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Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

🦋 Mystics

Recall that fearsome sentence of Carlyle, who read -- not without benefit -- Swe­denborg, and who said: The history of the universe is a scripture which we have, which is read and is written constantly. And it's true: we are continually presenting the history of the universe, and we are actors in it. And we are also letters, also we are symbols: A divine text in which we are written. At home I have a dictionary of correspondences. One can look up any word of the Bible and see what is the spiritual sense Swedenborg gave it.

The kingdom of heaven is owned by the poor in spirit, etc. This is what Jesus said. But Swedenborg adds more to that. He says that that is not enough, that a person must also save himself intellectually. He imagines heaven, above all, as a series of theological conversations between the angels. And if a person cannot follow these conversations, he is unworthy of heaven. Thus, he must live alone. And then comes William Blake, who adds a third salvation. He says that we can -- that we have to -- save ourselves also through the medium of art. Blake explains that Christ too was an artist, who did not preach through the medium of words, but of parables. And that parables are æsthetic expressions. That is to say, that salvation should be through the intellect, through ethics and through works of art.

And here let us recall some of the phrases in which Blake moderated, in a way, the great sentences of Swedenborg: The stupid one will not enter into heaven for being saintly. Or: Refuse sainthood; invest in intellect.

And then comes Blake, who adds that man must also be an artist to save himself. It is a triple salvation: we have to save ourselves through goodness, through justice, through abstract intelligence; and then through works of art.

The portion of the lecture where Borges is recommending that his students can't go wrong by reading a bit of Swedenborg's writing sounds to my ear like a throw-away -- he's obviously much more interested in the man's intellectual heirs. Besides Blake and Carlyle he mentions Emerson, William and Henry James, George Bernard Shaw.

A nice bit of background: Borges introduces his topic by saying that Voltaire said the most extraordinary person in history was Charles XII, that he is instead going to talk about a subject of Charles XII. Well -- I had not even known Voltaire wrote any history. But sure enough, he wrote a biography of King Charless XII of Sweden; you can read it at Google Books.

Also, from Wikipædia comes this fantastic bit of knowledge: Johnny Appleseed was a Swedenborgian! I had no idea!

Swedenborgianism in the news: the Springfield, IL News-Sun runs a profile of the Urbana Swedenborgian Church.

posted evening of February 24th, 2009: 4 responses
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Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

🦋 Puppy pictures

Lots of pictures of Lola and Pixie (and various other shih tsus around the neighborhood) are up now at the READIN family album.

...And here is the article that Ellen was taking those pictures for: Shih Tsus in South Orange.

posted evening of February 22nd, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Cogitare ergo esse

Later in "Immortality", some source material for Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius:

And here, Berkeley maintains that matter is a series of perceptions, and that these perceptions are inconceivable without a conscious entity which perceives. What is red? Red depends on our eyes, our eyes are a system of perceptions as well. Later comes Hume, who refutes both hypotheses, who destroys the soul and the body. What is the soul, except that which perceives, and what is matter, except something perceived? If in the world we are to do away with nouns, we are left limited to verbs. As Hume says, we are not allowed to say I think, because I is a subject; one must say it is thinking, in the same manner as we say it is raining. When Descartes said, I think, therefore I am, he ought to have said, something thinks or it is thinking, because I supposes an entity and we have no right to make that assumption. He could have said: It is thinking, therefore something exists.

posted afternoon of February 22nd, 2009: 2 responses
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🦋 Reading: sound and meaning

Mariana Eça's office in the Alfama quarter was half an hour's walk. It took him four hours. It began with him sitting down whenever he found a bench, sitting and changing his glasses. With the new glasses the world was bigger and for the first time, space really had three dimensions where things could extend unhindered. The Tagus was no longer a vague brownish surface, but a river, and the Castelo de São Jorge projected into the sky in three directions, like a real citadel.... In a little park, he took out Prado's notes and tried out the new glasses.

O verdadeiro encenador da nossa vida é acaso -- um encenador cheio de crueldade, misericórdia e encanto cativante. Gregorius didn't believe his eyes: he hadn't understood any of Prado's sentences so easily: The real director of our life is accident -- a director full of cruelty, compassion and bewitching charm.

I definitely experience the book differently when I am focusing on the sound of the words, rather than primarily on their meaning. I think there is something of value in this type of reading.

posted afternoon of February 22nd, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Nostalgia for Earth

A fun passage from the beginning of Borges' lecture "Immortality":

Without understanding [William James'] joke, don Miguel de Unamuno repeats it word for word in his The Tragic Sense of Life*: God is the provider of immortality, but he repeats many times that he wants to go on being don Miguel de Unamuno. Here I don't understand Miguel de Unamuno; I do not want to go on being Jorge Luis Borges, I want to be another person. I hope that my death will be total, I hope to die in body and soul.

