(no subject)

[proximoception]

Struggling with what to make of "The Theologians," everything in which is teasingly close to schematic without being it. Is the only point that these people, who find themselves so different, find their differences literally damnable, look basically alike to us - and presumably would look even more so to a not-so-personal (and not-so-specific?) God? Who can tell the heresies apart, even directly opposite ones: time is repeated infinitely, everything happens only once (actually, much more distinct than the most controversial ones re. Jesus which none of us can keep straight). Obviously both are wrong, but that both were believed indicates that a very similar thing keeps happening over and over - absurd religious disputes about attributes or intentions of God people pulled out of their asses. Or am I missing something else, something Borgesian and cool? Though it's pretty cool to be this scornfully yet sympathetically amused at theology itself.

Was the lightning bolt part of the humor? "Oh, he was struck by lightning, God must be punishing him," then the other shoe drops and "God" takes him into "heaven" indifferent of what he'd done, unable to tell him apart from his victim and worst enemy.

Seems like some kind of point is being made about quotation as well. Similarities exist but not sames? And we recognize this by borrowing opinions of others we nevertheless do not share in their exact form (since that would be Menardism)?

I don't know the date of composition, but I wonder if there's also present an element of mockery toward people's more creative interpretations of Borges' earlier stories. This one does leave you in no doubt - if you weren't already - that Borges doesn't actually believe in the various infinite demiurgencies he's been describing, at least in any occult way. Maybe even poking fun at Nietzsche too? Unoriginality, the same damn errors over and over, as the prize example of eternal recurrence. Though when John refutes the Monotones elegantly, his style seems like that of "all men" - perhaps it is our best that is most human, most shared. Whereas our differences, our insistent heresies, are falls from that? I don't know, I think I'm missing something.

Comments

googling

[andalus.livejournal.com]

Borges: In fact, it[The Warrior and the Captive]'s the same story as "The Theologians," now that I come to think of it. In "The Theologians" you have two enemies and one of them sends the other to the stake. And then they find out somehow they're the same man. But I think "The Warrior and the Captive" is a better story, no?

in re: 1) authors being no great judge of their own works but 2) surely sameness exists but not similarity. The lightning I took as a natural fire, the corollary of the human fire of the stake, they are opposites yet same, they recur but do not, their existence denies and proves the frameworks they both railed against or (accidentally?) touted. I guess the best in man here is their sameness, or their genius, which is unconnected to man or nature since both man and nature cut them both down fairly randomly.

I'm unsure about quotation though.

Re: googling

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Warrior and Captive gave me the Crowley vibe again. Yeah, more haunting, simpler - but the same?

But Theologians is very interesting to think about. I think same v. similar probably reverses because of what each of us is putting on those words. Seems like there's two sames: the selfsame of fulfilled human potential and the distressing sameness of prolonged individual departures from it - which in their details are different.

I'm finding the story coheres better when you think of it in terms of the title. He really means all of them - see elsewhere, can't remember where, his praise of the God of the theologians as the most intricate creation of humankind. And his famous early stories are less explicit assaults on some of the same targets, the same sorts of solutions. The Captive story praises the need for finding a secret newness in life, or withheld unfathomed oldness, without stressing the crazy contingencies this can lead you into (well, not much). Belonging to a people rather than an ideology - a nostalgia of Borges'?

Borges is a great judge of his own work! Though perhaps not decades later when he gave billions of interviews and didn't want to seem too strange or barbaric or ungrandfatherly to his young worshippers.