Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum Read online

  Umberto Eco

  Foucalt's Pendulum

  Only for you, children of doctrine and learning, have we written this work. Examine this book, ponder the meaning we have dispersed in various places and gathered again; what we have concealed in one place we have disclosed in another, that it may be understood by your wisdom

  --Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia, 3, 65

  Superstition brings bad luck.

  --Raymond Smullyan, 5000 B.C., 1.3.8

  KETER

  1

  That was when I saw the Pendulum.

  The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir, swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty.

  I knew¡Xbut anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing¡Xthat the period was governed by the square root of the length of the wire and by IT, that number which, however irrational to sublunar minds, through a higher rationality binds the circumference and diameter of all possible circles. The time it took the sphere to swing from end to end was determined by an arcane conspiracy between the most timeless of measures: the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane¡¦s dimensions, the triadic beginning of ir, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself.

  I also knew that a magnetic device centered in the floor beneath issued its command to a cylinder hidden in the heart of the sphere, thus assuring continual motion. This device, far from interfering with the law of the Pendulum, in fact permitted its manifestation, for in a vacuum any object hanging from a weightless and unstretchable wire free of air resistance and friction will oscillate for eternity.

  The copper sphere gave off pale, shifting glints as it was struck by the last rays of the sun that came through the great stained-glass windows. Were its tip to graze, as it had in the past, a layer of damp sand spread on the floor of the choir, each swing would make a light furrow, and the furrows, changing direction imperceptibly, would widen to form a breach, a groove with radial symmetry¡Xlike the outline of a mandala or pentaculum, a star, a mystic rose. No, more a tale recorded on an expanse of desert, in tracks left by countless caravans of nomads, a story of slow, millennial migrations, like those of the people of Atlantis when they left the continent of Mu and roamed, stubbornly, compactly, from Tasmania to Greenland, from Capricorn to Cancer, from Prince Edward Island to the Svalbards. The tip retraced, narrated anew in compressed time what they had done between one ice age and another, and perhaps were doing still, those couriers of die Masters. Perhaps the tip grazed Agarttha, the center of the world, as it journeyed from Samoa to Novaya Zemlya. And I sensed that a single pattern united Avalon, beyond the north wind, to the southern desert where lies the enigma of Ayers Rock.

  At that moment of four in the afternoon of June 23, the Pendulum was slowing at one end of its swing, then falling back lazily toward the center, regaining speed along the way, slashing confidently through the hidden parallelogram of forces that were its destiny.

  Had I remained there despite the passage of the hours, to stare at that bird¡¦s head, that spear¡¦s tip, that obverse helmet, as it traced its diagonals in the void, grazing the opposing points of its astigmatic circumference, I would have fallen victim to an illusion: that the Pendulum¡¦s plane of oscillation had gone full circle, had returned to its starting point in thirty-two hours, describing an ellipse that rotated around its center at a speed proportional to the sine of its latitude. What would its rotation have been had it hung instead from the dome of Solomon¡¦s Temple? Perhaps the Knights had tried it there, too. Perhaps the solution, the final meaning, would have been no different. Perhaps the abbey church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs was the true Temple. In any case, the experiment would work perfectly only at the Pole, the one place where the Pendulum, on the earth¡¦s extended axis, would complete its cycle in twenty-four hours.

  But this deviation from the Law, which the Law took into account, this violation of the rule¡¦ did not make the marvel any less marvelous. I knew the earth was rotating, and I with it, and Saint-Martin-des-Champs and all Paris with me, and that together we were rotating beneath the Pendulum, whose own plane never changed direction, because up there, along the infinite extrapolation of its wire beyond the choir ceiling, up toward the most distant galaxies, lay the Only Fixed Point in the universe, eternally unmoving.

