#umberto eco

decadentiacoprofaga:

Umberto Eco portrayed by Tullio Pericoli. Source.

thestandrewknot:

‘The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear… What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away… We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.’

 Umberto Eco (January 5, 1932 – February 19, 2016)

but also…

“Chi non legge, a 70 anni avrà vissuto una sola vita: la propria. Chi legge avrà vissuto 5000 anni: c'era quando Caino uccise Abele, quando Renzo sposò Lucia, quando Leopardi ammirava l'infinito… perché la lettura è un'immortalità all'indietro.”

The library of Umberto Eco

In the name of rose | Jean-Jacques Annaud | 1986

The ghost empire announces itself. A QAnon-style video with QAnon’s enemies as the (anti)heroes. (Then again, where do you think QAnon came from?) 

The goal is universal paranoia: to taint all information as misinformation and with this omni-skepticism to demobilize the public. Cordoning off information from misinformation isn’t going to be possible forever because there is no such boundary in experience, especially online experience; and not-too-bright Boomers who religiously watch The ViewandMorning Joe are a dwindling resource. So you break the whole society the way they broke the ‘60s militants: you don’t need entryists and informers if everybody thinks everybody else is an entryist or informer. And who’s to say what anybody’s motive is anyway? Just sit back and enjoy the ride.

The paranoids in the YouTube comments are already interpreting the scene where the witch unmasks the clown as a shot fired from military intelligence to CIA (i.e., “Clowns in America.”) Hermeneutics, baby! Or as we used to call it in my adjunct days in the English department, Textual Analysis.

A good day, maybe, to revisit my essay from that flaming summer of 2020 on Foucault’s Pendulum. Here are the ultra-paranoid opening paragraphs:

A strange series of coincidences, difficult to dismiss as chance, recently convinced me that I had to read Foucault’s Pendulum. First, the book itself appeared, “unbidden,” as the literary novelists always say. A few weeks ago, I found a hardcover in good condition inside a Little Free Library that usually boasts only children’s books and pop fiction. The LFL in question is, by the way, shaped like mailbox: was Someone sending me a message?

The mystery deepened only a week after I’d plucked the book from the box. I had been re-watching Chris Carter’s downbeat conspiracy-themed late-’90s TV series Millennium for the first time in many years, on the theory that the deliriously psychedelic conclusion to the controversial second season, in which an outbreak of the Marburg virus threatens to decimate America, might be newly relevant in “the age of coronavirus.” A few episodes before that apocalyptic finale, however, comes a tale that caught my paranoid eye. An episode titled “Anamnesis” is about gnosticism, matriarchal cults, and black madonnas; scripted by a female writing duo, it’s the only episode in all three seasons not to star the main male protagonist, featuring instead a team-up between his wife and his female sidekick; “Dancing Barefoot” plays, and “Thunder, Perfect Mind” is recited. Longtime readers of my work will know what I was thinking: that this episode, aired about a year after the novel’s publication, was inspired by Toni Morrison’s gnostic and female liberationist fantasia Paradise.

A bit of Internet sleuthing, though, demonstrated to me that no one had made the connection, and that the writers didn’t claim such an influence. On the other hand, I discovered that all the elements I’d associated with Morrison were there in Foucault’s Pendulum, precisely the novel I had found by chance just days before. Since Morrison has several times mentioned her admiration for Eco, it’s not out of the question that he influenced her or, perhaps more aptly, moved her to a counter-statement on some of the same themes. It’s also likely that this conspiracy-soaked occult novel affected the writers of Millennium, among many other late-20th-century gnostic revivalworks.

