The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XVIII -- chapter 17: THE BIRTH OF AN ATHEIST

Baptism of Augustine of Hippo

1. Interesting parallel: As an adult, the forgetfulness came without warning, like death in the night unexpected; as a child, death came without warning and all around him, and he had to work, "providently," to push out its memory, forget, and move on with his life.  The forced forgetting is very much like the Christian notion of repentance, but repentance must be voluntary like the childhood flushing of repugnant memory.  How then would you metaphorically qualify Yambo's adult amnesia?  Finally, as baptism is sometimes identified as a second birth, or spiritual birth/rebirth, does it fit in anywhere with all this?
2. How is Yambo's conclusion, "God does not exist," not surprising, coming as it does, of course, from his life and development?
3. Describe Yambo's relationship with sin.  How might this lead to the man we know (if we know) he became later?
4. Fine books and fine music become Yambo's gods after the episode in the gorge.  How is this, well, idolatry so much more convenient, yet, at least by the strictures of human limitation, comparably satisfying/challenging?
5. Yambo's life experiences were echoed in and formulated by his books.  He found meaning, explanation, and interpretation at writers' hands.  He experiences a form--perverted--of chaste indulgence by the leniencies allowed in text, "not flesh."  Does this open a window, as it were, overlooking the First Folio; and, by extension, how is the First Folio indeed Lila?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XVII -- chapter 16: DEFENESTRATING FOG

1. The first paragraph holds Eco's second mention of tapeworms (proglottid), and this time regarding their divisive mode of reproduction.  Is this (I'm being a little sarcastic here) Freudian?
2. I love the indirect comparison between the Seven Dwarfs and the kings of Rome.
3. Le corna, or "the horns," is the inadvertent obscene gesture in the aspirin ad.  The version shown is the augmentative of the one-handed horns, which are made by closing the thumb and the middle and fourth fingers and then pointing the remaining fingers (index and pinky, if you're not keeping track) at your target or, more figuratively, toward hell.  It's a versatile gesture with a number of variations, and happened to be the favorite and much-abused gesture of a close friend when I was in Italy.
4. Why is a stamp a perfect window--and so much simpler, if not cheaper, than books and comics--to another land and/or time?
5. Interesting how all the pulp and press from Part 2 find connections, subtle, tangential, and/or direct, to the truths of his memories in Part 3.
6. As far as storytelling is concerned, who is Gragnola?
7. "...it was like throwing rocks at a rhinoceros...."
8. Compare the figurative, fog-laden gorge of Yambo's memory to the real, childhood nightmare.  The latter was overcome by dedicated and systematized training.  Is there a correlative here to penetrating the memory fog?
9. Next character: as far as storytelling is concerned, who is Durante?
10. "...because we knew that half a Hail Mary would basically paralyze them."
11. "I lack the courage to go to Don Cognasso and confess… and besides, confess what? That which I did not do, nor even see, but only guessed at? Not having anything to ask forgiveness for, I cannot even be forgiven. It is enough to make a person feel damned forever."  There's something big here.  This story of terror and heroism and guilt occurs just at Yambo's coming of age.  All this, combined with Gragnola's ideologies and that of Yambo's books, comics, and grandfather, should add up to who he became as an adult.  Thoughts?
12. Following up from #8: The bottom of both the figurative and literal gorges hold the same event.  Is this Clarabell's treasure?  Is this, after everything, a parallel of some sort to the First Folio?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XVI -- chapter 15: IN THE WAKE OF GOD ISSUING FROM THE MACHINE

