BORGES ON IMMORTALITY; WE ARE GREEKS, NOT CHRISTIANS; WHY CHRISTIANITY CHANGED, BUT NOT ISLAM; SUICIDE IS THE NEW MURDER

INSCRIPTION ON ANY TOMB

Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breach of omnipotent oblivion,
in many words recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass beads are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men may not.

The essentials of the dead man’s life —
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain,
the wonder of sensual delight —
will abide forever.

Blindly the willful soul asks for length of days
when its survival is assured by the lives of others.
You yourself are the embodied continuance
of those who did not live into your time
and others who will be (and are) your immortality on earth.

~ Jorge Luis Borges, tr. W.S. Merwin

Borges was such a “singular” man (I mean it in the sense of unusual, exceptional -- but the word insists on its most common meaning) that it’s striking how he doesn’t buy “individualism.” He does not insist on his “exceptionalism.” Simply because we are human, we are not isolated individuals; we are humanity. We pass as the water in the river passes, but the river remains.

This realization may have come to Borges in part from his life among books. He realized that his mind is a tapestry of the endless volumes he’s read, influences he’d absorbed. From there it’s only a step to seeing oneself as part of the larger human community across time, and of the human continuum.

His acceptance of the collective mind set Borges apart from those writers in his generation who insisted on the cult of the artist as completely separate and alienated. But Borges communed with great writers across time, and knew he was part of a continuum.

This is not to deny the uniqueness of each of us, something we bring to the universe only once. “There will never be another you.” In the Western culture in particular, everyone has had at least moments of feeling so different from others that loneliness threatens to overwhelm: no one really knows me, so how can they love the “real me.” Never mind that the “real me” is so elusive, so . . . unreal. Even our memories are not fully ours, but a collage of we absorbed in all kinds of ways, including books and movies.

If we were words, each person would be an oxymoron: a collective individual. A single individual has no meaning apart from his social context. As Christian Wiman said, “Experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed within the lives of others.”

It took me a while to get beyond adolescent “individualism” and see that indeed “no man is an island.” The meaning of our lives is in how we touch the lives of others.

As Borges reminds us: others are and will be our immortality, here on earth.

The tomb of Borges in Geneva. The inscription, in Old Icelandic, says, “Be not afraid.” 

WE ARE NOT CHRISTIANS; WE ARE GREEKS AND ROMANS ~ A.C. Grayling

For most of the time since the seventeenth century, Britain and its growing empire were run by graduates of the ancient universities. The main studies at those universities were the classics. That means that the British governing class was brought up on the literature, philosophy and history of classical civilization — ancient Greece and Rome. This was a fine education — in government, military strategy, ethics, political theory, examples of good and bad rule, management of an empire, social conditions, how to mitigate popular unrest, educational theory, institutions of law, and much besides. Aristotle and Cicero, Homer. Aeschylus and Vergil, the ancient myths and legends, the examples of Horatio and Mucius Scaevola, had as much if not indeed more influence on the minds of the British ruling class than the etiolated beliefs of Christianity, which provide very little in the way of instruction or guidance - beyond a few generalizations about being nice to people — for dealing with the complexities of life.

And it is not surprising that this should be so. Only consider: if you go the New Testament for instruction on how to live, you are told to give away all your possessions, make no plans for the future, reject your family if they disagree with you, and stay celibate if you can (see respectively Matthew 19.21, Matthew 6.25, Matthew 12.48, and 1 Corinthians 7). This is the outlook of people who sincerely believed that the Messiah was going to return next week or next month, anyway very soon. It is an unlivable ethic, and when after several centuries the Second Coming had still not materialized and hope of it had been deferred sine die, more was needed in the way of ethics. Where did it come from? From Greek philosophy – not least from the Stoics – and from the Roman Republican virtues of probity, honor, duty, restraint, respect, friendship and generosity that Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Horace, and countless others wrote about and enjoined ceaselessly. ‘Christian values’ are largely Greek and Roman secular values. So Christianity is not even Christianity.

An associated point reinforces this. The early Christians, like St Paul, were Jews. They believed that when you die, your body sleeps in the grave until the Last Trump, at which points the graves open and all the dead rise to be judged. St Paul said that the faithful will ‘see no corruption’ — that is, their bodies will not rot in the grave. But anyway at the Last Trump when all rise, the faithful will be clothed in ‘new bodies,’ resplendent and fine.

But when Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire (which it very quickly did; it was legalized by Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313, and made the empire’s official religion by Theodosius IX in 381; within the next few decades all other religions were proscribed) and churches were being built apace, all requiring relics of the martyrs and saints, these latter were found to have rotted (‘seen corruption’) in their graves. This embarrassing problem was quickly got over by importing another useful idea from Greek philosophy: Plato’s doctrine of the immortal soul, which entered Christianity via the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus and his followers. That is why, starting from several centuries after the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth, Christians believe in such a thing. Once again, Christianity is not Christianity but borrowed Greek philosophy.

Mr Cameron would in fact have been more right to say that ‘we are Greeks and Romans’ and meant that we are defined by the following words — and therefore concepts — of classical Greek and Latin origin: democracy, liberalism, values, history, morality, comedy, tragedy, literature, music, academy, alphabet, memory, politics, ethics, populace, geography, energy, exploration, hegemony, theory, mathematics, science, theatre, medicine, gymnasium, climate, clone, bureaucracy, dialect, analogy, psychology, method, nostalgia, organ, encyclopedia, education, paradox, empiricism, polemic, rhetoric, dinosaur, telescope, system, school, trophy, type, fantasy, photography…take almost any word denoting political and social institutions, ideas, learning, science and technology, medicine, and culture, and it derives from the language — and therefore the ideas and the history — of ancient Greece and Rome.

