Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [103]
It was late. Aglie informed me that he was leaving Brazil. He gave me his Milan address.
I went home and found Amparo asleep. I lay down beside her in silence, in the dark, and spent a sleepless night. It was as if there were an unknown being next to me.
In the morning Amparo told me that she was going to Petrdp-olis to visit a girlfriend. We said good-bye awkwardly.
She left with a canvas bag, a volume of political economy under her arm.
For two months she sent me no word, and I made no attempt to seek her out. Then she wrote me a brief, evasive letter, telling me she needed time to think. I didn’t answer.
I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.
I stayed in Brazil for another year, with the constant feeling that I was on the brink of departure. I didn’t see Aglie again, I didn’t see any of Amparo’s friends. I spent long, long hours on the beach, sunbathing.
I flew kites, which down there are very beautiful.
GEVURAH
34
Beydelus, Demeymes, Adulex, Matucgayn, Atine, Ffex, Uquizuz, Ga-dix, Sol, Veni cito cum tuis spiritibus.
—Picatrix, Sloane Ms. 1305, 152, verso
The Breaking of the Vessels. Diotallevi was to talk to us often about the late cabalism of Isaac Luria, in which the orderly articulation of the Sefirot was lost. Creation, Luria held, was a process of divine inhalation and exhalation, like anxious breathing or the action of the bellows.
“God’s asthma,” Belbo glossed.
“You try creating from nothing. It’s something you do once in your life. God blows the world as you would blow a glass bubble, and to do that He takes a deep breath, holds it, and emits the long luminous hiss of the ten Sefirot.”
“A hiss of light?”
“God hissed, and there was light.”
“Multimedia.”
“But the lights of the Sefirot must be gathered in vessels that can contain their splendor without shattering. The vessels destined to receive Keter, Hokhmah, and Binah withstood their magnificence, but for the lower Sefirot, from Hesed to Yesod, light was exhaled too strongly in a single burst, and the vessels broke. Fragments of light were spilled into the universe, and gross matter was thus born.”
The breaking of the vessels was a catastrophe, Diotallevi said. What could be more unbearable than an aborted world? There must have been some defect in the cosmos from the beginning, and not even the most learned rabbis had been able to explain it completely. Perhaps at the moment God exhaled and was emptied, a few drops of oil lay in the first receptacle, a material residue, the reshimu, thus adulterating God’s essence. Or perhaps the seashells^the qelippot, the beginnings of ruin—were slyly waiting in ambush somewhere.
“Slippery folk, those qelippot,” Belbo said. “Agents of the diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu. And then what happened?”
And then, Diotallevi patiently explained, in the light of Severe Judgment, or Gevurah—also known as Pachad, or Terror—the Sefirah in which, according to Isaac the Blind, Evil first shows itself, the seashells acquired a real existence.
“Then the seashells are in our midst,” Belbo said.
“Just look around you,” Diotallevi said.
“But is there no way out?”
“There’s a way back in, actually,” Diotallevi said. “All emanates from God, in the contraction of simsum. The problem is to bring about tikkun, the restoration of Adam Qadmon. Then we will rebuild everything in the balanced structure of the par-zufim, the faces—or, rather, forms—that will take the place of the Sefirot. The ascension of the soul is like a cord of silk that enables devout intention, groping in the darkness, to find the path to the light. And so the world constantly strives, by combining the letters of the Torah, to regain its natural form, to emerge from its horrible confusion.”
And this is what I am doing now, in the middle of the night, in the unnatural calm of these hills. The other evening in the periscope, however, I was still mired in the slime of the seashells I felt afl around me, of the slugs trapped in the crystal cases