A Plan, a guilty party. The dream of our species. An Deus sit. If He exists, it’s His fault.
The thing whose address I lost is not the End, it’s the Beginning. Not the object to be possessed but the subject that possesses me. Misery loves company. Misery, company, too many dactyls.
Nothing can dispel from my mind the most reassuring thought that this world is the creation of a shadowy god whose shadow I prolong. Faith leads to Absolute Optimism.
I have committed fornication, true (or not true), but God is the one unable to solve the problem of Evil. Come, let us pound the fetus in the mortar with honey and pepper. Dieu le veult.
If belief is absolutely necessary, let it be in a religion that doesn’t make you feel guilty. A religion out of joint, fuming, subterranean, without an end. Like a novel, not like a theology.
Five paths to a single destination. What a waste. Better a labyrinth that leads everywhere and nowhere. To die with style, live in the Baroque.
Only a bad Demiurge makes us feel good.
But if there is no cosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not exist.
And what if there is a Plan, but it has eluded you—and will elude you for all eternity?
When religion fails, art provides. You invent the Plan, metaphor of the Unknowable One. Even a human plot can fill the void. They didn’t publish my Hearts in Exstasy because I don’t belong to the Templar clique.
To live as if there were a Plan: the philosopher’s stone.
If you can’t beat them, join them. If there’s a Plan, adjust to it.
Lorenza puts me to the test. Humility. If I had the humility to appeal to the Angels, even without believing in them, and to draw the right circle, I would have peace. Maybe.
Believe there is a secret and you will feel like an initiate. It costs nothing.
To create an immense hope that can never be uprooted, because it has no root. Ancestors who do not exist will never appear and say that you have betrayed. A religion you can keep while betraying it infinitely.
Like Andreae: to create, in jest, the greatest revelation of history and, while others are destroyed by it, swear for the rest of your life that you had nothing to do with it.
To create a truth with a hazy outline: when somebody tries to clarify it, you excommunicate him. Accept only those hazier than yourself. Jamais d’ennemis à droite.
Why write novels? Rewrite history. The history that then comes true.
Why not set it in Denmark, Mr. William S.? Seven Seas Jim Johann Valentin Andreae Luke-Matthew roams the archipelago of the Sunda between Patmos and Avalon, from the White Mountain to Mindanao, from Atlantis to Thessalonica to the Council of Nicaea.
Origen cuts off his testicles and shows them, bleeding, to the fathers of the City of the Sun, and Hiram sneers filioque filioque while Constantine digs his greedy nails into the hollow eye sockets of Robert Fludd, death death to the Jews of the ghetto of Antioch, Dieu et mon droit, wave the Beauceant, lay on, down with the Ophites and the Borborites, the snakes.
Trumpets blare, and here come the Chevaliers Bienfaisants de la Cité Sainte with the Moor’s head bristling on their pike. The Rebis, the Rebis! Magnetic hurricane, the Tower collapses, Rachkovsky grins over the roasted corpse of Jacques de Molay.
I did not possess you, but I can blow up history.
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.
That must have been how it happened. Belbo decided to take the universe of the Diabolicals seriously, not because of an abundance of faith, but because of a total lack of it.
Humiliated by his incapacity to create (and all his life he had dined out on his frustrated desires and his unwritten pages, the former a metaphor of the latter and vice versa, all full of his alleged, impalpable cowardice), he came to realize that by inventing the Plan he had actually created.
He fell in love with his golem, found it a source of consolation. Life—his life, mankind’s—as art, and art as falsehood. Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un livre (faux). But now he wanted to believe in this false book, because, as he had also written, if there was a Plan, then he would no longer be defeated, diffident, a coward.
And this is what finally happened: he used the Plan, which he knew was unreal, to defeat a rival he believed real. And then, aware that the Plan was mastering him as if it existed, or as if he, Belbo, and the Plan, were made of the same stuff, he went to Paris, toward a revelation, a liberation.
Tormented by the daily remorse that for years and years he had lived only with ghosts of his own making, he was now finding solace in ghosts that were becoming objective, since they were known also to others, even though he was the Enemy. Should he fling himself into the lion’s maw? Yes, because the lion taking shape was more real than Seven Seas Jim, more real than Cecilia, more real perhaps than Lorenza Pellegrini herself.
Belbo, sick from so many missed appointments, now felt able to make a real appointment. An appointment he could not evade from cowardice, because now his back was to the wall. Fear forced him to be brave. Inventing, he had created the principle of reality.
List No. 5
6 undershirts
6 shorts
6 handkerchiefs
has always puzzled scholars, principally because of the total absence of socks.
—Woody Allen, “The Metterling List,” Getting Even, New York, Random House, 1966, p. 8
It was during those days, no more than a month ago, that Lia decided a vacation would do me good. “You look tired,” she said. Maybe the Plan had worn me out. For that matter, the baby, as its grandparents said, needed clean air. Some friends lent us a house in the mountains.
We didn’t leave at once. There were things to attend to in Milan, and Lia said that nothing was more restful than taking a little vacation in the city when you knew you’d soon be going off on your real vacation.
Now, for the first time, I talked to Lia about the Plan. Until then she had been too busy with the baby. She knew vaguely that Belbo, Diotallevi, and I were working on some puzzle, and that it occupied whole days and nights, but I hadn’t said anything to her about it, not since the day she preached me that sermon about the psychosis of resemblances. Maybe I was ashamed.
I described the whole Plan to her, down to the smallest details, and told her about Diotallevi’s illness, feeling guilty, as if I had done something wrong. I tried to present the Plan for what it was: a display of bravura.
Lia said: “Pow, I don’t like your story.”
“It isn’t beautiful?”
“The sirens were beautiful, too. Listen, what do you know about your unconscious?”
“Nothing. I’m not even sure I have one.”
“There. Imagine that a Viennese prankster, to amuse his friends, invented the whole business of the id and Oedipus, and made up dreams he had never dreamed and little Hanses he had never met…. And what happened? Millions of people were out there, all ready and waiting to become neurotic in earnest. And thousands more ready to make money treating them.”
“Lia, you’re paranoid.”
“Me? You!”
“Maybe we’re both paranoid, but you have to grant me this: we started with the Ingolf document. It’s natural, when one comes across a message of the Templars, to want to decipher it. Maybe we exaggerated a little, to make fun of the decipherers of messages, but there was a message to begin with.”
“All you know is what that Ardenti told you, and from your own description he’s an out-and-out fraud. Anyway, I’d like to see this message for myself.”
Nothing easier; I had it in my files.
Lia took the paper, looked at it front and back, wrinkled her nose, brushed the hair from her eyes to see the first, the coded, part better. She said: “Is that all?”
“Isn’t it enough for you?”
“More than enough. Give me two days to think about it.” When Lia asks for two days to think about something, she’s determined to show me I’m stupid. I always accuse her of this, and she answers: “If I know you’re stupid, that means I love you even if you’re stupid. You should feel reassured.”
For two days we didn’t mention the subject again. Anyway, she was almost always out of the house. In the evening I watched her huddled