1. "Maybe I am not dead. If I were, I would feel no worldly passions, no love for my parents or anxiety about the bombings. To die is to remove oneself from the cycle of life and from the beating of one’s heart."  Was he dead and now lives?  Maybe (and this is just me being optimistic, because we still have to gain some additional connection to or by the First Folio) his resurgence--even resurrection--is truly a gift from God, who has emerged from the strange machinations of Yambo's (and Eco's, I think) dirge.
2. By the context of the book, the machine of it, a great shock was required to bring Yambo back from ... whatever you want to call it.  What else, and anything less Deus ex Machina-like than the Folio, could have done it?
3. Am I projecting my own beliefs onto the text, or do Yambo's ruminations (consider the evidence of the soul versus that of the encephalogram) have the true whiff of one wrestling with himself over a religious belief and/or awakening?  It was said, after all, in the last chapter that the boy Yambo was religious.
4. I may not be able to adequately articulate this:  Yambo, before the stroke, was selfish and even dismissive of (1) his past and (2) his loved ones.  Except for the subconscious (maybe that's too kind a word for it) ambition to find his Lila, he was entirely and selfishly only about his immediate "now."  "...may I be granted the gift of fierce selfishness. I live with myself and for myself, and I can remember that which, after my first incident, I had forgotten."  Has the amnesia just been a literal manifestation of what he'd been doing by his negligence as an adult all along, anyway?  Only now after the discovery of the Folio and now powerless within this new fog, everything internal, does he long for his wife and daughters, for a firm grip of and power over the memory and application of his past?
5. (Angelo Bear and his life and death bear a shocking similarity to Toy Story 3.  Just saying.)
6. "It is clear now, in the coma’s silence, that I understand better all that has happened to me. Is this the illumination others achieve when they come to the brink, at which point, like Martin Eden, they understand everything, but as they know, they cease to know? I, who am not yet on the brink, have an advantage over those who die. I understand, I know, and I even remember (now) that I know. Does that make me one of the lucky?"

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XV -- chapter 14: LOCKED AND LOADED

by Gustave Dore'

1. I’ve claimed elsewhere that I hate exposition.  I need to qualify that.  I hate obvious exposition, or poorly-done, contrived and unnatural exposition.  While Eco, clearly a skilled writer, is telling a story throughout these first 13 or 14 chapters, is it not mostly, if not entirely, exposition?  And if it is indeed and essentially all exposition, is it not also fairly obvious and contrived, no matter how artful?  Read my mind (which, at least in this particular case is and with any luck, is at least fairly aligned with yours): why do I find so much enjoyment here that I would, in otherwise similarly contrived and [never so] lengthy expositions, not find, because, honestly--14 chapters of exposition?
2. When the memory finally returns, will it be by effect of one particular trigger alone or the weeks of re-living the past in general or the simple heeling effects of time--or all three?
3. The "Hotel of the Three Roses" becomes another Clarabell's Treasure, as well as, and by the reference "A rose by any other name," another Shakespeare's First Folio.  How do these three things compare to the enigmatic "Mysterious Flames" he's experienced throughout, particularly as none of these three has necessarily sparked such a flame within (at least, in the case of the last of the three, by Yambo's first experience with it at the hands of the mischievous Sibilla)?
4. Maybe a tough question (so it is for me, anyway, as its answer may include the toppling of gods): Is the sudden and coincidental appearance of the First Folio too much--even a cop out?  Sure, Eco sets it up earlier by Sibilla's joke, but does this feel at all artificial--contrived--to you?  Would anyone in Yambo's circumstances also have to stumble upon their own personal version of the First Folio to shock them back to life (and I'm assuming, not remembering as it so happens, that this is indeed the trigger, based upon the event's placement not only at the end of Yambo's Solara efforts, but also at the end of the section)?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XIV -- chapter 13: OF DEVILS AND MASONS

