Hapaxlegomenon

anand bose 2004

For Bea

Hebraic Aleph in Borgesian story

As I am reading the story Aleph again and again, my thoughts about it
seem to be changing?And I am noting down my thoughts as they occurred
to me ? I am strangely wondering whether the woman in it Borges
referred to as Beatrice is Dante's Beatrice. It's really amusing to
connote Beatrice's brother as //Dante. // Daneri is a brilliant poet
but parodied by Borges himself as the first person, as concupiscence of
burlesque flesh!

Beatrice too in the Borgesian story is no longer alive; her memory is
resuscitated to life as a lover, as mystic fetish that adorned that
glorious mansion containing the Aleph. Borges is a shaman mourning the
fruit of withered Beatrice and a dialectical philosopher trying to
unite the spirit with at-least a representation. Its is humorous to
juxtapose the II-nd Corinthian thought: " the letter killeth: but, the
spirit giveth life and the esoteric wisdom of the kabbala that Aleph is
Ensof or boundless wisdom of creation. And still, the aleph is only
oxen's head in earliest origin.

The connotation of the Aleph as a "point in space containing all the
points" adds own the pompous abstraction of creative causality as
chance occurrence of representative consciousness striking exactitude
to the art of the symbol! Its paradoxical to infiltrate this idea with
literature: as the death of God is the death of unrecognised symbol.
The art of cognition to consciously adopt life is to understand the
mere representation of the symbol and translate it to the spirit as
being consciously done.

As the story of the Aleph progresses we find the state of the mansion
containing the Aleph to be dismantled to more propitious need of
commerce. Daneri wails as if possessed by a child and invites Borges to
traverse a long and winding cellar where the Aleph is kept as a
treasure. There's a child's journey into a looking glass where
geography, fantasy and fable mingle into amazing wonder of being the
joy literature. To the reader's consternation, we find that the Aleph
in Daneri's mansion is false. The real is left to a baffling nature of
being invited!

My readings of the Aleph are from Prof. Andrew Hurley's translation,
Penguin edition