eliot weinberger’s books of essays include Works on Paper, Outside Stories, and Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. Among his translations are the Collected Poems 1957-1987 of Octavio Paz and Borges’ Seven Nights. In 1992, he was named the first recipient of the PEN/Kolovakos Award for his work promoting Hispanic literature in the United States.
Notes
[←1]
In the decade since this rather pioneering piece of homage was framed, the Borges bibliography in English, with the forceful midwifery of Norman Thomas di Giovanni, has added an offspring a year, including a Personal Anthology and, that ultimate elegance, some Conversations With.
[←2]
In this fifteenth-century poem there is a vision of “three great wheels”: the first, motionless, is the past; the second, in motion, is the present; the third, motionless, is the future.
[←3]
A half century before Dunne proposed it, “the absurd conjecture of a second time, in which the first flows rapidly or slowly,” was discovered and rejected by Schopenhauer, in a handwritten note added to his Welt als Wille und Vorstellung which is recorded on p. 829 of vol. II of the historico-critical edition by Otto Weiss.
[←4]
The phrase is revealing. In chapter 21 of An Experiment with Time he speaks of a time that is perpendicular to another.
[←5]
This conjunction is common in religious poetry. Perhaps the most intense example is in the penultimate stanza of the “Hymn to God, my God, in my sickness,” March 23, 1630, composed by John Donne:
We think that Paradise and Calvary,
Christ’s Cross, and Adam’s tree, stood in one place,
Look Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
As the first Adam’s sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam’s blood my soul embrace.
[←6]
Cf. Spencer, Facts and Comments [1902], 148-151.
[←7]
This is included in the dictionary of jargon by Luis Villamayor, The Language of the Populace; El lenguaje del bajo fondo (Buenos Aires, 1915). Castro is not acquainted with this dictionary, perhaps because it is mentioned by Arturo Costa Alvarez in a key work, Argentine Spanish; El castellano en la Argentina (La Plata, 1928). Needless to say, no one says minushia, canushia, espirajushiar.
[←8]
The State is impersonal; the Argentine can only conceive of personal relations. Therefore, to him, robbing public funds is not a crime. I am noting a fact; I am not justifying or excusing it.
[←9]
Reyes (Capitulos de literatura espafiola, p. 133) correctly observes: “Quevedo’s political works do not propose a new interpretation of political values, they are mainly interesting from a rhetorical standpoint today. . . . They are either occasional pamphlets, or works of academic declamation. Despite its ambitious format, the Politica de Dios is nothing but a pronouncement against bad ministers. But some of Quevedo’s most typical traits are to be found on its pages.”
[←10]
Temblaron los umbrales y las puertas,
Donde la majestad negra y oscura
Las frias desangradas sombras muertas
Oprime en ley desesperada y dura;
Las tres gargantas al ladrido abiertas,
Viendo la nueva luz divina y pura,
Enmudecio Cerbero, y de repente
Hondos suspiros dio la negra gente.
Gimio debajo de los pies el suelo,
Desiertos montes de ceniza canos,
Que no merecen ver ojos del cielo,
Y en nuestra amarillez ciegan los llanos.
Acrecentaban miedo y desconsuelo
Los roncos perros, que en los reinos vanos
Molestan el silencio y los ofdos,
Confundiendo lamentos y ladridos.
(Musa IX)
[←11]
La Mendez llego chillando
Con trasudores de aceite,
Derramado por los hombros
El columpio de las liendres.
(Musa V)
[←12]
Aquesto Fabio cantaba
A los balcones y rejas
De Aminta, que aun de olvidarlo,
Le han dicho que no se acuerda.
( Musa VI)
[←13]
This is the text of a lecture given at the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores in March, 1949.
[←14]
Henry Seidel Canby (Walt Whitman [1943]) and Mark Van Doren in the Viking Press Anthology (1945) recognize that difference very well, but, to my knowledge, they are the only ones who do.
[←15]
The mechanism of these apostrophes is intricate. We are touched by the fact that the poet was moved when he foresaw our emotion. Compare these lines by Flecker, addressed to the poet who will read him a thousand years later:
friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.
[←16]
Reason and conviction differ so much that the gravest objections to any philosophical doctrine usually pre-exist in the work that declares it. In the Parmenides Plato anticipates the argument of the third man which Aristotle will use to oppose him; Berkeley (Dialogues, 3) anticipates the refutations of Hume.
[←17]
I have not read The Sense of the Past, but I am acquainted with the competent analysis of it by Stephen Spender in his book The Destructive Element (pp. 105-110) . James was a friend of Wells; to learn more about their relationship, consult the latter’s vast Experiment in Autobiography.
