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EL ALEPH  by Jorge Luís Borges:  notes on the work 

1. Borges is the narrator. Borges = 1899 in Buenos Aires, suffered severe head wound in 1938, got blood poisoning which left him near death.  Worked in a Buenos Aires National library.  Went blind in 1955 from a hereditary disease.  He died of liver failure in 1986 in Geneva, a place he had lived and studied.

2. His works are characterized as labyrinths within mazes within mirrors.  “A man sets himself the task of portraying the world.  Over the years he fills a given surface with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses and people.  Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.”

3. Borges said, “I am neither a thinker nor a moralist, but simply a man of letters who turns his own perplexities and that respected system of perplexities we call philosophy into the forms of literature.” “Finally, I come to understand that the space in which we are momentarily inserted is not real; it is a space made of words, signs, symbols.  It is another labyrinth.  It is a world of conventions we are trained to recognize.” “the impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe cannot dissuade us from outlining human schemes, even though we are aware that they are provisional.  These schemes are the business of philosophy and theology.” 

4. The doctrines that form the backdrop of his stories are very far from being essential truths.  It is true that he judges them to be literature, to be inventions of the imagination that at best have value as marvels of the mind, but the metaphysical systems which he handles constitute the synthesis of the human mind in its attempt to penetrate the arcane of the universe, and the theologies which he uses as literary ingredients for his stores are, to this day and throughout centuries of history, the theoretic foundation of religions whose followers number in the millions.  His stories suggest that, in man’s powerlessness to perceive the laws that govern the world, he has invented his own reality, ordered according to human laws which he can know.  The chaos of the world and the order created by man could be considered the abscissa and the ordinate of his narrative world.  Besieged and stimulated by the chaos of the universe, the human mind has striven to find an order, or the Order. 

5. A favorite image of Borges is the labyrinth.  The labyrinth expresses both sides of the coin:  it has an irreversible order if ones knows the solution (access to God), and it can be at the same time a chaotic maze if the solution constitutes an unattainable secret (only what the man can construe).  Man’s problem with respect to the universe is that the world is impenetrable, but the human mind never ceases to propose schemes in his ambition to resolve the enigma of the universe and this is vain. 

6. El Aleph is the first letter in the ancient Hebrew alphabet.  The letter “A” gets its shape from an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph of an eagle.  The Phoenicians later named it aleph, meaning ‘ox’, the head of which they thought the letter resembled.  The Greeks then called the letter alpha, and the Romans gave the letter the name we recognize:  “A”.  Alpha + Bet = alphabet. The aleph is one of the points in space that contain all points.  The place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist. (Refer to Picasso and the cubists)  The cellar is dark but it doesn’t matter.  If all places of the world are within the Aleph, there too will be all stars, all lamps, all sources of light.  (Contrast Ignacio in Ardiente here. “The stars and the other worlds are out there for us to know and to see if we only had the vision or sight to do so.  For Ignacio perhaps death would be the definitive vision for him to gain, there is no worldly one for him)  To view the Aleph, Borges needed to lie down in “dorsal decubitus” (on his back looking up) immobile, fixing your eyes on the 19^th step of the stairway. (Consult the 19^th Canto of the Paradise of the Divine Comedy here by Dante)  “It is the microcosm of the alchemists and the Kabbalists, our proverbial friend the multum in parvo, made flesh.” “Every language is an alphabet of symbols the employment of which assumes a past shared by its interlocutors.  How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain?  The central problem is this:  the enumeration, even partial enumeration, of infinity is irresolvable.”  What Borges saw was simultaneous and he writes about it as successive, because language is successive.  He “saw” a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness.  It was two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size.  Each thing was infinite things, because he could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos.  He saw everything that was everywhere all at once.  He saw the secret:  the inconceivable universe.  He described what he saw with 37 sentences.  These sentences describe the chaos of the world. Borges after seeing it feared that nothing ever again would have the power to surprise or astonish him, and he feared he never again be without a sense of déjà vu. 

7. The Jewish mystics saw the Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, as the spiritual root of all letters and the carrier, in its essence, of the whole alphabet and therefore of all the elements of human speech.  Thus, the Aleph is the first letter of the alphabet and also all that can possible by expressed.  According to Hassidic tradition, this letter was the only one that the people heard directly from the mouth of God, and this singular virtue makes it a symbol of his Will, that is of the universe.  The aleph in the Kabbala is the pure and unlimited godhead, shaped as a man pointing to the sky and to the earth to indicate that the lowerworld is the map and the mirror of the higher.  It is like a mirror in which the entire universe is reflected. (Refer here to Diego Velazquez and Quetzalcoatl, the buried mirror, refer to Carlos Fuentes)  Borges says that our minds are permeable to forgetfulness and like he, after a while even the aleph becomes distorted, eroded with the years, and is forgotten, like the features of Beatriz in his story. Part of man’s mystery is that he has to learn everything.  He has to educate himself and others in order to progress.  When he dies, his offspring don’t  come into the world with his body of knowledge.  They have to be taught.  With the extinction of mankind, goes the extinction of his collective knowledge (refer to the Holy Grail of Knights Templar).  Libraries and schools and literature are invented to preserve his knowledge.

8. Beatriz Viterbo=Vi + Verbo = I saw it and now I am going to tell you about it.

9. the universe = vast, unceasing, infinite, ever changing

10. Calle Garay in Buenos Aires is the house where she lived

11. Carlos Argentino Daneri = first cousin of Beatriz, probably a lover of hers, Dante Alighieri.  Carlos is a pink, substantial, gray haired man of refined features, who holds some sort of subordinate position in an illegible library in the outskirts toward the south of the city, authoritarian, an ineffectual writer, a rival of Borges.  Carlos is working on a poem divided into Cantos like the Divine Comedy, entitled The Earth, a description of the earth, he proposed to put into verse the entire planet.  To Carlos, the Aleph is inalienable, it belongs to him.  He was selfish about it and told no one. Carlos Argentino Daneri is the ‘argentine Dante’.  Borges, through this story and through Daneri, shows the reader that it is not the access to a unique experience or perspective (El Aleph) that makes one a poet, but rather knowing how to write, which Daneri doesn’t know how to do.  Borges is saying to the literary establishment that they heap awards on people who really cannot write no matter what else they have been blessed with, and ignore those who can, who may have had the same experiences (el aleph), but who are not transformed by the experiences.

12. There are many photographs and portraits of Beatriz in the house, snapshots of instances in her life.  The photos were not so much anachronistic as “outside time”.

13. Borges describes the visits he made to her house using dates on the calendar, man’s desire for order and ordering.

14. Carlos describes modern man as in his study, a watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio telephone and motion picture and magic lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins…

15.  The house on Calle Garay = one corner of the cellar there contained the Aleph.  Carlos needed the house to finish the poem he was writing, it was his source of research for the poem on the earth.  With the Aleph, Carlos could go around the world.

16. Dante Alighieri, Italian poet, 1265-1321

17. Quote the Elegy by Borges.

18. La Cábala = “The Hebrew letters are like a nut; you must crack them in order to extract from them their fruit and to find the truth”.  The Kabbalists try to use the geometric combinations of the Hebrew alphabet in order to find hidden secrets to the meaning of the Scriptures and hopefully unlock the secrets of the Heavens and Cosmos.