In Memoriam, Always Already

The view from my apartment complex.

Esta bala es antigua. 

En 1897 la disparó contra el presidente del Uruguay un muchacho de Montevideo, Arredondo, que había pasado largo tiempo sin ver a nadie, para que lo supieran sin cómplice. Treinta años antes, el mismo proyectil mató a Lincoln, por obra criminal o mágica de un actor, a quien las palabras de Shakespeare habían convertido en Marco Bruto, asesino de César. Al promediar el siglo XVII la venganza la usó para dar muerte a Gustavo Adolfo de Suecia, en mitad de la pública hecatombe de una batalla. 

Antes, la bala fue otras cosas, porque la transmigración pitagórica no sólo es propia de los hombres. Fue el cordón de seda que en el Oriente reciben los visires, fue la fusilería y las bayonetas que destrozaron a los defensores del Álamo, fue la cuchilla triangular que segó el cuello de una reina, fue los oscuros clavos que atravesaron la carne del Redentor y el leño de la Cruz, fue el veneno que el jefe cartaginés guardaba en una sortija de hierro, fue la serena copa que en un atardecer bebió Sócrates. 

En el alba del tiempo fue la piedra que Caín lanzó contra Abel y será muchas cosas que hoy ni siquiera imaginamos y que podrán concluir con los hombres y con su prodigioso y frágil destino.

***

This bullet is ancient. 

In 1897, a boy from Montevideo fired it at the president of Uruguay after spending a long time in solitude so he would be known to have acted alone. Thirty years previous, the same projectile killed Lincoln, in the criminal or magical act of a thespian made Marcus Brutus, assassin of Caesar, by Shakespeare himself. At the turn of the seventeenth century, vengeance used it to deal death to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the midsts of the public catastrophe of battle. 

Before that, the bullet was other things, because Pythagorean transubstantiation is not only the domain of men. It was the silk cord that Oriental viziers met; it was the artillery and the bayonets that destroyed the Alamo's last defenders; it was the triangular knife that slit the queen's throat; it was the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer and the wood of the Cross; it was the poison that the Carthagean general kept in an iron ring; it was the placid cup from which Socrates drank one late afternoon.

At the dawn of time it was the rock that Cain threw at Abel. It will be many more things that we cannot yet fathom but that will be able to put an end to men and their prodigious, fragile destiny. 

— Jorge Luis Borges. In Memoriam, J.F.K. English translation mine. 

A Canticle for Daniel, Part I

This will be a three-part series. The prologue is here.

Sometimes I wonder about the validity of the hedonistic, comfortable life I lead with my head buried deep in books or in the thirteenth century. Particularly if I've had a frustrating time teaching, I have a sense that I'm doing nothing to improve the world or make a mark. So I suppose that one small, quiet thing that I can do is to make different types of knowledge accessible, organized in an original and thought-provoking fashion — that is, be a certain type of long-form talking head and hope for the best. The medieval can be a guide, but so, too, is the twentieth century with its nationalism, new borders, cycle of despotism and the fearless reporting that was the first draft of it all. What follows is a most literary excerpt from that first draft, a lesser-known 1934 essay by Jorge Luis Borges entitled "Yo, judío," translated here 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, 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 Judaeo-Portuguese stock.' 'Acevedo' is included in this 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 Viceroyalty — an ancestor, in short, irreparably 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 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 Phonecians, Garamantes, Scythians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Huns, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Ethiopians, Illyrians, Paphalagonians, Sarmatians, 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. 

In Borges' reality, to be made a Jew is an act formed of malice and "outing;" in the present reality to be baptized is articulated an act of kindness. But the Mormon act is nothing more than the flip side of what was done to Borges in Crisol; both make being Jewish a flaw to be identified and remedied. Borges, though, walks cleanly down the line between what is and what might have been, fantasizing and stopping short of becoming his own inquisitor. Though he might have wished it to be different, he does what he can with the past he can identify and leaves the rest to hope, prayer, imagination.

He extends the same courtesy to his ancestors: In the realidad histórica, there are two: the visible Spanish viceroy and the missing Israelite. As an essayist, all he can do is present the gaping short distance between them rather than remedy it.

He also raises one of the interesting archival problems that the Mormon baptismal project creates. Intimating an answer of not much at all, Borges asks: "What would we think of someone in the year 4000 who uncovers people from San Juan Province everywhere?" What would we think? By posthumous baptism, the Latter-Day Saints are creating a world where future historians will find Mormons everywhere. They are creating a world where the five-hundred-years-from-now versions of ourselves will find people of San Juan Province everywhere. They're not making themselves the new Israel like early Christians did, or even like the Boston Puritans who made their colony a beacon on a hill as a light unto the nations; instead they are making themselves a latter-day Israel, the unqualified obsession of the modern age.

This is the enrichment of ignorance.