Christianity attempted to suppress all this heritage, and for a time succeeded. The Emperor Justinian closed the schools of Athens – the institutions founded by Plato, Aristotle and others – in 529, because they taught ‘pagan’ philosophy (‘philosophy’ then meant everything – science, history and the rest included). There was little learning worth the name in the first seven centuries of Christianity’s dominance, because it had suppressed it, leaving only the thin pickings of scripture; later it persecuted those who advanced scientific ideas in conflict with scripture: Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake, and Galileo nearly so, for not accepting that the sun goes round the earth as Psalm 104 and Joshua 10.12-13 says it does. If the list of words just given provides us with the terminology that we use to describe ourselves today, then the mighty endeavor of Christianity to obliterate all those words and what they mean makes us anything but a Christian nation.

We who had protest against the description of us as a ‘Christian nation’ had in mind the fact that we are a highly pluralistic nation, with many faiths and none, and that the ‘nones’ are net contributors to our society and culture in major ways that does not deserve having the fact of their principled rejection of religious belief overlooked.

But the remarks above should be further evidence that the description of us as a ‘Christian nation’ is deeply misleading if taken to imply that we are a nation of believers in Christian doctrines and legends. I hope and trust that Mr Cameron intended to mean something different and far better: that we are an open-minded, tolerant, generous, kindly nation. And I hope and trust he is right.

http://www.acgrayling.com/a-christian-nation

Oriana:

This essay describes the situation I noticed chiefly in regard to the 19th century: the emphasis in education was the classics, creating a this-worldly counterpoint to the otherworldliness of Christianity. The thorough knowledge of classical mythology that every educated person had, the free banter about “the gods” and similarities such as a divine father and a virgin human mother, may have sparked the suspicion, at least, that all religion is mythology.

Another interesting point is that the idea of the immortal soul came from Plato. Ancient Jews believed that life ended with the last breath — but god could, under extraordinary circumstances, reanimate a dead body with breath again. The early Christians believed that the dead bodies slept in their graves, to rise incorruptible at the sound of the Last Trump. The reality of the post-mortem decay was an inconvenient fact resolved by introducing the idea of the immortal soul. But how many Christians realize that Jesus himself did not believe in any such thing? That’s why RESURRECTION IN FLESH was of such importance. There was no disembodied soul flying around in the clouds (or anywhere else). Plato probably got his idea from Ancient Egypt.

WE ARE GREEKS, NOT CHRISTIANS ~ Aleksander Krawczuk (redux)

“I bring joyful news: the gods are back! Let me summarize it in four major points:

1. the joy of the body, games, sports.

2. the joy of sex between consenting adults. In the eyes of the immortal gods, sex is good; it’s not a sin.

3. the joy of knowledge, meaning freedom of inquiry and the true cult of science. We have finally dropped the idea that the ultimate truth comes from revelation. We use our limited mind, the faint lantern of our reason, to light up the surrounding darkness. For fifteen centuries Christianity managed to prevent the progress of science. Since truth is contained in revelation, what’s the point of seeking it? But slowly, slowly, since the Renaissance we’ve been returning to the idea that all we have is our reason. And we are discovering the magnificence of the Universe.

4. the joy of democracy. It was created in ancient Greece and grafted onto Rome, which remained a republic for several centuries. Now we claim that democracy is the best political system, and it should be adopted everywhere --  including the Catholic church. But it will be most difficult to democratize the church, since the church is anti-democratic; it stands for theocracy and feudalism, left over from the Middle Ages.”

~ Aleksander Krawczuk, interview in Pantheleon, December 29, 2009; translated by Oriana

http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2013/02/aphrodite-and-joy-of-body.html

WHY CHRISTIANITY CHANGED, BUT NOT ISLAM: SECULAR GOVERNMENT

“Why did Christianity change?

The very thing that has forced Christianity to redefine its positions, is the very thing that is not permitted in Islamic states, and it is a secular government. If it was not for a secular government to protect the rights of individuals to speak against religious dogma, free-thought heroes like Frederick Douglass would never have been permitted to say, “I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.” It was only because individuals like Douglass were free to write and speak as they pleased that Christianity was forced to incorporate verses like Galatians 3:26-28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free,” into its theology.

Likewise, it was the restraints of a secular government that allowed women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton the liberty to say, “The church is a terrible engine of oppression, especially as concerns women,” and Susan B. Anthony to state, “The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.” It was the protection of a secular government that required Christian theologians to redefine their stances on women with verses like Acts 2:17 “… your sons and daughters shall prophesy.”

We should expect nothing less in the Islamic world. The religious despots of Islam have never allowed a Reformation, and it is time world leaders begin encouraging one. It certainly does not help when leaders like President Bush compare the battle against terrorism as a “crusade.” Where were the leaders advising Iraq that a democracy only works if it is secular? Perhaps they were too caught up in the false belief that the United States is a Christian nation.”


SUICIDE IS THE NEW MURDER

“Unknown to most Americans is the fact that the rate of suicide is sharply on the rise and has been over the past decade. At the same time, the rising suicide rate is contrasted by a steadily declining homicide rate.

There are now nearly three suicides for every murder committed in the U.S. Suicides also outnumber deaths in motor vehicle accidents. To put it in perspective, there are currently about 15,000 murders, 33,000 auto fatalities and 38,000 suicides in the U.S. annually.

