Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [14]
—Abulafia, Hayye ha-Nefes, MS Munchen 408, fols. 65a-65b
The name of God...Of course! I remembered the first conversation between Belbo and Diotallevi, the day Abulafia was set up in the office.
Diotallevi was at the door of his room, pointedly tolerant. Diotallevi’s tolerance was always exasperating, but Belbo didn’t seem to mind it. He tolerated it.
“It won’t be of any use to you, you know. You’re not planning, surely, to rewrite the manuscripts you don’t read anyway.”
“It’s for riling, making schedules, updating lists. If I write a book with it, it’ll be my own, not someone else’s.”
“You swore that you’d never write anything of your own.”
“That I wouldn’t inflict a manuscript on the world, true. When I concluded I wasn’t cut out to be a protagonist—”
“You decided you’d be an intelligent spectator. I know all that. And so?”
“If an intelligent spectator hums the second movement on his way home from the concert, that doesn’t mean he wants to conduct it in Carnegie Hall.”
“So you’ll try humming literature to make sure you don’t write any.’’
“It would be an honest choice.”
“You think so?”
Diotallevi and Belbo, both from Piedmont, often claimed that any good Piedmontese had the ability to listen politely, look you in the eye, and say “You think so?” in a tone of such apparent sincerity that you immediately felt his profound disapproval. I was a barbarian, they used to say: such subtleties would always be lost on me.
“Barbarian?” I would protest. “I may have been born in Milan, but my family came from Val d’Aosta.”
“Nonsense,” they said. “You can always tell a genuine Piedmontese immediately by his skepticism.”
“I’m a skeptic.”
“No, you’re only incredulous, a doubter, and that’s different.”
I knew why Diotallevi distrusted Abulafia. He had heard that word processors could change the order of letters. A test, thus, might generate its opposite and result in obscure prophecies. “It’s a game of permutation,” Belbo said, trying to explain. “Temurah? Isn’t that the name for it? Isn’t that what the devout rabbi does to ascend to the Gates of Splendor?’’
“My dear friend,” Diotallevi said, “you’ll never understand anything. It’s true that the Torah—the visible Jbrah, that is—is only one of the possible permutations of the letters of the eternal Torah, as God created it and delivered it to the angels. By rearranging the letters of the book over the centuries, we may someday arrive again at the original Torah. But the important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest. And in an office! No, the Book must be murmured day after day in a little ghetto hovel where you learn to lean forward and keep your arms tight against your hips so there will be as little space as possible between the hand that holds the Book and the hand that turns the pages. And if you moisten your fingers, you must raise them vertically to your lips, as if nibbling unleavened bread, and drop no crumb. The word must be eaten very slowly. It must melt on the tongue before you can dissolve it and reorder it. And take care not to slobber it onto your caftan. If even a single letter is lost, the thread that is about to link you with the higher sefirot is broken. To this Abraham Abulafia dedicated his life, while your Saint Thomas was toiling to find God with his five paths.
“Abraham Abulafia’s Hokhmath ha-Zerufvtas at once the science of the combination of letter and the science of the purification of the heart. Mystic logic, letters whirling in infinite change, is the world of bliss, it is the music of thought, but see that you proceed slowly, and with caution, because your machine may bring you delirium instead of ecstasy. Many of Abulafia’s disciples were unable to walk the fine