Read How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays Online
Authors: Umberto Eco
How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays (22 page)
Luckily, when there is no fog on the Alessandrian plain, especially in the early morning,
scarnebbia,
as we say; it "unfogs." A kind of nebulous dew, instead of illuminating the fields, rises to confuse sky and earth, lightly moistening your face. Nowâin contrast to the foggy daysâvisibility is excessive, but the landscape remains sufficiently monochrome; everything is washed in delicate hues of gray and nothing offends the eye. You have to go outside the city, along the secondary roads or, better, along the paths flanking a straight canal, on a bicycle, without a scarf, a newspaper stuffed under your jacket to protect your chest. On the fields of. Marengo, open to the moon and where, dark between the Bormida and the Tanaro, a forest stirs and lows, two battles were won long ago (1174 and 1800), the climate is invigorating.
San Baudolino
The patron saint of Alessandria is Baudolino ("O San Baudolinoâfrom heaven protectâour diocese and its faithful elect"). This is his story, as told by Paulus Diaconus:
In Liutprand's times, in a place that was called Foro, near the Tanaro, there shone a man of wondrous sanctity, who with the help of Christ's grace worked many miracles, and he often predicted the future and spoke of distant things as if they were present. Once, when the king had come to hunt in the forest of Orba, it so happened that one of his men, having taken aim at a stag, with his arrow wounded the nephew of the same king, the little son of his sister, by the name of Anphuso. Seeing this Liutprand, who greatly loved the boy, began to weep over his misfortune and immediately sent one of his knights to the man of God, Baudolino, begging him to implore Christ to spare the life of the unhappy boy.
Here I will interrupt the quotation for a moment, to allow the reader to make his own predictions. What would a normal saintânot art Alessandrian, in other wordsâhave done in this situation? Now we will resume the story, again giving Paulus the floor:
As the knight set off, the boy died. Whereupon the prophet, seeing the man arrive, spoke to him thus: "I know the reason why you have come, but what you ask is impossible, because the boy is already dead." On hearing these words, the king, distressed though he was at not having had his prayer answered, still openly recognizd that Baudolino, the man of the Lord, was gifted with the spirit of prophecy.
I would say that Liutprand behaves well and understands the lesson of a great saint. Which is that, in real life, you can't perform too many miracles. And the wise man is he who bears necessity in mind. Baudolino performs another miracle: convincing a credulous Langobard that miracles are rare merchandise.
1965â90
1 T. A. Sebeok, "The Owls and Their Master," in
Zoosebeotics
(Bloomington, Ind.: Donald Duckworth, 1999).
***
2 Lee Falk and Ray Moore,
The Phantom and the Jungle Owls
(Bandar City, 1936).
***
3 "Text, Context, Co-Text and Cocotext," in
Textuals
(Texas University Press, 1978).
***
4 Camille Paglia, "Love on the Chest of Drawers,"
Vanity Unfair
33 (1990).
***
5 Erica Jong, "Dating a Text,"
Frequent Flyers
3 (1989).
***
6 Erich Segal, "Historia Noctuae,"
Archiv für laternische allgemeine Kauz-wissenschaften
xxxlv, 6 (1960).
***
7 E. L. Doctorow,
On Doctorowls
(New York: Ragtime Press, 1977).
***
8 Stanley Fish,
Is There Any Class in This Text?
(Freetext Press, 1991).
***
9 "Invention of All Mothers," in
Leviathans in Jurassic Park
(London: Owlish Press, n.d ).
***
10 Woody Allen,
With Feathers
(Manhattan: Getting Even Press, 1992).
***
11 Leslie Fiedler,
Sex and Owls on the Mississippi
(New Orleans: Huckleberry, 1969).
***
12 "Temps de la paillasse, temps de la commode," in
Annales
xxx, 1 (1960).
***
13 In
Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et son oeuvre,
the author raises the question of what would have happened in "The Raven" if, on the pallid bust of Pallas, three owls had lighted instead of a single raven. Professor Bonaparte subtly observes how difficult is to make one owl, let alone three, utter "Nevermore" correctly.
***
14 Robert Scholes,
Protocowls of Reading
(Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1987).
***
15 For better comprehension I refer to the Urdu translation.
***
16 "It is well known that some Lacanian secessionists insisted on putting elephants on the chest of drawers, bringing about the destruction of a valuable nineteenth-century credenza. This piece had formerly belonged to Little Hans, who, succumbing to the shock, died in a mental hospital in Vienna, in the delusion he was the Man of Wolves.
***
17 "La parole dont je me leurre ne pourra que se taire dans l'éclatement de ce qu'elle cache. Et pourtant...." One hundred eighty minutes of silence followed while Dr. Lagache tried to extricate himself from a Borromeo knot, yelping constantly (cf. Julia Kristeva, "Chora-Chora!", in
Tell Quayle,
5, 1980, from page 20 to
22).
***
18 According to Richard Rorty (
Philosophy and the Mirror on a Chest of Drawers,
New York, Owlish Press, 1990) in the last phase of his thinking Lacan considered continuing the experimental placing of a pocket mirror on a cigar box, since in the bankruptcy of the Ecole Freudienne his chest of drawers had been confiscated.
***
19 Jeffrey Nürnberg, Personal Communication (forthcoming).
***
20 "Misunderstanding Kabbalah," in
Journal of Aesthetics,
666, iii, nd. As a typical example of misunderstanding see Allen Ginsberg,
Howl
[sic], San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1956.
***
21 Jacques Derrida, "Limited Ink" (unfinished paper).
***
22 "Two Many Owls in Elm Street," in
Gavagai,
5, 1981. In the same issue see also Hilary Putnam, "Owls in a vat," as well as Marvin Minsky, "A Society of Minks." For the whole debate see Daniel Dennett,
Putnaming Owls,
Kuhnisberg, Bestsellers Press, 1979.
***
23 "Ambaraba in S5," in
Splash! Journal of Rigid Designation,
np., nd.
***
24 "John Searle, "The Owl Is in the Bowl," in
Cats & Mats,
2, 1987. Both Kripke and Searle had obviously been misled, perhaps by a defective critical edition. In fact they read
como
as
Como
(toponym) and inevitably their interpretation of the poem was contaminated. Obfuscated by the conviction that the owls were in Como, Kripke limited his research on the baptismal rite to the parish records of Como. This would explain his (wrong) conclusion that no Ambaraba Ciccì ever existed in Comoânothing excluding the possibility that he (or she) is alive and well in Mexico City.
***
25 It is well known that Montague abandoned his fruitful research on the owls since he was later fascinated by speaking horses. Sec for instance (in
Formal Philosophy,
New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1974: 242): "
Jones seeks a horse such that it speaks and a horse such that it speaks is a(n) entity such that Jones finds it
are in DS
L1
, but neither K
1
-entails the other in L
1
."