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The restaurant's staircase was adorned with roses on all three flights. Vases on the sideboards and stands were filled with striking flowers... and fat men with dark circles under their eyes, sipping Scotch whisky. Around midnight, dinner was announced. On the menu were cold cuts, salads, parma ham, galantines trembling in frozen seclusion, and an infinite variety of à la carte dishes served on side tables, leaving the vast expanse of carved oak with silver cutlery, china, and lace to the flowers that spilled from tall silver épernes in the center to the bouquet beside each plate; fruits, pyramid or layer cakes, or simply solid, chilled, and ornate delights; sauces, pies, jellies, custards, charlottes russes, or homemade sponge cake topped with raspberry jam, surrounding a veritable Mont Blanc of whipped cream dotted with red cherry stars; Towers of nougat and caramel, ice cream and vanilla ice cream served in baskets woven with candied orange peel and sugared rose petals or violets on top... Various wines in cut crystal jugs, each with its name engraved on a silver grape leaf hanging from the handle; chilled champagne skillfully served by waiters in gold-stamped or Bohemian crystal goblets... Illuminating everything were wax candles in crystal candelabras, and on the table, in silver candelabras. As the last customers were leaving, a plate of hot okra, a cup of strong coffee, and enchanting memories of a night at the beach appeared to fuel my brain until I got home by taxi. I got home and wrote ---- the joint burning in the ashtray: ------ There is form, the ghostly form, which includes all evolution, all metamorphosis, every Heideggerian entity, all germination buds and all rhizomes, all buds of abortion, diffraction, deformation, death and rebirth, seed, amnion, matrix, and post-birth. There is climate and atmosphere, foreground, the aquatic depths, and astral recessions: there are seasons, climates, temperatures, excursions, and haecceities; There are categories and departments, logic within logic, certainties as firm as ice, and then banks of fog, silt and dunes, mud and debris, or simply ozone pouring from the neck of an uncapped bottle. And, as if all this weren't enough, there are the crazy numbers, the Pleistocene memories, the escapes and placental subterfuges. Memories hanging by a hair that, when dying, gives rise to insects; faces that burn in luminol, casting a hysterical light on cellular problems; names flowing back to lethal sources, reverberating like twisted harps; words embedded in lymph that fall on hot fruits and form wild waterfalls in distant, nameless countries; birds that land between their eyes only to singe their wings, and vapors that rise from their arteries and congeal into webs of phosphorescent mica, which no dynamite can explode. A little further on, the face of the beloved looms. Slowly, like a fever, the nebula arrives. A moonlight that saturates the empty sky. Carved depths shimmer between precipice walls. The final glossolalia ascends the throne.
BORGES, The Aleph
ResponderExcluir(FRAGMENT)
I now come to the ineffable center of my story; here begins my despair as a writer. All language is an alphabet of symbols whose exercise presupposes a past shared by the interlocutors; how can I convey to others the infinite Aleph, which my fearful memory barely encompasses? Mystics, in a similar trance, are lavish in emblems: to signify divinity, a Persian speaks of a bird that, in some way, is all birds; Alanus of Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who, at the same time, addresses East and West, North and South. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they have some relation to the Aleph.) It is possible that the gods would not deny me the discovery of an equivalent image, but this story would be contaminated with literature, with falsehood. Especially since the central problem is insoluble: the enumeration, even partial, of an infinite set. In that gigantic instant, I saw millions of pleasurable or atrocious acts; none astonished me as the fact that they all occupied the same point, without overlap and without transparency. What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I will transcribe, successively, because language is such. Something, however, I will record.
At the bottom of the step, to the right, I saw a small, iridescent sphere of almost intolerable brilliance. At first, I thought it was spinning; then I realized this movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles it contained. The Aleph's diameter was perhaps two or three centimeters, but cosmic space was there, undiminished in size. Each thing (the mirror's crystal, let's say) was infinite things, because I saw it clearly from every point in the universe. I saw the teeming sea, I saw the dawn and the dusk, I saw the crowds of America, I saw a silver spider's web in the center of a black pyramid, I saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), I saw endless eyes nearby scrutinizing me as if in a mirror, I saw all the mirrors on the planet and none of them reflected me, I saw in a courtyard on Soler Street the same tiles that, thirty years ago, I saw in the vestibule of a house in Fray Bentos, I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapor, I saw convex equatorial deserts and each of their grains of sand, I saw in Inverness a woman I will not forget, I saw her violent hair, her proud body, I saw cancer in her breast, I saw a circle of dry earth on a sidewalk where a tree had once stood,
ResponderExcluiri saw a farm in Adrogué, a copy of the first English version of Pliny, by Philemon Holland, I saw, at the same time, every letter on every page (when I was little, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book didn't get mixed up and lost in the course of the night), I saw contemporary night and day, I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal, I saw my bedroom empty, I saw in a study in Alkmaar a globe between two mirrors that multiply it indefinitely, I saw horses with swirling manes on a Caspian beach at dawn, I saw the delicate structure of a hand, I saw the survivors of a battle sending postcards, I saw a Spanish deck of cards in a shop window in Mirzapur, I saw the oblique shadows of some ferns on the floor of a greenhouse, I saw tigers, pistons, bison, waves and armies, I saw all the ants that exist on earth, I saw a Persian astrolabe,
ResponderExcluiri saw in a desk drawer (and the writing made me tremble) obscene, unbelievable, precise letters that Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino, I saw a beloved monument in La Chacarita, I saw the atrocious relic of what had deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo, I saw the circulation of my dark blood, I saw the gears of love and the modification of death, I saw the Aleph, of all points, I saw in the Aleph the earth, and in the earth again the Aleph, and in the Aleph the earth, I saw my face and my entrails, I saw your face and felt dizzy and I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret object (and conjecture) whose name men usurp, but which no man has looked at: the inconceivable universe.
