from them, considering them an
expression of supreme contempt for the banality of other people's
truth.

Now, having breached the
secret of Abulafia and, with it, Belbo's soul, I see that what I
thought disenchantment and a philosophy of life was a form of
melancholy. His intellectual disrespect concealed a desperate
thirst for the Absolute. This was not immediately obvious, because
Belbo had many moods-irresponsibility, hesitation,
indifference¡Xand there were also moments when he relaxed and
enjoyed conversation, asserting absolutely contradictory ideas with
lighthearted disbelief. Then he and Diotallevi would create
handbooks for impossibilities, or invent upside-down worlds or
bibliographical monstrosities. When you saw him so enthusiastically
talkative, constructing his Rabelaisian Sorbonne, there was no way
of knowing how much he suffered at his exile rrom the faculty of
theology, the real one.

I had deliberately
thrown that address away; he had mislaid it and could never resign
himself to the loss.

In Abulafia's files I
found many pages of a pseudo diary that Belbo had entrusted to the
password, confident that he was not betraying his often-repeated
vow to remain a mere spectator of the world. Some entries carried
old dates; obviously he had put these on the computer out of
nostalgia, or because he planned to recycle them eventually. Others
were more recent, after the advent of Abu. His writing was a
mechanical game, a solitary pondering on his own errors, but it was
not¡Xhe thought¡X"creation," for creation had to be inspired by
love of someone who is not ourselves.

But Belbo, without
realizing it, had crossed that Rubicon; he was creating.
Unfortunately. His enthusiasm for the Plan came from his ambition
to write a book. No matter if the book were made entirely of
errors, intentional, deadly errors. As long as you remain in your
private vacuum, you can pretend you are in harmony with the One.
But the moment you pick up the clay, electronic or otherwise, you
become a demiurge, and he who embarks on the creation of worlds is
already tainted with corruption and evil.

FILENAME: A bevy of fair
women

It's like this: toutes
les femmes que j'ai rencontrdes se dressent aux horizons¡Xavec les
gestes piteux et les regards tristes des semaphores sous la
pluie...

Aim high, Belbo. First
love, the Most Blessed Virgin. Mama singing as she holds me on her
lap as if rocking me though I'm past the age for lullabies, but I
asked her to sing because I love her voice and the lavender scent
of her bosom. "O Queen of Heaven fair and pure, hail, O daughter,
queen demure, hail, mother of our Savior!"

Naturally, the first
woman in my life was not mine. By definition she was not anyone's.
I fell immediately in love with the only person capable of doing
everything without me.

Then, Marilena
(Marylena? Mary Lena?). Describe the lyric twilight, her golden
hair, big blue bow, me standing in front of the bench with my nose
upward, she tightrope-walking on the top rail of the back, swaying,
arms outstretched for balance (delicious extrasystoles!), skirt
flapping around her pink thighs. High above me,
unattainable.

Sketch: that same
evening as Mama sprinkles talcum powder on my sister's pink skin. I
ask when her wee-wee will finally grow out. Mania's answer is that
little girls don't grow wee-wees, they stay like that. Suddenly I
see Mary Lena again, the white of her underpants visible beneath
the fluttering blue skirt, and I realize that she is blond and
haughty and inaccessible because she is different. No possible
relationship; she belongs to another race.

My third woman, swiftly
lost in the abyss, where she has plunged. She has died in her
sleep, virginal Ophelia amid flowers on her bier. The priest is
reciting the prayer for the dead, when suddenly she sits up on the
catafalque, pale, frowning, vindictive, pointing her finger, and
her voice cavernous: "Don't pray for me, Father. Before I fell
asleep last night, I had an impure thought, the only one in my
life, and now I am damned." Find the book of my first communion.
Does it have this illustration, or did I make the whole thing up?
She must have died while thinking of me; I was the impure thought,
desiring the untouchable Mary Lena, she of a different species and
fate. I am guilty of her damnation, I am guilty of the damnation of
all women who are damned. It is right that I should not have had
these three women: my punishment for wanting them.

I lose the first because
she's in paradise, the second because she's in purgatory envying
the penis that will never be hers, and the third because she's in
hell. Theologically symmetrical. But this has already been
written.

On the other hand,
there's the story of Cecilia, and Cecilia is here on earth. I used
to think about her before falling asleep: I would be climbing the
hill on my way to the farm for milk, and when the partisans started
shooting at the roadblock from the hill opposite, I pictured myself
rushing to her rescue, saving her from the horde of Fascist
brigands who chased her, brandishing their weapons. Blonder than
Mary Lena, more disturbing than the maiden in the sarcophagus, more
pure and demure than the Virgin¡XCecilia, alive and accessible. I
could have talked to her so easily, for I was sure she could love
one of my species. And, in fact, she did. His name was Papi; he had
wispy blond hair and a tiny skull, was a year older than I, and had
a saxophone. I didn't even have a trumpet. I never saw the two of
them together, but all the kids at Sunday School laughed, poked one
another in the ribs, and whispered, giggling, that the pair made
love. They were probably lying, little peasants, horny as goats,
but they were probably right that she (Marylena Cecilia bride and
queen) was accessible, so accessible that someone had already
gained access to her. In any case¡Xthe fourth case¡XI was out in
the cold.

Could a story like this
be made into a novel? Perhaps I should write, instead, about the
women I avoid because I can have them. Or could have had them. Same
story.

If you can't even decide
what the story is, better stick to editing books on
philosophy.