[←18]
Around the middle of the seventeenth century the epigrammist of pantheism, Angelus Silesius, said that all the blessed are one (Cherubinscher Wandersmann V, 7) and that every Christian must be Christ (ibid., V, 9).
[←19]
At the end of the 18th or beginning of the 19th century, judged by readers with classical taste, “Kubla Khan” was much more scandalous than it is now. In 1884, Coleridge’s first biographer, Trail!, could still write: “The extravagant dream poem ‘Kubla Khan’ is little more than a psychological curiosity.”
[←20]
See John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (1927) 358, 585.
[←21]
Cf. the curious hypothesis of Leibniz, which so scandalized Arnauld: “The concept of each individual encloses a priori all the events that will happen to him.” According to this dialectical fatalism, the fact that Alexander the Great would die in Babylon is one of the qualities of that king, like pride.
[←22]
‘The phrase is from Reyes, who applies it to the Mexican man (Reloj de sol, 158).
[←23]
Amplifying a thought of Attar (“Everywhere we see only Thy face”), Jalal-uddin Rumi composed some verses that have been translated by Ruckert (Werke, IV, 222), which state that in the heavens, in the sea, and in dreams there is One Alone; that Being is praised for having reduced to oneness the four spirited animals (earth, fire, air, and water) that draw the cart of the worlds.
[←24]
Most writers of detective stories usually undertake to explain the obscure rather than the inexplicable.
[←25]
The notion of doors behind doors interposed between the sinner and glory is found in the Zohar. See Glatzer, In Time and Eternity, 30; also Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, 92
[←26]
In The Outline of History (1931) Wells praises the work of two other precursors: Francis Bacon and Lucian of Samosata.
[←27]
That he was truly a great poet may be demonstrated by these lines:
Licence my roving hands and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land . . . (Elegies XIX)
[←28]
Cf. the sepulchral epigram of Alcaeus of Messene ( Greek Anthology VII, I )
[←29]
Cf. De Qui
ncey, Writings VIII, 398; Kant, Religion innehalb der Grenzen der Ver nunft II, 2
[←30]
I do not recall that history records conical, cubical, or pyramidal gods, although it does record idols. On the other hand, the form of the sphere is perfect and corresponds to the divinity (Cicero, De natura deorum, II, 17). God was spherical for Xenophanes and for the poet Parmenides. In the opinion of some historians, Empedocles (Fragment 28) and Melissus conceived Him as an infinite sphere. Origen believed that the dead would return to life in the form of spheres; Fechner (Vergleichende Anatomie der Engel) attributed that form, which is the shape of the visual organ, to the angels.
Before Pascal, the noted pantheist Giordano Bruno applied the sentence of Trismegistus to the material universe.
[←31]
De Coelo et inferno, 535. For Swedenborg, as for Boehme (Sex puncta theosophica, 9, 34), heaven and hell are states that man seeks freely, not penal and pious establishments. Cf. also Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, III.
[←32]
Having written this, I read in the glosses of Francesco Torraca that in a certain Italian bestiary the griffin is a symbol of the devil (“Per Ia Grifane intenda Ia nemica”). I don’t know if it is permissible to add that in the Exeter Codex, the panther, a beast with a melodious voice and delicate breath, is a symbol of the Redeemer.
[←33]
It could be objected that such ugliness is the reverse of a preceding “Beauty.” Of course, but it is significant. . . . Allegorically, the eagle’s aggression represents the first persecutions; the she-fox, heresy; the dragon, Satan or Mohammed or the Antichrist; the heads, the deadly sins (Benvenuto da Imola) or the sacraments (Buti); the giant, Philippe IV, known as Philippe le Beau, king of France.
[←34]
Theoretically, the number of systems of numeration is unlimited. The most complex (for use by divinities and angels) would record an infinite number of symbols, one for each whole number; the simplest requires only two. Zero is written o, one 1, two 10, three 11, four 100, five 101, six 110, seven 111, eight 1 000. . . . It is the invention of Leibniz, who was inspired (it seems) by the enigmatic hexagrams of the I Ching.
[←35]
Nonrecognition of the sacred animal and its opprobrious or accidental death at the hands of the people are traditional themes in Chinese literature. See the last chapter of Jung’s Psychologie und Alchemie (Zürich, 1944), which contains two curious illustrations.
[←36]
See T. S. Eliot: Points of View (1941), pp. 25-26.