Suicide is no longer concentrated among isolated, elderly Americans and, to a lesser extent, troubled teenagers. It has been dramatically on the rise among middle-aged Americans. There has also been a dramatic increase in suicides among veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Dr. Ileana Arias, Deputy Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told The New York Times that the rising suicide rate among middle-aged Americans might be due to a series of life and financial circumstances that are unique to the baby boomer generation. Men and women in that age group are often coping with the stress of caring for aging parents while still providing financial and emotional support to adult children.

There is a tremendous stigma attached to suicide in the U.S. that I believe is linked to the Protestant religious ethic and its emphasis on individual choice and responsibility. That is, the Protestant ethic would suggest that if you commit suicide then you alone are culpable and society is relieved of any moral responsibility for your actions.

This religious perspective which is at the heart of American culture can help to explain why politicians, religious leaders, and law enforcement authorities are not discussing the current suicide epidemic. As a result, it is invisible to the general public. The pervading American ideology of fierce individualism based on the Protestant ethic precludes an open discussion of suicide as a serious social problem.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wicked-deeds/201502/suicide-is-the-new-murder-in-america

Oriana: 

I'm not sure if Protestantism is a really important factor anymore. As I experienced it, this culture immediately divides people into winners and losers, and losers vastly outnumber winners. Big and unrealistic expectations are planted in the young, who are then not given much help as they flounder in the difficult adult world for which the schools have not prepared them. I do agree that suicide is not seen as a social problem.


ending on beauty

How can you gather together
the thousand fragments
of each person?

~ George Seferis


 
The walls of Troy

BORGES: WE ARE BOTH MORTAL AND IMMORTAL, INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE

Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything. ~ Saul Bellow

ARS POETICA

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river
To know we stray like a river
And our faces vanish like water

To feel that waking is another dream
That dreams of not dreaming and the death
We fear in our bones is the death
That every night we call a dream

To see in every day and year a symbol
Of all the days of man and his years
And convert the outrage of the years
Into a music, a proverb, and a symbol

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
A golden sadness, such is poetry
Humble and immortal, poetry
Returning, like dawn and the sunset

Sometimes at evening there is a face
That sees us from the deep of a mirror
Art must be that kind of mirror
Disclosing to each of us his face

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders
Wept with love on seeing Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
A green eternity, not wonders

Art is endless like a river flowing
It passes, yet remains, a mirror to the same
Inconstant Heraclitus, the same
And another, like the river flowing

~ Jorge Luis Borges

This is an enchanting poem, resplendent with repetitions (yes, I used “resplendent” because of the alliteration; I just had to). The same simple words, repeated just right, create an ecstatic music. My congratulations to the translator, whose name was not given in my online source — an excellent version. It seems to read itself, the words inevitable. 

OH-OH!

~ except for the second stanza. The translation of the second stanza troubled me in that the word “sueño” means both sleep and dream in Spanish. Since Borges uses “el sueño” in a later stanza that starts “Ver en la muerte el sueño” — note the definite article — I lean toward “sleep.”

Harold Morland translates as follows:

To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.

My thanks to Hyacinth for drawing my attention to that stanza.
 

 

 OUR FACES VANISH LIKE WATER

So many wonderful lines here, but I love best the first line of the poem — the idea that a river is made not just of water, but of time and water. The river is always beginning and ending, all at the same time. A river is both its hidden spring and its dissolution upon meeting with the sea. And in between — memory.

And memory, strangely enough, has no past tense. It springs back to our mind, simultaneous with  our present life. The old, remembering their childhood, are at the beginning again. They are skipping rope in their hometown while driving to see an orthopedic surgeon about knee replacement.

“It passes, yet remains” — that’s the paradox of river. “Our faces vanish like the water” — yet the river of humanity continues. (It’s interesting that poetry makes beautiful what would otherwise be extremely painful: “our faces vanish like the water.”)

Let’s consider the sheer beauty of that first stanza again (and oh, what a disappointment the second stanza is — mainly because the first one is so wondrous):

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river
To know we stray like a river
And our faces vanish like water

 A RIVER AS ETERNITY; THE OUTRAGE OF THE YEARS TURNED INTO MUSIC

Though it’s not true of geological time, in human time a river is an example of eternity. And there is nothing static about this eternity: it keeps on flowing, and you “never step twice into the same river.”  But you are never exactly the same person as the one who stepped into that river at an earlier time. We are that “inconstant Heraclitus, the same and another.”

Our faces pass away like water, our names are writ in water with extremely few exceptions — yet the endless river of humanity flows on. Is this a consolation for our mortality — what Borges wonderfully calls “the outrage of years”? Only if we gain a great connection to the river of time and humanity thanks to art, especially poetry, able as it is to transform the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” into music and image:

To see in every day and year a symbol
Of all the days of man and his years
And convert the outrage of the years
Into a music, a proverb, and a symbol

In the next stanza we have sunset as a “golden sadness.” The day is ending, but the sunset is so beautiful. Here I am reminded of Plato’s Symposium, where love is the offspring of wealth and poverty. Borges makes poetry the offspring of immortality and mortality. If mortality is our poverty, our wealth is immortality: the continuing river of humanity and art.

Thus, when we see our face in the mirror of poetry, it should be a universal face in that larger sense of humanity. We recognized ourselves in others. No person is an isolated individual; each is a part of humanity. Each story matters because it’s part of the greater story of humanity. Each suicide saddens us; each story of endurance encourages us. That’s because everyone’s story is also OUR story. 

ART AS A GREEN ETERNITY, NOT WONDERS

The penultimate stanza is my special favorite. At first it seems to veer away from the main theme of how things are mortal and immortal at the same time. But on closer look, it’s precisely an instance of that phenomenon: it’s ordinary and transient events that add up to immortality, an ordinary island that becomes someone’s Holy Land.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders
Wept with love on seeing Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
A green eternity, not wonders

Here we may protest that poetry sometimes speaks of wonders, of the extraordinary as well as the ordinary. But Borges wants the emphasis on continuity, found in the ordinary, “humble and green,” rather than in  the exceptional.

