Tag: literature

On the Roads

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Complete street directions for Kerouac’s journey in On the Road. Now you too can experience time truly and confront the living, beating soul of a nation.

Borges’s Genius for the Capacious Detail

Reading “El Aleph” in translation, I came across this fever dream of a passage which conveys perfectly the uncanny ability of Jorge Luis Borges to create voluminous illustrations with just a few well-chosen details. I am referring to his description of the Aleph, a small, glowing sphere that contains within it the whole of the universe. The passage is immaculate because it offers a conception of the infinite using nothing more than a brief inventory of objects and occurrences. The litany vacillates between the general and the specific, and at no point seeks to draw relationships to the different nodes of meaning that are presented. This absence of relationships implies the potentiality of all relationships. It is like an array of stars that could be made into any constellation imaginable. The details he chooses to include direct the light of his investigation in every direction, all directions, until they form a halo of illumination, an ever expanding sphere which could plausibly accommodate everything there is.

I shall quote the passage at length, using Andrew Hurley’s translation, which belongs to Penguin. I wish I could read the original words:

“The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me), saw in a rear courtyard on Calle Soler the same tiles I’d seen twenty years before in the entryway of a house in Fray Bentos, saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapor, saw convex equatorial deserts and their every grain of sand, saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget, saw her violent hair, her haughty body, saw a cancer in her breast, saw a circle of dry soil within a sidewalk where there had once been a tree, saw a country house in Adrogué, saw a copy of the first English translation of Pliny (Philemon Holland’s), saw every letter of every page at once (as a boy, I would be astounded that the letters in a closed book didn’t get all scrambled up together overnight), saw simultaneous night and day, saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal, saw my bedroom (with no one in it), saw in a study in Alkmaar a globe of the terraqueous world placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly, saw horses with wind-whipped manes on a beach in the Caspian Sea at dawn, saw the delicate bones of a hand, saw the survivors of a battle sending postcards, saw a Tarot card in a shopwindow in Mirzapur, saw the oblique shadow of ferns on the floor of a greenhouse, saw tigers, pistons, bisons, tides, and armies, saw all the ants on earth, saw a Persian astrolabe, saw in a desk drawer (and the handwriting made me tremble) obscene, incredible, detailed letters that Beatriz had sent Carlos Argentino, saw a beloved monument in Chacarita, saw the horrendous remains of what had once, deliciously, been Beatriz Viterbo, saw the circulation of my dark blood, saw the coils and springs of love and the alterations of death, saw the Aleph from everywhere at once, saw the earth in the Aleph, and the Aleph once more in the earth and the earth in the Aleph, saw my face and my viscera, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has ever truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe.”

The passage is so stunning. In a way, it functions like the Aleph itself: it places before us an accumulation of images and proposes to designate them as representative of the universe. Of course this is an illusion, but it functions as well as if it were real. It’s difficult to know how exactly Borges accomplishes this, but I have an idea…

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I count at least 45 separate details cited in the passage. Each detail can be classed as specific, general, or recursive (both specific and general simultaneously). The most commonly used are the general details. I think Borges employs these to give the impression of magnitude. Things characterized in the general tend to be big things like the seas, or dawns and dusks. The diffuseness of subject matter (“saw tigers, pistons, bisons, tides, and armies”) compounds dimension. Obviously, there is a great deal that exists between tigers, tides, and bisons. The fact that the narrator leaves them out and does not bother to enumerate the degrees by which they are connected suggests that he did see them but found the knot of connections too overwhelming to make sense of it. The universe lives in the narrator’s omissions. The parts of it that are mentioned are just waypoints.

Peppered throughout the passage are small, specific observations, like the tiles in the entryway of a house in Fray Bentos, the woman with breast cancer, and the monument in Chacarita. Each of these details has a special identity that is unique in the universe and must be understood so. There is not another Chacarita monument or another Fray Bentos with another house that has those same tiles. Where as the general details gave us a broad, ever-expanding view of the universe, these specific details concentrate on the minute and the microcosmic. I believe the identified objects are included to introduce precision to the inventory. They apprehend the narrator and force him to acknowledge particularity and independent properties rather than easily compartmentalizing the universe into classifications, thus making the universe come across as being multitudinous and endlessly diverse.

