Borges's 'new refutation of time' begins with the following quotation from a follower of Jacob Bohme- the great German mystic who believed in the vital importance of spiritual re-birth- the regeneration of being born again in God, which manifests as consciousness of "inner light."
Vor mir war keine Zeit, nach mir wird keine seyn,Mit mir gebiert sie sich, mit mir geht sie auch ein
(Sexcenta Monodisticha Sapientum, III, II, Daniel von Czepko (1655))
Before me there was no time, after me there will be none
Had this refutation (or its title) been published in the middle of the eighteenth century, it would
have been of its Time. Published in the mid Twentieth Century it was either 'out of its Time' or else was refuting a particular dynamic that the Time posited by the Theologica Germanica was currently displaying.
be included in a bibliography by Hume, or at least mentioned by Huxley or Kemp Smith.
Kemp Smith would certainly have done so if Kant had responded to it. Perhaps he was doing some such thing in the Opus Postumum.
But published in 1947 (after Bergson)
Bergson had shat the bed 25 years previously in his debate with Einstein. It may be that a 'spatialized' time (i.e. one with three dimensions) could give Bergsonian duration a coherent description in concurrency theory. As an artist, Borges could give a coherent description of even the most complicated configuration spaces of the heart's deep cave.
it is the anachronistic reductio ad absurdum of an obsolete system, or even worse, the feeble artifice of an Argentine adrift on a sea of metaphysics.
Anachronisms, however absurd, are preferable to Argentinians- presumably because they dance the tango even on improvised rafts crossing turbulent oceans of ontology.
A word on the title: I am not unaware that it is an example of that monster called a contradictio in adjecto by logicians, for to say that a refutation of time is new (or old, for that matter) is to recognize a temporal predicate that restores the very notion the subject intends to destroy.
Only if Liebniz's law of identity applies to the qualifying term. If the 'extension' changes or is impredicative in a particular way, then Liebniz's law does not apply and logic has no purchase.
But I shall let this fleeting joke stand to prove, at least, that I do not exaggerate the importance of wordplay.
All words are related to each other. There is radical impredicativity. Wordplay, we may say, is not wholly independent of some sort of intersubjective arrow of time. But there is 'wriggle room' such that 'locally' there is time-reversal or non-locality. It may be that this temporally heteroclite monadology only applies to consciousness or the tuirgen knight's tour which may appear to occur under that rubric. In dreams, it may be, Grothendieck's God or Joyce's Wake re-establishes univocity.
In any case, language is so saturated and animated by time that, quite possibly, not a single line in all these pages fails to require or invoke it. I dedicate these exercises to my ancestor Juan Cristomo Lafinur (1797-1824), who left a memorable poem or two to Argentine letters and who strove to reform the teaching of philosophy by refining out traces of theology and by explaining the theories of Locke and Condillac in his courses.
It appears he was influenced by Dauxion Lavaysse who forcefully rejected the notion that Africans or indigenous Americans belonged to a different race or were inferior in any way. Borges, of course, had lived to see the Jews- Christ's people- condemned as 'sub-human'.
He died in exile: as with all men, it was his lot to live in bad times.
but, it was his moral luck, that such times were their own refutation.
Borges says he relies on Berkeley's idealism and Leibniz's identity of indiscernibles. The problem here is that either everybody shares in Berkeley's idealism- i.e. everybody is Berkeley- or there are individuating properties which may be indiscernible but nevertheless must exist. But, is Borges really concerned with ontology, or rather with the imaginal?
If we deny matter and spirit, which are continuities, and if we also deny space, I do not know what right we have to the continuity that is time.
Without that continuity we may be marooned beyond the reach of anything material or spiritual or capable of intersubjectivity.
Let us imagine a present moment, any one at all.
We would get stuck in it if Time ceases to be a continuity and thus can't flow.
A night on the Mississippi. Huckleberry Finn wakes up. The raft, lost in the shadows of twilight, continues downstream.
He and Nigger Jim have missed the turn off to the free state of Illinois.
