Foucault's Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

Akkabu, dulla akkanullather thing nullaw: Belbulla ullarders Akkabu tulla chakkange akkall wullards, makkake eakkach “akka” becullame “akkakkakka” akkand eakkach “ulla” becullame “ullakka,” fullar akka pakkarakkagrakkaph tulla lullaullak akkalmullast Finnish.

Boaty McBoatface!

“My dear friend,” Diotallevi said, “you’ll never understand anything. It’s true that the Torah—the visible Torah, that is—is only one of the possible permutations of the letters of the eternal Torah, as God created it and delivered it to the angels. By rearranging the letters of the book over the centuries, we may someday arrive again at the original Torah. But the important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest. And in an office! No, the Book must be murmured day after day in a little ghetto hovel where you learn to lean forward and keep your arms tight against your hips so there will be as little space as possible between the hand that holds the Book and the hand that turns the pages. And if you moisten your fingers, you must raise them vertically to your lips, as if nibbling unleavened bread, and drop no crumb. The word must be eaten very slowly. It must melt on the tongue before you can dissolve it and reorder it. And take care not to slobber it onto your caftan. If even a single letter is lost, the thread that is about to link you with the higher sefirot is broken.

And he showed Diotallevi the program; Diotallevi had to agree it looked cabalistic:

Do not expect too much of the end of the world. —Stanislaw J. Lee, Aforyzmy. Fraszki, Kraków, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977, “Myśli nieuczesane”

“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.”

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.

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.

lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”

There’s nothing worse than an army when the war is over.

This was a face I knew from photographs of firing squads—on both sides. In those days men with the same face shot one another.

Where do you think Mahomet, another great Druid initiate, got the inspiration for the Black Stone of Mecca?

I worked for another year and produced two hundred and fifty typewritten pages on the trial of the Templars. It was then that I learned that a graduate student is less an object of suspicion than an undergraduate. Those were years when defending a thesis was considered evidence of respectful loyalty to the state, and you were treated with indulgence.

I devoted myself to Renaissance philosophers and I discovered that the men of secular modernity, once they had emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages, had found nothing better to do than devote themselves to cabala and magic.

The world is monotonous, men learn nothing, and, with every generation, they fall into the same errors and nightmares, events are not repeated but they resemble one another … novelties end, surprises, revelations.

Pilade’s was an arcade of sinister flashing lights, and couriers from the Red Brigades on recruiting missions may well have been taking their turn at the Space Invaders screen. But they couldn’t play the pinball; you can’t play pinball with a pistol stuck in your belt.

I told him it was Anselmo d’Aosta, and that only the English, who had to be different from everybody else, called him Anselm of Canterbury.

I told them about a strange thing I had seen in Paris, a bookshop near quai Saint-Michel. Its symmetrical windows advertised its own schizophrenia: on one side, books on computers and the electronics of the future; on the other, occult sciences. And it was the same inside: Apple and cabala.

“Exactly,” Garamond said, missing the reference. “It’s a gold mine, all right. I realized that these people will gobble up anything that’s hermetic, as you put it, anything that says the opposite of what they read in their books at school.

I don’t know how Crowley could have activated the Rituals of the Beast without bearing in mind the Liturgy of the Sword. Only by unsheathing the sword can the nature of Mahapralaya be understood, the Third Eye of Kundalini, in other words. And also in his arithmology, all based on the Number of the Beast, he failed to consider the New Numbers: 93, 118, 444, 868, and 1001. “What do they mean?” asked Diotallevi, suddenly all ears. “Ah,” said Professor Camestres, “as was already stated in the first Liber legis, every number is infinite and therefore there is no real difference!”

“I’m not saying that those people are connected with politics, but … There was a time when we went looking for the Red Brigades in squats and the Black Brigades in martial arts clubs; nowadays the opposite could be true. We live in a strange world. My job, I assure you, was easier ten years ago. Today, even among ideologies, there’s no consistency. There are times when I think of switching to narcotics. There, at least you can rely on a heroin pusher to push heroin.”