I do not know if it's ambitious or modest, or at all justifiable, my pretension of speaking about personal immortality, about a soul which preserves a memory of that which was on earth and which already in the other world corresponds to the previous one. I remember that my sister, Norah, was at my house the other day and said: I'm going to paint a picture called "Nostalgia for Earth", having as its content that which an angel feels in heaven, thinking of earth. I'm going to make it up of elements from Buenos Aires when I was a girl.

Update: fixed a blunder in my translation, after referring to Eliot Weinberger's translation of the lecture in Selected Non-Fictions.

* Jaime Nubiola and Izaskun Martínez of the Universidad de Navarra have written a paper on Unamuno's Reading of The Varieties of Religious Experience and its Context. Nubiola also has an interesting note in Streams of William James, vol. I, #3 (pdf), on "Jorge Luis Borges and WJ", and in vol. III, #3 (pdf), on "WJ and Borges Again: the Riddle of the Correspondence with Macedonio Fernández". Professor Nubiola has confirmed to me by e-mail that as he understands it, "Unamuno is a deep believer and William James is -- at the end of the day -- a non believer, who understands the belief in God as the other side of the belief of immortality."

posted afternoon of February 22nd, 2009: 4 responses
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Friday, February 20th, 2009

🦋 Borges as teacher

I was reading the author's preface to Borges oral just now, in which he explains how he chose each of his topics -- of "The Book," he says it is the tool "without which I could not imagine my life, and which is no less intimate to me than my hands or my eyes."

I was very taken with Borges' humble description of his role as a teacher:

Thanks to the listener, who gives me his indulgent hospitality, my classes achieved a success which I had not hoped for, and which I certainly did not merit.

As a lecture, the class is a collaborative work, and those who listen are no less important than he who speaks.

This book contains my personal portion of these sessions. I hope the reader may enrich them as much as they were enriched by the listeners.

posted evening of February 20th, 2009: Respond

🦋 Somewhere on down the road

Sylvia and I read Chapter 18 of The Amber Spyglass tonight, in which Lyra and Will enter the world of the dead; and I found myself utterly blown away by Pullman's creativity. There has been a lot to love about this series of books; but I think the transition here from the multiple universes of living reality to the world of the dead might be the single greatest bit of genius so far. It's believable and elegant and not kitsch, it seems like Dante writing science fiction. -- Wait no, that's not quite what I mean; I mean something more like "a great science fiction author writing the Inferno."

Sylvia impressed me last night when we were reading about Mary Malone among the mulefa, by picking up on the fact that what Mary was building was going to be "the amber spyglass" -- she figured this out before I did.

posted evening of February 20th, 2009: 2 responses
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🦋 El Libro

Of all the diverse tools of man, the most astonishing is, without a doubt, the book.

The first lesson is very engaging and fun -- he's talking about how people have looked at the book throughout history, what space it has occupied in cultures, with reference to classical philosophy and to the Old Testament; and to Spengler's Decline of the West. Some of this is over my head but Borges has composed it in such a way as to welcome inquiry -- he is not assuming his students will understand the references but rather that they will be prompted to investigate further.

Very nice to think about the aged author (in his 70s at the time he delivered these lectures) addressing the class. I am wondering now whether these lectures were ever recorded...

posted evening of February 20th, 2009: 3 responses

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

🦋 Nos queda la palabra

Saramago writes today about Paco Ibáñez, and links to his web site --

Tomorrow, Saturday, Paco Ibáñez will sing at Argelès-sur-mer, on the coast of Provence, in homage to the memory of the Spanish republicans, among others his father, who there suffered torments, humiliations, evil treatment of all kinds, in the concentration camp erected by the French authorities.

posted evening of February 19th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Portuguese Lit

Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness.

Fernando Pessoa, Book of Disquiet

I said before that I was not really identifying with Gregorius, and that's still true -- I was thinking tonight though, it's funny I don't -- some aspects of his situation have parallels to aspects of my own life, I think; seems like if I tried, I ought to be able to put myself in his shoes. And curious -- in the last book I read, Elizabeth Costello, I also found that I was not "relating" to the text that way. My feeling about this is that both Coetzee and Mercier have a very different type of voice -- at a first approximation, "more cerebral" -- than much of what I've been reading in the last few years. It could also be that I'm moving in a different direction as a reader. This is difficult to quantify; I'm just going to leave it out there for the time being.

posted evening of February 19th, 2009: Respond
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