Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952 by Jorge Luis Borges
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Zohar for Beginners

Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with the Kabbalah is self-attested and well known. He wrote two substantial pieces on the work and made frequent allusion to it in his themes and stories. I decided to try my hand at some Kabbalah-uncovering by re-reading Other Inquisitions 1937-1952. And seeking of course does mean finding:

In ‘The Wall and the Books’ Borges’s perennial and explicitly dialectical theme of revelation and concealment is combined with the theme of eternity. This is summarised elegantly in his final phrase, “...that imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced is, perhaps, the aesthetic reality.”

The Rev Raiah Kook puts the same idea somewhat less laconically in the Root HaKodesh,

“The present and the future are divided within the truth of being. That which has been is that which shall be, and that which has been done is that which shall be done. That which has already been done and that which shall be done in the future is gradually being done in the present, constantly and frequently.”

‘Pascal’s Sphere’ closes with a similarly powerful sentence on two more themes of the Kabbalah, universal history and language, “Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of a few metaphors.”

In the Kabbalah universal history refers to the metaphorical contraction, breakage and restoration that are held to be fully present in all things, events and experiences at all times. These metaphorical ‘moments’constitute the Absolute, the Ein-Sof of God, which is the contradiction of all Absolutes. Just as Borges says: the entire history of the cosmos in just a few metaphors.

Borges’s meditation on ‘The Flower of Coleridge’ returns to the aesthetic idea of the future as impending revelation, “More incredible than a celestial flower or the flower of a dream is the flower of the future, the unlikely flower whose atoms now occupy other spaces and have not yet been assembled.” He continues this theme of revelation breaking into the present in ‘The Dream of Coleridge’ in a somewhat Jungian tone, “Perhaps an archetype not yet revealed to men, an eternal object (to use Whitehead’s term) is gradually entering the world; its first manifestation was the palace; its second was the poem. Whoever compared them would have seen that they were essentially the same.”

The Zohar in the same spirit considers a dream un-interpreted as a letter unopened, already present but waiting to be revealed. Dreams demand attention because they show how forms can morph and yet remain constant in their denotation. As the Baal HaSulam explains in his study of ‘Inner Reflection’ in The Study of the Ten Sefirot,

“…you should know that spiritual movement is not like tangible movement from place to place. Rather, it refers to a renewal of form, for we denominate every renewal of form by the name ‘movement.’"

The idea of morphing forms maintaining their significance is identical to Borges's.

Eternity is the explicit theme of ’Time and J. W. Dunne.’ Borges makes an apparently ’non-denominational’ reference when he says, “Theologians define eternity as the simultaneous and lucid possession of all instants of time and declare it to be one of the divine attributes.” His use of ‘attributes’ rather than ’names’, however, suggests he is not referring to Christian theologians but to Jewish mystics who view God in an almost pantheistic dispersion throughout creation.

The Sulam commentary, for example, says,

“The Zohar speaks nothing of corporeal incidents, but of the upper worlds, where there is no sequence of times as it is in corporeality. Spiritual time is elucidated by change of forms and degrees that are above time and place.”

The universe itself is eternal, a thought shared interestingly with Thomas Aquinas as well as Borges.

‘The Creation and P. H. Gosse’ turns the idea of infinity inside out, as it were, by considering the very small rather than the very large. “God lies in wait”, Borges writes, “in the intervals [of time].” His anticipation of quantum time is stunning enough, but once again his condensation of Kabbalistic insight is even more remarkable.

Kabbalah defines time as the distance between cause and effect, the separation between action and reaction, the divide between the crime and its consequence. Within this temporal “gap” it is hoped that a person eventually becomes enlightened to the senselessness of his negative ways and to recognise the rewards associated with spiritual growth and positive, unselfish behaviour. Precisely the place where Borges's God ambushes the wary soul.

It occurs to me that to go on showing the extent to which every Borges story is not just affected by but steeped in Kabbalah is pointless. Once seen, it is impossible to un-see. Even his sarcastic critique of a pompous Spanish literary pundit, ‘Dr. Americo Castro Is Alarmed’, reflects fundamental beliefs about language as a divine gift rather than a human possession.

Says one scholar of The Zohar,

“Letters, symbols, and speech serve for conveying spiritual knowledge, and attainment. Every letter of every alphabet contains its spiritual meaning because people convey their sensations through books. Any sensation, not only human but animal as well, represents an unconscious perception of the Creator. Nobody understands this, but in reality when a poet for example, composes a verse portraying his love for a woman, children, the sun, light, or even in describing his suffering, he is expressing his impressions of the light that acts upon him, whether he wants it or not.”

Much the same could be claimed for Borges’s writing. For me the comparison enhances an appreciation of both Borges and the Kabbalah.

For more on the Kabbalah, its symbolism, and its effect on literature see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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