ResponderExcluirhttp://pijamasurf.com/2011/10/cientificos-confirm-que-los-trances-hipnoticos-son-reales/
ResponderExcluirScientists confirm that hypnotic trances are real.
Scandinavian scientists prove that hypnosis is a state of the human mind and not "mere suggestion."
Many people remain skeptical of hypnosis, believing it to be a pseudoscientific practice or a combination of relaxation, visualization, and the power of suggestion or autosuggestion.
A group of Finnish and Swedish scientists, however, found evidence that hypnotic trances are real and constitute a unique state of altered consciousness.
The key appears to lie in the glassy gaze characteristic of this state.
Using high-resolution eye-tracking technology and a "motor-goggle" that triggers automatic eye responses, researchers discovered that the glassy gaze characteristic of hypnosis is accompanied by calculable shifts in the automatic eye reflexes.
This suggests that hypnosis should not be considered a merely imaginary state, but rather a tangible state of consciousness from a scientific perspective.
The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim
ResponderExcluirJorge Luis Borges
Translated by Carlos Nejar
Philip Guedalla writes that the novel *The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim*, by Bombay lawyer Mir Bahadur Ali, "is a rather uncomfortable combination of those allegorical poems of Islam that rarely fail to interest their translator, and those detective novels that inevitably surpass John H. Watson and perfect the horror of human life in the most irreproachable Brighton boarding houses." Previously, Mr. Cecil Roberts had denounced in Bahadur's book "the dual, unlikely tutelage of Wilkie Collins and the illustrious twelfth-century Persian, Ferid Eddin Attar"—a peaceful observation that Guedalla repeats without further ado, but in an angry dialect. Essentially, both writers agree: they both point to the work's detective mechanism and its mystical undercurrent. This hybridization may lead us to imagine a certain similarity with Chesterton; we will soon see that there is no such thing.
The editio princeps of *Approach to Al-Mu'tasim* appeared in Bombay in late 1932. The paper was almost newsprint; the cover announced to the buyer that it was the first detective novel written by a Bombay native. Within a few months, the public sold out four editions of a thousand copies each. The Bombay Quarterly Review, the Bombay Gazette, the Calcutta Review, the Hindustan Review (of Alahabad), and the Calcutta Englishman lavished their dithyramb on it. Then Bahadur published an illustrated edition titled *The Conversation with the Man Called Al-Mu'tasim* and magnificently subtitled: *A Game with Shifting Mirrors*. This edition is the one that Vítor Gollanez has just reproduced in London, with a prologue by Dorothy L. Sayers and with the omission—perhaps merciful—of the illustrations. I have it in my possession; I was unable to obtain the first, which I sense is far superior. I am authorized to do so by an appendix, which summarizes the fundamental difference between the original version of 1932 and that of 1934. Before examining it - and discussing it - it is appropriate that I briefly indicate the general course of the work.
ResponderExcluirIts visible protagonist—we are never told his name—is a law student in Bombay. Blasphemously, he disbelieves in his parents' Islamic faith, but, as the tenth night of Muharram wanes, he finds himself at the center of a civil unrest between Muslims and Hindus. It is a night of drums and invocations: through the opposing crowd, the large paper canopies of the Muslim procession make their way. A Hindu tile flies from a soteia; someone plunges a dagger into a stomach; someone—Muslim, Hindu?—dies and is trampled. Three thousand men fight: baton against revolver, obscenity against curse. God, the Indivisible, against the Gods. Astonished, the freethinking student joins the riot. With desperate hands, he kills (or thinks he has killed) a Hindu. Thunderous, equestrian, half-asleep, the Sirkar police intervene with impartial beatings. The student flees, almost under the horses' hooves. He searches for the last outskirts. He crosses two railway tracks or the same track twice. He scales the wall of a cluttered garden, with a circular tower at the back. A mob of moon-colored dogs (a lean and evil mob of moon-colored hounds) emerges from the black rose bushes. Harassed, he seeks refuge in the tower. He climbs an iron ladder—a few flights to go—and on the terrace, which has a blackened well in the center, he comes across a gaunt man, who is urinating vigorously, crouched, in the moonlight.
ResponderExcluirThis man confides that his profession is stealing the gold teeth from the white-clad corpses the Parsis leave in this tower. He says other vile things and mentions that he hasn't purified himself with buffalo dung for fourteen nights. He speaks with evident resentment of certain horse thieves from Gujarat, "dog-eaters and lizard-eaters, men, in short, as infamous as the two of us." It's getting light: in the air there's a low flight of fat vultures. The student, annihilated, falls asleep; when he wakes, with the sun already high in the sky, the thief is gone. Also missing are a pair of Trichinopoli cigars and some silver rupees. Faced with the threats projected the night before, the student decides to get lost in India. He thinks he's proven himself capable of killing an idolater, but not of knowing for sure whether the Muslim is more right than the idolater. Guzerat's name remains with him, as does that of a malka-sansi (a woman of the thieving caste) from Palanpur, much favored by the corpse-slayer's curses and hatred. He argues that the rancor of such a thoroughly vile man amounts to praise. He decides—without further hope—to seek her out. He prays and sets out with steady slowness on the long journey. Thus ends the second chapter of the work.