Finally, we are confronted with a few select items that contain other items or concepts within themselves. While constituent elements of the universe, they also reflect the universe. Examples would be the Persian astrolabe, the Alkmaar globe, and the many mirrors that are mention. Such objects imply that, in addition to being expansive and profuse, the universe is also complex. There are more than just nominal objects. There are also events and causes and ideas and information. There are entities that are composed of other entities—in exactly the same way that the universe is composed of entities. Here, the universe is demonstrated to be fractal, an infinite regress. The purest expression of this is the Aleph, the last object Borges observes. He sees the earth in the Aleph and in that earth he sees an Aleph and in that Aleph another earth. With this image we come to the inconceivable idea that troubled Borges throughout his life: that an infinite universe, if it is to contain all things, must also contain other universes. It is a paradox that is impossible to reconcile. The Aleph is a monstrous manifestation of vicious recursion. It is the ghost in what I want to call a ghost story.

Erich Auerbach and the Reading Public

The full title of Auerbach’s monumental project is Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. It is an examination how writers went about the work of portraying the world around them in a way that was comprehensible and recognizable to their readers. The analysis covers every major stage and stylistic program of the European literary tradition, beginning with the Homeric epics and the Torah and ending with 20th century modernism. Each chapter represents a new development in aesthetic attitude and approach to creative representation. Auerbach chooses a work that is exemplary of its time and surveys the text’s language and theme. It is intended that the text act as an artifact and that it disclose the identity and attributes of the era of which it was a part. As a work of literary criticism, I’d say Mimesis is unexceptional. Auerbach is able to provide unique interpretation for only a few of the text, those that he is most familiar and has made a career writing about. The rest he just reproduces the standard interpretations that are already widely accepted and which offer little besides a starting point for more penetrating analysis. Many of us remember the major controversy that erupted from having viagra pills from canada prayer in schools and the even better news is, no prescription is required. Erectile dysfunction is said to be a silent killer that murder viagra generika male sexual desires every night. How to buy generic sildenafil online? One can buy the efficient and effective viagra free consultation 100 mg pills (generic sildenafil citrate) online from our medical stores at an unbeatable price; Buying from us has several advantages such as- *Genuine and effective medications*FDA approved*cheap price*Discounts on bulk purchase*secure way of transactions*no prescription required*doorstep delivery Visit our online pharmacy now and place an order for the medicine. it will reach to. But, the question is which one has the viagra generic canada most successful rate of turning impossible into possible. At its worst, Mimesis feels like an undergraduate lecture, albeit an exquisitely composed and unusually erudite undergraduate lecture. I think the work is more interesting and more useful as an historical treatise. Auerbach is able to distill the tastes, attitudes, emotions, manners of speech, and modes of thinking of an entire age into 20 or 30 pages, and he’s perfectly accurate, remarkably effective. His most profound insights have to do not with the texts under consideration but with the people who produced those texts and who read them. Invariably we are talking about an elite class of folk when we are talking about literary audiences. These are individuals who shaped history, who led society from one age to the next. We learn more about the way they thought and how they saw the world by investigating their entertainments and fantasies than we do by studying their achievements and aspirations. There are few better scholars of the European ruling classes than Erich Auerbach. What he has to say about them is endlessly fascinating.

Interactive Poesy

Found a neat little poetry toy the other day. Go to www.sweetoldetc.org to see. The creator is named Alison Clifford. She does other audiovisual work beside this. I found a number of light play videos and images in her portfolio which she calls “interstitial articulations.” I included one of them above. They’re pretty slick.

Usually men face complication in generic pharmacy cialis getting full erection as they age. Since this medicine is a prescription drug, they need to obtain a prescription from a doctor. http://www.cerritosmedicalcenter.com/pid-2465 canadian prices for viagra But working with a licensed therapist that is trained and skilled for dealing with impotence issue. cialis prescription cheap no prescription viagra Serogen Key Ingredients Serogen Pure Extract contains Vitamin A, Vitamin E and Cernate. Sweet Old Etcetera is one of her earlier works, and you can tell at times that it is indeed someone’s early work. There are some rather broad gestures, like letters drifting across the browser window to form the word leaf and a few other corny animations that sometimes give it the feeling of a flash animation greeting card. Nonetheless, it is a wonderfully interesting experiment. She arranges the poetry of ee cummings into shaped text blocks which are visually representational. The words themselves are usually only vaguely significant, as cummings had intended. I think the project is really playful and imaginative, and nicely complements what ee cummings was trying to do. The different arrangements produce an added semiotic layer to the semi-sensical text phrases. The aural tones are stimulating and emotionally correlative. Most interesting of all is how the verse animations, which have an effect of mutating lines into new statements, create a new sort of lineation that transforms focus compartments of text within the whole poem rather than employing a serial transition to each succeeding line.

Have a look for yourself and play around with it.