  So it was hot so much the earth to which I addressed my gaze but the heavens, where the mystery of absolute immobility was celebrated. The Pendulum told me that, as everything moved¡X earth, solar system, nebulae and black holes, all the children of the great cosmic expansion¡Xone single point stood still: a pivot, bolt, or hook around which the universe could move. And I was now taking part in that supreme experience. I, too, moved with the all, but I could see the One, the Rock, the Guarantee, the luminous mist that is not body, that has no shape, weight, quantity, or quality, that does not see or hear, that cannot be sensed, that is in no place, in no time, and is not soul, intelligence, imagination, opinion, number, order, or measure. Neither darkness nor light, neither error nor truth.

  I was roused by a listless exchange between a boy who wore glasses and a girl who unfortunately did not.

  "It's Foucault's Pendulum," he was saying. "First tried out in a cellar in 1851, then shown at the Observatoire, and later under the dome of the Pantheon with a wire sixty-seven meters long and a sphere weighing twenty-eight kilos. Since 1855 it's been here, in a smaller version, hanging from that hole in the middle of the rib."

  "What does it do? Just hang there?"

  "It proves the rotation of the earth. Since the point of suspension doesn't move..."

  "Why doesn't it move?"

  "Well, because a point...the central point, I mean, the one right in the middle of all the points you see...it's a geometric point; you can't see it because it has no dimension, and if something has no dimension, it can't move, not right or left, not up or down. So it doesn't rotate with the earth. You understand? It can't even rotate around itself. There is no ¡¥itself.' "

  "But the earth turns."

  "The earth turns, but the point doesn't. That's how it is. Just take my word for it."

  "I guess it's the Pendulum's business."

  Idiot. Above her head was the only stable place in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business, not hers. A moment later the couple went off¡Xhe, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter¡Xtheir first and last encounter¡Xwith the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude?

  I watched with reverence and fear. In that instant I was convinced that Jacopo Belbo was right. What he told me about the Pendulum I had attributed to esthetic raving, to the shapeless cancer taking gradual shape in his soul, transforming the game into reality without his realizing it. But if he was right about the Pendulum, perhaps all the rest was true as well: the Plan, the Universal Plot. And in that case I had been right to come here, on the eve of the summer solstice. Jacopo Belbo was not crazy; he had simply, through his game, hit upon the truth.

  But the fact is that it doesn't take long for the experience of the Numinous to unhinge the mind.

  I tried then to shift my gaze. I followed the curve that rose from the capitals of the semicircle of columns and ran along the ribs of the vault toward the key, mirroring the mystery of the ogive, that supreme static hypocrisy which rests on an absence, making the columns believe that they are thrusting the great ribs upward and the ribs believe that they are holding the columns down,
the vault being both all and nothing, at once cause and effect. But I realized that to neglect the Pendulum that hung from the vault while admiring the vault itself was like becoming drunk at the stream instead of drinking at the source.

  The choir of Saint-Martin-des-Champs existed only so that, by virtue of the Law, the Pendulum could exist; and the Pendulum existed so that the choir could exist. You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another; you cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.

  Still unable to take my eyes from the key of the vault, I retreated, step by step, for I had learned the path by heart in the few minutes I had been there. Great metal tortoises filed past me on either side, imposing enough to signal their presence at the corner of my eyes. I fell back along the nave toward the front entrance, and again those menacing prehistoric birds of wire and rotting canvas loomed over me, evil dragonflies that some secret power had hung from the ceiling of the nave. I saw them as sapiential metaphors, far more meaningful than their didactic pretext. A swarm of Jurassic insects and reptiles, allegory of the long terrestrial migrations the Pendulum was tracing, aimed at me like angry archons with their long archeopterix-beaks; the planes of Brdguet, Bleriot, Esnault, and the helicopter of Du-faux.

  * * *

  To enter the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris, you first cross an eighteenth-century courtyard and step into an old abbey church, now part of a later complex, but originally part of a priory. You enter and are stunned by a conspiracy in which the sublime universe of heavenly ogives and the chthonian world of gas guzzlers are juxtaposed.