After this magnificent detour into the Odyssey and “green eternity,” we return to the river “that passes and remains.” The poem returns to its beginning, and we can contemplate the rich symbolism of the river, “made of time and water” again and again, in our own flowing. 

“INCONSTANT HERACLITUS”: THE SAME SELF, YET ALWAYS DIFFERENT 

To Heraclitus’s famous saying that you can’t step into the same river twice we need to add another insight: that when you step into the river for the second time, you are not exactly the same person as the one who stepped into it before. Yet if we didn’t maintain some notion of continuity, we’d be unable to carry on, carried off by a tornado of constant change.

Art is endless like a river flowing
It passes, yet remains, a mirror to the same
Inconstant Heraclitus, the same
And another, like the river flowing

Art too evolves, and what is modern today will be old-fashioned fifty years from now, no longer a useful mirror to — and maker of — the new generations.

And perhaps there is something to praising a person for dying just at the right time — though of course we can’t control it. But for me there is some consolation in thinking that as the world I loved ends for me, it just begins for another little girl somewhere, transfixed with wonder as she sees mountains or the ocean for the first time. And there will be pain too, the same eternal discovery that romantic love must end, its spell broken — and we are changed, we go on like a river.

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water” could be the inscription on any tomb.

MORTAL AND IMMORTAL

Speaking of inscriptions on tombs, here is another Borges poem I treasure:

INSCRIPTION ON ANY TOMB

Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breach of omnipotent oblivion,
in many words recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass beads are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men don’t speak about.

The essentials of the dead man’s life —
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain,
the wonder of sensual delight —
will abide forever.

Blindly the willful soul asks for length of days
when its survival is assured by the lives of others.
You yourself are the embodied continuance*
of those who did not live into your time
and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth.

~ Jorge Luis Borges, tr. W.S. Merwin

* Borges: tu mismo eres el espejo y la réplica

= “you yourself are the mirror and the reply”

I don’t know why Merwin chose to “explicate” the poetry of that line in the original. He made it the meaning more clear, but at the cost of abstraction.

Willful soul is in Borges “arbitrary soul” — which carries the connotation of “accidental.” 

This poem presents a profound answer so often missing in poetry,  much of which deals with mortality, but not in a very satisfying way. We'd like to be immortal, but the old religious answers are not credible anymore. In any case, it's high time to be rid of the cruel archaic god whose power rests on the fear of hell, and whose heaven, let's face it, is utterly unattractive (a reminder: no internet there).

Borges provides a secular answer, and it's not the cosmic union. He does not warble that "we become stardust again.” After the richness of being human, that's not terribly attractive either. Even being ecologically buried in a biodegradable shroud so that we can efficiently feed the plants is not terribly satisfying, especially now with the drought and the prospect of becoming part of a prickly pear cactus rather than a rose bush.

Borges disregards the whole idea of “returning to nature” or the vague spirituality of “going home.”  He says that our immortality is the lives of those who come after us, just as our ancestors continue in us. It may not be exactly what we want, but that's what we get. There is a senses of honesty here that's exhilarating in itself. It’s like a former pastor (Ryan Bell) realizing that a “relationship with reality” is more rewarding than a relationship with an imaginary omnipotent being who for some perverse reason won’t answer his prayers or give the slightest sign of his existence.

Or — trust me, this will bring us to Borges again — it’s like Milosz admitting in a late poem that for decades he prayed for a sign of the supernatural: namely, that a statue in church would move its hand. In the end Miloz admits his disappointment: the statue would remain motionless forever. But people outside the church would shake hands with him, talk with him, smile at him. This, he decides, is the sign of the divine. To me, it’s the sign of the human, and that is enough. Borges, too, finds being human sufficiently rich. When we have the affectionate interaction with others, an imaginary “Lord” is neither needed nor missed. 

 

WE ARE BOTH INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE

Borges was such a “singular” man (I mean it in the sense of unusual, exceptional — but the word insists on its most common meaning) that it’s striking how he doesn’t buy “individualism.” He does not insist on his “exceptionalism.” He does not announce that his verse will be immortal, or will make anyone immortal. No, we are all destined for “ominipotent oblivion.” But . . . simply because we are human, we are not isolated individuals; we are humanity. We pass as the water in the river passes, but the river remains.

Forget the particulars of a person’s life; they will be forgotten anyway. They are the worthless “glass beads.” What matters is the treasure of continuity, of being part of humanity. No one is just an isolated person, but a portion of humanity.

This realization may have come to Borges in part from his life among books. He realized that his mind is a tapestry of the endless volumes he’s read, influences he’d absorbed. From there it’s only a step to seeing oneself as part of the larger human community across time, and of the human continuum.

His acceptance of the collective mind set Borges apart from those writers in his generation who insisted on the cult of the artist as “separate, different, and superior” — alienated from the culture at large, and basically from all others. But Borges communed not only with his peers, but also, to a great extent, with great writers of the past, and knew he was part of a continuum.

It reminds me of Rilke’s idea that we love not just a single person, but, within that person, multitudes of others who’ve gone before — mothers and fathers, those crumbled mountains and dry riverbeds who shaped the landscape of the beloved.

This is not to deny the uniqueness of each of us, something we bring to the universe only once: “there will never be another you.” That’s astonishing too; we tend to celebrate the uniqueness of an individual, those aspects that stand out as different. This individualism can make us forget how typical we are in most ways, children of our age and culture. In the West in particular, almost everyone has had at least moments of feeling so different from others that loneliness threatens to overwhelm: no one really knows me, so how can they love the “real me.” Never mind that the “real me” is so elusive, so . . . non-existent. Even our memories are not fully ours, but a collage of we absorbed in all kinds of ways, including books and movies and the stories we heard, eventually conflating them with our own.