It may be a bit cold. Huckleberry Finn recognizes the soft, ceaseless sound of the water. Negligently he opens his eyes: he sees an indefinite number of stars, a nebulous line of trees. Then he sinks into a sleep without memories, as into dark waters.
What would happen to Huck Finn, or Kipling's Kim, if their manumitting Mississippi or river of the arrow is lost to Time's ever rolling stream? Will they turn into Peter fucking Pan?
Metaphysical idealism declares that to add to these perceptions a material substance (the object) and a spiritual substance (the subject) is precarious and vain. I maintain that it is no less illogical to think that they are terms in a series whose beginning is as inconceivable as its end.
Like the real numbers. It is a set without a well-ordering. Kripke posits an "end of mathematical time" where all truths about Brouwer's free choice sequences would be definitively known. But to the 'creating subject' of that sequence there would be no such end. This is like Borges's story 'the secret miracle'. The poet completes his 'the God's theatre' while the bullet which kills him is yet in flight.
To add to the river and the riverbank perceived by Huck the notion of yet another substantive river with another riverbank,
as we all do. Reading Twain in Delhi, for me that river was Yami's Yamuna. Then I saw the film 'Sholay' and learned that the mother of the producer was known as Mrs. Sippy. I think this is because American stunt coordinators were used in that movie.
to add yet another perception to that immediate network of perceptions, is altogether unjustifiable in the eyes of idealism.
The 'third man argument' was also fatal to Platonism. If goats participate in the Platonic form of the goat, why should they not also participate in the form of that relationship and so forth.
In my eyes, it is no less unjustifiable to add a chronological precision: for instance, the fact that the above-mentioned event should have taken place on the night of June 7, 1849, between 4:10 and 4:11.
Huck Finn is imaginary. Still, maybe there is a dynamic type of Time where he exists.
In other words, I deny, using the arguments of idealism, the vast temporal series that idealism permits.
We may deny our own secret miracle. But that's what makes it a miracle.
Hume denied the existence of an absolute space, in which each thing has its place; I deny the existence of one single time, in which all events are linked.
Argentina was living in a somewhat more civilized age than much of war-ravaged Europe.
To deny coexistence is no less difficult than to deny succession. I deny, in a large number of instances, the existence of succession. I deny, in a large number of instances, simultaneity as well. The lover who thinks, "While I was so happy, thinking about the faithfulness of my beloved, she was busy deceiving me;'
Perhaps, she did so because of the lover's obsession with fidelity or his taking her for granted.
is deceiving himself. If every state in which we live is absolute, that happiness was not concurrent with that betrayal.
Djikstra's dining philosopher's would starve to death before they could arrive at a 'natural' or canonical rule for utensil sharing. Fortunately, nothing is absolute- at least when it comes to proof.
The discovery of that betrayal is merely one more state, incapable of modifying "previous" states, though not incapable of modifying their recollection. Today's misfortune is no more real than yesterday's good fortune.
But language may make it increasingly so. Borges had that gift but, being a gentleman, used it sparingly.
I will look for a more concrete example: At the beginning of August 1824, Captain Isidoro Suarez,
Borges's great grandfather.
at the head of a squadron of Peruvian hussars, assured the Victory of Junin;
this victory is credited to William Miller.
at the beginning of August 1824, De Quincey
ten years older than De Quincey and of opposite views on issues like slavery and European Imperialism. Still, De Quincey was a prolific journalist who, as he says, wasn't actually 'published' but remained, so to speak, merely a manuscript. In other words, even if Miller had read De Quincey, he hadn't read De Quincey because the author of that name hadn't yet been constituted.
issued a diatribe against Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; these deeds were not contemporaneous (they are now), inasmuch as the two men died- the one in the city of Montevideo, the other in Edinburgh- knowing nothing of each other ....
