No one can write a book

The Sky of Blue Is Sky and Is Blue

by Jorge Luis Borges

The landscape is gathered around the window. I see spread before me dunes, languishing and soft, the sea which under the sky of a blue coward is pressed against the horizon, the high, sandy hills open with an amplitude of nascent pressure, and in the space which little by little humbles itself until it forms the beach, a house of zinc, there, struck again by the miles and besieged by the crowds of sun.

All that, and sometimes one of these pyramids of lead black which are raised on the oil wells, composes the desperate landscape which surrounds me, and is known only too well by all the inhabitants of this corner of Chubut.

Its written fixation – where the habit of literature has imposed one or two images – occupies more lines, which nonetheless copy a unique perception, that can be embraced with a very brief glance.

Let us try now to put it into the different languages of metaphysics and see in what manner the philosophers explain this simple phenomenon: the perception of a thing, an inquiry which opens right away on the problem of comprehension and can guide us, without technical pleasantries or virtual jargon, straight to the most astonishing depths of our subject.

Before anything else, we examine the explanation, current and without value, of the man who is never inclined to the metaphysical. This one begins by denying the existence of the problem, then doubts the seriousness of our question, and after having drifted for some time through the unavoidable suburbs of philosophical initiation, declares to us that before I looked at it, this landscape was already anchored there, just as it is now. Then, hammering out a classical dialectic, we announce to him that the landscape is an ensemble visual subject of innumerable changes, by light, time, distance, the aspect of the spectator and other conditions still. Of all these landscapes, we ask him, which is the real? The man tries to delimit a frontier between the real landscape and the caprices brought to it by the perspective of the climate, gets bogged down in the words, and ends up in silence, paralyzed by the rebellious and traitorous character, completely unforeseen, that they assume.

And we can leave him there, to make his apprenticeship with Kant, to invent some old responses and to be delayed at the timeworn crossroads, always a little dazed from his shock by the metaphysical, full of hope today in his final revenge, and ready to fall tomorrow into a more complete incredulity. Now let us hear the materialists. They affirm that this which I sense, hear, see, feel, taste and clasp in my hands has no reality, and that the only things which merit being honored by a such a worthy denomination are energy, atoms or molecular combinations; things which in themselves are not verifiable by the senses. However, to imagine them from any particular fashion and make up for their condition of unimportant thing and simple amplified word, I must give them visibility, a dimension and other singularities proper to render them apparent; that is to say that I must assimilate them perfectly to the ensembles of perceptions for the explication of which they have been invented, and of which the materialists deny totally the reality. That is an aberration which, if we were to hear it for the first time, would fill us with fear.

In sum, materialism explains nothing, and the concept of two coexistent, parallel universes, the one essential, continuous, collective, and the other phenomenal, intermittent, psychological, is more a complication than an aid. If we accept it, we are faced not with one, but two problems. The fact that the physical sciences have need of electrons, of magnetism and of molecules does not imply that these have an independent existence: a negation which comes close to the instrumental concept of truth defended by the pragmatists and which, as we will see later, is not, any more than the others, completely just . . .

Finally, the arbitrary distinction that materialism establishes between such and such qualities in affirming that this which is touched in particular is objective, but that sounds and colors are only subjective, is nothing other than a shameful incomprehension and a philosophical droning that does not succeed at redeeming some poor presentiments and vague flashes of the metaphysical vision.

Let's listen to idealism, then. Schopenhauer, the thinker who promulgated this doctrine with the happiest perspicacity and the most plausible assaults of ingenuity, wants to elucidate the world with the aid of two keys, representation and will. This can be expressed in the following way.

Before Schopenhauer, all ontological speculation made either the spirit or matter its point of departure. On one side were those who lowered the spirit to the point of making it only a derivation of matter and the consequence of its transformations; the others, inversely, declared that matter is a creation of the spirit, to which they gave a name. Subject, for Fichte, Demiurge or God for the theologians. Schopenhauer left aside these two hypotheses, in posing the impossibility of a subject without object and vice versa, this which is expressed in the terms of our example, in saying that the landscape cannot exist without someone to perceive it, nor can I exist without something occupying the field of my consciousness. The world is, consequently, representation, and there is not a causal link between objectivity and the subject.

But it is equally will, for each of us senses that to the powerful tide and the continual push of exterior things we can oppose our volition. Our body is a machine which registers perceptions; but it is also a tool which transforms them as it wants. It is this force of which we attest all in existence that Schopenhauer calls will: a force which is asleep in the rocks, awake in the plants, and conscious in humans . . .