ExcluirIt's impossible to trace the adventures of the remaining nineteen. There's a dizzying proliferation of dramatis personae—not to mention a biography that seems to exhaust the movements of the human spirit (from infamy to mathematical speculation) and a pilgrimage that encompasses the vast geography of Hindustan. The story, which began in Bombay, continues in the lowlands of Palanpur, lingers for an afternoon and a night at the stone gate of Bikaner, recounts the death of a blind astrologer in a Benares sewer, conspires in the multiform palace of Kathmandu, prays in the pestilential stench of Calcutta, in Machu Bazaar, contemplates the dawn of the sea from a Madras registry office, watches the afternoons die at sea from a balcony in the state of Travancor, falters and kills in Indapur, and concludes its orbit of leagues and years in Bombay itself, a stone's throw from the garden of moon-colored dogs. The fugitive we know falls among people of the vilest class and settles down among them, in a sort of contest of infamy. Suddenly—with Robinson's miraculous astonishment at the footprint of a human foot in the sand—he perceives a certain mitigation of this infamy: a tenderness, an exaltation, a silence, in one of the detestable men.
ResponderExcluir"It was as if a more complex interlocutor had crossed arms in the dialogue." He knows that the vile man he is conversing with is incapable of this momentary decorum; hence, he postulates that this man reflected a friend, or a friend of a friend. Rethinking the problem, he arrives at a mysterious conviction: Somewhere on Earth there is a man from whom this clarity comes; somewhere on Earth there is the man who is equal to this clarity. The student resolves to dedicate his life to finding him.
ExcluirThe general plot is already glimpsed: the insatiable search of a soul through the faint reflections it has left in others: at first, the faint trace of a smile or a word; at the end, diverse and growing splendors of reason, imagination, and goodness. As the men questioned came to know Al-Mu'tasim more closely, their divine portion became greater, but they are believed to be mere mirrors. The mathematical technicality applies: Bahadur's ponderous novel is an ascending progression, whose final term is the anticipated "man named Al-Mu'tasim." Al-Mu'tasim's immediate predecessor is a Persian bookseller of supreme courtesy and happiness; the one preceding this bookseller is a saint... After a few years, the student arrives at a gallery "at the back of which is a door and a cheap mat with many beads, and behind it a splendor." The student claps his hands once or twice and asks for Al-Mu'tasim. A man's voice—the incredible voice of Al-Mu'tasim—invites him to pass. The student opens the curtain and steps forward. At this point the romance ends.
ResponderExcluirIf I'm not mistaken, the successful elaboration of such a plot imposes two obligations on the writer: one, the varied invention of prophetic features; the other, that the hero prefigured by these features is not a mere convention or phantasm. Bahadur satisfies the first; I don't know to what extent the second. In other words: the unheard-of and unconsidered Al-Mu'tasim should leave us with the impression of a real character, not a jumble of insipid superlatives. In the 1932 version, the supernatural notes are sparse: "the man called Al-Mu'tasim" has its share of symbolism, but is not without idiosyncratic, personal traits. Unfortunately, this fine literary approach did not persist. In the 1934 version—the one I have in view—the novel devolves into allegory: Al-Mu'tasim is an emblem of God, and the hero's specific itineraries are, in some way, the soul's progress in its mystical ascent. There are distressing details: a black Jew from Kochin, speaking of Al-Mu'tasim, says his skin is dark; a Christian describes him on a tower with his arms outstretched; a red lama remembers him sitting "like that yak-butter image I fashioned and worshipped in the Tashilhunpo monastery." These statements are meant to imply a unitary God who accommodates human inequalities.
ResponderExcluirIn my view, the idea is uninspiring. I won't say the same about this other one: the conjecture that the Almighty is also in search of Someone, and this Someone of Someone superior (or simply indispensable and equal), and so on until the End—or rather, the Endless—of Time, or in cyclical form. Al-Mu'tasim (the name of that eighth Abbasid who was victorious in eight battles, fathered eight sons and eight wives, left eight thousand slaves, and reigned for eight years, eight moons, and eight days) etymologically means "The Seeker of Protection." In the 1932 version, the fact that the object of the pilgrimage was a pilgrim opportunely justified the difficulty in finding him; in the 1934 version, it gives rise to the extravagant theology I mentioned. Mir Bahadur Ali, we have seen, is incapable of eluding the most ludicrous of art's temptations: that of being a genius.
ExcluirI reread the previous one and fear I haven't sufficiently highlighted the book's virtues. There are some very civilized details: for example, a certain argument in chapter nineteen in which one senses that Al-Mu'tasim's friend is a contender who doesn't refute the other's sophistries, "so as not to triumphantly be right."
ResponderExcluirIt is understood to be honorable that a contemporary book derives from an ancient one: since no one likes (as Johnson said) to owe anything to their contemporaries. The repeated but insignificant contacts between Joyce's "Ulysses" and Homer's "Odyssey" continue to receive—I will never know why—the stunned admiration of critics; those between Bahadur's novel and Farid ud-din Attar's venerated "A Colloquy of the Birds" receive the no less mysterious applause of London, and even of Alahabad and Calcutta. Other derivations abound. One researcher enumerated some analogies between the novel's first scene and Kipling's narrative, On the City Wall; Bahadur admits them, but claims that it would be highly unusual for two paintings of the tenth night of Muharram not to coincide... Eliot, more justly, recalls the seventy cantos of the incomplete allegory *The Faërie Queene*, in which the heroine, Gloriana, does not appear once—as a censure by Richard William Church points out (Spencer, 1879). I, in all humility, point to a distant and possible precursor: the Jerusalem kabbalist Isaac Luria, who in the sixteenth century propagated that the spirit of an ancestor or teacher can enter the soul of an unfortunate person to comfort or instruct them. This variety of metempsychosis is called Ibbür.(1)
ResponderExcluir............................................................................