While this is my favorite chapter of the book so far, so it contains one of my favorite comparison: that of tapeworms and gall stones to bad poetry, and all its pathetic symptoms and affectations.  Here, though, we have to examine Eco's use of, what he considers as its his own, bad poetry.  The creation and strategic use of intentionally bad poetry is like the now-commonly mentioned (Michael Chabon) generation of intentional coincidences.  A wise student once commented hopefully and pointedly on the poetry I confessed I was writing for a then-current novel.  "I hope you're not trying to write intentionally bad poetry to make it look like a teenager did it," she said.  I admitted that indeed I was not and so assured her with a sincere expression of my insecurity as a poet, (more or less:) "I'm hoping the best poetry I can do can qualify as believably excellent or even just believable teen-poetry."  So I wonder how Eco, certainly an excellent writer, but not necessarily a poet (and so he sagely acknowledges in the end of the chapter in reference to another's poem, "This is beautiful because it is not mine"), approached his poetry attempts, or, as I suspect is the case as with other issues/references in the book, these are autobiographically accurate, and indeed pieces he composed as a precocious teen--that and, well, the poems' apparent and beyond-coincidentally prophetic natures for Yambo's unique future.  For example, bad poetry or not, this is quite telling:

you cannot enter twice

the kingdom of remembrance

and hope to find unspoiled

the unexpected freshness

of the first theft.

1. The poem of "three days before Christmas" interests me, as in subject (a purity in stark contrast to what we know of the adult Yambo) and prediction (the loss of memory) it is particularly prophetic, appropriate (even mysteriously coincidentally so, as already mentioned above), and perhaps directly metaphoric.  It may even offer a potential explanation for why the memory was lost in the first place (accurate as prediction or not, I don't remember).  Thoughts?
2. As there are literal rooms of memory in the house that align with Yambo's segmented memories of his past, all of which are natural divisions--segmentations--of life, and with a particularly sturdy and tall wall set ("to put a final seal on memories I was renouncing") between adolescence and young adulthood, high school and college, so his literal loss of memory builds a wall (even a "satanically masonic" wall) between his present and past.  Sounds like a classic, though thoroughly exaggerated, mid-life crisis.
3. Lila Saba: "saba" is the food for bacteria that create balsamic vinegar.  Consider the various classic metaphors of vinegar, not to mention grapes, as well as the definition of balsam against the mellifluous connection between Lila Saba and Sibilla (additional, of course, to the fact that Lila is a nickname for Sibilla anyway).
4. An affecting little book: "La Vita Nuova."  Beatrice penetrated all sorts of walls that otherwise held everyone else back in Dante's life; so similar to this Lila who is the only one, besides Gianni, who transcends all of Yambo's barriers, consciously and subconsciously--the "relay race across the years."

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XIII -- chapter 12: BOTH THE TIME and THE PLOT POINTS, THEY "SI GIRANO"

Ming the Merciless

1. If Chabon is right (or, at least, if his ideal carries over to Eco in this case), then the story of Saint Antoninus isn't merely told to characterize the little town.  Thoughts?
2. Superstition, of course, is borne as explanation by the ignorant of an event otherwise unexplained.  Any thoughts on how that applies here with Amalia, and maybe in context of events and information shared to this point?
3. Wretched simoniacs....
4. Of course the folio is Clarabell's treasure (or a foreshadowing thereof), and appropriately so, as he found it where he wasn't looking.  But how will this, if so it does, tie into his memory?  Regardless of the imminent connection, why is Shakespeare's first folio appropriate (and not only in personal terms to Yambo)?  Of course, it's not real.  Is it?
5. "That's my book.  Is it worth it?"
6. The little bottle atop the bookcase: any connection at all to the "Drink Me" bottle of Wonderland (though not by drinking, surely, or literally so, anyway)?
7. Gordon, Ming, and the castor oil.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XII -- chapter 11: PHILATELY

I'm tempted to call this chapter a little self-indulgent on the part of Eco, except that I enjoy this chapter.  It's quiet, pensive, and offers an effect of the Calm Before the Storm, and all the little pieces collected might be assembled, somehow, later to make some more complete picture.  Maybe.  Whatever.  As far as I'm concerned, there are only really three questions here:

