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Sunday, March 28th, 2010
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Años depsués, Taylor visitó las cárceles de ese reino; en la de Nithur el gobernador le mostró una celda, en cuyo piso, en cuyos muros, y en cuya bóveda un faquir musulmán habÃa diseñado (en bárbaros colores que el tiempo, antes de borrar, afinaba) una especie de tigre infinito. Ese tigre estaba hecho de muchos tigres, de vertiginosa manera; lo atravesaban tigres, estaba rayado de tigres, incluÃa mares e Himalayas y ejércitos que parecÃan otros tigres. El pintor habÃa muerto hace muchos años, en esa misma celda; venÃa de Sind o acaso de Guzerat y su propósito inicial habÃa sido trazar un mapamundi. | | Years later, Taylor visited the prisons of this district; in the one at Nithur, the governor showed him a cell on whose walls, on whose floor, on whose vault a Muslim fakir had laid out (in barbarous colours which time, not yet ready to wipe them clean, was refining) a sort of infinite tiger. This tiger, this vertiginous tiger, was composed of many tigers; tigers ran across it and radiated outward from it; it contained seas and Himalayas and armies which appeared as other tigers. The painter had died many years before, in this same cell; he came from Sindh or perhaps from Gujarat, and his initial intention had been to draw a map of the world. |
"The Zahir"
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Más de una vez grité a la bóveda que era imposible descifrar aquel testo. Gradualmente, el enigma concreto que me atareaba me inquietó menos que el enigma genérico de una sentencia escrita por un dios. ¿Qué tipo de sentencia (me pregunté) construirá una mente absoluta? Consideré que aun en los lenguajes humanos no hay proposición que no implique el universo entero; decir el tigre es decir los tigres que lo engendraron, los ciervos y tortugas que devoró, el pasto de que se alimentaron los ciervos, la tierra que fue madre del pasto, el cielo que dio luz a la tierra. Consideré que en el lenguaje de un dios toda palabra enunciarÃa esa infinita concatenación de los hechos, y no de un modo implÃcito, sino explÃcito, y no de un modo progresivo, sino inmediato. Con el tiempo, la noción de una sentencia divina parecióme pueril o blasfematoria. Un dios, reflexioné, sólo debe decir una palabra, y en esa palabra la plenitud. Ninguna voz articulada por él puede ser inferior al universo o menos que la suma del tiempo. | |
More than once, I screamed at the vaulted ceiling that it would be impossible to decipher this testament. Gradually, the immediate riddle confronting me came to trouble me less than the general riddle: a sentence written by a god. What sort of sentence (I asked) would an absolute consciousness construct? I reflected: even in the languages of humanity there is no proposition which does not imply the entire universe; to speak of the tiger is to speak of the tigers which begot it, the deer and turtles which it ate, the pasture on which the deer nourished themselves, the earth which was mother of the pasture, the heavens which gave forth light onto the earth. I reflected: in the language of a god, every word must bespeak this infinite concatenation of things, not by implication, but explicitly; not in a progressive manner, but in the instant. With time, the notion of a divine sentence came to appear puerile, blasphemous. A god, I reasoned, would only be able to say a single word, and in this word would be everything. No voice, no articulation of his could be inferior to the universe, could be less than the sum of all time.
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"The God's Scripture"*
The twenty-centavo piece which falls into Borges' palm and destroys him in "The Zahir," is the same entity which Tzinacán labors mightily to comprehend (and which destroys him) in "The God's Scripture." (Notice Borges says at the beginning of his tale, "I am not the man I was then, but I am still able to recall, and perhaps recount, what happened. I am still, albeit only partially, Borges" -- Tzinacán closes his story saying, "I know I shall never speak those words, because I no longer remember Tzinacán.")
What I remembered about "The Zahir" before I reread it today, was the broad arching theme of it, the object which is a manifestation of God, which cannot be forgotten, which drives people mad; I had totally forgotten what a great story it is, the characters, the local flavor of Buenos Aires.
 * Update -- Thinking further, I would rather translate this story's title -- "La escritura del dios", which Hurley renders literally as "The Writing of the God" -- simply as "Scripture".
posted evening of March 28th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, March 22nd, 2010
"The Theologians" offers an alternate vision of eternity: Months later, when the Council of Pergamo was convened, the theologian entrusted with refuting the errors of the Monotoni was (predictably) John of Pannonia; his learnèd, measured refutation was the argument that condemned the heresiarch Euphorbus to the stake. This has occured once, and will occur again, said Euphorbus. It is not one pyre you are lighting, it is a labyrinth of fire. If all the fires on which I have been burned were brought together here, the earth would be too small for them, and the angels would be blinded. These words I have spoken many times. Then he screamed, for the flames had engulfed him. It is (perhaps) not immediately obvious that eternal recurrence entails the same extension of the present moment I discussed in my last post -- it was not immediately obvious to me. But if the present moment is going to be repeated an infinite number of times, it must have eternal duration. And indeed you can visualize the universe of eternal recurrence with the same four-dimensional model; but instead of a straight vector, the 3-space which we inhabit has to follow a cyclical orbit. I found the end of "The Theologians" confusing: The end of the story can only be told in metaphors, since it takes place in the kingdom of heaven, where time does not exist.* One might say that Aurelian spoke with God and found that God takes so little interest in religious differences that He took him for John of Pannonia. That, however, would be to impute confusion to the divine intelligence. It is more correct to say that in paradise, Aurelian discovered that in the eyes of the unfathomable deity, he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox and the heretic, the abominator and the abominated, the accuser and the victim) were a single person. -- I would have thought the pairing of "orthodox and heretic" would apply, in the context of this story, to Aurelian (or John of Pannonia) in counterpoint to Euphorbus -- that the two churchmen were colleagues with maybe a small rivalry, but both in good graces with the Church. I am missing something here.
 * (And what a marvelous, breathtaking statement this is.)
Update:... on rereading I see that I was giving far too little weight to the rivalry between Aurelian and Pannonia -- this is really the principal subject of the story.
posted evening of March 22nd, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, March 20th, 2010
That day, all was revealed to me. The Troglodytes were the Immortals; the stream and its sand-laden waters, the River sought by the rider. As for the city whose renown had spread to the very Ganges, the Immortals had destroyed it almost nine hundred years ago. Out of the shattered remains of the City's ruin they had built on the same spot the incoherent city I had wandered through -- that parody  or antithesis of the City which was also a temple to the irrational gods that rule the world and to those gods about whom we know nothing save that they do not resemble man. The founding of this city was the last symbol to which the Immortals had descended; it marks the point at which, esteeming all exertion vain, they resolved to live in thought, in pure speculation. They built that carapace, abandoned it, and went off to make their dwellings in the caves.
I know the parallels are pretty vague; but this portion of "The Immortal" is reminding me of nothing so much as the City of Reality (and Illusions), in The Phantom Tollbooth.
posted evening of March 20th, 2010: Respond
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