Without Lifting A Finger

The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: “Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.” Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its re...

Jumped around a bit before landing on a reread of Borges' Greatest Hits (still reading). Something this week -- I believe it was the Russian Gogol Series, which I couldn't finish -- made me look into Gogol's early Ukrainian tales, and I ended up reading Viy . Not bad, certainly better than the series it inspired.

Oz was OK, but I eventually got tired of it: weaving (and never leaving) a lot of the same material over and over. A short novel but a lot seemed like filler. And the tease between Atalia and Shmuel: OK, I guess, but it too sometimes felt like filler. Now Borges' little "Three Versions of Judas" -- that's a nut to keep returning to (see "clip" below). From Borges Judas: The Ending:      Drunk with sleeplessness and his dizzying dialectics, Nils Runeberg wandered the streets of Malmo, crying out for a blessing -- that he be allowed to share the Inferno with the Redeemer.      He died of a ruptured aneurysm on March 1, 1912. Heresiologists will perhaps remember him: he added to the concept of the Son, which might have been thought long spent, the complexities of misery and evil.  

Perhaps, by chance, there's a bit of alphabet logic in my choice? I've finished with Borges anthology on Borges (supposedly) -- good, but missing a lot of Borges "greats," and perhaps a bit too weighted with poems (and not always his best poems). I'm sure more Borges will eventually hit the Kindle menu (if it's not already there). * Just starting another Barnes: essays on all things French: Something to Declare . A "clip": La France profonde has disappeared within our century; or at least is now graspable only in tainted form. Edith Wharton saw this about to happen as she roared through France with Henry James at her side. “The trivial motorist,” as she described herself, was to prove the forerunner of other destructive agents: war, peace, communications technology, mass tourism, the industrialization of agriculture, the unfettered free market, Americanization, Eurification, greed, short-termism, complacent ahistoricism.

The anthology is an admixture of prose and poetry. Not every piece rises to the same level (always the case), but every piece speaks (yells) of Borges. * The argument set forth in the preceding paragraphs, rather encumbered and interrupted by examples, may seem intricate. I will find a more direct method. Let us consider a life in whose course repetitions abound: my life, for instance. I never pass in front of the Recoleta cemetery without remembering that my father, my grandparents, and great-grandparents are buried there, just as I shall be; then I remember having remembered the same thing innumerable times before; I can not walk through the outlying neighborhoods of the city in the silence of the night without thinking that nighttime is pleasing precisely because it does away with useless details, like memory; I can not lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating on how one only loses what one really never h ad; each time I cross one of the streets in...

Finished with Sebald (and Sebald is finished with me) for now. The ending of Vertigo has something in common with Borges' "Matthew 25:30" (I'm rereading JLB via an Anthology I found on Kindle -- and he himself supposedly stirred the mix): MATTHEW 25:30 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The first bridge on Constitución. At my feet the shunting trains trace iron labyrinths. Steam hisses up and up into the night which becomes, at a stroke, the Night of the Last Judgment. From the unseen horizon, and from the very center of my being, an infinite voice pronounced these things— things, not words. This is my feeble translation, time-bound, of what was a single limitless Word: “Stars, bread, libraries of East and West, playing cards, chessboards, galleries, skylights, cellars, a human body to walk with on the earth, fingernails, growing at nighttime and in death, shadows for forgetting, mirr...

I put randomness aside and turned to Borges' poems. I found a blue textbook receipt (blank on the inked side, filled with silliness on the other) signaling "The Suicide." I remember liking the phrase "dust of dust" (probably not unique in itself), especially the Spanish version: polvo el polvo . I must've walked around with that in my head for weeks. I've got miles to go today, so I'll only give the English translation (by Alastair Reid). The Suicide Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.

I grabbed up the Non-Fictions again and looked for the first Hogarthian squiggle. This one also added an exclamation mark. Maybe if I keep this up, I'll get around to rereading the whole. This one's from a piece titled "The Creation and P. H. Gosse": I wonder if he knew the ancient sentence that is quoted at the beginning of Rafael Cansinos Assens' Talmudic anthology: "It was only the first night, but a number of centuries had already preceded it."

Homes, like Churches, can be carried with you invisibly. Anyway: I walked an old path this morning -- from 2nd St. to the Peninsula and back again -- but not as old as the path I've walked the last two or three weeks (summer is a time when the calendar is truly a fiction). No pics today: everything stood out but not in a take-my-pic way. Still, I wanted to put something up besides my babble. I worked in a somewhat random way (the text was lounging to my left, atop a few other choice texts) and grabbed up Borges' Selected Non-Fictions . Compounding that randomness I flipped through the book and found one of my old Hogarthian lines (something I miss from the old papyrus and vellum days): I chose what that line and its author seemed to be impressed with so many years ago for my blog entry. The non-fiction piece from Borges (should we even stoop to categories for his work) is titled "A Grandiose Manifesto from Breton" and the Borges' quote I squiggled follows on h...

In my Selected Non-Fictions (Penguin, Edited by Eliot Weinberger) it appears on p. 215 (in "The Total Library") and is the second of only two footnotes for the very short text. I also reread Total's fiction counterpart, "The Library of Babel," and, alas, the busy primate is missing (but I'll perhaps check again -- he may be in the john of one of the unspotlighted hexagons). "Strictly speaking, one immortal monkey would be sufficient."

I'm off to Michigan tomorrow (roots -- forever "unfinished" like Vincent's last painting), so I'm not going to chip away at Sebald's Grunewald till I get back. Hopefully. Remember: I said it was a work in progress. Anyway, game time is roughly an hour away and I thought I'd post some real action: something more akin to real life: terra firma. Right. Anyway. ***       Nota Bene : All in good fun. Gunter was "snipped" from his Wikipedia portrait; Jorge was cut from Flickr.