Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

Wrong, I thoughtSaturday evening as I huddled in the periscope. Climbing the stepsto the Garamond oifice had been like entering the Palace. Binah,Diotallevi used to say, is the palace Hokhmah builds as He spreadsout from the primordial point. If Hokhmah is the source, Binah isthe river that flows from it, separating into its various branchesuntil they all empty into the great sea of the last Sefirah. But inBinah all forms are already formed.

HESED

23

The analogy of oppositesis the relation of light to shadow, peak to abyss, fullness tovoid. Allegory, mother of all dogmas, is the replacement of theseal by the hallmark, of reality by shadow; it is the falsehood oftruth, and the truth of falsehood.

¡XEliphas Levi, Dogme dela haute magie, Paris, Bailie re, 1856, XXII, 22

I went to Brazil out oflove for Amparo, I stayed out of love for the country. I never didunderstand how it was that Amparo, a descendant of Dutch settlersin Recife who intermarried with Indians and Sudanese blacks¡Xwithher Jamaican face and Parisian culture¡Xhad wound up with a Spanishname. For that matter, I never managed to figure out Braziliannames. They defy all onomastic dictionaries, and exist only inBrazil.

Amparo told me that intheir hemisphere, when water drains down a sink, the little eddyswirls counterclockwise, whereas at home, ours swirls clockwise. Ormaybe it's the other way around: I've never succeeded in checkingthe truth of it. Not only because nobody in our hemisphere has everlooked to see which way the water swirls, but also because, aftervarious experiments in Brazil, I realized it's very hard to tell.The suction is too quick to be studied, and its direction probablydepends partly on the force and angle of the jet and the shape ofthe sink or the tub. Besides, if this is true, what happens at theequator? Maybe the water drains straight down, with no swirling, ormaybe it doesn't drain at all.

At that time I didn'tagonize over the problem, but Saturday night in the periscope I wasthinking how everything depended on telluric currents, and thePendulum contained the secret.

Amparo was steadfast inher faith. "The particular empirical event doesn't matter," shesaid. "It's an ideal principle, which can be verified only underideal conditions. Which means never. But it's stilltrue."

In Milan, Amparo'sdisenchantment had been one of her most desirable traits. But inBrazil, reacting to the chemistry of her native land, she becameelusive, a visionary capable of subterranean rationality. Stirredby ancient passions, she was careful to keep them in check; but theasceticism which made her reject their seduction was notconvincing.

I measured her splendidcontradictions when I watched her argue with her comrades. Themeetings were held in shabby houses decorated with a few postersand a lot of folk art, portraits of Lenin and Amerindian fetishes,or terra-cotta figures glorifying the cangaceiros, outlaws of theNortheast. I hadn't arrived during one of the country's most lucidmoments politically, and, after my experiences at home, I decidedto steer clear of ideologies, especially in a place where I didn'tunderstand them. The way Amparo's comrades talked made me even moreuncertain, but they also roused a new curiosity in me. They were,naturally, all Marxists, and at first they seemed to talk more orless like European Marxists, but the subject somehow was alwaysdifferent. In the middle of an argument about the class struggle,they would suddenly mention "Brazilian cannibalism" or therevolutionary role of Afro-Brazilian religions.

Hearing them talk aboutthese cults convinced me that at least ideological suction, downthere, swirled in the opposite direction. They described a panoramaof internal migrations back and forth, the disinherited of thenorth moving down toward the industrial south, where they becamesubproletarians in immense smog-choked metropolises, eventuallyreturning in desperation to the north, only to repeat their flightsouthward in the next cycle. But many ran aground in the big citiesduring these oscillations, and they were absorbed by a plethora ofindigenous churches; they worshiped spirits, evoked Africandivinities...And here Amparo's comrades were divided: someconsidered this a return to their roots, a way of opposing thewhite world; others thought these cults were the opiate with whichthe ruling class held an immense revolutionary potential in check;and still others maintained that the cults were a melting pot inwhich whites, Indians, and blacks could be blended¡Xfor whatpurpose, they were not clear. Amparo had made up her mind: religionwas always the opiate of the people, and pseudo-tribal cults wereeven worse. But when I held her by the waist in the escolas desamba, joining in the snaking lines to the unbearable rhythm of thedrums, I realized that she clung to that world with the muscles ofher belly, her heart, her head, her nostrils...Afterward, she wasdie first to offer a bitter, sarcastic analysis of the orgiasticcharacter of people's religious devotion¡Xweek after week and monthafter month¡Xto the rite of carnival. Exactly the same sort oftribal witchcraft, she would say with revolutionary contempt, asthe soccer rituals in which the disinherited expended theircombative energy and sense of revolt, practicing spells andenchantments to win from the gods of every possible world the deathof the opposing halfback, completely unaware of the Establishment,which wanted to keep them in a state of ecstatic enthusiasm,condemned to unreality.

In time I lost any senseof contradiction, just as I gradually abandoned any attempt todistinguish the different races in that land of age-old, unbridledhybridization. I gave up trying to establish where progress lay,and where revolution, or to see the plot¡Xas Amparo's comradesexpressed it¡Xof capitalism. How could I continue to think like aEuropean once I learned that the hopes of the far left were keptalive by a Nordeste bishop suspected of having harbored Nazisympathies in his youth but who now faithfully and fearlessly heldhigh the torch of revolt, upsetting the wary Vatican and thebarracudas of Wall Street, and joyfully inflaming the atheism ofthe proletarian mystics won over by the tender yet menacing bannerof a Beautiful Lady who, pierced by seven sorrows, gazed down onthe sufferings of her people?

One morning Amparo and Iwere driving along the coast after having attended a seminar on theclass structure of the lumpen-proletariat. I saw some votiveofferings on the beach, little candles, white garlands. Amparo toldme they were offerings to Yemanja, goddess of the