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THE SAME, 1952, followed by 15 minutes with Borges, by Ricardo Nirenberg.
Kurosawa's Rashomon had just opened at a Princeton cinema. The "same" scene, a rape, viewed from different points of will, not of view: the Same is the product of our Will, of our Volition, rather than of our Representation. In a house on Battle Road two friends discussed, fluctuating between English and German, about man's sense of the Sublime. Erwin Panofsky was an art historian: naturally he found the theme important. It was no less important to his friend, the medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, who was later to write The King's Two Bodies. That night, Monday, February 18, 1952 was cold, sternklar over New Jersey, and as they stepped out of the house, Kantorowicz declared, "Looking at the stars, I feel my own futility." And Panofsky, "All I feel is the futility of the stars."
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Entscheidungsproblem: How to decide? Perhaps the two futilities are one and the same.
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At Room 115 of Fuld Hall, another conversation was taking place, mostly in German. Eisenhower was almost sure to run, and Gödel liked him. Einstein disagreed: he disliked Ike, he would vote Democratic. A few years ago, Gödel had found a smooth solution of his friend's field equations showing the following peculiarity: going back in time is possible. What were the logical implications? For instance, would all physical functions become periodic? More worrisomely, would logic itself remain the same? Gödel emphatically answered "Yes" to the last question, and Einstein impishly asked whether Gödel's God (a caring One, unlike Spinoza's) is bound by logic. In view of his friend's famous theorem (that the concept of truth of a sentence in a language cannot be defined in that language), should we conclude that Gödel's God, like Pontius Pilate, doesn't know what truth is? Or simply that He thinks in infinitely many languages simultaneously?
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Meanwhile and nearby, over at the Institute for Advanced Study Director's residence, Oppenheimer agonized. His friends had been attacked, his loyalties impugned. Yet he knew that his motives were pure. Supervisor of the Super bomb, all his energy, down to the most unconscious and secret, had been directed toward the building of a device that would enable his country to put a violent end to all life. Unlike other physicists, he viewed himself as a tragic actor. Prince Arjuna facing the carnage, and the sad, blue eyes of old Hegel came to his mind: Oppenheimer, too, knew that there is no escaping the whirlwind in whose eye he was caught. For him only to do his best, not to choose or to decide. He agonized, yet tacitly decided that it is preferable to be in the eye than in the periphery, for only there, in the eye, where the stars come alive, do we meet the Sublime.
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On the previous day, Sunday, February 17, 1952, the University of Chicago Nippur expedition had announced the discovery of a treasure trove of Sumerian "literary" clay tablets. For three thousand years nations had wept over the death of Tammuz or Dumuzi, their Shepherd King; then, for the next two thousand years, no one remembered how he had died, or why he should be wept. Now the story resurfaced: Dumuzi had been condemned by Inanna, his wife.
Inanna, the goddess of love and war, had tried to conquer the Land of the Dead, the Kingdom of Oblivion, but was defeated and perished in the attempt. Three days later she was resuscitated, but was able to leave the Underworld only on the condition of providing a replacement. When Inanna arrived at her palace, she found Dumuzi having a grand time. The goddess of Love struggling to conquer Oblivion, while her husband blithely forgets her! The goddess of War striving to conquer the vastness of the Past, while her lover wallows in the narrow pigsty of the Now! In a jealous rage she handed him, life most precious to her, over to the henchmen of Hell. Ancient weapons were not as devastating as ours, but ancient weeping was deeper.
The lovely, frightening shape of the goddess, protected by ancient writing, patient wedge work on clay, emerged once more from the Netherworld and became visible to us, warm holiday of peace at the height of the Cold War. "For the long-desired-for, the golden fruit, fallen from ancient trunk in shaking storms, is then, as loveliest good, protected by sacred fate itself with tender weapons, the very presence of the gods": so Hölderlin, in Friedensfeier.
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That same Sunday Stalin ordered, after his usual, night-long libation with Beria, the execution of all Yiddish writers and the drawing up of plans to kill all Jewish doctors.
