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But the fact is that it doesn't take long for the experience of the Numinous
to unhinge the mind. (6)
Greek fire [is] the kind that burns and destroys. (90)
It's quite possible that mortality is simply the result of poor education. (149)
One day, saying that he had known Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, he described
minutely the governor's house and listed the dishes served at supper. Cardinal de Rohan, believing these were fantasies, turned
to the Comte de Saint-Germain's valet, an old man with white hair and an honest expression. 'My friend', he said to the servant,
'I find it hard to believe what your master is telling us. Granted that he may be a ventriloquist; and even that he can make
gold. But that he is two thousand years old and saw Pontius Pilate? That is too much. Were you there?' 'Oh, no, Monsignore,'
the valet answered ingenuously, 'I have been in M. le Comte's service only four hundred years.' (Collin de Placy, Dictionnaire infernal, Paris, Mellier, 1844, p. 434. Quoted in Eco. p. 151)
The age of the Antonines . .
. The world was full of marvelous correspondences, subtle resemblances; the only way to penetrate them - and to be penetrated
by them - was through dreams, oracles, magic, which allow us to act on nature and her forces, moving like with like. Knowledge
is elusive and volatile; it escapes measurement. That's why the conquering god of that era was Hermes, inventor of all trickery,
god of crossroads and thieves. He was also the creator of writing, which is the art of evasion and dissimulation and a navigation
that carries us to the end of all boundaries, where everything dissolves into the horizon, where cranes lift stones from the
ground and weapons transform life into death, and water pumps make heavy matter float, and philosophy deludes and deceives.
(156)
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet somewhere
and decide to have a contest. They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each one's free to take it and
run with it. At the end, they'll see who's done the best job. The four stories are picked up by some friends who act as critics:
Matthew is fairly realistic, but insists on that Messiah business too much; Mark isn't bad, just a little sloppy; Luke is
elegant, no denying that; and John takes the philosophy a little too far. Actually, though, the books have an appeal, they
circulate, and when the four realize what's happening, it's too late. Paul has already met Jesus on the road to Damascus,
Pliny begins his investigation ordered by the worried emperor, and a legion of apocryphal writers pretends also to know plenty.
. . . Toi, apocryphe lecteur, mon semblable, mon frére. It all goes to Peter's head; he takes himself seriously. John threatens
to tell the truth, Peter and Paul have him chained up on the island of Patmos. Soon the poor man is seeing things: Help, there
are locusts all over my bed, make those trumpets stop, where's all this blood coming from? The others say he's drunk, or maybe
its arteriosclerosis. . . . Who knows, maybe it really happened that way.
(168-169)
Now I know that Hesed is not
only the Sefirah of grace and love. As Diotallevi said, it is also the movement of expansion of the divine substance, which
spreads out to the edge of infinity. It is the care of the living for the dead, but someone also must have observed that it
is the care of the dead for the living. (179)
An
initiate is not the same as a mystic. Being an initiate - having an intuitive comprehension of what reason cannot explain
- is a very deep process; it is a slow transformation of the spirit and of the body, and it can lead to the exercise of superior
abilities, even to immortality. But it is secret, intimate; it does not show itself externally; it is modest, lucid, detached.