(1) In the course of this article, I referred to Mantiq al-Tayr (Colloquy of the Birds), by the Persian mystic Farid al-Din Abu Talib Muhammad ben Ibrahim Attar, whom the soldiers of Tule, son of Zingis Jan, killed when Nishapur was plundered. Perhaps I cannot summarize the poem. The remote king of birds, the Simurg, drops a splendid feather in the center of China; the birds resolve to seek it, tired of their former anarchy. They know that their king's name means thirty birds; they know that his fortress is in the Kaf, the circular mountain that encircles the Earth. They undertake the almost infinite adventure; they cross seven valleys, or seas; the name of the penultimate is Vertigo; the last is called Annihilation. Many pilgrims desert; others perish. Thirty, purified by their labors, set foot on the mountain of the Simurg. Finally they contemplate it: they realize that they are the Simurg and that the Simurg is each of them and all of them. (Plotinus also - Enneads, V, 8, 4 - describes a paradisiacal extension of the principle of identity: Everything in the sky is intelligible, it is everywhere. Anything is all things. The Sun is all the stars, and each star is all the stars and the Sun.) The Mantiq al-Tayr was translated into French by Garcin de Tassy; into English by Edward Fitzgerald; for this note, I consulted the tenth volume of Burton's Arabian Nights and the monograph The Persian Mystics: Attar (1932), by Margaret Smith.
ResponderExcluirThe points of contact between this poem and Mir Bahadur Ali's novel are not excessive. In the twentieth chapter, some words attributed by a Persian bookseller to Al-Mu'tasim are perhaps a magnification of others spoken by the hero; this and other ambiguous analogies may signify the identity of the sought and the seeker; they may also imply that the latter influences the former. Another chapter insinuates that Al-Mu'tasim is the "Hindu" the student believes he killed.
ResponderExcluirEnd here THE APPROCH TO AL MU' TASIM
ResponderExcluirPost Scriptum
ResponderExcluirHere we find exactly the very little-known intersection point - despite the multiple references in Jamaican reggae music - between Judaism/Zionism and (surprise!) Rastafarianism - from the names of famous bands like Israel Vibration or Lions of Judah to lyrics like Hebron Gate or Zion's Blood
ResponderExcluir
ResponderExcluirAnother of the stories necessary to mention Borges as a hermeneutist of the Kabbalah is "The Library of Babel". Babel, Babylon, has been considered as a complement to every negative expression for millennia. The sacred texts of Jews and Christians recognize several insults for this land where many Jews were taken as prisoners. This metaphor also remains in Rastafiarianism, where Babylon refers to all the negative things while its paradisiacal state is Zion, where all enslaved Africans will return to achieve their freedom on political and metaphysical soil. But it is highly probable that Borges emulated the mythical Tower of Babel in his library of Babel. This story tells the beginning of mutual human incomprehension and asymism, the beginning of all hermeneutic necessity. With this divine punishment for which his brothers did not understand their languages, the translation and interpretation were also inaugurated; of the forms that, from the writing, will unfold as a journey between texts: as a hermeneutics itself. Every time you travel, you don't leave something appropriate for your departure and arrive at your destination with something to hand. This double betrayal that presupposes every translation: betrayal of the reader and betrayal of the author is born with this foundational myth of multilingualism, the tower of Babel.
En su cuento escrito en 1941, a tan sólo tres kilómetros desde donde medito estos fragmentos8, Borges se muestra más conciliador que los creadores del mito de la torre. Su biblioteca conserva, a partir de una imposible arquitectura, quizá escheriana, todos los ejemplares con todas las combinaciones posibles de caracteres y de sentidos. Cada sección está divida en hexágonos y cuando se refiere a la estructura general parafrasea a Alain de Lille nuevamente al decir que "La Biblioteca es una esfera cuyo centro cabal es cualquier hexágono, cuya circunferencia es inaccesible"9.
ResponderExcluirו. Los símbolos de la biblioteca no son veintitrés como aparecen en la cita de Burton sino veintidós como la cábala, pero con tres elementos de puntuación adicionales: el espacio, el punto y la coma. La idea cabalística del texto absoluto deviene "biblioteca" y Borges advierte que
…dedujo que la Biblioteca es total y que sus anaqueles registran todas las posibles combinaciones de los veintitantos símbolos ortográficos (…) o sea todo lo que es dable expresar (…) la historia minuciosa del porvenir, las autobiografías de los arcángeles, el catálogo fiel de la Biblioteca, miles y miles de catálogos falsos…10.
In the Library of Babel the fears and hopes of the cabalist are mixed. The fatality appears as some infinite false combinations and the redemption manifests itself as the perfect example that contains "the perfect compendium of all others", according to Borges, "some librarian has resorted to it and is analogous to a few gods"11. This apotheosis prize is what awaits the cabalist, although there is in this task a desire of impossibility. How to find the appropriate reading among an infinite number of possible readings? Borges's response should not be expected: "That the sky exists, even if my place is hell"12. That's it, the desire that the perfect book exists, that the true interpretation is attainable, even when there is no one who discovers it. Reading, some reading is not true, but it is supported by the existence of a true reading that is less "possible".
ResponderExcluirPost scriptum
ResponderExcluirZion, a central concept in Rastafarianism, represents both a physical place (Ethiopia, seen as the promised land) and a spiritual state of freedom and union with God.
Zion for Jewish people is a multifaceted term. It primarily refers to Mount Zion, a hill in Jerusalem, and is a key symbol in Jewish tradition and faith. Beyond the physical location, "Zion" has come to represent the Land of Israel as a whole and the concept of Jewish self-determination and statehood. Zionism, the movement advocating for this, played a significant role in the establishment of the State of Israel.
ResponderExcluirIn Rastafari, Moses is often viewed as a significant figure, alongside figures like Jesus and Haile Selassie I, who is seen as an embodiment of Jah, or God,. Rastas recognize Moses as a prophet and a model of "livity" (a way of living) who, like them, experienced oppression and struggle. Some Rastafarians interpret Moses's story, along with that of other prophets, as reflecting the Rasta concept of reincarnation, with these figures seen as avatars of Jah.
