Idiot. Above her head was the only stable placein the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei,and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business, not hers. A momentlater the couple went off¡Xhe, trained on some textbook that hadblunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to thethrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of theirencounter¡Xtheir first and last encounter¡Xwith the One, theEin-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down beforethis altar of certitude?
I watched with reverence and fear. In thatinstant I was convinced that Jacopo Belbo was right. What he toldme about the Pendulum I had attributed to esthetic raving, to theshapeless cancer taking gradual shape in his soul, transforming thegame into reality without his realizing it. But if he was rightabout the Pendulum, perhaps all the rest was true as well: thePlan, the Universal Plot. And in that case I had been right to comehere, on the eve of the summer solstice. Jacopo Belbo was notcrazy; he had simply, through his game, hit upon the truth.
But the fact is that it doesn't take long forthe experience of the Numinous to unhinge the mind.
I tried then to shift my gaze. I followed thecurve that rose from the capitals of the semicircle of columns andran along the ribs of the vault toward the key, mirroring themystery of the ogive, that supreme static hypocrisy which rests onan absence, making the columns believe that they are thrusting thegreat ribs upward and the ribs believe that they are holding thecolumns down, the vault being both all and nothing, at once causeand effect. But I realized that to neglect the Pendulum that hungfrom the vault while admiring the vault itself was like becomingdrunk at the stream instead of drinking at the source.
The choir of Saint-Martin-des-Champs existedonly so that, by virtue of the Law, the Pendulum could exist; andthe Pendulum existed so that the choir could exist. You cannotescape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another; youcannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge inthe illusion of the multiple.
Still unable to take my eyes from the key ofthe vault, I retreated, step by step, for I had learned the path byheart in the few minutes I had been there. Great metal tortoisesfiled past me on either side, imposing enough to signal theirpresence at the corner of my eyes. I fell back along the navetoward the front entrance, and again those menacing prehistoricbirds of wire and rotting canvas loomed over me, evil dragonfliesthat some secret power had hung from the ceiling of the nave. I sawthem as sapiential metaphors, far more meaningful than theirdidactic pretext. A swarm of Jurassic insects and reptiles,allegory of the long terrestrial migrations the Pendulum wastracing, aimed at me like angry archons with their longarcheopterix-beaks; the planes of Brdguet, Bleriot, Esnault, andthe helicopter of Du-faux.
* * *
To enter the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiersin Paris, you first cross an eighteenth-century courtyard and stepinto an old abbey church, now part of a later complex, butoriginally part of a priory. You enter and are stunned by aconspiracy in which the sublime universe of heavenly ogives and thechthonian world of gas guzzlers are juxtaposed.
On the floor stretches a line of vehicles:bicycles, horseless carriages, automobiles; from the ceiling hangplanes. Some of the objects are intact, though peeling and corrodedby time, and in the ambiguous mix of natural and electric lightthey seem covered by a patina, an old violin's varnish. Others areonly skeletons or chassis, rods and cranks that threatenindescribable tortures. You picture yourself chained to a rack,something digging into your flesh until you confess.
Beyond this sequence of antique machines¡Xoncemobile, now immobile, their souls rusted, mere specimens of thetechnological pride that is so keen to display them to thereverence of visitors¡Xstands the choir, guarded on the left by ascale model of the Statue of Liberty Bartholdi designed for anotherworld, and on the right by a statue of Pascal. Here the swayingPendulum is flanked by the nightmare of a deranged entomologist¡Xchelae, mandibles, antennae, proglottides, and wings¡Xa cemetery ofmechanical corpses that look as if they might all start workingagain at any moment¡Xmagnetos, monophase transformers, turbines,converters, steam engines, dynamos. In the rear, in the ambulatorybeyond the Pendulum, rest Assyrian idols, and Chaldean,Carthaginian, great Baals whose bellies, long ago, glowed red-hot,and Nuremberg Maidens whose hearts still bristle with naked nails:these were once airplane engines. Now they form a horrible garlandof simulacra that lie in adoration of the Pendulum; it is as if theprogeny of Reason and the Enlightenment had been condemned to standguard forever over the ultimate symbol of Tradition and Wisdom.
The bored tourists who pay their nine francs atthe desk or are admitted free on Sundays may believe that elderlynineteenth-century gentlemen¡Xbeards yellowed by nicotine, collarsrumpled and greasy, black cravats and frock coats smelling ofsnuff, fingers stained with acid, their minds acid withprofessional jealousy, farcical ghosts who called one another chermaitre¡Xplaced these exhibits here out of a virtuous desire toeducate and amuse the bourgeois and the radical taxpayers, and tocelebrate the magnificent march of progress. But no:Saint-Martin-des-Champs had been conceived first as a priory andonly later as a revolutionary museum and compendium of arcaneknowledge. The planes, those self-propelled machines, thoseelectromagnetic skeletons, were carrying on a dialog whose scriptstill escaped me.
The catalog hypocritically informed me thatthis worthy undertaking had been conceived by the gentlemen of theConvention, who wanted to offer the masses an accessible shrine ofall the arts and trades. But how could I believe that when thewords used to describe the project were the very same Francis Baconhad used to describe the House of Solomon in his New Atlantis!
Was it possible that only I¡Xalong with JacopoBelbo and Dio-tallevi¡Xhad guessed the truth? Perhaps I would havemy answer that night. I had to find a way to remain in the museumpast closing, and wait here for midnight.
How would They get in? I had no idea. Somepassageway in the network of the Paris sewers might connect themuseum to another point in the city, perhaps near Porte St.-Denis.But I was