1. What parallel can you draw between Yambo and the purportedly poorly-told tale of Queen Loana and her Mysterious Flame, despite Yambo's claim that he must have moved past the lamentable narrative in favor of the exotic and suggestive--mellifluous--names?
2. What connection is there (indeed identified, at least simply, if no more than skatingly, by Yambo) between philatery and all those comic books, another kind of philately in itself, though with a sort of (this is stretching, I know) tax exemption all its own?
3. Will the memory return if he jumps into the fog filling the gorge?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XI -- chapter 10: TIME'S TEMPLE, IMMURED

"Ugolino' by Carpeaux

According to Brer Rabbit, everyone needs a laughing place, which, as far as I'm concerned, is really about as crucial to life and existence as water and food and air and whatever else.  Everyone--more especially, or at visibly, kids, but all adults have them as well, just with more variation in form and location--needs a brier patch, a hiding place, a closet or tree-house or attic or, in this case, a wall-up former-chapel now forgotten where treasures can be stored, secret prayers offered, dark rites performed, etcetera; but how many have such a fantastical treasure house--Cave of Wonders--as does Yambo?  Having such a place is as cliche' a fantasy as immurement is a terror, and here in chapter ten, both coexist and balance, almost symbiotically.  I've hopefully check every attic of every house I've lived in, hoping for that escapist's window to the past, and felt the vicarious thrill of reading about it in books or watching it in movies (Harry Potter's Room of Requirement, the attic here, The Bridge to Terabithia, and even corny movies like The Lake House).  This is why I hope someday to build a house with a private library at the top of a tower accessible exclusively by an iron spiral staircase.  This is why I have family members who love old rundown barns or houses.  This is why I keep a flashlight in the car.  I think I speak for everyone: we all want to discover and possess a secret place grander or more romantic than our current, likely inadequate, laughing place.

1. Based on Paola's psychologist's explanation, are Yambo's fears and insecurities regarding his past valid?  Along the same lines, cross-textually, who was/is more affected by the Alice books, Alice Liddell or Lewis Carroll/children or adults?  Is Paula over-simplifying?
2. "This one knows you always bring him chewing gum.  That's all."
3. How is it appropriate that the doorway is walled up and was also once the entrance to the chapel?
4. "...and I often hid there and did God knows what."  (Haha!  Get it!?)
5. This is a circumstantial connection of course, as immurement is among the most primal of fears (and Poe's bread and butter, no less), but this reminds me, at least on the outset, of Count Ugolino from L'Inferno, not to mention all those Poe stories.
6. "At that moment a thunderstorm was gathering."  In just the last chapter, Yambo (if not Eco, but here I think indistinguishable), criticizes Romance-period writers for their manipulation of the elements to echo a book's plot and circumstances.  Isn't that what he's doing right here?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana X -- chapter 9: FLIP-FLOPPING ITALY