ResponderExcluirIn Rastafari, Moses is often viewed as a significant figure, alongside figures like Jesus and Haile Selassie I, who is seen as an embodiment of Jah, or God,. Rastas recognize Moses as a prophet and a model of "livity" (a way of living) who, like them, experienced oppression and struggle. Some Rastafarians interpret Moses's story, along with that of other prophets, as reflecting the Rasta concept of reincarnation, with these figures seen as avatars of Jah.
ResponderExcluirRastafarianism
Excluir, a religion and social movement, is deeply intertwined with the ideas of Marcus Garvey and the Bible. Garvey, a Jamaican political activist, is considered a key precursor to Rastafari, with his prophecies and emphasis on Black empowerment and repatriation to Africa heavily influencing the movement. Rastafarians see Garvey as a prophet, second only to Haile Selassie I, the Ethiopian emperor they believe to be the divine embodiment of God
ResponderExcluirPost scriptum
ResponderExcluirIf there is a philosopher for whom Borges expressed his sympathy explicitly, it was Baruch de Spinoza. Due to its Jewish and Portuguese origins, it was born under the name Bento D’Espiñosa, sharing the origins of the elusive "Azevedo" in Borges' genealogical tree. To Bento I dedicated the sonnets: "Spinoza" and "Baruch Spinoza" and his mentions of his ideas in "Borges y yo", "El Alquimista", "Israel", "El indigno", "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "La muralla y los libros", "La creación y P. H. Gosse". "El primer Wells", "De alguien a nadie", "De las allegorías a las soap operas", "Historia de los echoes de un nombre", "La cabal", among others.
Among the main Spinozian ideas, metaphysical monism stands out, the principle of self-preservation or conatus, the equivalence between divinity and naturalness through the formula Deus sive natura (God or sea of nature) and felicidad (beatitude) understood as the knowledge of divinity. These aspects combined with the interesting biography of the Dutch philosopher were a source of inspiration for the Argentine poet. Spinoza was a Dutch, Jewish, Portuguese man who at the same time had his roots in Spain and who therefore spoke all the languages corresponding to those origins together with the Latin that he learned from his teacher Van den Enden.
Políglota brings in his name a tragicomic paradox of his life: if Baruch the Bento, "the blessed one", was maligned by his community, excomulgado and expelled for his heterodox ideas that endangered the fragile status of the community in the tolerant Netherlands. Both Borges and Spinoza were suspected of atheism, both one and the other had solitary and reflective spirits and, in the case of Moshe Idel, both were interested in the Kabbalah.
ResponderExcluirAccording to the idea of the main ideas of the philosopher admired by Borges, he was present at a cabalist of the XIII siglo: Rabbi Abraham Abulafia. Warren Zev Harvey said that on the ground Abulafia also had a maimonid like Rabbi Abraham Shalom in the XV century. According to Harvey, Abulafia anticipated Spinoza four years ago by stating the numerical equivalence between the words "God" (elohim) and "naturaleza" (ha-teba'). Both add up to eight and six and remember the absence of bad luck in the writing, a kabbalistic thesis par excellence, connoting a strong link between both concepts. In addition to it, it also poses an expression similar to the one that defines the beatitude in Spinoza as love Dei intellectualis: ahabah elohit sikhlit (divine intellectual love)25. This is evidence of a reading of Spinoza for at least a series of sources in common with the Kabbalah. With these data, the affection of the Cabalist Borges for the Amsterdam philosopher seems, more than a predilection, a necessity.
ResponderExcluirAnecdote
ExcluirIn his book "Y SEREIS COMO DEUS," Erich Fromm states that "in 1284, Abraham Abulafia of Tudela announced his claim to be the Messiah and that the year 1290 would be the year of his messianic appearance. But a letter written by one of Spain's rabbinical authorities, Rabbi Solomon Ben Adret, almost immediately derailed his plan. Abulafia, however, undauntedly pursued the path of anarchy" (Paidós, 1960, p. 129).
Post Scriptum
We have already emphasized Abulafia as an apocryphal father of Dadaism and Surrealism, and as a complete paradigm for appreciating the operability of remembrance, invocation, and enchantment. ABULAFIA overflows with precisions that can confirm, complete, and deepen our practices and theories, whether they are of some Semitic or Aryan esotericism, aesthetosophy or metastetics...
Postscript
ExcluirFocus all your thoughts on imagining the NAME, blessed be it, and with it, the heavenly angels. And visualize them in your heart as if they were human beings surrounding you, sitting or standing. And you are among them like a messenger... And when you have imagined all this completely, prepare your mind and heart to understand the subliminal thoughts that will be sent to you through the letters of the NAME that has arisen in your heart, and ask that they bring with them the power to face intact a pitched battle against political oppression and the police-like degradation of the State.
To this is added another method that Abulafia calls "dillug" or "kefitsá," which we can translate as the leap from one concept to another. It involves using associations and moving from one to the other according to certain rules established intrapsychically through self-hypnosis: each leap opens a new sphere, within which the spirit can establish new and unsuspected associations. In Abulafia's words, this leap+ frees us from the prison of the sphere of
NATURE and raises us to the limits of the CELESTIAL sphere
(it produces what Marcel Proust called a "minute freed from time" or a fissure, a crack, a point of veiling, a pore of origin, so to speak, Orphic in the walls of superficial reality)
...............................................................................................