Finally, canvassing the Wikipedia entry on the novel before I read it, I found that among the endless occult paraphernalia Eco packed into the text was “[a]n obscure one-time reference to the fictional Cthulhu cult through a quote from The Satanic Rituals—‘I’a Cthulhu! I’a S’ha-t’n!’. The words closed a ritual composed by Michael Aquino.” Aquino was a high-ranking Satanist and a psychological warfare expert for the U.S. military; he co-wrote the notorious Pentagon position paper “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory”. Understandably, he recurs again and again in the annals of American conspiracy theory: the politically paranoid on the right abominate him for his Satanism, while those on the left loathe his anticommunist and militarist commitments. Through a vector I’m not at liberty to disclose, I am only two of the proverbial degrees of separation away from Aquino, though I have obviously never met him or had anything to do with him or even discussed him with anyone who has. I imagine conspiracy theorists will promulgate this curious fact widely on the Internet to discredit me whenever I finally become as famous as I deserve to be, considering that I am one of America’s great writers. (Megalomania and paranoia: like horse and carriage.) Two days after I made the Aquino-Eco-Millennium connection, it was announced on Twitter that Aquino had died. Yes, Someone was trying to tell me Something: I dutifully took up Foucault’s Pendulum and began to read.

I did answer the question posed in that last paragraph about my nonrelational connection to Aquino here, but you’re going to have to subscribe if you want to listen. Since DF sees the future in this bewildering epoch, I’d say it’s worth it.

Adso in the Library * illustration to “The Name of the Rose” of Umberto Eco

Welcome with commissions!:)

Brother William of Baskerville and Adso of Melk
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Illustration to “The name of the Rose” of Umberto Eco
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Commissions are open! Welcome:)

Hello!

Dear friends!

“There is a body that enfolds the whole of the world; imagine it in the form of a  circle, for this is the form of the Whole… Imagine now that under the circle of this  body are the 36 decans, midway between the total circle and the circle of the zodiac, separating these two circles and, so to speak, delimiting the zodiac, transported  along it with the planets… The changing of kings, the rising up of cities, famine, plague, the tides of the sea, earthquakes: none of these takes place without the influence of the decans…”

~ Corpus Hermeticus, Stobaeus, excerptum VI (from the Umberto Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum”, chapter 4)

△“It’s a wonderful story. Did you know that our universe is the result of an error and  that it’s partly my fault? Sophia was the female part of Absolute, because Absolute then was more female than male; it was you men who later put a beard on him and started calling him He. I was his good half. (…) I tried to create the world without asking permission—I, the Sophia, who is also called—the Ennoia. But my male part didn’t want to create; maybe he lacked the courage or was impotent. So instead of uniting with him, I decided to make the world by myself. I couldn’t resist; it was through an excess of love. Which is true; I adore this whole mixed-up universe. And that’s why I’m the soul of this world. (…) ~ You mean the Demiurge? ~ That’s him, yes. Or maybe it wasn’t Sophia who made this Demiurge; maybe he was  already around and she egged him on: Get moving, silly, make the world, and then we’ll have real fun. The Demiurge must have been a real screwup, because he didn’t know  how to make the world properly. In fact, he shouldn’t even have tried it, because matter is bad, and he wasn’t authorized to touch the stuff. Anyway, he made this  awful mess, and Sophia was caught inside. Prisoner of the world.”▼

~ Umberto Eco (,Foucault’s Pendulum’, chapter 5 Gevurah/50) Pictures: 1. Anima Mundi = Sophia; 2. art by Marcel Roux; 3. Virgin Mother.

“If by intellectual you mean somebody who works only with his head and not with his hands, then the bank clerk is an intellectual and Michelangelo is not. And today, with a computer, everybody is an intellectual. So I don’t think it has anything to do with someone’s profession or with someone’s social class. According to me, an intellectual is anyone who is creatively producing new knowledge. A peasant who understands that a new kind of graft can produce a new species of apples has at that moment produced an intellectual activity. Whereas the professor of philosophy who all his life repeats the same lecture on Heidegger doesn’t amount to an intellectual. Critical creativity — criticizing what we are doing or inventing better ways of doing it — is the only mark of the intellectual function.”

~ Umberto Eco (“The Art of Fiction, No. 197”, The Paris Review/Summer 2008, No. 185, Art by Michael Taylor)

~ Ps. My dad always said:“You cannot learn to be ,intelligent’, no school or academic title give you that… With ,intelligence’ you can only born. That’s why we have many educated people, so many times more stupid than these without education, and only few, over the centuries, so-called: geniuses.” I agree with that… I think Eco was one of the few geniuses in our century we had honor to know up close.

Umberto Eco gone today, as well. 

05.01.1932 - 19.02.2016