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Unless certain conditions are met, unless there is some universal and eternal record —Sibylline books, heilige Schiksal, or God— we cannot say that February 17 and 18, 1952 exert any power on us and our own time. More likely it is the other way around: the present always wields absolute power over the past, for the present can eliminate any part of the past, killing it, forgetting it. The traditional attributes, omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, goodness, are not what we are most in need from God; what we need most is perfect recollection, for to the heart nothing is more intolerable than oblivion. Any tyrant knows that. We can —many did— reconcile ourselves to a God who opted for contingency and the risks of becoming; a God who's vulnerable to the abyss of the moment is more sublime than a safe One; we understand and love a God who suffers, or a Goddess who kills her lover. What we cannot accept is that those sufferings be forgotten, that they cease being wept over. I would go farther and deny the omnipotence of God, deny that He is able to forget the fall of the smallest leaf in the remotest forest.
When we reflect on intolerable oblivion, when we bring it to heart, and only then, do we gain an understanding of all that's implied by that phrase, the death of God. It's not enough to say, as Dostoevsky's Kirilov, that once He's not, his Will is not, and only our will is left: this, awful as it is, is not awful enough, for we are misled into thinking that we can exercise our will when we will, and for the rest, we may rest. No, once God is no more, we are the ones who must remember; we cannot trust promises, libations, epitaphs on the tombs of brides and warriors; the truly awful task is this: we must remember the fall of the tiniest leaf, the wriggling of the lowest worm. This thought must have tormented Nietzsche, until, in bliss at Sils Maria, the idea hit him (rather, he willed it) of a perfect and immanent memory, the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Now, he thought, he could leave remembering, the cruelest yet most pious, ineluctable task, to Being, and stretch and wield his will as he willed, or as the Spirit called.
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Nietzsche was wrong. Eternal, godless Recurrence of the Same is fraus as pia as God but less consistent. For, as Kurosawa exemplified, and as scientific minds will conceive, the Same cannot recur —cannot even happen, doesn't even make sense— without a will. If God and his Will are not there, it is we who are left to will the Same; we must will it non-stop, we must do nothing but will it, otherwise there is no Same. Nietzsche's liberation was actually enslavement.
And all the talk of Nietzsche's epigones, all that rant about Power and highfalutin emancipations, is actually enslavement. Confronted with our godly task, of what help is it to us to be told that everything is the result of clashes of forces or Empedoclean strife? Or greed, or lust, or drive for recognition? No aide-mémoire in any of that.
As in old times, we are left with the stark choice: either the gods or we must remember. To do so ourselves we must resort to the old tools —rhythms, echoes, striking images, melodies, dramatic gestures and arresting scenes. To the old Muses, daughters of Mnemosyne. "As though it is aware of the fragility and treachery of man's faculties and senses, a poem aims at human memory": we understand that Joseph Brodsky, coming from the U.S.S.R., should have feared fragility and treachery, chief allies of tyranny, above all. Poets are dogged resisters to Oblivion, supreme Politburo.
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For that they may suffer persecution, but they may also secure a comfortable life. The first poet known to have peddled remembrance, charging money for eulogies, epitaphs and dirges, was Simonides of Ceos, an island close to Attica. In our days, billionaires who are more likely to spend on beneficence than on poems should listen to Theocritus, even though as a poet he was hardly disinterested: in his sixteenth Idyll he ponders the immense riches of Scopas, a mogul of Thessaly, and notes that he would be forever forgotten among the wretched dead, had not been for Simonides, who placed him, or his name, among the generations of young men. And indeed, we remember Scopas only because we remember Simonides. The manner of Scopas' death has been preserved by Cicero in On the Orator. The wealthy Thessalian had organized a large dinner party at which Simonides sang in his honor; having heard the poem, and decided that too much space in it was devoted to praising Castor and Pollux, Scopas told the author to apply for half the agreed-on stipend to the Dioscuri. A little later, Simonides received a message that two young men were outside, asking for him, so he left the table and went to the door, but found no one. At that very moment the dining room collapsed and everyone in it was killed, their bodies maimed so badly as to be unidentifiable. Simonides, however, was able to identify each of the men by the place they occupied at table. This was, says Cicero, the origin of Simonides' great discovery, "that order is what brings maximum light to memory," and the invention of "the art of memory," or mnemonics, or mnemotechnics, a forgotten subject until, three months later, in May 1952 at the Warburg Institute, it began to interest Frances Yates, who would rescue it from oblivion in her book The Art of Memory.
