Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [177]
“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 Then we fill in the gaps, call the repetitions prophecies, and—voila—a hitherto unpublished chapter of the history of magic, at the very least!”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