That is why the Masters of the World, initiates, do not indulge in mysticism. For them, a mystic is a slave, a site of the
manifestation of the numinous, through which site the signs of a secret can be observed. The initiate encourages the mystic
and uses him as you might use a telephone, to establish long-distance contact, or as a chemist might use litmus paper, to
detect the action of a particular substance. The mystic is useful, because he is conspicuous. He broadcasts himself. Initiates,
on the contrary, are recognizable only to one another. It is they who control the forces that mystics undergo. In this sense
there is no difference between the possession experienced by the cavalos and the ecstasies of Saint Theresa of Avila or Saint
John of the Cross. Mysticism is a degenerate form of contact with the divine, whereas initiation is the fruit of long askesis
of mind and heart. Mysticism is a democratic, if not demagogic, phenomenon; initiation is aristocratic. (180-181)
FILENAME: Pinball
____________________________________________________________________
You don't play pinball with just your hands, you play it with the groin too. The pinball problem is not
to stop the ball before it's swallowed by the mouth at the bottom, or to kick it back to midfield like a half-back. The problem
is to make it stay up where the lighted targets are more numerous and have it bounce from one to another, wandering, confused,
delirious, but still a free agent. And you achieve this not by jolting the ball but by transmitting vibrations to the case,
the frame, but gently, so the machine won't catch on and say Tilt. You can only do it with the groin, or with a play of the
hips that makes the groin not so much bump, as slither, keeping you on this side of an orgasm. And if the hips move according
to nature, it's the buttocks that supply the forward thrust, but gracefully, so that when the thrust reaches the pelvic area,
it is softened, as in homeopathy, where the more you shake a solution and the more the drug dissolves in the water added gradually,
until the drug has almost entirely disappeared, the more medically effective and potent it is. Thus from the groin an infinitesimal
pulse is transmitted to the case, and the machine obeys, the ball moves against nature, against inertia, against gravity,
against the laws of dynamics, and against the cleverness of its constructor, who wanted it disobedient. The ball is intoxicated
with vis movendi, remaining in play for memorable and immemorial lengths of time. But a female groin is required, one that
interposes no spongy body between the ileum and the machine, and there must be no erectile matter in between, only skin, nerves,
padded bone sheathed in a pair of jeans, and a sublimated erotic fury, a sly frigidity, a disinterested adaptability to the
partner's response, a taste for arousing desire without suffering the excess of one's own: the Amazon must drive the pinball
crazy and savor the thought that she will then abandon it.
____________________________________________________________________
(187-188)
A sudden illumination: I had a trade after all. I would set up a cultural investigation agency, be a kind
of private eye of learning.
Instead of sticking my nose into all-night dives and cathouses,
I would skulk around bookshops, libraries, corridors of universities departments. Then I'd sit in my office, my feet propped
on the desk, drinking, from a Dixie cup, the whiskey I'd brought up from the corner store in a paper bag. The phone rings
and a man says: 'Listen, I'm translating the book and came across something or someone called Motakallimun. What the hell
is it?'
Give me two days, I tell him. Then I go to the library, flip
through some card catalogs, give the man in the reference office a cigarette, and pick up a clue.
That evening I invite an instructor in Islamic studies out for a drink. I buy him a couple of beers and
he drops his guard, gives me the lowdown for nothing. I call the client back. 'All right, the Motakallimun were radical Moslem
theologians at the time of Avicenna. They said the world was a sort of dust cloud of accidents that formed particular shapes
only by an instantaneous and temporary act of the divine will. If God was distracted for even a moment, the universe would
fall to pieces, into a meaningless anarchy of atoms. That enough for you? The job took me three days. Pay what you think is
fair.' (189-190)
I was accumulating experience and information, and I never threw
anything away. I kept files on everything. . . . I had cross-referenced index cards. Nebulae, Laplace; Laplace, Kant; Kant,
Konigsberg, the seven bridges of Konigsberg, theorems of topology . . . It was a little like that game where you have to go
from sausage to Plato in five steps, by association of ideas. Let's see: sausage, pig bristle, paintbrush, Mannerism, Idea,
Plato. Easy. Even the sloppiest manuscript would bring twenty new cards for my hoard. I had a strict rule, which I think secret
services follow, too: No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding
the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them. (190)
'Time is an invention
of the West.' (282)
"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. She so slim and supple with 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, you really have to be in an attic while 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 the spirit of Mercury and Manicheanism 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 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, shut up and don't joke, and 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 its 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 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, your 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 worshipped not because they're horizontal, but because there's water in them, and you don't need me to explain to you
the relations 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." (301-303)
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 who 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 - or for them, there is more than one woman, there are many,
I lost them all in the same way, through neglect - and 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 my anguish, I keep racking my
brain for the reason I permitted - or wanted - the 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 Vosages . . . no, more open, because
at the end stands a kind of Madeleine. Passing the square, moving behind the temple, I come to a street - there's a secondhand
bookshop on the corner - that 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 - and I remember it with the clarity
of a photograph - that 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 - it's impossible that I dreamed them in another dream - with 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 retiro, in the odor of precious
junk.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Why can't I dream of college entrance exams like everybody else?