G. H. von Schubert:
ResponderExcluir"This language full of images and hieroglyphics, from which the supreme wisdom is used in all its revelations to humanity -which is again found in the language, next, of Poetry- and which in our current condition seems more like the metaphorical expression of death than in the prose of the vigil, you can ask yourself if this is language is not the true language of the upper region. If, while we believe we are awake, we are not immersed in a thousand-year-old story or, at least, in the echo of their dreams, from which we only perceive the language of God in certain isolated and obscure words, as a sleeper perceives their conversations. surroundings.”
Postscriptum
Rabbi Eliezer says:
"If all the seas were full of ink and all the water tanks were empty of water, if the sky and the earth were filled with parchment and all the human beings practiced the art of writing, they would no longer have the Torah that I taught; in their corner the Torah would not be diminished by more than it could be held by the sea at the tip of the brush."[vii]
ResponderExcluirI am truly devoted to the magic of words and I have always considered that CREATIONISM, DADAISM, SURREALISM, together with immemorial HIEROGLYPHICS are an operative possibility of realizing the opening of the verb to the fundamental trait of the DIVINITY of making ciphers with analogies... Adamic and naturally turbulent language that makes me think again of ABULAFIA, the kabbalist who wanted to convert Pope Nicholas III to the Torah that he taught, preceding SURREALISM by centuries in the chaotic and exclusively phonic use of words to seek intensified states of consciousness... in fact ANDRÉ BRETON wanted to put SURREALISM in the hands of RENE GUENÓN, the beacon of the East and the West, the great clarifier of the term TRADITION and creator of other terms such as COUNTERTRADITION, COUNTER-INITIATION, etc. and both ANTONIN ARTAUD AND RENE DAUMAL (who died as a disciple of GURDJIEFF because GUENON did not accept disciples) and IONESCO, creator of THEATRE OF THE ABSURD, considered him the greatest guru of esoteric enlightenment
Another famous case of psychotic divine self-election is that of Mansur.
ResponderExcluirKnowing how to retract in time...
Meister Eckhart and Mansur Al-Hallaj—The Christ, the Jesus of Islam!—both, during a period of their lives, dated very lucid and revolutionary women.
Mansur distanced himself from the external revolution and explained why, and he gave himself so much to the internal one, becoming so dangerous and inflamed that he ended up being dismembered. He had warned and proclaimed that he was God. Muslims say that even after being quartered, his blood continued to bubble on the ground, shouting, "I am God!"
In India, before it was socially democratized or democratically socialized, it was common to be congratulated for publicly advocating and proclaiming your own divinity.
And since Meister Eckart was quite "tampered with" in his heyday, he was on the verge of being burned at the stake more than once, but he always successfully recanted in time...
I am mistaken if what we are saying is in part a waste, a sacrilege to use this medium for ordinary, literal, denotative, moral or merely allegorical communication... In addition to exchanging experiences and speculations, it is necessary to operate with the decoding itself and this must be above the tropological, that is, it must be almost entirely hieroglyphic and so baroquely contorted that it produces or reveals "cracks", indications, signs, ciphers, etc... and, at the same time, exhausting all the anfractuosities of the hieroglyphics, an ANAGOGIC EFFECT is achieved with our style which, in other words, must be PRE-ALPHABETIC and POST-ALPHABETIC (the alphabet must be twisted, lashed, cornered, annotated so that it returns to us intact the SYMBOLISM, the archaic IDEOGRAMMAR), otherwise, what exactly are we doing here? Because no matter how enlightened, freed from time or immersed in a primordial state you are in your life, if you express yourself here in a literal way you will give the impression of being just another insufferable and useless reverend.
ResponderExcluirPost Scriptum
ResponderExcluirI use this case to exemplify the ENTIRE situation of intraprofane, profane, and esoteric oral and written exposition. A modern, materialistic, rationalist mentality that has been imposing itself since Pythagoras and his disciples were burned at the stake; a mentality that has wreaked havoc... Regardless of the fact that it has always been essential to INTERPRET everything: sacred books, myths, parables, legends, any communication process at all levels, from allegorical and symbolic to analogy; and never sink into the logical, literal (which had times of relative health due to the openness to the analogical; something that has long since ceased to occur, with everything else being a rational or logical consideration, a critique of critique strictu sensu.)
With the ALPHABET, the intellectual horizon of man was finally closed; there is nowhere to go.
"There is a goal, but no path; what we call the path is vacillation."
FRANZ KAFKA"
Let the initiate err in everything, except in the direction toward the goal.
IBN ARABI
Now we've reached the point - I'll continue in a minute
ResponderExcluirThe cabal in the ground is not a piece of museum, but rather a sort of thought metaphor."
ResponderExcluirJ. L. Borges, Siete noches.
What do you have in common with the Jewish cabalists, the Arab alchemists, the Franciscan Ramón Llull, the Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the modern Gottfried Leibniz? On the ground, Borges's interest lies in everyone's obsession with an ars combinatoria, that is, an art of combination. The cabalists sought, through hermeneutic combinations, to access the primordial meaning of writing, to approach divinity through the perfection of the knowledge of their work and the instrument of their work: the sacred language. To combine terms, numbers, interpretations; he himself made alchemists mix substances. In siglo XIII, Llull invented in his Ars Magna a machine that, mixing metaphysical terms, had the capacity to provide, through rotation and combination, the supreme knowledge.
For his part, Pico della Mirandola was convinced that the truth was distributed among the different sects, which is why he opened his nineteen thesis in the three great traditions: classical Greco-Roman, Christian and Jewish-Babylonian. Leibniz, however, replanted Llull's problem in his Dissertatio de arte combinatoria, from 1666, and I maintain that all truths are not more than the combination of a few concepts. Now, the question would be: what is Borges's combinatorial art and what connection does it have with the cabal?
