Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [280]
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Perhaps no one intended it, perhaps the sacrifice of Lorenza was to have sufficed, but the acolytes were now pressing inside the magic circle, which was made accessible by the immobility of the Pendulum, and someone—Ardenti, I think—was hurled by the others against the table, which literally disappeared from beneath Belbo’s feet. It skidded away, and, thanks to the same push, the Pendulum began a rapid, violent swing, taking its victim with it. The wire, pulled by the weight of the sphere, tightened around the neck of my poor friend, yanked him into the air, and he swung above and with the Pendulum, swung toward the eastern extremity of the choir, then returned, I hoped without life, in my direction.
Trampling one another, the crowd drew back, retreated to the edges of the semicircle, to allow room for the wonder. The man in charge of the oscillation, intoxicated by the rebirth of the Pendulum, supplied pushes directly on the hanged man’s body. The axis of motion made a diagonal from my eyes to one of the windows, no doubt the window with the colorless spot through which, in a few hours, the first ray of the rising sun would fall. Therefore, I did not see Belbo swing in front of me, but this, I believe, was the pattern he drew in space...
His head seemed a second sphere, trapped in the loops of the wire that stretched from the center of the keystone; and when the metal sphere tilted to the right, Belbo’s head tilted to the left, and vice versa. For most of the long swing, the two spheres tended in opposite directions, one on either side of the wire, so what cleaved the air was no longer a single line, but a kind of triangular structure. And, while Belbo’s head followed the pull of the wire, his body—at first in its final spasms, then with the disarticulated agility of a wooden marionette, arm here, leg there—described other arcs in the void, arcs independent of the head, the wire, and the sphere beneath. I had the thought that if someone were to photograph the scene using Muybridge’s system—fixing on the plate every moment as a succession of positions, recording the two extreme points the head reached in each period, the two rest points of the sphere, the points of intersection of the wire with time, independent of both head and sphere, and the intermediary points marked by the plane of oscillation of the trunk and legs—Belbo hanged from the Pendulum would have drawn, in space, the tree of the Sefirot, summing up in his final moment the vicissitude of all universes, fixing forever in his motion the ten stages of the mortal exhalation and defecation of the divine in the world.
Then, as the Mandrake in tails continued to encourage that funereal swing, Belbo’s body, through a grisly addition and cancellation of vectors, a migration of energies, suddenly became immobile, and the wire and the sphere moved, but only from his body down; the rest—which connected Belbo with the vault-now remained perpendicular. Thus Belbo had escaped the error of the world and its movements, had now become, himself, the point of suspension, the Fixed Pin, the Place from which the vault of the world is hung, while beneath his feet the wire and the sphere went on swinging, from pole to pole, without peace, the earth slipping away under them, showing always a new continent. The sphere could not point out, nor would it ever know, the location of the World’s Navel.
As the pack of Diabolicals, dazed for a moment in the face of this portent, began to yowl again, I told myself that the story was now finished. If Hod is the Sefirah of glory, Belbo had had glory. A single fearless act had reconciled him with the Absolute.
114
The ideal pendulum consists of a very thin wire, which will not hinder flexion and torsion, of length L, with the weight attached to its bary-center. For a sphere, the barycenter is the center; for the human body, it is a point 0.65 of the height, measured from the feet. If the hanged man is 1.70m tall, his