In his essay “THE WALL AND THE BOOK,” The twentieth-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges writes: “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon” (emphasis added). Lovecraft’s “NOTES ON THE WRITING OF WEIRD FICTION” opens with this sentence: “My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature” (emphasis added). This sense of mystery that is never dissipated by express knowledge but is forever an imminence or expectancy explains much of the attraction of the best supernatural stories (Algernon Blackwood’s “THE WILLOWS,” Lovecraft’s “THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE”, Poe’s “THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER,” Borges’s “TLÖN, UQBAR, ORBIUS TERTIUS”), which have at their center an abyss of the unknown, with perhaps a miasma of death floating about its edges. Only when we feel that something great is about to be revealed does anything seem to mean something. And this experience, as the preceding quotes from Borges and Lovecraft concur, is stirred by works of art or by an aesthetic vision of things in the world. Meaning arises on the brink of knowing and topples with the incursions of scriptures, doctrines, and narratives that specify the mysterious as an object, a datum. In themselves, all objects and data in existence are meaningless. To wail adamantly that a god exists is to kill that god or turn it into a plastic idol. To say that a god might exist is to vivify it with the meaning of mystery. 16 Borges’s essay “THE DOCTRINE OF CYCLES” both cites and conceives several refutations catastrophic for the ancient concept of the eternal return, which posits the unending and identical recurrence of all beings and events. In the words of the bookish Argentine, the “eternal return of the same” is “the most horrible idea in the universe.” To Borges, this idea was a nightmare born of bad philosophy; to Nietzsche, it was a nightmare fathered by his need to be joyful, or to believe he would be joyful no matter what horror befell him. In Nietzsche’s world, coming to terms with this idea as a reality was a must for affirming one’s life and life itself, thus recalculating the horrors of existence into a fate, or an unceasing series of fates, that would somehow inspire love rather than alarm. Given the antimony on this issue between Borges and Nietzsche, should one writer be heralded over the other as genuine, authentic, or whatever term of approval one cares to wield? The question is moot to the highest possible or impossible power. Each man was handling the stress of a hyperdiligent consciousness in his own style and not in one pressed upon him by cognitive meddlers. Ligotti sobre Borges
Posted on: Sat, 15 Feb 2014 04:10:44 +0000
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