[←37]
A century later, the Chinese sophist Hui Tzu reasoned that a staff cut in two every day is interminable (H. A. Giles: Chuang Tzu, 1889, page 453)
[←38]
In the Parmenides―whose Zenonian character is irrefutable ―Plato expounds a very similar argument to demonstrate that the one is really many. If the one exists, it participates in being; therefore, there are two parts in it, which are being and the one, but each of these parts is one and exists, so that they enclose two more parts, which in turn enclose two more, infinitely. Russell (Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 1919, page 138) substitutes for Plato’s geometrical progression an arithmetical one. If one exists, it participates in being: but since being and the one are different, duality exists; but since being and two are different, trinity exists, etc. Chuang Tzu (Waley: Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, page 25) resorts to the same interminable regressus against the monists who declared that the Ten Thousand Things (the Universe) are one. In the first place ― he argues ― cosmic unity and the declaration of that unity are already two things; these two and the declaration of their duality are already three; those three and the declaration of their trinity are already four . . . Russell believes that the vagueness of the term being is sufficient to invalidate this reasoning. He adds that numbers do not exist, that they are mere logical fictions.
[←39]
An echo of this proof, now defunct, resounds in the first verse of the Paradiso:
La gloria di Colui che tutto move.
[←40]
I follow the exposition by James (A Pluralistic Universe, 1909, pages 55-60). Cf. Wentscher: Fechner und Lotze, 1924, pages 166-171.
[←41]
The commentators have noted that it was customary at that time to read out loud in order to grasp the meaning better, for there were no punctuation marks, nor even a division of words, and to read in common because there was a scarcity of manuscripts. The dialogue of Lucian of Samosata, Against an Ignorant Buyer of Books, includes an account of that custom in the second century.
[←42]
Galileo’s works abound with the concept of the universe as a book. The second section of Favaro’s anthology (Galileo Galilei: Pensieri, motti e sentenze; Florence, 1949) is entitled “II libra della Natura.” I quote the following paragraph: “Philosophy is written in that very large book that is continually opened before our eyes (I mean the universe), but which is not understood unless first one studies the language and knows the characters in which it is written. The language of that book is mathematical and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures.”
[←43]
To these must be added the poet of genius, William Butler Yeats, who in the first stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium” speaks of “Those dying generations” of birds, with a deliberate or involuntary allusion to the “Ode.” See T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower (1950), p. 211.
[←44]
Writings, 1896, Vol. I, page 129.
[←45]
What is a divine mind? the reader will perhaps inquire. There is not a theologian who does not define it; I prefer an example. The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconceivable figure. The Divine Mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle. This figure (perhaps) has its given function in the economy of the universe.
[←46]
In literature, that is, not in mysticism: the elective Hell of Swedenborg—De coelo et inferno—is of an earlier date.
[←47]
The same design is repeated in Buddhism. The first texts narrated that the Buddha, at the foot of the fig tree, intuits the infinite concatenation of all the causes and effects in the universe, the past and future incarnations of every being. The later texts, redacted centuries later, argue that nothing is real and that every understanding is fictitious and, further, that if there were as many Ganges rivers as there are grains of sand in the Ganges and as many Ganges again as there are grains of sand in the new Ganges rivers, the number of grains of sand would be less than the number of things the Buddha does not know.
[←48]
For us tills dream is merely ugly. Not so for the Hindus: the elephant, a domestic animal, is a symbol of gentleness; the proliferation of tusks could scarcely disquiet those used to viewing an art which, in order to suggest that God is everything, fashions figures with multiple arms and faces; six is a customary number (there are six ways of transmigration; six Buddhas anterior to Buddha; six cardinal points, counting the zenith and the nadir; six divinities which the Yajur-Veda calls the six portals of Brahma).
[←49]
This metaphor may have stimulated the Tibetans to invent the prayer wheels: cylinders or wheels which gyrate around an axis, carrying rolled up strips of paper with magic words upon them. Some of the wheels are manually operated, others are like great mills, moved by water or wind.
[←50]
Rhys Davids proscribes this locution, introduced by Burnouf, but its use in this phrase is less cumbersome than that of the Great Passage or Great Vehicle, which would have given the reader pause.
[←51]
That is how Milton and Dante interpreted those words, to judge by certain passages which seem imitative. In the Comedy (Inferno, I, 60; V, 28) we have d’ogni luce muto and dove il sol tace to indicate dark places; in the Samson Agonistes (86-89):
The Sun to me is dark
And silent as the Mo
on,
When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Cf. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Miltonic Setting, 101. 164
[←52]
Also in Swedenborg. In Man and Superman we read that Hell is not a penal establishment but a state that dead sinners choose, because they feel an affinity with it, just as the good choose Heaven. Swedenborg’s treatise De Coelo et Inferno, published in 1758, expresses the same doctrine.
[←53]
Thus Milton and Dante interpreted them, to judge by certain passages which seem to be imitative. In the Commedia (Inferno, I, 60; V, 28) we have: dogni luce muto and dove il sol tace to signify dark places; in the Samson Agonistes (86-89):