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

"Then the seashells arein our midst," Belbo said.

"Just look around you,"Diotallevi said.

"But is there no wayout?"

"There's a way back in,actually," Diotallevi said. "All emanates from God, in thecontraction of simsum. The problem is to bring about tikkun, therestoration of Adam Qadmon. Then we will rebuild everything in thebalanced structure of the par-zufim, the faces¡Xor, rather,forms¡Xthat will take the place of the Sefirot. The ascension ofthe soul is like a cord of silk that enables devout intention,groping in the darkness, to find the path to the light. And so theworld constantly strives, by combining the letters of the Torah, toregain its natural form, to emerge from its horribleconfusion."

And this is what I amdoing now, in the middle of the night, in the unnatural calm ofthese hills. The other evening in the periscope, however, I wasstill mired in the slime of the seashells I felt afl around me, ofthe slugs trapped in the crystal cases of the Conservatoire, amongthe barometers and rusted clockworks, in deaf hibernation. Ithought then that if there had been a breaking of the vessels, thefirst crack probably appeared that evening in Rio, during the rite,but it was on my return to my native country that the shatteringoccurred. It happened slowly, soundlessly, so that we all foundourselves caught in the morass of gross matter, where noxiousvermin emerge by spontaneous generation.

When I returned fromBrazil, I hardly knew who I was anymore. I was approaching thirty.At that age, my father was a father; he knew who he was and wherehe lived.

I had been too far frommy country while prodigious things were happening. I had lived in aworld swollen with the incredible, where events in Italy wore ahalo of legend. Shortly before leaving the other hemisphere¡Xit wasnear the end of my stay and I was treating myself to an airplaneride over the forests of Amazonia¡XI picked up a local newspaperduring a stopover in Fortaleza. On the front page was a prominentphotograph of someone I recognized: I had seen him sipping whitewine at Pilade's for years. The caption read: "O homem que matouMoro."

When I got back, I foundout that, of course, he wasn't the man who killed Moro. Handed aloaded pistol, he would have shot himself in the ear when checkingto see if it worked. What had happened was simply that anantiterrorist squad had burst in on him and found three pistols andtwo packs of explosives hidden under the bed. He was lying on thebed, since it was the only piece of furniture in that one-roomapartment, whose rent was shared by a group of survivors of ¡¥68who used it as a place to satisfy the demands of the flesh. If itssole decoration hadn't been a poster of Che, the place could havebeen taken for any bachelor's pied-a-terre. But one of the tenantsbelonged to an armed group, and the others had no idea that theywere financing the group's safe house. They all ended up in jailfor a year.

I understood very littleof what had happened in Italy over the past few years. The countryhad been on the brink of great changes when I left¡Xleft guiltily,feeling almost that I was running away at the moment of thesettling of scores. Before I left, I could tell a man's ideologyjust by the tone of his voice. I was back and now could not figureout who was on whose side. No one was talking about revolution; thenew thing was the unconscious. People who claimed to be leftistsquoted Nietzsche and Celine, while right-wing magazines hailedrevolution in the Third World.

I went back to Pilade's,but I felt I was on foreign soil. The billiard table was stillthere, and more or less the same painters, but the young fauna hadchanged. I learned that some of the old customers had openedschools of transcendental meditation or macrobiotic restaurants.Apparently nobody had thought of a tenda de umbanda yet. Maybe Iwas ahead of the times.

To appease the historichard core, Pilade still had one of those old-fashioned pinballmachines, the kind that now seemed copied from a Lichtensteinpainting and were bought up wholesale by antique dealers. Next toit, however, the younger customers crowded around other machines,machines with fluorescent screens on which stylized hawks orkamikazes from Planet X hovered, or frogs jumped around grunting inJapanese. Pilade's was an arcade of sinister flashing lights, andcouriers from the Red Brigades on recruiting missions may well havebeen taking their turn at the Space Invaders screen. But theycouldn't play the pinball; you can't play pinball with a pistolstuck in your belt.

I realized this onenight when I followed Belbo's gaze and saw Lorenza Pellegrini atthe machine. Or, rather, when I later read one of his files.Lorenza isn't named, but it's obviously about her. She was the onlyone who played pinball like that.

FILENAME:Pinball

You don't play pinballwith just your hands, you play it with the groin too. The pinballproblem is not to stop the ball before it's swallowed by the mouthat the bottom, or to kick it back to midfield like a halfback. Theproblem is to make it stay up where the lighted targets are morenumerous and have it bounce from one to another, wandering,confused, delirious, but still a free agent. And you achieve thisnot 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 thatmakes the groin not so much bump, as slither, keeping you on thisside of an orgasm. And if the hips move according to nature, it'sthe buttocks that supply the forward thrust, but gracefully, sothat when the thrust reaches the pelvic area, it is softened, as inhomeopathy, where the more you shake a solution and the more thedrug dissolves in the water added gradually, until the drug hasalmost entirely disappeared, the more medically effective andpotent it is. Thus from the groin an infinitesimal pulse istransmitted to the case, and the machine obeys, the ball movesagainst nature, against inertia, against gravity, against the lawsof dynamics, and against the cleverness of its constructor, whowanted it disobedient. The ball