ExcluirEmploying a neologism of Hellenic origin, we can decide that we find in Borges plenty of tests with a syndiastic approach, which are combinatorial and perspectivist. It is not content with recognizing the combination that supports the idea of the West "Athens and Jerusalem", it is deciding the Greek philosophy and Jewish-Christian thought, which mixes Nordic, Gnostic and Arab elements. The Borgean universe is an infinite kaleidoscope in which cultural forms mix like the concepts of Leibniz or Llull. Therefore, it is inevitable that between its pages the problem of identity between concept and concept will be filtered because Borges is Argentinean, Jewish, Viking, Portuguese, English, if he becomes the other and the same.
ResponderExcluirThis restless essence and construction, as Pico della Mirandola thought, has a direct connection with the cabal. It seemed that the interpretation and Borgean interests could be understood as a methodology of redemption. In his conferences entitled Siete Noches he explains that the Kabbalah is a noetic metaphor. This metaphor is latent in the ground in Borgeano's thinking in his work. This feeling of Kabbalistic Jewry that attracts him is because he understands Judiciary as a single man who "…is Spinoza and the Baal Shem and the Cabalists, / a man who is the Book"27. A man who is a book, a man who has the properties of the Kabbalistic text, can be read in many ways even to the point of absurdity: the life of Borges can be understood as that of a judgment in search of its origin or even in the sole of a non-judgment as well as a non-Borges. In the same sevenfold conferences our author states: "the cabal enseñó the doctrine that the griegos called apokatástasis, according to which all creatures, including Cain and the Demon, will return, after long transmigrations, to be confused with the divinity of which some time emerged"28. What is the redemption that Borges seeks from the cabalist? The writing of his own identity, in an incessant rewriting of the same-other (like Pierre Menard), waiting for the return to the One. Free yourself, seek yourself.
ResponderExcluirLucas Emmanuel Misseri
ExcluirProfessor and graduate in Philosophy from the National University of Mar del Plata (UNMDP). PhD student in Philosophy at the National University of Lanús thanks to a doctoral scholarship from CONICET. Adjunct professor of History of Modern Philosophy at the University of Business and Social Sciences of Buenos Aires and first assistant in the chair of Medieval Philosophy at UNMDP. Member of the Argentine Asociación de Investigaciones Éticas, editor-in-chief of Prometeica. Revista de Filosofía y Ciencias and co-editor of Agora Philosophica. Marplatense Magazine of Philosophy. He has carried out training sessions in Slovakia and Mexico and has published several articles and books on themes linked to utopianism and the Philosophy of Renaissance
Now my personal contribution for these cabalistic exegese by a little 2023 text about Giordano Bruno and his ars combinatoria inspired in Raymond Lull
ResponderExcluirTHE COSMIC (alien) EGG
ResponderExcluir(Giordano Bruno's Platonic panpsychism works with the idea of a single principle of movement that encompasses the entire universe with its incessant morphogenesis, and which bears many parallels to the Greek Pneuma and the Hindu Prana --- the infinite number of worlds, in Bruno, is conditioned by the Platonic idea of the shadows of things in the "cave," of their archetypes or perfect aspects, in addition to all the Kabbalistic influence of that period of the Italian Renaissance, through Lullio and Abulafia, something very little remembered when it comes to its "combinatoric" (in Eco's book on The Perfect Language there is a perfectly erudite reading of such a process of conception --- and it can indeed be demonstrated that in the Jewish tradition, particularly in mystical and apocalyptic literature, there is an intrinsic relationship between the study of a text and the visionary experience. Far from being mutually exclusive, the visionary experience itself can be of a interpretative, while the exegetical task can originate and culminate in a revealing state of consciousness --- to illustrate the evident parallels between Giordano Bruno's Ars Combinatoria and Semitic Hermeneutics, we now transcribe an excerpt from Elliot R. Wolfson's book, "The Hermeneutics of Visionary Experience":
"The theses of this essay, simply formulated, are that in the Zohar the two modes, revelation and interpretation, identify and merge. And that this convergence occurs is due to the fact that the underlying theosophical structure provides a phenomenological basis common to both. In the hermeneutical relationship that the mystical exegete maintains with the text, he sees God anew as God was seen in the historical event of revelation. In short, from the perspective of the Zohar, visionary experience is a vehicle for hermeneutics, just as hermeneutics is a vehicle for visionary experience. The combination of these modalities constituted an enormous force that exerted a profound influence on subsequent generations of Jewish exegetes." Once the connections between textual study and visionary experience were established, the interpretation of Scripture was no longer considered a simple execution of God's fundamental mandate—in this case, to study the Torah (Talmud Torah). Rather, such interpretation was better understood as an act of participation in the very appropriation of revelation by the interpreter. Interpretation itself became a moment of revalatio, which, in the language of the Zohar, also encompasses the process of devequt, that is, the union of the individual with God"
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ResponderExcluir--- SIGN, REFERENCE, IMAGE, EMBLEM, HIEROGLYPH AND SEAL --- according to Humberto Eco, for Bruno: ‘’the IMAGE of something can also lead us to UNITY through its own opposite, and this is more or less what we read in Bruno’s Eroici Furori, where he writes: ‘’... to contemplate divine things it is necessary to open our eyes through figures, similarities and other reasons that the peripatetics understand under the name of PHANTOM’’ --- the spectral essence of things and their relations with the physical world and the human body --- IMAGES also have a magical-operative capacity, Giordano Bruno’s ‘’magic’’ is an intellectual operation that, through mentally deepened images, drags the meditator to the Open of the world of uncreated, that is, divine, energies: NIRVANA ---