1. This might be entirely out of context or beyond the scope of the book, but the disregard (contextually justified) of his sister's box of elementary- and middle-school things makes me think about the degree of selfishness this trip represents in Yambo.  He has had one afternoon with his daughters and grandchildren that, perhaps, pulled him at least slightly and temporarily away from himself.  Of course we have no indication that their visit did any more to help him than all his much less selfless hours, but yet I wonder: might he not be better off simply living his life as best he can, and if the memories come, great, and if not, then, oh well?  This taps into the issue, of course, that we've touched on already: would a character realistically want to rediscover (and likely thereby have to relive) his past, having to balance and negotiate the potential discovery of unsavory memories, acts, thoughts, etcetera.  None of Yambo's friends or family have acknowledged (beyond his infidelity, which, apparently, is no big secret anyway) that there's anything Yambo should be scared or hesitant to discover, but still, is there a potential advantage (I don't know of any advantage specifically, so I'm throwing the question "out there" for suggestions) to altruism rather than selfish seclusion?
2. What do you make of Yambo's dubiously effecting act of turning on the radio panel light and then playing a record? The last chapter indicated the necessity of the records rather than radio, but why does he bother with the entirely connotative radio light?
3. Gee Whiz 1: The B and V phonemes are very similar, and in some alphabets even interchangeable, and commonly misused by children learning to speak, among others.  I'm not going to get into the details, but if you don't believe it, try out each letter and consider what your mouth is doing to produce each sound.
4. Connect the lie of fog to the fascist propaganda; then disconnect it (or whatever you think best) by the "truth" of fog.
5. Gee Whiz 2:  Italian pronouns for address, and their levels of formality: tu (singular) = you, informal; lei (singular) = you, formal; voi (also 2nd person plural) = you (singular), more formal; loro (also 3rd person, plural) = you (singular or plural), super formal, as in for royalty or, more likely today, sarcastic formality.
6. "That song must be why, years later, I took note of this passage from Corazzini’s poem 'The Streetlamp': Murky and scant in the lonely thoroughfare, / in front of the bordello doors, it dims, / and the good smoke that from the censer swims / might be this fog that whitens out the air.  [¶]  "'Lili Marleen' came out not too long after the giddy 'Comrade Richard.' Either we were generally more optimistic than the Germans, or in the interim something had happened, our poor comrade had grown sad and, tired of walking through muck, longed to go back to his streetlamp. But I was coming to realize that the same series of propagandistic songs could explain how we had gone from a dream of victory to one of the welcoming bosom of a whore as hopeless as her clients."
7. What is the potential for the Italians' experience in WWII to be a parallel of some sort to Yambo's current predicament?
8. What is the value of one's past childish ambitions and dreams to an adult?
9. Unbreakable.
10. "I was still missing some link, perhaps many links. At some point I had changed, but I did not know why."
11. Finally, what do you make of the chapter title?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana IX -- chapter 8: PULP FICTION and other POP FROM THE PAST

1. "Are you clear about the distance between you and these stories?"  Is this a valid question, despite Yambo's argument that he's not crazy?  On the other side of the equation, how might recounting the stories as he is to children and grandchildren be perhaps a better way to spark the flame than simply rereading them alone in the attic?
2. Why might pulp literature--or even Stevenson--be a better vehicle for the spark and flame than "Homer, Manzoni, and Flaubert"?
3. "Radio, the voice that enchants"; "enchants," being, of course, the operative word.
4. Tabula rasa is a Locke coinage, as far as I know.  Certainly Yambo's slate has been razed, but is it true that by listening to his friend it's being spoiled by/with another's memories?
5. "Over the previous few days, I had been trying to imagine the divided self of a boy exposed to messages of national glory while at the same time daydreaming about the fogs of London, where he would encounter Fantômas battling Sandokan amid a hail of nailshot that ripped holes in the chests and tore off the arms and legs of Sherlock Holmes’s politely perplexed compatriots—and now here I was learning that in those same years the radio had been proposing as an ideal the life of a humble accountant who longed for nothing more than suburban tranquility" (emphasis added).  Yambo seems to worry his way through this and subsequent paragraphs that all the varied media stimuli might have incited moral contradiction and confusion in his past self (though, interestingly, he seem to be observing or discovering his own past in the third person, but not necessarily as the past but as if it were presently happening).  Is the massive exposure to media such a problem as Yambo imagines it to be?  Why might he be worried about it at all, as that boy from the past is him, and, well, hasn't he turned out all right--except for this whole amnesia thing, of course?
6. So why is it so vital that he find his old schoolbooks?
7. The woman ("like a saxophone in heat" ... uh, whoa!) in the lyric recalls a bit the women of the cocoa and antacid tins from the previous chapter.  Obviously women play/ed a big role in Yambo's life, but what, by evidence here and elsewhere, do you supposed that role really is?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana VIII -- chapter 7: THE MEMORIOUS