If we were words, each person would be an oxymoron. We are both individual and collective. A single individual has no meaning apart from his social context. As Christian Wiman said, “Experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed within the lives of others.”

Pondering how deeply I agree with this reminds me that it wasn’t always that way. At some point in my late teens and early twenties I felt a deep alienation and wanted to be as independent and unconnected as possible, not needing others. That is of course not infrequent in early youth, this wanting to be a lone hero — I’ve definitely seen it in others, especially young men. The culture enshrines the apparently self-sufficient frontiersman who  builds his own house, grows his own food, hunts, and so on. It may seem humbling to realize how dependent on others we are. Even the lone frontiersman has the benefit of tools designed and produced by others.

And experience quickly shows us that a lot more can be done by cooperating with others. As for writers, they may say it’s between them and the language, but that’s true only during the creative process. Writers needs readers, and they need their peers. And even the most reclusive of them (think of Emily Dickinson) rely on the collective psyche, that “greater mind” that resides in the language and culture. And that greater mind is so rich that even a recluse has enough to write about — especially an educated recluse surrounded by books.

So, in the most radical sense, there should be no inscription upon any tomb. This was once a human being; that is enough. And yet, and yet . . . I confess I love to read inscriptions on old tombs, the little that remains of that “individual” part. Now, however, cremation followed by the scattering of ashes is becoming standard, so the dead live only in our memory, as well as in the anonymous ways in which the words they said, the pain and delight they felt, are now said and felt by others. We are both mortal and immortal, individual and collective, Borges says. In this poem, his emphasis is on the collective. This is quite striking coming from Borges, who seems deeply “individuated,” as Jungians would say. Perhaps that’s why he feels completely at ease insisting on the collective dimension as the one that’s more essential. 

And indeed, treasured reader (I say this without a grain of irony or condescension; I am touched that people want to read my posts), the very fact that you are reading these words on an electronic screen is testimony of the collective human genius that creative the great collective mind known as the Internet. And before the Internet could come into being, countless developments in science, mathematics, and civilization as a whole had to happen. 

TWO SIDES OF THE COIN AND THE GOD WHO FORGETS

I won’t go through yet another poem by Borges, but the post would be incomplete without mentioning it. It’s “The Iron Coin.” It describes two sides of a metaphoric coin. Here is an excerpt:

On the upper sphere are interwoven

The fourfold firmament borne up by the flood

And the unalterable planets.

Adam, the young father, and the young Paradise.

The evening and the morning.
God in every creature.
In this pure labyrinth is your reflection.


Let us toss again the iron coin

Which is also a magic mirror. 
Its reverse side
Is no one and nothing and darkness and blindness.

That is you.
The two faces forge a single iron echo.

Your hands and your tongue are unfaithful witnesses.

God is the ungraspable center of the ring.
He neither praises nor condemns.
He behaves better: he forgets.

The “god in every creature” on the paradise side of the coin could be interpreted as “immanent divinity” of the sort that Spinoza proposed. Or he could be seen as the young, active, interested god of Genesis — not the silent, sullen, hidden god of the later books of the Hebrew Bible, eventually transformed by the Enlightenment thinkers into a creator who made the world, then abandoned it to its own workings. The god who neither praises nor condemns is the indifferent god of the Deists. It is the universe. It is nature.

Every coin is just one coin — but it has two sides. One side of the coin shows the young Adam in the “young Paradise.” The other side, “no one and nothing and darkness and blindness.” (Su reverso / es nadie y nada y sombra y ceguera. Eso eres.)

Eso eres: You are that — no one and nothing and darkness and blindness. Borges does not write “inspirational” verse. He doesn’t spare us the news: you have already lived in paradise. No other paradise awaits.

Great writers don't shrink from staring at the abyss (which, as Nietzsche observes, stares back at you).

(A shameless digression: did Dostoyevski shrink from the abyss after all? Through Ivan Karamazov, Dostoyevski condemned god as evil. But even Dostoyevski did not deal with “no one and nothing and darkness and blindness.” Perhaps it can be done only in poetry because the beauty of the language is a redeeming affirmation.)

(Another shameless digression: Borges did not really have a relationship with nature. Hence also his limitation as a poet and thinker. It’s extremely important to have a connection with humanity, but it’s also important to have a connection with trees and flowers and stars and birds. Borges gives us a start in one area; we must venture into more connectedness on our own; we must dance with the wolves.)

A BIT OF TALMUDIC WISDOM

This reminds me of [Talmudic?] wisdom says that in one pocket we should carry a note that says something like, "You are a magnificent being for whom the world was created," and in the other pocket a note that says, "You are nothing." And we should reach for whichever note/reminder is right for the occasion.

Two sides of the coins, or two pockets, each with a different note in it. Sometimes it’s very important to remember that we are mortal — there is only so much time in which to be happy and productive. “If not now, when?”

And at other times it’s important to glory in the continuity of the human culture and progress. Since Jesus is never coming back, it’s entirely up to us to keep on building a more compassionate, humanitarian society.

It’s up to us the living to help shape the kind of immortality we will have.

Photo: Maja Trochimczyk; the opening image is also by Maja Trochimczyk

FREUD AND BORGES: BEYOND THEISM?

