The Sun to me is dark
And silent as the Moon
When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Cf. E. M. W. Tillyard: The Miltonic Setting, 101.
[←54]
And in Swedenborg. In Man and Superman we read that Hell is not a penal establishment but rather a state dead sinners elect for reasons of intimate affinity, just as the blessed do with Heaven; the treatise De Coelo et Inferno by Swedenborg, published in 1758, expounds the same doctrine.
[←55]
Carlyle, in his Early Kings of Norway, spoils the economy of the phrase with an unfortunate addition, when, to the “six feet of English earth” he adds “for a grave.”
[←56]
For the convenience of the reader I have chosen a moment between two intervals of sleep: a literary, not a historical, instant. If anyone suspects a fallacy, he can insert another example, one from his own life, if he wants
[←57]
And, earlier, by Newton, who maintained: “Each particle of space is eternal, each indivisible moment of duration is everywhere.” (Principia, III, 42.)
[←58]
For the convenience of the reader I have selected a moment between two periods of sleep, a literary moment, not a historical one. If anyone suspects a fallacy, he may substitute another example, one from his own life if he so chooses.
[←59]
And, earlier, by Newton, who maintained: “Each particle of space is eternal, each indivisible moment of duration is everywhere” (Principia, III, 42).
[←60]
Similarly, in Leibniz’ Monadology (1714), we read that the universe consists of inferior universes, which in turn contain the universe, and so on ad infinitum.
[←61]
Pompeo Venturi disapproves of the election of Ripheus, a personage who until this apotheosis had existed only in a few lines of the Aeneid (II, 339, 426). Virgil declares him the most just of the Trojans and adds to the report of his end the resigned ellipsis: “Dies aliter visum” [The gods ruled otherwise]. There is not another trace of him in all of literature. Perhaps Dante chose him as a symbol by virtue of his vagueness. Cf. the commentaries of Casini (1921) and Guido Vitali (1943).
[←62]
Katibi, author of the Confluence of the Two Seas, declared: “I am of the garden of Nishapur, like Attar, but I am the thorn of Nishapur and he was the rose.”
[←63]
Silvina Ocampo (Espacios metricos, 12) has put this episode into verse:
Era Dios ese pajaro como un enorme espejo:
los contenia a todos; no era un mero reflejo.
En sus plumas hallaron cada uno sus plumas
en los ojos, los ojos con memorias de plumas.
[Like an enormous mirror this bird was God:/containing them all, and not a mere reflection./In his feathers each one found his own feathers/in his eyes, their eyes with memories of feathers. ]
[←64]
One of the Platonic dialogues, the Cratylus, discusses and seems to negate a necessary connection between words and things.
[←65]
The Gnostics inherited or rediscovered this unusual opinion, and they created a vast vocabulary of proper names, which Basilides (according to lrenaeus) reduced to a single cacophonous or cyclical word, “Kaulakau,” a sort of universal key to all the heavens.
[←66]
Buber (in What Is Man?, 1938) writes that to live is to enter a strange house of the spirit, whose floor is the chessboard on which we play an unknown and unavoidable game against a changing and sometimes frightening opponent.
[←67]
Cf. Inferno IV,123: “Cesare armato con gli occhi grifagni” [Caesar armed with the eyes of a hawk].
[←68]
Throughout time, the sirens have changed form. Their first chronicler, the bard of the twelfth book of the Odyssey, does not tell us how they were; for Ovid they are reddish-plumed birds with virginal faces; for Apollonius of Rhodes, women from the waist up, the rest, a bird; for the playwright Tirso de Molina (and for heraldry), “half women, half-fish.” No less disputable is their species; the classical dictionary of Lempriere considers them nymphs, in Quicherat’s they are monsters and in Grimal’s they are demons. They dwell on an island in the west, near Circe’s isle, but the corpse of one of them, Parthenope, was found in Campania, and her name given to the famous city now called Naples; the geographer Strabo saw her tomb and witnessed the gymnastic games and the race with torches, periodically celebrated to honor her memory.
The Odyssey tells that the sirens attracted and led sailors astray and that Ulysses, to hear their song and not perish, plugged with wax the ears of his oarsmen and ordered that they tie him to the mast. To tempt him, the sirens promised him knowledge of all things in the world:
Till now none sail’d this way, but stopt to hear
Our honied accents warble in his ear:
But felt his soul with pleasing raptures thrill’d:
But found his mind with stores of knowledge fill’d.
We know whate’er the kings of mighty name
Achiev’d at Ilion in the field of Fame;
Whate’er beneath the sun’s bright journey lies.
O stay and learn new wisdom from the wise!
(Odyssey XII, tr. Pope).
A tradition gathered by the mythologist Apollodorus, in his Bibliotheke, tells that Orpheus, from the ship of the Argonauts, sang more sweetly than the sirens, who then threw themselves into the sea and turned into rocks, because their law was to die when no one felt bewitched by them. The Sphinx, too, leaped from on high when her riddle was answered.