“You’re joking, but I—” “I’m not joking. Come and read the manuscripts that turn up at Manutius. But if you want a more down-to-earth explanation, it’s like the story of the man with a bad stammer who complains that the radio station wouldn’t hire him as an announcer because he didn’t carry a party card. We always have to blame our failures on somebody else, and dictatorships always need an external enemy to bind their followers together. As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.”

What a lunatic writes may explain the thinking of the man who puts the bomb on the train.

When I told Lia about this episode, she said: “If you ask me, he was sincere. He really did want to get it all off his chest. You think he can find anyone at police headquarters who will listen to him wonder whether Jeanne Canudo was right-wing or left? He only wanted to find out if it’s his fault he can’t understand it or if the whole thing is too difficult. And you weren’t able to give him the one true answer.” “The one true answer?” “Of course. That there’s nothing to understand. Synarchy is God.” “God?” “Yes. Mankind can’t endure the thought that the world was born by chance, by mistake, just because four brainless atoms bumped into one another on a slippery highway. So a cosmic plot has to be found—God, angels, devils. Synarchy performs the same function on a lesser scale.” “Then I should have told him that people put bombs on trains because they’re looking for God?” “Why not?”

On every third tree a lantern had been hung, and a splendid virgin, also dressed in blue, lighted them with a marvelous torch, and I lingered, longer than necessary, to admire the sight, which was of an ineffable beauty. —Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 2, p. 21

“But you said the manifestoes were fake,” Belbo said. “So? What we’re putting together is fake.” “True,” he said. “I was forgetting that.”

“If the Plan exists, it must involve everything. Either it explains all or it explains nothing,”

It’s possible to have a splendid organizational talent but quite confused ideas.

If I had only stopped there. If I had only written a white book, a good grimoire, for all the adepts of Isis Unveiled, explaining to them that the secretum secretorum no longer needed to be sought, that the book of life contained no hidden meaning; it was all there, in the bellies of all the Lias of the world, in the hospital rooms, on straw pallets, on riverbanks, and that the stones in exile and the Holy Grail were nothing but screaming monkeys with their umbilical cord still dangling and the doctor giving them a slap on the ass. And that the Unknown Superiors, in the eyes of the Thing, were only me and Lia, and the Thing would immediately recognize us, without having to go ask that old fool de Maistre.

“Yes, cover your eyes with your hands. And meanwhile, in that firm of yours, you publish such books … How many Jews are there among your authors?” “We don’t ask our authors to fill out racial forms,” I replied stiffly. “You mustn’t think me an anti-Semite. No, some of my best friends … I have in mind a certain kind of Jew….” “What kind?” “I know what kind….”

A map is not the territory. —Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 1933; 4th ed., The International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1958, II, 4, p. 58

But whatever the rhythm was, luck rewarded us, because, wanting connections, we found connections—always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else….

Come on, Eco!

“The moral of the story?” “Who said stories have to have a moral? But, now that I think about it, maybe the moral is that sometimes, to prove something, you have to die.”

The conspiracy theory of society … comes from abandoning God and then asking: “Who is in his place?” —Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, London, Routledge, 1969, iv, p. 123

If you feel guilty, you invent a plot, many plots. And to counter them, you have to organize your own plot. But the more you invent enemy plots, to exonerate your lack of understanding, the more you fall in love with them, and you pattern your own on their model. Which is what happened when Jesuits and Baconians, Paulicians and neo-Templars each complained of the other’s plan. Diotallevi’s remark was: “Of course, you attribute to the others what you’re doing yourself, and since what you’re doing yourself is hateful, the others become hateful. But since the others, as a rule, would like to do the same hateful thing that you’re doing, they collaborate with you, hinting that—yes—what you attribute to them is actually what they have always desired. God blinds those He wishes to destroy; you just have to lend Him a helping hand.”