Noah’s Ark, Edward Hicks, 1846

DARWIN, ONCE MEANT FOR THE CLERGY,
IMAGINES HIS SERMON ON NOAH

Too late, dear brethren, too late to believe
there never was a rainbow before the Flood –
or that the ark, three hundred cubits long,
could contain millions of species.
I won’t belabor the ark’s humble door
vis-à-vis a giraffe,
the whine of the two thousand
species of mosquito.

And the animals of the then-unknown
Australia and the New World?
Did they plunge into distant oceans,
two and two of all flesh,
and every thing that creepeth on the earth –
snails and slugs slithering for centuries.
As iron-dark clouds barred heaven,
did gorillas and polar bears parade
through a mud-brick Mesopotamian village?

And our fabled forefather, when the Lord
shut the door of the ark,
was six hundred years old.
The less believable it is,
the more enchanting it is.

Listen how tenderly it is said, But the dove
found no rest for the sole of her foot . . .
then he put forth his hand, and took her,
and pulled her in unto him into the ark –

The new theologians tell us the myth
is not even Hebrew, but primeval:
purification of the world by water.
Purification by science
is another Deluge.
Evolution is not crowned with a rainbow.

Brethren, I do not speak of Truth –
I offer evidence. I too carry
a heavy church in my heart.
The ship I sailed on for five years
was a kind of ark – I and Noah
on a long, crowded journey,
he with his salvaged animals,
I with my specimens in jars.

Brethren, behold the rainbow and rejoice
in the frail moment when the dove
alighted with a glistening olive leaf –
but how can we forget
the faces of the drowned –

Now the windows of heaven are shut;
all we have is stories.
Perhaps a future humanity will evolve
a kinder God, without wrath.
Today let us honor our father Noah,
drifting with the saved
seed of life toward Ararat.

~ Oriana © 2014

**

The problems with the traditional Judeo-Christian worldview did not begin with Darwin. As the Episcopalian Bishop Shelby Spong points out in his Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and as most educated people realize, the Copernican idea that the earth orbited the sun, combined with Galileo’s astronomical observations using the telescope (which showed, among many other wonders, that the moon had a crater-scarred landscape rather than being a perfectly smooth sphere -- oh no, an imperfection in a celestial body!), displaced the earth from the center of the universe. 

If the whole universe was created with us in mind, as the bible implied, so that we could worship the creator, then obviously the earth should not be just another planet orbiting the sun. Later astronomers created even more trouble, discovering that the sun was a rather average star in a provincial corner of our galaxy. And the cosmic distances were quite troubling. In modern times someone calculated that if Jesus moved with the speed of light (which is not possible, but let’s imagine), given the 2000 years since the Ascension, he still hasn’t left the galaxy.

(Sophisticated Reader, I realize that an answer to this is: let’s not be literal, only metaphorical. But the argument that in the past people used to read the bible in a metaphorical way and only in modern times we slid into weak-minded literalism doesn’t convince me. I just don’t see a medieval peasant grasping the Ascension as a metaphor for spiritual development, while we moderns devolved to the mentality of kindergarten.)

Galileo’s drawing of the moon

Darwin created a worse problem by far, and not only by making man a highly evolved animal with a more developed brain. Far more damaging was the very concept of evolution, soon adopted by other fields of knowledge. Thus, the earth evolved; the whole universe evolved and was still evolving. At the human level, cultures evolved and continues to evolve at an amazingly accelerated pace. Technology and knowledge have evolved. Art has evolved (some would say that starting with Impressionism, it devolved).

CHRIST TZAR

Religions too evolved and may now be dying -- or, if not, it will eventually be greatly transformed (into something more benign, we hope). The very concept of god evolved -- from a tribal warrior deity, the “Lord of Hosts” who fought against the enemies of his tiny chosen nation, to the sole and absolute ruler of the whole universe, the “king of kings” (absolute monarchy being dominant at the time; the sacred scriptures of humanity were written in the era of kings and emperors and warlords).

As Nietzsche observed, it’s not necessary to argue about the existence of god; it’s enough just to trace the evolution of the concept. 

Christ Tzar, a Russian icon, 1690

THE UNEMPLOYED GOD

Bishop Spong notes that the Christian churches resisted Darwin with vigor, but the pre-Reformation ecclesiastical power had already been broken, and the Church’s ability to threaten Darwin with execution as a heretic no longer existed. Besides, truth can never be deterred for long just because it is inconvenient. Spong observes that if man was an animal, then the concept of the soul and the afterlife, traditionally denied to animals, became questionable. Some have tried to cope with this by bestowing soul and afterlife on animals, especially dogs and cats, and maybe horses. Given their intelligence, maybe also elephants and dolphins. But where do we stop? Are frogs and fishes to be denied? (Milosz wanted even the insects to enjoy resurrection.)

Spong quotes Michael Goulder, an Episcopalian priest who renounced priesthood when he decided that the god of the past “no longer had any real work to do”:

The tasks assigned to this God by traditional wisdom, he suggested, have been slowly but surely stripped from the divine side. This God no longer fights wars and defeats enemies. This God no longer chooses a special people and works through them. This God no longer sends the storms, heals the sick, spares the dying, or even judges the sinner. This God no longer rewards goodness and punishes evil. Yet this virtually unemployed deity is still the primary object and substance of the Christian Church’s faith.

The theistic God has no work to do. The power once assigned to this God is now explained in countless other ways. The theistic God is all but unemployed.  . . . If there is no other possible understanding of God, then surely God has died.

Religion and personal and autobiographical. The theist deity always reflected the particular theologian, Spong maintains: “The fact is that the God of Thomas Aquinas looked and acted very much like Thomas Aquinas.” 

Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, 1467

**

But what about the emotional need for a protective deity, a parent in the sky? Even if science shows that god is not necessary for the function of the universe, it can’t do away with people’s longing for “invisible support.” This is where Spong is at his most interesting. He quotes an ancient Hebrew prophet:

With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will be Lord be pleased with thousands of rams; with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? Mica 6:6-7

From the historical point of view, this is an interesting window on what used to constitute worship. But from where we stand, isn’t this simply disgusting?

Could it be that some people still don’t realize how archaic the bible is -- like all “holy scriptures,” a product of its times? Maybe they realize, but still cling to religion in the hope of emotional security.

Dead ideas continue to slow down our development. Many are afraid that the light of reason would force them to drop their security blanket. In Act 2 of Ghosts, Ibsen wrote:

I almost think we’re all of us Ghosts. ... It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.

FREUD’S “THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION”

In Judaism, god is “the Lord.” In Christianity he becomes “our father.” This  family analogy attracted the attention of Sigmund Freud, who duly noted the infantile character of much of the language of Christianity.

In his 1927 volume, The Future of an Illusion, Freud argued that humans were traumatized by the knowledge of their mortality. A psychological coping mechanism was needed. Spong writes:

Religion, Freud contended, was the coping mechanism, the human response to the trauma of self-consciousness, and it was designed above all to keep hysteria under control and to manage for these self-conscious creatures the shock of existence.

For Freud, the essence of an illusion is that it springs from a wish. We wish to be immortal the way a poor girl wishes to marry a prince. Man feels helpless, and thus wishes for an all-powerful protector(s). In Freud’s words: “The gods retain the threefold task: they must exorcise  the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”

Nietzsche said that religion is “not wanting to know the truth.” And because religion is not a search for truth, but rather a part of a complex emotional defense system, it does not tolerate open debate and dissent. Its truths are “revealed” and thus can’t be questioned. And the hysteria that religion was meant to contain reveals itself in irrational hostility when dissent is encountered. I remember, a few months after I stopped going to church the priest who was shouting at me, sweating and red in the face, his black robe billowing in the spring wind; right in the middle of the sidewalk of one of the busiest streets in Warsaw, he was shouting at a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl. I now feel sorry for the man,  so threatened by a young girl’s disbelief.

Nevertheless, there are those who see the irrationality of religion as its greatest strength. Otherwise, the collective power of the human intellect would have disposed of it long ago. At his most optimistic, Freud maintained that the voice of the intellect is soft, but it will not rest until it’s been heard. 




RILKE: WE ARE BUILDING GOD

In 1900, when Rilke was twenty-five, he wrote in his diary:

There were times, earlier, when I believed: he [god] is in the wind, but for the most part I didn’t experience him as a unified personality at all. I knew only aspects of god. And many of those aspects were horrifying. For even death was only a component of his being. And he seemed to me unjust in the extreme. He tolerated unspeakable things, permitted cruelty and grief, and was massively indifferent . . .

I argued on his behalf. That his shortcomings, his injustice, and the deficiencies of his power were all matters of development. That he is not finished yet. When was there time for him to have become?

GOD IS NOT FINISHED YET. I can almost go along with it. 

God in the wind? It’s possible that Rilke refers to the Hebrew ruach, which literally means wind, but came to be interpreted as the breath (or spirit) of god. Originally, the same word meant wind and spirit, hinting at archaic animism: wind as a supernatural element, the breath of god. In Slavic languages the word for spirit is related to the word for breath, and inspire used to mean both “inhale” and “blow into” or “breathe into.”

The more interesting part is the positing of god’s incomplete consciousness, also pointed out by Jung in Answer to Job. By developing our consciousness, we are helping god become more conscious, more ethical. God is a projection of human ideals, but in some mysterious way a real being as well. Thanks to human progress, god is in a constant process of becoming. We are building god.

This is called Process Theology. (Are there any Process Theologians in the trenches?) 
An abandoned locomotive in a former Siberian gulag

WE ARE NOT BUILDING GOD; WE ARE BUILDING HUMANITY

It’s not god’s consciousness that needs fuller development; it’s the collective human psyche. We are coming closer and closer to realizing how amazing it is to be human. And we are beginning to acknowledge that we are interconnected with other humans, and with all of life.

In The Sirens of Titan, one of my favorite science-fiction novels, Kurt Vonnegut described the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. But obviously we don’t want an indifferent god, even though logically that seems to be the only possible deity. Fortunately concern for us exists: we receive it from other human beings. It makes sense to be kind and cultivate friendships.

(Disappointed Reader: I hear you saying: “other human beings” -- is that all? Isn’t it time we came to hold human beings in higher esteem? Because, aside from dogs, that’s our only source of love and help.)

CAN WE REALLY IMAGINE A NON-THEIST GOD?

Spong and many others who want to salvage the divine have suggested that god is not a being; it (this seems the appropriate pronoun) is some transcendent force field, intelligent cosmic energy, or even the “Ground of Being.” Spong prefers the “Ground of Being.” We exist in god as fish live in water, but in a more mysterious way than can be expressed.

Alas, this is so abstract that it makes no sense to me. It seems like desperate  clinging to the concept of god when we don’t need this hypothesis. The universe simply IS. We ARE. We are a part of the universe, or, to make it sound more affectionate, we are the children of the universe. The universe itself is our “ground of being.” Isn’t that enough?

But what about the non-theistic religions of Buddhism and Taoism? They have become tremendously popular -- finally an alternative to a personal god, obviously created by man. Yet those who’ve traveled to East Asia claim that in practice Buddhism and Taoism are theistic and based in ritual and magic; only in pure doctrine can they be said not to be “pure” non-theism.

(I won’t get here into allegation of sex abuse in the Buddhist monasteries. But we do know that as soon as religion becomes institutionalized, it becomes corrupt.)