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All tyrants know this about oblivion: nothing is more unbearable to the heart. The misery of one roasting inside the brazen bull of Phalaris can be redoubled by the whispered assurance that no one will remember his name, that his cause will be obliterated or dishonored. The world might be told that he died in peace and on a honeyed bed, breathing on flutes the tyrant's praises. Screams? Oh, no! Just roars of the royal bulls in heat.
Tyrants and torturers convey that with a sneer, or with mock bonhomie. No less despicable, the neutral-timbre bureaucrat. Tyranny, though, is inefficient at suppressing memory, the interest and power invested in suppression rather lending it more lasting life. Shih-huang-ti, the self-styled First Emperor, ordered the burning of most books and the execution of all relatives of anyone who "appealed to the past to condemn the present," yet not even he was successful: a forbidden word resounds in silence, and what the tyrant bans cannot be forgotten. For most of us, progress (the expectation of sustained prosperity, or, for Hegelians, the expectation of a sustained synthesis) is a more efficient suppressor of long-range memory. Much like Nietzsche with his Eternal Return, progressives and meliorists gladly leave the responsibility of remembering to Metaphysics (to the Nature of Things, to Development, to Geist) and to professional chroniclers.
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Perhaps the most efficient suppressor of memory is a combination of righteousness, pragmatism and sycophancy. During the Revolutionary Wars in South America, after a small Indian town in Alto Perú (modern Bolivia) rebelled against the Spaniards three times, a Spanish general razed it to the ground and declared its name, Cangallo, erased from the "catalogue of human habitations." When Rivadavia, Minister of State in Buenos Aires, heard that, he banged his desk so hard ink from the inkstand fell on the belly bulge of his white waistcoat (this was in 1822,) he bellowed, "Aha!," and named Cangallo a main street of the city. For the next 160 years Cangallo daily sounded on ten thousand tongues, was borrowed by jewelers and stationers for their stores, and by a German elementary school, Cangallo Schule, which my wife attended as a child. Most people in Buenos Aires had no idea where the name came from; nevertheless it was on their lips, and so a small, physical part of that Quechua-speaking town and its massacred people was kept alive. Death, where is thy sting, then? Oh no: in the 1980s, at the end of the most lawless epoch in Argentina, a duly elected government changed the name of Cangallo Street to Teniente General Juan Domingo Perón, not to honor what can't possibly be honored but for the public good: begging for the benevolence of the Peronist opposition. The other, the Spanish general, had been right after all: Cangallo was erased from memory. For the good of the people.
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"Not only Cangallo," says Postumus soothingly; "every ode and epode, the very name of Horace will be erased, every solar system. So, bring us another rhythm, one that calls for drink and dance; before the day goes down, lift your golden cup and toast with chicha to the Sun." My feet fall flat and my hands are limp: for me the star is extinguished now.
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Says the Anchoress of Norwich, "Pray not for memory but for faith. Most things have been forgotten, yet all manner of them shall be okay." I do remember Gerard Manley Hopkins' years of patient noting the shapes of leaves, the ooze out of a dying sheep, and the conformation of fine-weather clouds. I also remember his peculiar notion of sentimentality: assigning to a thing greater importance than God intended. And so, thanks to his knowledge of the divine plan, the Jesuit poet could, like the great occultists of the Renaissance, remember intensely and justly; as for me, only by the cynical bootstraps of who-could-care-anyway can I pull myself up from the mire of sentimentality, so that both I and the stars seem equally insignificant.