But Suarez knew Miller who knew Wyllie who knew Lady Jane Franklin- I believe he offered her a Hawaiian peerage- whose husband knew or was related to several of De Quincey's acquaintances in Edinburgh. Franklin's ship disappeared in the Arctic and his wife- whose petticoat government in Tasmania had attracted adverse comment- launched many expeditions to find his remains. Apparently, his crew hadn't eaten him or even each other. Still, back then, whether you were a Tasmanian or a Tamil, a Peruvian or a Pole, if you knew a Britisher, it was more than likely that only two or three degrees of separation lay between him and Coleridge or De Quincey or Charles fucking Dickens.
Every instant is autonomous. Not vengeance nor pardon nor jails nor even oblivion can modify the invulnerable past.
Wilde said that what is impossible for even the God of Aristotle- viz. to change the past- is easy for the repentant sinner.
No less vain to my mind are hope and fear, for they always refer to future events, that is, to events which will not happen to us, who are the diminutive present. They tell me that the present, the "specious present" of the psychologists, lasts between several seconds and the smallest fraction of a second, which is also how long the history of the universe lasts.
Borges had previously mentioned the Buddhist 'kshanikavada' doctrine of momentariness. There is neither past nor future. There is only the bare and empty moment briefly illumined by the lightning flash of 'cetana' or intentionality.
Or better, there is no such thing as "the life of a man," nor even "one night in his life."
The good thing about stuff which doesn't exist is that even a very poor man like me can have as much of the thing as anybody else.
Each moment we live exists,
Existed.
not the imaginary combination of these moments.
The difference between Buddhism and Jainism is that the former denies complexity. The latter embraces permutations and combinations even going so far as to predict a sort of 'heat death' of the Universe such that all souls ultimately achieve kevalya omniscience.
The universe, the sum total of all events, is no less ideal than the sum of all the horses-one, many, none?-Shakespeare dreamed between 1592 and 1594.
The Jains would say it is uncountable.
I might add that if time is a mental process, how can it be shared by countless, or even two different men? The argument set forth in the preceding paragraphs, interrupted and encumbered by examples, may seem intricate. I shall try a more direct method. Let us consider a life in which repetitions abound: my life, for instance.
What Borges will next say has been becoming part of my live over the last 40 years. I suppose this is also true of the other writers I return to every decade or so- Kipling, Chesterton, Beerbohm & Saki.
I never pass the Recoleta cemetery without remembering that my father, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents are buried there, as I shall be;
He was buried in Geneva.
then I remember that I have remembered the same thing many times before; I cannot stroll around the outskirts of my neighborhood in the solitude of night without thinking that night is pleasing to us because, like memory, it erases idle details; I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without reflecting how one loses only what one really never had; each time I cross one of the southside corners, I think of you, Helena; each time the air brings me the scent of eucalyptus I think of Adrogue in my childhood; each time I recall fragment 91 of Heraclitus, "You cannot step into the same river twice," I admire his dialectical skill, for the facility with which we accept the first meaning ("The river is another") covertly imposes upon us the second meaning ("I am another") and gives us the illusion of having invented it; each time I hear a Germanophile deride Yiddish, I reflect that Yiddish is, after all, a German dialect, barely tainted by the language of the Holy Ghost. These tautologies (and others I shall not disclose) are my whole life. Naturally, they recur without design; there are variations of emphasis, temperature, light, general physiological state. I suspect, nonetheless, that the number of circumstantial variants is not infinite: we can postulate, in the mind of an individual (or of two individuals who do not know each other but in whom the same process is operative), two identical moments. Once this identity is postulated, we may ask: Are not these identical moments the same moment? Is not one single repeated terminal point enough to disrupt and confound the series in time? Are the enthusiasts who devote themselves to a line of Shakespeare not literally Shakespeare?
Pierre Menard is not Cervantes. Lovers of Borges can be, as I am, ignorant boors.
I am still not certain of the ethics of the system I have outlined, nor do I know whether it exists. The fifth paragraph of chapter IV in the Sanhedrin of the Mishnah declares that, in the eyes of God, he who kills a single man destroys the world.
That may be a true prediction. It may be that the life of our species will end by the end of the decade just because, with very good reason, one vicious tyrant is killed and this sparks Nuclear Armageddon.