I am selectively attracted to the Eastern wisdom. I see “being posthumous” as a state of bliss. To me, being posthumous means that my life has already happened -- or at least the essence of that life: writing and teaching -- poems, publications, jobs, anything else that typically goes on a resumé -- as well as great love, dancing with the Prince etc. Now I can enjoy simply being. I don't need to prove anything, achieve anything. Nor am I waiting for the Prince. All that anguish is over.

It’s pretty much the Eastern wisdom,  but with my own personal angle. Now I finally write for pleasure. Imagine! Writing for pleasure, without the torture of trying to publish. Until this stage, writing was a joy only when I was a beginner -- how amazing to have come full circle, though of course at a different level and even different kind of writing.

Actually someone upbraided me once: “You have a duty to publish! You have so much to say. The world needs to hear this. You can’t just write for your own pleasure!” -- not realizing that at the time I wasn’t writing for pleasure; I was writing to prove that I was not a failure, or at least not a TOTAL failure, even if I had little luck publishing.

Such ironies often happen in life: I gained an international audience (India! Saudi Arabia!) only  when I started writing for pleasure (here I remember another person chiming in, when I emailed her I was starting my blog e-dress, “As long as you enjoy doing it; pleasure is the only thing you’ll ever get out of it.”) And it has indeed been an avalanche of pleasure! Not just the pleasure of writing, but also the pleasure of having an audience and getting feedback, and the pleasure of publishing on my own terms.

Arabian sand cat

CLIMBING A VERTICAL MOUNTAIN

Once -- many years before my “posthumous” insight -- I had a dream in which I was climbing an almost vertical mountain. I had the right technique: I knew that if I never rested and if I kept climbing quickly enough, I would not fall off the sheer wall with practically no foothold. To my left was my grandmother Veronika. I didn’t see her face, but I recognized her leather slippers. She was climbing the impossible steepness in parallel with me.

At the same time I could see a beautiful wide road with a pine forest on one side and the sea on the other (my memories of the Baltic). People were walking down that road. I strongly suspected -- in fact I knew! -- that the road led to the same place as the virtually impossible climb up the mountain, but I did not dare stop my struggle. When I was at the top, on the large plateau, I saw that the easy and beautiful road did indeed lead to the same place, and that’s how other people arrived there. Some in fact drove in in large cars! I assumed they had to be Americans.

When I told the dream to a friend, she asked what my grandmother and I had in common. I answered, “A lot of hardship in life.” The dream was transparent in its message. Still, it took me more than a decade to accept the idea that taking the beautiful and easy road was the right choice, rather than persisting in an agonizing effort, akin perhaps to “dying with honor.”

Compounding the problem was having grown up with the Catholic cult of suffering. Suffering was good for you. It was the way to heaven. I am not sure if anyone stated this to me in so many words, or if it was just a conclusion I drew based on reading the lives of the saints. Fortunately I never tried self-flagellating (one of my cousins did). But enough digression!

The point seems to have been by Eastern sages many centuries ago: stop striving and just be. Let happiness happen. The root of “happiness” is “hap” -- luck, or chance, or whatever happens.

In The Idiot, Dostoyevski asks, through the mouth of Prince Myshkin, “Can anyone be unhappy, really?” To the Prince, as to Dostoyevski, just to be alive was miraculous. 

Cezanne Mt. Victoire

BORGES AND IMMORTALITY

Still, I’m quick to concede that Dostoyevski regarded the belief in immortality as a vital part of human culture. True, he was torn with doubt; on Tuesday morning he believed in god and the afterlife; by Wednesday he didn’t. But probably all would agree that the chief attraction of theistic religion is the promise of life everlasting.

Borges has an answer to this in what is perhaps his most extraordinary poem:

INSCRIPTION ON ANY TOMB

Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breach of omnipotent oblivion,
in many words recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass beads are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men may not.

The essentials of the dead man’s life --
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain,
the wonder of sensual delight --
will abide forever.

Blindly the willful soul asks for length of days
when its survival is assured by the lives of others.
You yourself are the embodied continuance
of those who did not live into your time
and others who will be (and are) your immortality on earth.

~ Jorge Luis Borges, tr. W.S. Merwin

 

Borges was such a “singular” man (I mean it in the sense of unusual, exceptional -- but the word insists on its most common meaning) that it’s striking how he doesn’t buy “individualism.” He does not insist on his “exceptionalism.” Simply because we are human, we are not isolated individuals; we are humanity. We pass as the water in the river passes, but the river remains.

This realization may have come to Borges in part from his life among books. He realized that his mind is a tapestry of the endless volumes he’s read, influences he’d absorbed. From there it’s only a step to seeing oneself as part of the larger human community across time, and of the human continuum.

His acceptance of the collective mind set Borges apart from those writers in his generation who insisted on the cult of the artist as completely separate and alienated. But Borges communed with great writers across time, and knew he was part of a continuum.

This is not to deny the uniqueness of each of us, something we bring to the universe only once. “There will never be another you.” In the Western culture in particular, everyone has had at least moments of feeling so different from others that loneliness threatens to overwhelm: no one really knows me, so how can they love the “real me.” Never mind that the “real me” is so elusive, so . . . unreal. Even our memories are not fully ours, but a collage of we absorbed in all kinds of ways, including books and movies.

If we were words, each person would be an oxymoron: a collective individual. A single individual has no meaning apart from his social context. As Christian Wiman said, “Experience means nothing if it does not mean beyond itself: we mean nothing unless and until our hard-won meanings are internalized and catalyzed within the lives of others.”

As Borges reminds us: others are and will be our immortality, here on earth.