  On the floor stretches a line of vehicles: bicycles, horseless carriages, automobiles; from the ceiling hang planes. Some of the objects are intact, though peeling and corroded by time, and in the ambiguous mix of natural and electric light they seem covered by a patina, an old violin's varnish. Others are only skeletons or chassis, rods and cranks that threaten indescribable tortures. You picture yourself chained to a rack, something digging into your flesh until you confess.

  Beyond this sequence of antique machines¡Xonce mobile, now immobile, their souls rusted, mere specimens of the technological pride that is so keen to display them to the reverence of visitors¡Xstands the choir, guarded on the left by a scale model of the Statue of Liberty Bartholdi designed for another world, and on the right by a statue of Pascal. Here the swaying Pendulum is flanked by the nightmare of a deranged entomologist¡X chelae, mandibles, antennae, proglottides, and wings¡Xa cemetery of mechanical corpses that look as if they might all start working again at any moment¡Xmagnetos, monophase transformers, turbines, converters, steam engines, dynamos. In the rear, in the ambulatory beyond the Pendulum, rest Assyrian idols, and Chaldean, Carthaginian, great Baals whose bellies, long ago, glowed red-hot, and Nuremberg Maidens whose hearts still bristle with naked nails: these were once airplane engines. Now they form a horrible garland of simulacra that lie in adoration of the Pendulum; it is as if the progeny of Reason and the Enlightenment had been condemned to stand guard forever over the ultimate symbol of Tradition and Wisdom.

  The bored tourists who pay their nine francs at the desk or are admitted free on Sundays may believe that elderly nineteenth-century gentlemen¡Xbeards yellowed by nicotine, collars rumpled and greasy, black cravats and frock coats smelling of snuff, fingers stained with acid, their minds acid with professional jealousy, farcical ghosts who called one another cher maitre¡Xplaced these exhibits here out of a virtuous desire to educate and amuse the bourgeois and the radical taxpayers, and to celebrate the magnificent march of progress. But no: Saint-Martin-des-Champs had been conceived first as a priory and only later as a revolutionary museum and compendium of arcane knowledge. The planes, those self-propelled machines, those electromagnetic skeletons, were carrying on a dialog whose script still escaped me.

  The catalog hypocritically informed me that this worthy undertaking had been conceived by the gentlemen of the Convention, who wanted to offer the masses an accessible shrine of all the arts and trades. But how could I believe that when the words used to describe the project were the very same Francis Bacon had used to describe the House of Solomon in his New Atlantis!

  Was it possible that only I¡Xalong with Jacopo Belbo and Dio-tallevi¡Xhad guessed the truth? Perhaps I would have my answer that night. I had to find a way to remain in the museum past closing, and wait here for midnight.

  How would They get in? I had no idea. Some passageway in the network of the Paris sewers might connect the museum to another point in the city, perhaps near Porte St.-Denis. But I was certain that if I left, I would not be able to find that route back in. I had to hide somewhere in the building.

  I tried to shake off the spell of the place and look at the nave with cold eyes. It was not an epiphany now I was seeking, but information. I imagined that in the other halls it would be difficult to escape the notice of the guards, who made the rounds at closing time, checking to see that no thief was lurking somewhere. The nave, however, crammed with vehicles, was the ideal place to settle in for the night as a passenger: a live man hiding inside a lifeless vehicle. We had played too many games for me not to try this one, too.

  Take heart, I said to myself: don't think of Wisdom now; ask the help of Science.

  2

  Wee haue divers curious Clocks; And other like Motions of Return...Wee haue also Houses of Deceits of the Senses, where we represent all manner of Feats of Juggling, False Apparitions, Impostures, and Illusions...These are (my sonne) the Riches of Salomon's House.