Which other explanations of life do you want us to examine? There is the one proposed by Pythagoras, who wanted to found the world on numeric principles; there is that proposed by Plato, who affirmed that if in seeing the dunes I can perceive their slope and their yellowish tone, it is because in another life cycle I knew the pure ideas of Yellow or of the Oblique that these hills of sand now copy – a response which is limited to displacing the problem towards the inaccessible distance – ; there is this which the Cabala whispers and which the theosophists of Alexandria savored, according to which we are emanations of God and our inquietude is the profound desire to return to the divine fatherland; there is this of Kant, who propped the sensual appearances on an imperceptible thing in itself; there is this of Valentin, who offered that the initiators of the world were the sea and silence. These explanations, and many more still, of which the reader will correct the fortuitous or voluntary omission, are opposed and in contradiction.

However, all these divergences have a common center: the configured practice of relating a phenomenon to some others, and of insisting on the existence of an axis which, according to the idiosyncrasy of the schools, is called God, Representation or Energy.

They who have noted this universal weakness insist in seeing there a simple indulgence of the tongue, an indiscreet splashing in the river of language, which goes out on great waves from the jurisdiction of its bed. This is an error. The fault cannot be imputed to language, and the keys already mentioned are not equal to "sesame," "abracadabra" and other talisman-like conjurations of an old superstition. These last signify nothing, and the former say something, even parsimoniously. The fault is in rejecting the search, not the response.

Let’s remember that Lichtenberg called man das rastlose Ursachentier, the indefatigable causal beast. And if the principle of causality were a myth, and each state of consciousness – perception, memory or idea – concealed nothing, had neither hiding places nor paths to others, nor profound signification, and were only that which it seemed to be in its absolute and confidential integrity?

At first sight, this conjecture seems impossible to us. Nevertheless, a simple meditation convinces us of its validity and even of its axiomatic certitude.

Choose the philosophical key which seems to you the most efficacious and apply it to the chain of ocular perceptions which motivated this inquiry. You will see that, far from clarifying them or being confounded with them, it remains intact, isolated. It will be only an event in your consciousness, as would be an intention or a sound. It in no way alters the truth of this which was or this that we have considered; it will simply be another reality, which will envelop the momentary present, but unable to modify the other presents which, regrouped in a single word, are called "pasts" by the actual present. These last remain strangers and inaccessible to all leveling connection. The horror of the nightmare which mistreats us during the night is not at all lessened by the observation that we make, upon waking, of its "falseness."

Someone will reproach me, perhaps, for stating with this argument a petitio principii, furnished by an arbitrary identification of events with the information we arrive at. But the fact is that we cannot go out of our consciousness, that all is produced there as in a unique theater, that we have in no way as yet experimented outside of these limits, and consequently that to presuppose that there exists something outside of these is only an unthinkable and vain obstinacy. This which it can be possible to pronounce, then: there is no continuity in life. Time is not a torrent in which phenomena bathe, the subject is not a trunk on which are hung, with an obstinate slack, sensations and ideas. For example, a pleasure is a pleasure, and to define it as the result of an equation of which the terms are the exterior world and the physiological structure of the individual is only incomprehensible and tedious pedantry. The sky of blue is sky and is blue, contrary to what Argensola posed [see below].

Or better: all exists, and nothing is.

A last affirmation. Language, this organized, military category, is not the most appropriate of intermediaries for the non-causality and the autonomy of facts. If you stop at the words of my argument and look for a way to return them and contradict them, you will succeed, perhaps, and you will find there an amusing verbal brainteaser and a brief diversion of the spirit, perceiving in it that your dialectic of the one who reads is superior to mine, to me, the one who writes. But if, surpassing these oral artifices, you try to deepen the substance of this I advance, you will feel that massive life cracks and disperses. Your Subject will consume its suicide, joyous and definitive; the opinions most opposed will never be annulled; wrinkled Eternity will hold in the short period of actuality; the formidable theological shadows will break; and infinite space will disappear with the exorbitant number of the stars.

Translated by Greg Macon

A una mujer que se afeitaba y estaba hermosa

by Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola

Yo os quiero confesar, don Juan, primero,
que aquel blanco y color de doña Elvira
no tiene de ella más, si bien se mira,
que el haberle costado su dinero.
Pero tras eso confesaros quiero
que es tanta la beldad de su mentira,
que en vano a competir con ella aspira
belleza igual de rostro verdadero.

Mas ¿qué mucho que yo perdido ande
por un engaño tal, pues que sabemos
que nos engaña así Naturaleza?

Porque ese cielo azul que todos vemos,
ni es cielo ni es azul. ¡Lástima grande
que no sea verdad tanta belleza!

To a woman who wore makeup and looked beautiful

At first, Sir John, I must confess to you
that Lady Helen's white and ruby glow
is only hers, if truth is to be told,
in that her money's spent to make it so.
But after that I also must confess
the beauty of her lie is so extreme
that never could a rival hope to try
her loveliness to best by natural means.

Yet do not be surprised that my desire
pursues this clear deceit, since we all know
that Nature's ways are surely devious too:

for that blue heaven that we all admire
is neither blue nor heaven. What a shame
that such great beauty should be so untrue!