Your whale collection would be incomplete without this book,
Merry Christmas!
Mom & Dad
“In Hyrcania, the people maintain dogs for the public use; the nobles have their own—and we know that they have a good breed of dogs; but every one, according to his ability, provides himself with some, in order to be eaten by them after death; and they hold that to be the best kind of interment.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculan Disputations
Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;
Remember the wisdom out of the old days:
Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,
And the winds that blow through the starry ways,
Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood
Cover over and hide, for he has no part
With the lonely, majestical multitude.
—W.B. Yeats, To his Heart, bidding it have no Fear
why do we go on
with our minds and
pockets full of
dust
like a bad boy just out of
school—
you tell
me,
you who were a hero in some
revolution
you who teach children
you who drink with calmness
you who own large homes
and walk in gardens
you who have killed a man and own a
beautiful wife
you tell me
why I am on fire like old dry
garbage.
—Charles Bukowski
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Una milonga que me gusta mucho, cantada por Jorge Cafrune, y con letra de Atahualpa Yupanqui, hoy que es su cumpleaños.
Milonga del Peón de Campo
I, a Jew
By Jorge Luis Borges
Date: 1934
tr. by Eliot Weinberger
Like the Druzes, like the moon, like death, like next week, the distant past is one of those things that can enrich ignorance. It is infinitely malleable and agreeable, far more obliging than the future and far less demanding of our efforts. It is the famous season favored by all mythologies.
Who has not, at one time or another, played with thoughts of his ancestors, with the prehistory of his flesh and blood? I have done so many times, and many times it has not displeased me to think of myself as Jewish. It is an idle hypothesis, a frugal and sedentary adventure that harms no one, not even the name of Israel, as my Judaism is wordless, like the songs of Mendelssohn. The magazine Crisol [Crucible], in its issue of January 30, has decided to gratify this retrospective hope; it speaks of my “Jewish ancestry, maliciously hidden” (the participle and the adverb amaze and delight me).
Borges Acevedo is my name. Ramos Mejía, in a note to the fifth chapter of Rosas and His Times, lists the family names in Buenos Aires at that time in order to demonstrate that all, or almost all, “came from Judeo-Portuguese stock.” “Acevedo” is included in the list: the only supporting evidence for my Jewish pretensions until this confirmation in Crisol. Nevertheless, Captain Honorio Acevedo undertook a detailed investigation that I cannot ignore. His study notes that the first Acevedo to disembark on this land was the Catalan Don Pedro de Azevedo in 1728: landholder, settler of “Pago de Los Arroyos,” father and grandfather of cattle ranchers in that province, a notable who figures in the annals of the parish of Santa Fe and in the documents of the history of the Vice-royalty—an ancestor, in short, irreparable Spanish.
Two hundred years and I can’t find the Israelite; two hundred years and my ancestor still eludes me.
I am grateful for the stimulus provided by Crisol, but hope is dimming that I will ever be able to discover my link to the Table of the Breads and the Sea of Bronze; to Heine, Gleizer, and the ten Sefiroth; to Ecclesiastes and Chaplin.
Statistically, the Hebrews were few. What would we think of someone in the year 4000 who uncovers people from San Juan Province everywhere? Our inquisitors seek out Hebrews, but never Phoenicians, Garamantes, Scythians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Ethiopians, Illyrians, Paphlagonians, Sarmantians, Medes, Ottomans, Berbers, Britons, Lybians, Cyclopes, or Lapiths. The nights of Alexandria, of Babylon, of Carthage, of Memphis, never succeeded in engendering a single grandfather; it was only to the tribes of the bituminous Dead Sea that this gift was granted.
I ruined the binding of a book.
I swear it’s the first time it happens.
The most archetypal hero in literature and mythology is Achilles. He was an asshole.
In a famous letter to Can Grande della Scala, Dante Alighieri notes that his Commedia, like the Holy Scriptures, may be read four different ways, of which the literal is only one. Overwhelmed by the beauty of the poetry, the reader nevertheless retains the indelible impression that the nine circles of Hell, the nine terraces of Purgatory, and the nine heavens of Paradise correspond to three establishments: one whose nature is penal; one, penitential; and another—if this archaism is bearable—premial. Passages such as “All hope abandon, ye who enter here” reinforce that topographical conviction made manifest through art.
This is completely different from Swedenborg’s extraterrestrial destinies. The Heaven and Hell in his doctrine are not places, although the souls of the dead who inhabit and, in a way, create them perceive them as being situated in space. They are conditions of the soul, determined by its former life. Heaven is forbidden to no one; Hell, imposed on no one. The doors, so to speak, are open. Those who have died do not know they are dead. For an indefinite period of time, they project an illusory image of their usual surroundings and friends. At the end of that period, strangers approach. The wicked dead find the looks and manners of the demons agreeable and quickly join them; the righteous choose the angels. For the blessed, the diabolical sphere is a region of swamps, caves, burning huts, ruins, brothels, and taverns. The damned are faceless or have faces that are mutilated and atrocious, but they think of themselves as beautiful. The exercise of power and mutual hatred is their happiness. They devote their lives to politics, in the most South American sense of the word: that is, they live to scheme, to lie, and to impose their will on others.
Swedenborg tells how a ray of celestial light once fell into the depths of Hell; the damned perceived it as a stench, an ulcerated wound, a darkness.
—Jorge Luis Borges
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
The Dubliners - Johnny McGorry
Hey, Johnny McGorry
Tell me where’s your glory gone
I saw you up in the Monto
With your old leg gone
A dirty Flanders bullet
Sure it left you half a man
Hey, Johnny McGorry
Where’s your old leg gone?
All the birds have flown up and gone;
A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
We never tire of looking at each other -
Only the mountain and I.
The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and I,
until only the mountain remains.
—Li Po
