Borges, a writer in search of meaningWe continue following the clues of the concept of God in the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges. In the collection of poems, In Praise of the ShadowWe extract some verses from "Fragments of an apocryphal gospel":
12. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they see God.
15. Let the light of a lamp be lighted, though no man see it. God will see it.
32. God is more generous than men and will measure them with another measure.
49. Happy are those who keep in memory the words of Virgil or of Christ, for they will give light to their days.
In these fragments, Borges carries out a kind of imitation of some evangelical phrases, and the 32 could be a variation of "with the measure you measure you will be measured", but to say that God is more generous than men and will measure them with another measure is a distinctly Christian and biblical thought: God's mercy, God's love and God's intelligence far exceed our expectations.
At The eye of the tigers (1972) we read a fragment of the poem "Religio medici, 1643":
Defend me, Lord. (The vocative does not imply Nobody. It is only one word of this exercise that reluctance carves out.
From time to time Borges wants to make it clear that he is an agnostic, that he doubts, that he ignores what the word actually means. Mr.In other cases, however, it is used without any kind of footnote.
At The Deep Rose (1975) there is a poem titled very significantly "De que nada se sabe" (Of which nothing is known):
Perhaps human destiny
of short joys and long sorrows
is an instrument of Another. We ignore it;
giving God's name does not help us.
He writes "it does not help us", but in Borges there is a serene search without stridency throughout his life. There is an inquiry, a speculation about meaning, time, eternity, death, life.
At The Iron Coin (1976) we read in a poem entitled "The End":
God or Maybe or Nobody, I ask you
its inexhaustible image, not oblivion.
He doubts but does not deny, he doubts but seeks: "I ask you / his inexhaustible image, not oblivion". Here he does not want oblivion. Here he asks for non-forgetfulness. Perhaps Spinoza has taught him oblivion and perhaps his own mind, his own readings, and his own freedom of thought make him think that it cannot all end in oblivion.
In the poem "Einar Tambarskelver" we read:
Odin or the red Thor or the White Christ...
Little matter the names and their gods;
there is no other obligation but to be brave
This thought again has a stoic aftertaste: I don't know who he is, but I'm looking for him.
"In Iceland the dawn," another poem, we read:
It is the shadow glass in which you look
God, he doesn't have a face.
God does not have a face, the God of the philosophers certainly does not have a face. The God of the Old Testament does not have a face either, although he sometimes presents himself with anthropomorphic attitudes. The only face that God really has is Christ, the visible image of the invisible God. But Borges's philosophical aftertaste tends to impose itself.
In "Some Coins" there is a short poem inspired by a verse from Genesis:
GENESIS, IX, 13
The arc of the Lord crosses the sphere
and blesses us. In the great pure arc
are the blessings of the future,
but there is also my love, who waits.
It is a poem inspired by Genesis and therefore fully in tune with the biblical text, and Borges glosses it because he is also rewriting in some way a book that fascinates him: the Bible.
There is a poem dedicated to Baruch Spinoza.
Someone builds God in the twilight.
A man begets God. [...]
The sorcerer insists and carves
God with delicate geometry;
from his illness, from his nothingness,
continues to erect God with the word.
We can consider this poem by Borges quite sincere in that he is probably describing what Spinoza or many philosophers do: construct a God to their measure, to their rational measure, to their geometric measure, and perhaps -following Borges with the perhaps- it is not the authentic God.
Another poem: "For a version of I King".
The path is fatal as the arrow
but in the cracks is God, who lurks.
He stresses once again the force of destiny, but in that crack "there is God".
In "You are not the others":
There is no pity in the Fairy
and God's night is infinite.
The same idea of infinite dissolution that we saw at the beginning of our tour through Borges' poetry.
At La Cifra -In 1981, we read a curious poem dedicated to an angel with many biblical resonances:
Lord, that at the end of my days on earth
I did not dishonor the Angel.
It seems that it is the angel of paradise, the angel that expels Adam and Eve, and ends the poem with this authentic prayer: "Lord, at the end of my days on Earth, may I not dishonor the Angel". In another poem of the same collection of poems The figure entitled "To run or to be" we read:
Perhaps on the other side of death
I will know if I have been a word or someone.
This text seems to us decisive: "a word or someone". What sediment has Occam's nominalism really had in modern and contemporary philosophy? Perhaps it is a cliché, but perhaps because it is a cliché it is true. "Whether I have been a word or someone": all that diatribe of universals. But Borges says "perhaps" on the other side of death I will know if I have been a word, a flatus vocis or someone. Because if God exists and God is on the other side, and I am in His mind not as a file in a computer memory, but I am in His mind as a being dear to Him, I will have regained a full identity.
The Conjured (1985), the last collection of poems, we read in a poem entitled "La tarde":
it may well be that our short life
is a fleeting reflection of the divine.
It seems that at the end of his life Borges' search for meaning, his search for God, is becoming more and more accentuated. And in one of his last poems entitled "Góngora" he writes:
Such spoils
have banished God, who is Three and is One,
of my awakened heart. [...]
Who will tell me if in the secret archive
of God are the letters of my name?
I want to get back to the common things:
Water, bread, a pitcher, roses...
He returns to the previous idea of whether I am a word or someone: Who will tell me if the letters of my name are in God's secret archive? Until the end of his life, Borges, starting from an agnosticism induced by his father's education, by his readings, leaves an open door to a God in whom the essence of his life may lie.