____________________________________________________________________
(308-309)
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 fiancée
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.' (312-313)
'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.' (314)
Maybe only cheap fiction gives us the true measure of reality. Maybe they've
deceived us [by m]aking us believe that on one hand there is Great Art, which portrays characters in typical situations, and
on the other hand you have the thriller, the romance, which portrays atypical characters in atypical situations. . . . I played
with the dime novel, in order to take a stroll outside of life. It comforted me, offering the unattainable. But I was wrong.
. . . Proust was right: life is represented better by bad music than by a Missa solemnis. Great Art makes fun of us as it
comforts us, because it shows us the world as the artists would like the world to be. The dime novel, however, pretends to
joke, but then it shows us the world as it actually is or at least the world as it will become. . . . Shakespeare, Melville,
Balzac, and Dostoyevski all wrote sensational fiction. What has taken place in the real world was predicted in penny dreadfuls.
The fact is, it's easier for reality to imitate the dime novel than to imitate
art. Being Mona Lisa is hard work; becoming Milady follows our natural tendency to choose the easy way. (407-408)
We're remaking history; we can't be squeamish. (p. 422)
If the problem is this absence of being and if what is is what is
said, then the more we talk, the more being there is.
The dream of science is that there be little being, that it be concentrated and sayable, E=mc2. Wrong. To
be saved at the very beginning, for all eternity, it is necessary for that being to be tangled. Like a serpent tied into knots
by a drunken sailor: impossible to untie.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - -
Invent, invent wildly, paying no attention to connections, till it becomes impossible to summarize. A simple relay
race among symbols, one says the name of the next, without rest. To dismantle the world into a saraband of anagrams, endless.
And then believe in what cannot be expressed. Is this not the true reading of the Torah? Truth is the anagram of an anagram.
Anagrams = ars magna. (435)
Beware of faking: people will believe you. People believe those who sell lotions that make lost hair grow back. They
sense instinctively that the salesman is putting together truths that don't go together, that he's not being logical, that
he's not speaking in good faith. But they've been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the
closest thing to God. The farfetched is the closest thing to a miracle.
(444)
Belbo was sure by now that the cosmos was a practical joke of the Demiurge. (452)
"Rearranging the letters of the Book means rearranging the world. There's
no getting away from it. Any book, even a speller. People like your Dr. Wagner, don't they say that a man who plays with words
and makes anagrams and violates the language has ugliness in his soul and hates his father?"
"But those are psychoanalysts. They say that to make money. They aren't your rabbis."
"They're all rabbis. They're the same thing. Do you think the rabbis, when they spoke of the Torah, were talking about
a scroll? They were talking about us, about remaking our body through language. Now, listen. To manipulate the letters of
the Book takes great piety, and we didn't have it. But every book is interwoven with the name of God. And we anagrammatized
all the books of history, and we did it without praying. Listen to me, damn it. He who concerns himself with the Torah keeps
the world in motion, and he keeps in motion his own body as he reads, studies, rewrites, because there's no part of the body
that doesn't have an equivalent in the world. . . . If you alter the Book, you alter the world; if you alter the world, you
alter the body. . . .
"Manipulating the words of the Books, we attempted to construct a golem. . . .
"For months, like devout rabbis, we uttered different combinations of the letters of the Book. GCC, CGC, GCG, CGG.
What our lips said, our cells learned. What did my cells do? They invented a different Plan, and now they are proceeding on
their own, creating a history, a unique, private history. My cells have learned that you can blaspheme by anagrammatizing
the Book, and all the books of the world. And they have learned to do this now with my body. They invert, transpose, alternate,
transform themselves into cells unheard of, new cells without meaning, or with meaning contrary to the right meaning. There
must be a right meaning and a wrong meaning; otherwise you die. My cells joke, without faith, blindly. . . . I talk like this
because finally I understand everything about my body. I've studied it day after day, I know what's happening in it, but I
can't intervene; the cells no longer obey. I'm dying because I've convinced myself that there was no order, that you could
do whatever you liked with any text. I spent my life convincing myself of this, I, with my own brain. And my brain must have
transmitted the message to them. Why should I expect them to be wiser than my brain? I'm dying because we were imaginative
beyond bounds." (466-468)
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