1. Just the first two paragraphs of this chapter already give the impression of the trope of one's life flashing before his eyes.  Obviously there are inherent problems to the application of this metaphor here; the Benjamin Button/Signor Pipino complex, on the other hand, may be more appropriate.  Thoughts?
2. "Sibilla was now beginning to seem like a distant childhood memory, while everything I was gradually excavating from the fog of my past was becoming my present" (emphasis added).  Explain.
3. In color, Eco's description of the attic resembles that of Joyce's general description of Dublin (a perhaps likely comparison, considering Eco's admiration for Joyce): brown, in all its variations.  However, this attic is nothing like Dublin.  What is the difference--defined in terms of color, or substance--between the two?
4. I don't generally associate Eco with poetry, the way I do with other prose writers, like, and especially so, Borges (who wrote a lot of poetry); however, this sentence, "If a cellar prefigures the underworld, an attic promises a rather threadbare paradise, where the dead bodies appear in a pulverulent glow, a vegetal elixir that, in the absence of green, makes you feel you are in a parched tropical forest, an artificial canebreak where you are immersed in a tepid sauna," is gorgeous and poetic.  More, there's a potentially fascinating indication in it, ascribing a sort of natural metaphor (and recalling and defining vast amounts of literature in the process) to the house, or even to architecture in general.
5. Further to the Dantean "Commedic" (#4) and Button/Pipino themes (#1), justify Eco's use of his brief "womb" analogy, and why, perhaps in Yambo's case, the genetic (is the adjectival form of genesis really genetic?) locus of garret is more appropriate than cellar.
6. Some great "p" words here: pluvial, pulverulent (and here)
7. What is the inherent problem with Yambo's belief that Clarabelle's treasure is "certainly there"; or, rather, what's the inherent issue to what we might call The Paradox of Clarabelle's Treasure?
8. Further information of Clarabelle as a name: Clara (also clara/chiara, Italian, meaning "clear"); belle (also bella, Italian, meaning "beautiful" and related to bene, for good); and Claribel, and Clara.
9. All three tins' illustrations (two of them: the cocoa "Due Vecchi" ("two old people"), the antacid, "Brioschi" (company name)) have a woman serving a man, and note the ages of the women, where given.  Appropriate?  And, of course, the image-within-an-image....
10. This paragraph with the repeating images and infinite return/regression, is pretty bleak, hopeless.  If he is indeed at the bottom of the regression, holding the tin, then it should be finite, else there would be no bottom; but in fact, by the physics of reflection and Mobius strips and whatnot, it is infinite, in which case Yambo will never arrive at himself.
11. "At the instant he knew, he ceased to know."  This recalls, of course, the flashing-before-the-eyes mentioned in #1.
12. Yambo, the author, is the forebear of our protagonist's nickname, yet it's his our hero's hero, Ciuffettino, with whom our Yambo identifies himself.  (Did you get that?)
13. If you haven't yet read "Funes, His Memory," By Borges, (here, "Funus, the Memorious," and not my preference for translation, ignorant though I am generally of Spanish), you should do so now.
14. I'm not going to bother with speculations on the cresch's fountain. 

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana VII -- chapter 6: WHEN ENTERING THE VAULTS OF YOUR BRAIN, ENSURE YOU HAVE YOUR KEYS--OR A HATCHET

