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The Creation of Abulafia
In 1988, Umberto Eco published Foucault’s
Pendulum. In it, three editors at a Milan publishing house (Belbo,
Diotallevi, and Casaubon) spend their working days on manuscripts by
people they privately call the Diabolicals, self-financing occultists
who have discovered that the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits,
the Cathars, and the pyramids are all the same thing wearing different
hats1.
I read it in 2020, stuck at home, and marvelled at Eco’s vast
knowledge of literature, the occult, and also of computing.
Belbo owns a personal computer he calls Abulafia,
after a thirteenth-century kabbalist whose practice was permuting the
letters of the divine names. Belbo, being a modern man, does it in
BASIC, because despite what he and his colleagues might say, they are a
curious bunch. Eco even gives the listing for the first program Belbo
writes:
It’s a nice little program. The trick on line 100 is cute. It’s not
all that believable that someone would use such a sophisticated trick in
a first program, but let’s drop believability for a second.
In the end, the program calls LPRINT, and the revelation
comes out on paper.
There’s a bug in it, too, can you spot it? I’m sure the output would
reveal it to you quite quickly2.
Eventually the three of them get bored, or contemptuous, and decide
to generate a Diabolical book of their own. It’s really quite remarkable
because they know that the book is generated at random from the crank
manuscripts they feed it, but still decide to take the juxtapositions it
returns, connect them up, and a story unfolds (in truth, we’re already
in the middle of it, the book is about a lot of different things at
once).
Belbo, Diotallevi, and Casaubon are not cranks. They are professional
skeptics. They know the Plan is made up, because they are the ones
making it up, and they keep saying so to each other, joke about it, the
whole thing.
But there is an insidious recursive mechanism that traps them anyway.
Neither smugness nor smartness is enough to save them.
Abulafia’s output is meaningless by construction, so anything
meaningful in it has to be supplied by a reader. They supply it as a
game, knowingly. But the game’s output is text, and text is exactly the
same kind of thing as the input, so it goes back in. The connection they
invented yesterday is available today, and you build on it for tomorrow.
And so the nonsense and the making-sense-of-it intertwine and grow
together until they are one and the same putrid flower.