However what the Mishnah was getting at was that financial crimes or punishments were not as bad as murder or execution because, when a man is killed, his potential descendants, too, are wiped out. This is why 'blood money'- i.e. financial compensation for the killing of a member of your clan- should be accepted
If there is no plurality, he who annihilated all men would be no more guilty than the primitive and solitary Cain- an orthodox view- nor more global in his destruction-which may be magic, or so I understand it. Tumultuous and universal catastrophes-fires, wars, epidemics-are but a single sorrow, multiplied in many illusory mirrors. Thus Bernard Shaw surmises ( Guide to Socialism, 86): What you yourself can suffer is the utmost that can be suffered on earth. If you starve to death, you experience all the starvation that ever has been or ever can be.
Shaw was wrong. Starving to death isn't as bad as watching your kids starve to death. But what is truly intolerable is ordering a pizza at 10.45 pm and it gets delivered to the wrong address and the place is closed when you ring up to complain.
If ten thousand other women starve to death with you, their suffering is not increased by a single pang: their share in your fate does not make you ten thousand times as hungry, nor prolong your suffering ten thousand times. Therefore do not be oppressed by "the frightful sum of human suffering": there is no sum .... Poverty and pain are not cumulative. ( Cf. also C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain VII.)
This is silly. Suffering multiplied is suffering it is economic to remove because there are likely to be substantial economies of scope or scale. Where suffering is not removable, maybe it isn't suffering at all. It's stuff for which you could get some really nice prescription drugs.
Lucretius (De rerum natura I, 830) attributes to Anaxagoras the doctrine that gold consists of particles of gold; fire, of sparks; bone, of imperceptible little bones. Josiah Royce, perhaps influenced by St. Augustine, proposes that time is made up of time and that "every now within which something happens is therefore also a succession" ( The World and the Individual II, 139 ). That proposition is compatible with my essay.
It is certainly possible that there was something like 'Time molecules' which were subject to convergent evolution under the law of increasing functional information and this led, at some very early moment of the Big Bang to what appears like Newtonian time at the macroscopic scale.
All language is of a successive nature; it does not lend itself to reasoning on eternal, intemporal matters.
Reception can be holophrastic. Equally, according to the Hindu 'sphota' theory, language is like a pus filled boil which bursts.
Those readers who are displeased with the preceding arguments may prefer this note from 1928,
Borges would have been 29 at that time.
titled "Feeling in Death;' which I mentioned earlier:
I wish to record here an experience I had some nights ago, a trifling matter too evanescent and ecstatic to be called an adventure, too irrational and sentimental to be called a thought. I am speaking of a scene and its word, a word I had said before but had not lived with total involvement until that night. I shall describe it now, with the incidents of time and place that happened to reveal it. This is how I remember it: I had spent the afternoon in Barracas,
a working class neighbourhood about 3 miles from Borges's family home in Palermo
a place I rarely visited, a place whose distance from the scene of my later wanderings lent a strange aura to that day. As I had nothing to do that night and the weather was fair, I went out after dinner to walk and remember. I had no wish to have a set destination; I followed a random course, as much as possible; I accepted, with no conscious anticipation other than avoiding the avenues or wide streets, the most obscure invitations of chance. A kind of familiar gravitation, however, drew me toward places whose name I shall always remember, for they arouse in me a certain reverence. I am not speaking of the specific surroundings of my childhood, my own neighbourhood, but of its still mysterious borders, which I have possessed in words but little in reality, a zone that is familiar and mythological at the same time. The opposite of the known- its reverse side- are those streets to me, almost as completely hidden as the buried foundation of our house or our invisible skeleton.
He had published 'Fervor de Beunos Aires' in 1923. Wikipedia informs me 'Borges rejects the poeticization of the modern city (in opposition to his contemporaries Maples Arce and Oliverio Girondo) and proposes the rescue of the marginal: 'The marginal is the most beautiful,' he writes, and among the topics that deserve his attention are 'any little house in the suburbs, serious, childish and calm,' the café where he finds himself, the urban landscape uncontaminated by verbalisms.
This puts me in mind with Beerbohm's 'Diminuendo', which he published at the age of 24 to announce his retirement from the cult of Walter Pater and of 'burning like a hard gem like flame'. Like Borges, turning his back on the great metropolises of Europe, to seek in the 'arrabal' suburbs which shade into the pampas, Beerbohm suggests that he will retire to a villa in Twickenham or some other such dormitory suburb where nothing more sensational ever happens than the flowering of laburnums in the tiny front garden.
Of course, Beerbohm did nothing of the kind. He frequented the Cafe Royal and that portion of Soho where 'in the first years of the century, a little girl, and with her a boy named De Quincey, made nightly encampment in darkness and hunger among dust and rats and old legal parchments'.My walk brought me to a corner. I breathed the night, in peaceful respite from thought. The vision before me, in no way complicated, in any case seemed simplified by my fatigue. It was so typical that it seemed unreal. It was a street of low houses, and although the first impression was poverty, the second was undoubtedly joyous. The street was both very poor and very lovely. No house stood out on the street; a fig tree cast a shadow over a corner wall; the street doors-higher than the lines extending along the walls-seemed made of the same infinite substance as the night. The sidewalk sloped up the street, a street of elemental clay, the clay of a still unconquered America. Farther away, the narrow street dwindled into the pampa, toward Maldonado. Over the muddy, chaotic earth a red pink wall seemed not to harbor moonglow but to shed a light of its own. There is probably no better way to name tenderness than that red pink. I stood looking at that simple scene. I thought, no doubt aloud: "This is the same as it was thirty years ago .... "I guessed at the date: a recent time in other countries, but already remote in this changing part of the world. Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for him a small, birdsize affection; but most probably the only noise in this vertiginous silence was the equally timeless sound of the crickets. The easy thought I am somewhere in the 1800s ceased to be a few careless words and became profoundly real. I felt dead, I felt I was an abstract perceiver of the world, struck by an undefined fear imbued with science, or the supreme clarity of metaphysics. No, I did not believe I had traversed the presumed waters of Time; rather I suspected that I possessed the reticent or absent meaning of the inconceivable word eternity. Only later was I able to define these imaginings. Now I shall transcribe it thus: that pure representation of homogeneous facts- calm night, limpid wall, rural scent of honeysuckle, elemental clay- is not merely identical to the scene on that corner so many years ago; it is, without similarities or repetitions, the same.
This is Ibn Arabi's doctrine of no repetition in theophany (manifestation) lâ takrâr fi'l-tajallî. But, there may be no manifestation. There is only 'apoorvata'- novelty or what is unknown.
If we can intuit that sameness, time is a delusion: the impartiality and inseparability of one moment of time's apparent yesterday and another of time's apparent today are enough to make it disintegrate. It is evident that the number of these human moments is not infinite. The basic elemental moments are even more impersonal- physical suffering and physical pleasure, the approach of sleep, listening to a single piece of music, moments of great intensity or great dejection.
Borges had included Beerbohm's 'Enoch Soames' in his anthology of fantasy some five or six years previously. In that story, a Decadent poet is projected a hundred years into the future so that he can taste the great literary acclaim he believes he will have earned. Sadly, the only mention of his name he can find in the British Library is a mention of a fictional character created by Max Beerbohm. He has sold himself to the Devil for the price of an infinite humiliation. Beerbohm points out that Soames would have been real but the future people he saw in the Reading Room were ghosts. But they were aware that there was something strange about the appearance of Soames. It follows that some rival of the author , who mentioned Beerbohm's story without having read it to the end, must have spotted his error. The ghosts of future people had not been able to communicate with the real Soames. Sadly, after a century's lapse, they would be real but Soames himself would be a mere apparition without a mind or consciousness. Thus Soames would continue to believe that Beerbohm had heartlessly betrayed him by caricaturing him in a story. Yet, both had, in early manhood, subscribed to the same aesthetic creed- perhaps one not too distantly related to Borges's own youthful 'ultraism'. Beerbohm gained almost immediate success. Soames failed utterly. But Soames was genuinely damned precisely because he lacked the talent of the poètes maudits. Moreover, for Soames, Beerbohm would always be located in a lower circle of Hell- that of traitors where the greatest of traitors, the Devil, chews on his ilk.
Beerbohm is the most Sufi of European writers. There is no repetition in manifestation but what is truly ghastly is that there is a gadarening Tardean mimetics of mere egotism or artifice. In Zuleikha Dobson, not Proust, is the fractal algebra of Girardian mimetic desire most irrefragably unveiled.
I have reached, in advance,
this is Stoic prohairesis
the following conclusion: life is too impoverished not to be also immortal.
Life's oikeiosis is merely towards whatever forever lives. It is one thing to be rejected by the love of one's life. It is another to be denied any encounter with even darkness as a bride.
But we do not even possess the certainty of our poverty, inasmuch as time, easily denied by the senses, is not so easily denied by the intellect,
the reverse is true. The senses register only change because of the law of increasing functional information.
from whose essence the concept of succession seems inseparable. So then, let my glimpse of an idea remain as an emotional anecdote;
Borges lived to become the reverse of Enoch Soames. We are comforted to know that the worst that can happen to us is better than to survive in a book.
let the real moment of ecstasy and the possible insinuation of eternity which that night lavished on me, remain confined to this sheet of paper, openly unresolved.
Borges gave much to literature for he had much to give. But what he didn't give, his modest virtue or abstemious habit of prohairesis, was a yet greater gift. The dark mysteries of the heart remain, from time to time, for his recurrent readers, inviolate from Time's wasting hand.
A fifth-century Buddhist treatise, the Visuddhimagga,
which is about 'karmasthana' meditation as opposed to 'Dhyana' which is 'Chang' which is 'Zen' and which offers instantaneous enlightenment by the lightning flash of intention.
or The Path to Purity, illustrates the same doctrine with the same figure: "Strictly speaking, the life of a being lasts as long as an idea. Just as a rolling carriage wheel touches earth at only one point, so life lasts as long as a single idea" (Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy I, 373).
Borges was a writer. Literature was his 'karmasthana'. He might have to kill off a character or make that character commit a horrible crime.
Other Buddhist texts say that the world is annihilated and resurges six billion five hundred million times a day and that every man is an illusion, vertiginously wrought by a series of solitary and momentary men. "The man of a past moment," The Path to Purity advises us, "has lived, but he does not live nor will he live; the man of a future moment will live, but he has not lived nor does he now live; the man of the present moment lives, but he has not lived nor will he live" (I, 407), a dictum we may compare with Plutarch's "Yesterday's man died in the man of today, today's man dies in the man of tomorrow" (De E apud Delphos, 18). And yet, and yet . . . To deny temporal succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, appear to be acts of desperation and are secret consolations. Our destiny (unlike the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology)
both of which are Ibn Arabi's 'barzakh' or, in Sanskrit, 'antarabhava' (from which the Tibetan 'bardo' etymologically derives). There may be a common Indo-Iranian origin of these notions.
is not terrifying because it is unreal; it is terrifying because it is irreversible and iron-bound. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. Freund, es ist auch genug. Im Fall du mehr willst lesen, So geh und werde selbst die Schrift und selbst das Wesen. [ Friend, this is enough. Should you wish to read more,/Go and yourself become the writing, yourself the essence.] -Angelus Silesius, Cherubinischer Wandersmann VI, 263 (1675)
We feel fortunate that Borges befriended us in youth. We may never plumb the depths of his metaphysical or mathematical previsions. We may neither aspire to, nor appreciate, his consummate literary culture and Laissez-passer to epochs remote from our own. Indeed, we may be dismissive of Beerbohm or Borges as 'minor masters'. But, by reason of their modest self-effacement, they remain, in memory, as heralds of what we might have been, whom we may without guilt, or embarrassment, visit the more frequently as we age and linger longer with because other companions have we none.
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