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Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
In his note on "Jorge Luis Borges and William James" (pdf), Jaime Nubiola quotes a passage from Borges' introduction to a Spanish translation of James' Pragmatism. Very nice: I now understand a little better than I ever did before the common distinction between "Aristotelians" and "Platonists". (Also, I never realized this distinction was Coleridge's coinage.) This paragraph is useful in reading Borges' lectures on Emanuel Swedenborg and on Immortality.
Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians
or Platonists. The latter feel that ideas are realities: the
former, that they are generalizations. For the latter,
language is nothing but a system of arbitrary symbols:
for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist
knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos,
an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an
error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the
latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists
change their name and language: one is Parmenides,
Plato, Anselm, Leibnitz, Kant, Francis Bradley; the
other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Roscelin, Locke, Hume,
William James. (...) From 1889, this lucid tradition is
enriched with William James. Like Bergson, he fights
against positivism and against idealist monism. He
advocates, like Bergson, in favor of immortality and
freedom.
Here is the source for Coleridge making this observation: Table Talk of S.T. Coleridge, p. 102.
posted morning of February 25th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
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.
I wonder how much of my response to Borges' lecture on "Emanuel Swedenborg" is what I'm bringing to the reading, how much is Borges' intent. As I'm reading it, this lecture's principal subject is William Blake: Borges mentions Blake at a couple of points in the lecture, and always with the sense that Blake is where to go from Swedenborg, Blake is why you would want to understand Swedenborg:
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 in the closing words of the lecture we see the same construct:
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
 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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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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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. Reading Night Train to Lisbon last night, I realized I was moving my lips to sound out the words -- this surprised me as I have not done such a thing in many years, since grade school. And then I realized oh, I was just reading Borges oral, where I have to move my lips to sound out the foreign words; and it made me wonder how much this new drive to learn Spanish is affecting my relationship with my mother tongue.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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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.
It's just really nice to see Borges, whom I've always pictured as a sort of forbidding presence, talking in this down-to-earth manner, having a house and a sister...
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 MartÃnez 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
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
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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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Of all the diverse tools of man, the most astonishing is, without a doubt, the book.
At the library today I found a lovely little book by Jorge Luis Borges -- it is called Borges oral and is the texts of five lectures Borges gave at the Universidad Belgrano, in Buenos Aires, in the 70's. The topics are "The Book", "Immortality", "Emmanuel Swedenborg", "The Detective Story", and "Time" -- Borges says he "chose topics with which I have occupied my time."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
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Thursday, February 19th, 2009
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.
Argelès-sur-mer is a village very close to the Pyrenees (about 10 miles north of Cerbère); in the final years of the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of republicans were interned there.
posted evening of February 19th, 2009: Respond
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