A Hindu Borges

 It is likely that before there was the lyre, there was the lyric and before there was the lyric, there was whatever is so much umbrally sadder or unbearably sweeter that, as Lorca perhaps realised, it can be spoken of but metaphorically as lullaby. 

I suppose, the Europe I was born in 62 years ago had itself been a cradle rocked by trench and tank wars and wanted done with both. The hope was that Nationalism had sung its swan song   and, to quote the young Borges's first aesthetic credo, 'Lyric should be condensed to its original element- metaphor' because all melody ends as threnody whereas metaphors are a mathematics which outlasts its own music as, in the silence of the nightingale, the rose rends its skirt.

 Previously, even if all art, as Pater said, aspired to the condition of Music, that Music would have its Wagnerian  Götterdämmerung leading to a Splengerian decline of the West. The Capital Cities of Empires over which the Sun never set would themselves suffer either eclipse or stasis or both stasis and eclipse. Meanwhile, modern Literature entering the Academy, had itself been entered by those academically trained in it. James Joyce, who had a degree in modern languages, had turned the novel, first into a Tuirgen knight's tour of consciousnesses and then ventured into the perhaps collective unconscious of the dream which, it may be, is the former's true hypokeimenon. T.S Eliot, who had studied Sanskrit and who had a PhD in Philosophy, had used the method of medley he found in the Sama Veda, to make not, as with Browning, God adjectival to Man, but both, accidental to Jazz or the Tango or some gay refrain wafted from the waterfront by whatever fogged the windows of the bourgeoisie. 

Borges, a poet whose Criollismo was founded in Krausismo rather than some exemplary Gaucho Guru, responded to the political disappointments of the Twenties- culminating in the overthrow and arrest of Hipólito Yrigoyen- in the same way that the Cowles Commission responded to the Wall Street crash.  Mathematics- with its ideas of duality, computability & hierarchies of infinity- might be that deeper dream which prevails over History's nightmares or hysteresis- and a suave economia of ergodicity establish itself on the basis of the law of increasing functional information. Towards this end, Borges's essays attain canonicity by maximizing 'surprisal'. 

In this he is the reverse of the first poet to have gained truly universal currency in his own life-time. I refer of course to Rabindranath Tagore who was as famous, or even influential, in China and Japan and Latin America and Germany as he was in India or that America where TS Eliot first heard him lecture in 1913. True, in translation, Tagore is not lyrical. He deals in metaphors of a vague, if numinous, type. Rothenstein, who had painted Enoch Soames, had discovered Tagore. Did he also invent him? No. Okakura got to him first. Gitanjali is the cucumber sandwich which accompanies his 'Book of Tea'. 

L.E.J Brouwer, after the outbreak of the Great War, proposed the creation of an Academy to take forward the 'Significs' program of Victoria Lady Welby. He hoped Tagore, whose slim volumes of poetry were a great solace for soldiers in the trenches, would help create new words with “spiritual meaning” for Western languages such that there would be- perhaps by virtue of a fixed-point theorem proving existence- uniqueness or categoricity. In other words, the German God would not be at war with the English God. This might involve 'identifying and highlighting words in major languages that misleadingly suggest spiritual meanings for ideas actually rooted in the desire for material comfort, and by doing so, to purify and correct the goals of democracy towards a universal common good' . It is interesting that Borges writes what is to my mind the best Indian novel since Kipling's Kim at just around the time Turing, on Bernays' suggestion, uses Brouwer's overlapping choice sequences to arrive at what Husserl could not- viz. a canonical, if not an eidetic, result.

 Borges's 'Search for Al-Mutasim' is, of course, a fixed point for Indglish literature- which concerns itself almost exclusively with the doings of Mama and Puppu and Tootoo and Soosoo- in that it is incompossible with its authentic existence. If Borges builds on and innovates on the basis of what went before in the literary tradition of his own country, the Indian, writing in English, does the opposite. There may be imitation but it is swiftly followed by emigration.

 Borges attributes his imaginary Indian novel to a lawyer whose name echoes that of one of the first Urdu writers to work for the British at Fort William College. One may say that 'Mutasim' updates Mir Bahadur Ali Hussaini's 'Akhlaq-e-Hindi' ('Indian Ethics'- it contains moral fables taken from a Persian translation of the Hitapodesha) which had been published 130 years earlier. Sadly, even at that time, English poets were better able to use such 'oriental' material. In Calcutta, T.S Eliot supplanted Tagore because Eliot could make better use of Upanishadic material. Indeed, Paul Brunton's 'Search in secret India' had come out a year or two before Borges's imaginary 'Search'. The odd thing is that Brunton probably helped Ramana Maharishi more than the other way around. Meanwhile, Yeats had been recruited by Shri Purohit Swami to translate the Ten Principal Upanishads. Isherwood, a disciple of Swami Prabhavananda, would translate the Bhagvad Gita & the Viveka Chudamani. But this was nothing new. Gandhi himself first read the Gita in Sir Edwin Arnold's translation, while Nehru, who was home-schooled by an English theosophist before going on to Harrow, didn't even know the Gayatri mantra. I suppose the truth is, as Victor Hugo said, during the Nineteenth Century, India ended up turning into Germany. No one raised an eyebrow when a German high-school teacher- now recognized as one of the greatest mathematicians- produced an excellent translation and dictionary of the Rg Veda in the 1870s. 

Borges, who had been a student at the school founded by John Calvin in Geneva, is, for the purpose of this volume of Socioproctological Investigation, that lapidary horologist whose exquisite escapements synchronise such oxymoronic monadologies as I impute to my natal 'Benares-on-the-Rhine' or, if  Ashok Alexander fucking Sridharan, or some other such half-Mallu or Maratha has rendered the task otiose, Borges is my blind watch-maker whose self-inquisitorial complications track the tides of incompossible moons.