  ¡XFrancis Bacon, The New Atlantis, ed. Rawley, London, 1627, pp. 41-42

  I gained control of my nerves, my imagination. I had to play this ironically, as I had been playing it until a few days before, not letting myself become involved. I was in a museum and had to be dramatically clever and clearheaded.

  I looked at the now-familiar planes above me: I could climb into the fuselage of a biplane, to await the night as if I were flying over the Channel, anticipating the Legion of Honor. The names of the automobiles on the ground had an affectionately nostalgic ring. The 1932 Hispano-Suiza was handsome, welcoming, but too close to the front desk. I might have slipped past the attendant if I had turned up in plus fours and Norfolk jacket, stepping aside for a lady in a cream-colored suit, with a long scarf wound around her slender neck, a cloche pulled over her bobbed hair. The 1931 Citroen C6G was shown only in cross section, an excellent educational display but a ridiculous hiding place. Cugnot's enormous steam automobile, all boiler, or cauldron, was out of the question. I looked to the right, where velocipedes with huge art-nouveau wheels and draisiennes with their flat, scooterlike bars evoked gentlemen in stovepipe hats, knights of progress pedaling through the Bois de Boulogne.

  Across from the velocipedes were cars with bodies intact, ample receptacles. Perhaps not the 1945 Panhard Dynavia, too open and narrow in its aerodynamic sleekness; but the tall 1909 Peugeot¡Xan attic, a boudoir¡Xwas definitely worth considering. Once I was inside, deep in its leather divan, no one would suspect a thing. But the car would not be easy to get into; one of the guards was sitting on a bench directly opposite, his back to the bicycles. I pictured myself stepping onto the running board, clumsy in my fur-collared coat, while he, calves sheathed in leather leggings, doffed his visored cap and obsequiously opened the door...

  I concentrated for a moment on the twelve-passenger Obeis-sante, 1872, the first French vehicle with gears. If the Peugeot was an apartment, this was a building. But there was no hope of boarding it without attracting everyone's attention. Difficult to hide when the hiding places are pictures at an exhibition.

  I crossed the hall again, and there was the Statue of Liberty, "eclairant le monde" from a pedestal at least two meters high in the shape of a prow with a sharp beak. Inside the pedestal was a kind of sentry box, from which you could look through a porthole at a diorama of New York harbor. A good observation point at midnight, because through the darkness it would b
e possible to see into the choir to the left and the nave to the right, your back protected by a great stone statue of Gramme, which faced other corridors from the transept where it stood. In daylight, however, you could look into the sentry box from outside, and once the visitors were gone, a guard would probably make a routine check and peer in, just to be on the safe side.

  I didn't have much time: they closed at five-thirty. I took another quick look at the ambulatory. None of the engines would serve the purpose. Nor would the great ship machinery on the right, relics of some Lusitania engulfed by the waves, nor Le-noir's immense gas engine with its variety of cogwheels. In fact, now that the light was fading, watery through the gray window-panes, I felt fear again at the prospect of hiding among these animals, for I dreaded seeing them come to life in the darkness, reborn in the shadows in the glow of my flashlight. I dreaded their panting, their heavy, telluric breath, skinless bones, viscera creaking and fetid with black-grease drool. How could I endure in the midst of that foul concatenation of diesel genitals and turbine-driven vaginas, the inorganic throats that once had flamed, steamed, and hissed, and might again that very night? Or maybe they would buzz like stag beetles or chirr like cicadas amid those skeletal incarnations of pure, abstract functionality, automata able to crush, saw, shift, break, slice, accelerate, ram, and gulp fuel, their cylinders sobbing. Or they would jerk like sinister marionettes, making drums turn, converting frequencies, transforming energies, spinning flywheels. How could I fight them if they came after me, instigated by the Masters of the World, who used them as proof¡Xuseless devices, idols only of the bosses of the lower universe¡Xof the error of creation?

  I had to leave, get away; this was madness. I was falling into the same trap, the same game that had driven Jacopo Belbo out of his mind, I, the doubter...