In the sixth century, a siren was captured and baptized in northern Wales, and became a saint in certain ancient almanacs, under the name of Murgan. Another, in 1403, passed through an opening in a dike and lived in Haarlem until the day of her death. Nobody understood her, but they taught her to weave and she worshiped, as if by instinct, the cross. A sixteenth-century chronicler argued that she was not a fish because she knew how to weave, and that she was not a woman because she could live in the water.
In English, the classical siren is different than those with fish tails (mermaids). The formation of the latter kind had been influenced by the analogous Tritons, divinities of the court of Poseidon.
In the tenth book of Plato’s Republic, eight sirens preside over the rotation of the eight concentric heavens.
“Siren: supposed sea beast,” we read in a blunt dictionary.
[←69]
As I do not have the original text, I have copied this passage from Menendez y Pelayo’s Spanish version (Obras completas de Marco Tulia Cicerón III, 88). Deussen and Mauthner speak of a sack ofletters but do not say they are made of gold; it is not impos sible that the “illustrious bibliophage” has contributed the gold and removed the sack.
[←70]
Strictly speaking, one immortal monkey would be sufficient.
[←71]
The French version is rather unfortunate: “Lit nuptial, lit de parturition, lit de mort aux spectrales bougies.” The fault, of course, lies with the language, which is incapable of compound words.
[←72]
The Scholastic concept of time as the flow of the potential into the actual is akin to this idea. Cf. Whitehead’s eternal objects, which constitute “the kingdom of possibility” and participate in time.
[←73]
Alive, Son of Awake, the improbable metaphysical Robinson of Abubeker Abentofail’s novel, resigns himself to eating only those fruits and fish that abound on his island, and always tries to ensure that no species will perish and the universe be thus impoverished by his fault.
[←74]
I do not wish to bid farewell to Platonism (which seems icily remote) without making the following observation, in the hope that others may pursue and justify it: The generic can be more intense than the concrete. There is no lack of examples to illus trate this. During the boyhood summers I spent in the north of t
he province of Buenos Aires, I was intrigued by the rounded plain and the men who were butchering in the kitchen, but awful indeed was my delight when I learned that the circular space was the “pampa” and those men “gauchos.” The same is true of the imaginative man who falls in love. The generic (the repeated name, the type, the fatherland, the tanta lizing destiny invested in it) takes priority over individual features, which are tolerated only because of their prior genre.
The extreme example-the person who falls in love by word of mouth-is very common in the literatures of Persia and Arabia. To hear the description of a queen her hair like nights of separation and exile, but her face like a day of delight, her breasts like marble spheres that lend their light to moons, her gait that puts antelopes to shame and is the despair of willow trees, the onerous hips that keep her from rising, her feet, narrow as spearheads-and to fall in love with her unto tranquillity and death is one of the traditional themes of The Thousand and One Nights. Read, for example, the story of Badrbasim, son of Shahriman, or that of Ibrahim and Yamila.
[←75]
The idea that the time of men is not commensurable with God’s is prominent in one of the Islamic traditions of the cycle of the miraj. It is known that the Prophet was carried off to the seventh heaven by the resplendent mare Alburak and that he con versed with each one of the patriarchs and angels that dwell there and that he traversed Unity and felt a coldness that froze his heart when the hand of the Lord clapped his shoulder. Leaving the earth, Alburak’s hoof knocked over a jug full of water; on returning, the Prophet picked up the jug and not a single drop had been spilled.
[←76]
Jesus Christ had said: “Suffer the little children to come unto me”; Pelagius was accused, naturally, of interposing himself between the little children and Jesus Christ, thus delivering them to hell. Like that of Athanasius (Sathanasius) his name was con ducive to wordplay: everyone said Pelagius had to be an ocean (pelagus) of evils.
[←77]
I believe I detect an ironic reference to Flaubert’s own fate.
[←78]
Agrippa the Skeptic argued that any proof demands a proof in its turn, and so on to infinity.
[←79]
Its reverse is the “classic” doctrine of Poe, the romantic, who makes the poet’s work an intellectual exercise.
[←80]
Let us follow the variations of a Homeric trait across time. Helen of Troy, in the Iliad, weaves a tapestry, and what she weaves are the battles and misadventures of the Trojan War. In the Aeneid, the hero, a fugitive from the Trojan War, arrives in Carthage and sees, in a temple, representations of scenes from that war and, among the many images of warriors, his own image as well. In the second Gerusalemme, Godofredo receives the Egyptian ambassadors in a muraled pavilion whose paintings represent his own battles. Of the three versions, the last is the least felicitous.
[←81]
In this case, as in others, the precursor is infinitely more valuable than the successors.
[←82]
Léon Bloy developed this conjecture in the Kabbalistic sense. See, for example, the second part of his autobiographical novel Le Désespéré.
[←83]
Tennyson interspersed this yearning for a Fürher in some of his poems; for example, in the fifth stanza of the tenth part of Maud.: "One still strong man in a blatant land . . ."
[←84]
More than one spectator will ask himself: Since they are usurping voices, why not also faces? When will the system be perfect? When will we see Juana Gonzalez playing the role of Greta Garbo playing the role of Queen Christina of Sweden?
Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952
(Series: # )
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends