Borges's Alexandria, A.D. 641

This is a late poem from Borges  translated by Stephen Kessler

Alexandria, A.D. 641

Since the first Adam who beheld the night
And the day and the shape of his own hand,
Men have made up stories and have fixed
In stone, in metal, or on parchment
Whatever the world includes or dreams create.
Here is the fruit of their labor: the Library.
They say the wealth of volumes it contains
Outnumbers the stars or the grains
Of sand in the desert. The man
Who tried to read them all would lose
His mind and the use of his reckless eyes.
Here the great memory of the centuries
That were, the swords and the heroes,
The concise symbols of algebra,
The knowledge that fathoms the planets
Which govern destiny, the powers
Of herbs and talismanic carvings,
The verse in which love's caress endures,
The science that deciphers the solitary
Labyrinth of God, theology,
Alchemy which seeks to turn clay into gold
And all the symbols of idolatry.
The faithless say that if it were to burn,
History would burn with it. They are wrong.
Unceasing human work gave birth to this
Infinity of books. If of them all
Not even one remained, man would again
Beget each page and every line,
Each work and every love of Hercules,
And every teaching of every manuscript.
In the first century of the Muslim era,
I, that Omar who subdued the Persians
And who imposes Islam on the Earth,
Order my soldiers to destroy
By fire the abundant Library,
Which will not perish. All praise is due
To God who never sleeps and to Muhammed, His Apostle.

Borges knew that according to John 25- the acts of the risen Christ, if written down, were a text larger than the world could contain.

He also knew, being a librarian, that no building could contain 'as many books as there are grains of sand or stars in the sky'. 

But, Caliph Omar might not know this. He may also believe that the number of books in the Alexandrian library are greater than the grains of sand in the Sahara desert. What he is sure of is that

Declaran los infieles que si ardiera

Ardería la historia. Se equivocan

The faithless say that if the Library were to burn,

History would burn with it. They are wrong. 

Man will recreate again every work which was lost. Caliph Omar is not a barbarian. He does not seek to destroy what he does not understand or stand in need of.  Shaw's Caesar says of the library which is the 'memory of humanity'- 'it is an infamous memory! Let it burn.' Omar sees its contents as recoverable 'verum factum'. The truths man has made- albeit 'made up stories'-  he will remake. But of what God has made, only God knows the truth.

When I first read this poem 40 years ago, I supposed Borges's affection for Islam caused him to write a poem absolving the second Caliph of what bibliophiles consider a ghastly crime. Fortunately, I later learned, historians had cast doubt on this legend long ago. The Muslims were a people of the Book. Within an astonishingly short time they were producing great scholars who 'pursued knowledge unto China'. 

Re-reading the poem now, I find an insomniac nightmare quality to it which troubles me. Why? Adam beholds the night and the shape of his own hand. He can make neither. He does not know their truth. He can only make up stories about them. 

 What of the works of his hand? Geulincx, Samuel Beckett's favourite philosopher, said, 'quod nescis quo modo fiat, non facis – if you do not know how a thing is done, then you do not do it. 

Do we really know how the work of our hands is done? One may say, 'if you can duplicate what was done- yes.' But, is duplication the same thing as the original act? Geulincx died some 20 years before Leibniz published his 'law' re. the identity of indiscernibles. I believe the former has God as the only efficient cause whereas the latter's pre-established harmony involves what we might call pre-programmed synchronisation. With Liebniz's law, we can say they amount to the same thing. But do they really?

Borges went blind before he had the chance to learn Braille. We imagine him reconstructing in his own mind some text he had read long ago. When a visitor drops by, he might be able to get that time-waster to bring down the volume he had been thinking of and read out to him the passage he had sought once again to savour. No doubt, his remembered version would be an improvement. But even if were exactly the same, was it actually exactly the same? Pierre Menard's Quixote is not the same as that of Cervantes. They live in different centuries. Not only are their histories different, their very conception of History would diverge widely.  

Sadly, there is a reason the opposite is equally true. Quixote writes but the hand he writes with is not a hand he has himself created. As for what he writes, could it distinguish between what is foundational to its own existence as a piece of writing and what is adventitious or exogenous? 

The Qur'an divides its own verses into two main categories: Muhkamat (clear/decisive) and Mutashabihat (ambiguous/unclear). This classification is established in Surah Ali 'Imran (3:7), which explains that the Muhkamat are the foundation of the book, while the Mutashabihat contain deeper, less explicit meanings known fully only to Allah.

It appears there is a pre-established harmony between the truly faithful in this regard. Interestingly, there is a hadith which differentiates between 'implementation' (which good people will do for what is clearly instructed) and 'belief' (where there is some doubt as to what is meant or what is to be done). I suppose, if you have the right belief & you see your moral superiors implementing the right instruction, you may copy them though you do not possess their erudition or training in ethical behaviour. But this means that there is something equivocal even about univocity. You may do the right 'implementation' though it is unclear (equivocal) as to what it is. Why? You are proceeding by mimicry. There is a difference between you & your mimetic target. Or is there? Perhaps what we perceive as ambiguous or equivocal is univocity, or irrelevance, to God. 

Returning to what Caliph Omar says about the ancient Library- which, after all, permitted a chronological order to be imposed upon texts which might otherwise not contain enough information for them to be ranked in that manner- why would it be wrong to say that its destruction would also be that of History- at least that of the books it contains? Surely, what is 'mukhamat' is the date on which such and such manuscript was received or the date mentioned in the text itself. If this is burned up, how can the chronology be reconstituted? 

Perhaps Omar's meaning is 'chronology is not 'mukhamat' & foundational to History. It is 'mutashabihat'- i.e. information unambiguously interpretable for God not man.' 

What then is History's foundation?

Fire. 

Making fire made us human. But what humans make is equivocan save in that it heaps up the auto da fe which, for Faith, is the library of God.

 We have no foundation for we know nothing unequivocally. We are but an ambiguity to ourselves and an irrelevance to aught that truly knows us.