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Suffering generates memories, and memories generate more suffering. A rabbi suffers on a cross, someone writes it down, and Jews suffer for a hundred generations. To what purpose? Blut und Boden, irredentism, the conviction of being at once superior and a victim that goes by the names of nationalism or neurosis: those are the natural excrescences of memory. Besides, for the peace and quiet of your retirement you will not have Mecenas or Augustus to thank, but the general eagerness to forget —to forget old techniques, to discard last-year gizmos and buy the newer ones, so that the economy keeps growing.
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Then I hear, emerging from the modern din and contemporary cacophony, the patient voice of Borges:
"I, too, have felt that poignancy, the obligation to keep countless flames, like so many stars, burning for ever bright: a rose Milton held in his blind hands, the sun setting on an evening of 1928 beyond the wisteria-brimmed walls in the western suburb of Villa Luro, to name but two. I've often thought such indiscriminate piety the poet's universal fate, for poets are promiscuous vestals, but have heard others blame the effect of the barbarous Pampas that surround us. Tò tês Léthes pedíon, the plain of Lethe or Oblivion which Plato mentions in the last book of his Republic, was the Greek equivalent of the briefer Quechua word Pampa, and we, transplanted Europeans, have always been aware of being on the brink of forgetting. To counter that (so the theory goes) we turned humanists with a vengeance, intellectually voracious; in other words, Alexandrine."
"However that may be, oblivion has been my most haunted theme, because it is the first and highest enigma of Metaphysics. As a man, I've looked upon oblivion with sadness veined with horror, but as a littérateur I have been forced to appreciate its benefits. I refer you to my Aleph. This particular Aleph was located, as you know, on the nineteenth riser of the stairs in Carlos Argentino Daneri's basement, on Garay Street, and in it one could distinctly see each and every event in the universe. Un tour d'adresse, a French critic was kind enough to call my story; yet, as I realized later, I hadn't been clear as to what was shown in the Aleph. Was it each and every event, from every point of view, but only in the present moment? No, I reasoned: as long as someone remembers a past event, the memory itself is a present event, and so only what is totally forgotten and has left no trace, only (only!) that is not shown in the Aleph. But here's what I'm aiming at: the disastrous influence the Aleph had on Carlos Argentino's writing."
"I've always found it painful to read the ridiculously pedantic samples you offer of Carlos Argentino's writing, because I always feared it resembled my own," I said, hoping that Borges would dismiss my fear as having no foundation.
"I well see why," he said instead, "since you were just now attempting to cover, point by point, a couple of days in February, 1952. The problem, of course, is not that it's impossible, but that it makes for obnoxious writing, the Carlos Argentino's type. The Aleph points the reader to the opposite, to good writing, such as Borges'. "
The final sentence is, approximately, for I'm not prone to quote myself precisely: "Through time's tragic erosion I find myself falsifying Beatriz' features, letting them slip away." The vulgar reader will see in this the typical tugging at his sentimental heart, nothing but the old topos, "Love against Oblivion," which shines so magnificently in Quevedo's sonnet: "... Serán ceniza, mas tendrán sentido, / Polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado." I trust that you, however, have detected in my last sentence a different and almost opposite suggestion: that Borges' forgetting, his letting go of his beloved Beatriz Viterbo, however tragic for the man, was of great benefit to the poet. Writing is a tree rooted in remembrance, but it is forgetfulness that gives it air and vivifying light.
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Then my will is to be faithful to memory and a failed artist, even if I commit thereby all I have written to oblivion. Mine will be meaningful ashes: a loser's dust, but dust in love. Pig-headed? Yes indeed: a tethered pig that roots up truffles. As for the Aleph (which, as Borges points out, is also the first letter of the sacred tongue), even if it were real, even if it were possible, I'd have no use for that minutious mirror. I do not want to have everything that is and hasn't yet been forgotten present to my eyes; I want to rescue everything that was and is no more. Like Sumerian Inanna, I aspire to conquer Not-Being in the name of Love.
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No Aleph I but Alpha, alpha privative, undoer and negator of oblivion. A-lethés, that is, true; a-létheia, that is, truth.