1. I know this seems fairly obvious, and maybe it is so entirely.  Regardless, there are levels and levels of connection and metaphor here, and it's all just so well done and so deep that it's good to see it in words: describe the parallels--from the obvious to the obscure to the speculative--between the central wing (and more than just its contents--also its nature) and Yambo's locked-up brain.
2. Yambo's grandfather was a "curious collector," according to Amalia.  Yambo is having a hard time recognizing the man's style and taste, and is appalled by some brown, blobby landscapes, which "he could not have loved...," yet he collected them.  If we assume, at least for the moment, that the old man didn't necessarily love what he collected but the act of collecting itself, then (or regardless) what is the comparison between the two men?
3. This whole chapter is like a giant Rorschach blot--or a million of them.  (I wrote this point out before I got to the joke about the inkblots.  Of course, after the joke, the comment makes more sense anyway, though I meant it initially to allude to the fact that we see what we want to see, even if we don't know it's what we want, in an inkblot: what is Yambo seeing?)
4. I love Amalia's description of Il Duce.  It makes him sound like Sauron or Voldemort!
5. Maybe Eco's a fan of Tennessee Williams.  Whatever, right?  Is there something more, however, to the word "desire" ascribed as label to the associatively misread streetcar?
6. We already talked about Yambo's reversion to childhood.  More than that now, and all the more so echoing his amnesia, he thinks about infancy, as he sees the room which he's deduced to be his parents' and even his birthplace.  All children have amnesia, its onset falling somewhere between the ages of two and four.  Some call it a veil, and it's one that can never be lifted, at least not in this life.  Is there any further connection here between Yambo's situation and the veil over infancy?
7. To draw another perhaps uncalled-for connection to Harry Potter, this central wing, and especially the attic, becomes a sort of Room of Requirement (a sort of metaphysical Rorschach blot all by itself) --it becomes what we need it to be.
8. If there's a visual similarity between the fashion illustrations and Sibilla--even possibly in exactitude--would Yambo's draw to her be stronger pre- or post-amnesia?
9. Flatus Vocis -- do you think this is referring to its literal translation of "breath of voice," and therefor potentially indicating that everything that he experiences in the central wing has deep and specific significance to his life, past, and spirit; or do you think it might translate, at least by application, to the essentially Latin and more vulgar "fart's worth of words" --that is just a whole bunch of stuff--words and words and words and worthless?
10. A hatchet to the head, or squeezing the skull until the brain bursts from the seams might be an effective way to release what's trapped there.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana VI -- chapter 5: OF GOOD FOOD, GHOSTS, and ... STUFF

a vineyard in the Monferrato hill country, Italy

1. I think we all knew the Mickey Mouse cartoon about Clarabelle and her treasure would come back.  I suppose the number of sources for metaphors on memory and collecting are endless; so why something like Mickey Mouse et alia?  (And how perfectly the comments from Chapter 4 predict this first point as well as the title of the new section!)
2. "...I could not help tasting one [fig] and venturing to say that that tree always had been bountiful...."  Is Yambo trying out his ability to generate memory, and to what end?
3. What of the "memory of humanity," and the peaches, the poop, and the grapes?  When I first read this, it took me by surprise, especially when there was a bathroom just inside.  But consider the contrast from Milan to Solara in the first place.  The descent into the vineyard is perhaps but the final steps of this journey to the bottom of the well, back of the cave, to the very beginning and all its metaphoric baggage.  (Aside from all this, I think these few paragraphs are hilarious.)
4. Borromini
5. I wonder about Eco's use of "spirit" here: "In order to rediscover lost time, one should have not diarrhea but asthma. Asthma is pneumatic, it is the breath (however labored) of the spirit: it is for the rich, who can afford cork-lined rooms. The poor, in the fields, attend less to spiritual than to bodily functions. [¶]  "And yet I felt not disinherited but content, and I mean truly content, in a way I had not felt since my reawakening."  Is he admitting a level of spirituality or is it separate and/or euphemistic?
6. The general American population doesn't understand, or fully comprehend, the level at which other cultures (generally not first world, or which were relatively recently and widely impoverished) hold/value their food.  Like a language, it really has to be lived, rather than just studied.  With few exceptions (generally holidays, though school-day lunch periods may also qualify, though not for reason food quality), we eat simply because we need to, and without ceremony.  Our culture is not built around our meals; we come by them too easily.  Also, and at its simplest, it's also directly connected to that very personal issue of defecation from earlier.
7. A little Carrollian riddle: How is a Yambo like a house cat?
8. Owls = ghosts, pretty much always by the way, or phantoms more generally and symbolically speaking.
9. If Paola is acting mother in the tale, this journey away from her and home, more than just a quest, is also a test: can Yambo control his eating, among other things, without mommy breathing down his neck, making this story a sort of coming-of-age (yes, I'm intentionally avoiding the more "correct" literary snob term).  Thoughts (about the question or the contents of the parentheses)?