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 that odor of precious junk.
Why can’t I dream of college entrance exams like everybody else?
…the frame…was twenty foot square, placed in the middle of the room. The superficies was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered on every square with paper pasted on them, and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions, but without any order….
The pupils at his command took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the lads to read the several lines softly as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys….
—Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, III, 5
I believe that in embellishing his dream, Belbo returned once again to the idea of lost opportunity and his vow of renunciation, to his life’s failure to seize—if it ever existed—the Moment. The Plan began because Belbo had now resigned himself to creating private, fictitious moments.
I asked him for some text or other, and he rummaged through the papers on his desk, where there was a heap of manuscripts perilously piled one on top of the other, with no concern for weight or size. He found the one he was looking for and tried to slip it out, thus causing the others to spill to the floor. Folders came open; pages escaped their flimsy containers.
“Couldn’t you have moved the top half first?” I asked. Wasting my breath: this was how he always did it.
He replied, as he always did: “Gudrun will pick them up this evening. She has to have a mission in life; otherwise she loses her identity.”
But this time I had a personal stake in the safety of the manuscripts, because I was now part of the firm. “Gudrun won’t be able to put them back together,” I said. “She’ll put the wrong pages in the wrong folders.”
“If Diotallevi heard you, he’d rejoice. A way of producing different books, eclectic, random books. It’s part of the logic of the Diabolicals.”
“But we’d find ourselves in the situation of the cabalists: taking millennia to discover the right combination. You’re simply using Gudrun in place of the monkey that spends an eternity at the typewriter. As far as evolution goes, we’ve made no progress. Unless there’s some program in Abulafia to do this work.”
Meanwhile Diotallevi had come in.
“Of course there is,” Belbo said, “and in theory you could have up to two thousand entries. All that’s needed is the data and the desire. Take, for example, poetry. The program asks you how many lines you want in the poem, and you decide: ten, twenty, a hundred. Then the program randomizes the line numbers. In other words, a new arrangement each time. With ten lines you can make thousands and thousands of random poems. Yesterday I entered such lines as ‘And the linden trees quiver,’ ‘Thou sinister albatross,’ ‘The rubber plant is free,’ ‘I offer thee my life,’ and so on. Here are some of my better efforts.”
I count the nights, the sistrum sounds …
Death, thy victory,
Death, thy victory…
The rubber plant is free.
From the heart of dawn
Thou sinister albatross.
(The rubber plant is free….)
Death, thy victory.
And the linden trees quiver,
I count the nights, the sistrum sounds,
The hoopoe awaits me,
And the linden trees quiver.
“It’s repetitive, yes, but repetitions can make poetic sense.”
“Interesting,” Diotallevi said. “This reconciles me to your machine. So if we fed it the entire Torah and told it—what’s the term?—to randomize, it would perform some authentic temurah, recombining the verses of the Book?”
“Yes, but it’s a question of time. That would take centuries.”
I said: “What if, instead, you fed it a few dozen notions taken from the works of the Diabolicals—for example, the Templars fled to Scotland, or the Corpus Hermeticum arrived in Florence in 1460—and threw in a few connective phrases like ‘It’s obvious that’ and ‘This proves that’? We might end up with something revelatory. Then we fill in the gaps, call the repetitions prophecies, and—voila—hitherto unpublished chapter of the history of magic, at the very least!”
“An idea of genius,” Belbo said. “Let’s start right away.”
“No. It’s seven o’clock. Tomorrow.”
“I’m starting tonight. Help me, just for a minute. Pick up, say, twenty of those pages on the floor, at random, glance at the first sentence of each, and that will be an entry.”
I bent over, picked up, and read: “Joseph of Arimathea carries the Grail into France.”
“Excellent…. I’ve written it. Go on.”
“According to the Templar Tradition, Godefroy de Bouillon founded the Grand Priory of Zion in Jerusalem.”
And “Debussy was a Rosicrucian.”
“Excuse me,” Diotallevi said, “but you also have to include some neutral data—for example, the koala lives in Australia, or Papin invented the pressure cooker.”
“Minnie Mouse is Mickey’s fiancee.”
“We mustn’t overdo it.”
“No, we must overdo it. If we admit that in the whole universe there is even a single fact that does not reveal a mystery, then we violate hermetic thought.”
“That’s true. Minnie’s in. And, if you’ll allow me, I’ll add a fundamental axiom: The Templars have something to do with everything.”
“That goes without saying,” Diotallevi agreed.
We went on for a while, but then it was really late. Belbo told us not to worry, he’d continue on his own. When Gudrun came in and told us she was locking up, he said he’d be staying to do some work and asked her to pick up the papers on the floor. Gudrun made sounds that could have belonged either to Latin sine flexione or to Chermish but that clearly expressed indignation and dismay, which demonstrated the universal kinship of all languages, descendants branched from a single, Adamic root. She obeyed, randomizing better than any computer.
The next morning, Belbo was radiant. “It works,” he said. “It works beyond anything we could have hoped for.” He handed us the printout.
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.”
If our hypothesis is correct, the Holy Grail … was the breed and descendant of Jesus, the “Sang real” of which the Templars were the guardians….At the same time, the Holy Grail must have been, literally, the vessel