--- in his De Magia, Bruno states: "better defined letters among the Egyptians, who called them hieroglyphics, through which they spoke with their gods to perform incredible acts" --- and the veneration for the Egyptian tradition in the West dates, in fact, at least from Pythagoras and his disciples; the shiver of infinity runs down the spine with its underlying cosmology and its poetic machine of making perceptible, through intellection avant la lettre and extrasensory visions, a kaleidoscope of unthinkable alien scenarios --- Bruno speaks of images "ad omnes formationes possibilis, adaptabiles" in his De Umbris, and of all the aspects involving the Ars Combinatoria of Raymond Lullio and Abulafia, with the (according to Eco) "metaphysical certainty of the infinity of worlds" ---
ResponderExcluir--- for Bruno, there is also a Perfect Language that, magically remade in a tantrically overheated poetic crucible, becomes a key to access and express other worlds, celestial or pandoric --- in this “perilous combinatory”, the decoding of a kabbalistic nature happens through the associative short-circuits of a mnemonic rhetoric, in the course of which, even, Bruno himself dies burned at the stake of the Inquisition, accused of practicing black magic)
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ResponderExcluirPost Scriptum
ResponderExcluirAt that same time, I imagined and wrote a text in which the German philosopher Martin Heidegger discusses intimately the origins of his idea of a turbulent Adamic language conceptualized as the CLEARANCE OF BEING
Look
MARTIN (1963)
ResponderExcluir(At the moment my ontological radicalization broke the silence about the “forgetfulness of being,” I found myself trying to unearth, in the retreat to an unconceptualized origin, the original determination that, distorted and obscured by millennia of philosophical speculation, had been subtly linking my understanding of everyday life to the transcendence of “being-there” suspended in Nothingness.)---for me, the failure to perceive this was the most shameful thing about the secular claim to superiority of modern science and technology as an organizing force of existence, its dominant articulating perspective as a routine of stabilized and institutionalized practices.--and if many here want to see René Guenon’s work as one of the matrices of my own, let us not neglect the fact that he (at the time I wrote Being and Time, Guenon was already the supreme master of esoteric enlightenment, surpassing Blavatsky in learned circles) was as fervent a Catholic as De Maistre (both can be considered the precursors of systematization of fascism as political thought),
whom he certainly read with admiration, and from whom (as a professor of rhetoric) he undoubtedly extracted many elements and rhythms to compose his famous "style" of dissertation (De Maistre, the enemy of his entire era, evokes Guenon's East and West a lot) --- for De Maistre (shortly after the French Revolution) the language of science is ALREADY "something degraded", and the degradation of language is ALREADY a certainty of the degradation of a people --- according to De Maistre, "language is a mystery of divine origin", which already places us in the onto-gnosiological trail of 20th century philosophical thought --- that is, OF MY THOUGHT! --- (: ‘’...modern science speaks tacitly of Nothing and brings out the metaphysical fact of finitude linked to the understanding of Nothing’’ --- that is (: ‘’with the way scientists assure what is most proper to them (the possibility of conduct of Dasein, which is the one that gives meaning to things, the being of beings, the being that understands being, in a public and everyday surrounding world), they speak, in fact, of SOMETHING ELSE’’
ResponderExcluir--- "In a sharp and blunt form, the question of being strikes the empire of Logic in Metaphysics, transforming the superiority of science into ridicule, and Metaphysics into a 'determining event within the scope of Dasein' " --- the determining event of the metaphysical existence of Dasein is the being of the being that Nothingness unveils (the original truth remembered) --- and let us remember here that in De Maistre this obsession already exists in the form of a crypto-historical embryo: for both De Maistre and Guenon, the traditional sacred books are mines from which much hidden gold gushes --- and that through laborious, zealous and patient knowledge (typical of a bibliographical alchemist) are found the hidden meanings and techniques of spiritual power whose access has been purposefully hindered by initiatory vigilance over the millennia --- for both De Maistre and Guenon (as well as for Vico and the German Romantics) "language" is not an invention human, and expresses a knowledge of divine origin that demands an investigation of the hidden meanings of its traces and subtexts (a kind of exploration of the collective unconscious of humanity, or, in the case of De Maistre, just of Christianity) ---
ResponderExcluir--- for example: we do not know exactly in what language God speaks to Adam in the Old Testament, however, judging by his Masonic and occult leanings (Freemasonries derived from authentic historical lineages still existed at that time in France), De Maistre (the ultramontane theocrat) probably thinks of a language born of inner illumination, in which God expresses himself through atmospheric phenomena, thunder and lightning, of which the main descendants would be the mystically perfect original languages (according to Humberto Eco, and on which René Guenon would dwell for a long time): Hebrew, Egyptian, Chinese and Sanskrit --- the Indo-European laboratory model and its totally dead and phantasmatic mother tongues --- and also the mystical-symbolic magical languages of the initiatory mysteries of Helleusis; and the dream languages, the language of the mad, of drugged and schizophrenic poets who express themselves in a state of trance; and the language of shamans, of glossolalia --- the language of Artaud in Tutuguri, the Rite of the Black Sun, and the transmental language of the Russian poet Khlebnikov---
ResponderExcluir--- and also the reptilian and amphibological languages of modern science fiction --- the language of all lunatic semiology that yearns for the unlimited and the indefinable with a furious and suicidal death-lust --- this lunatic effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, so clear in Guenon, already appears roaringly in De Maistre more than a century earlier, with his interest in Swendenborg and the “mystical explanations of natural phenomena” --- a whole impetuosity of means appears here struggling with unattainable goals to activate extrasensory powers of perception, whose spiritual origins are always shrouded in mystery and danger --- in my work, I did not have the courage to publicly expose in this way my “discovered transcendence”, the determining metaphysical event, the difference (between being and entity) that brings time closer to being and that distances being from being --- get it!)
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