No Regrets Journal Jorge Luis Borges
Fall 2017 Issue 22
No Regrets, a journal of poetry, prose and images about the exploration of being and meaning. Clayton Medeiros, Editor, Poet, Photographer claymedeiros@aol.com Neil McKay (Johnny Trash), Webmaster Submissions are by invitation of the editor Epublishing http://issuu.com/claymedeiros/docs Facebook page No Regrets Journal, haikus poems and photographs https://www.facebook.com/NoRegretsJournal 
Thief of Borges This story Stolen from Borges References Arcane texts Respectfully Translated Hidden moments Mirrors speak Minotaur listens Immune to time Among his libraries Every written word Of the endless world He may be the creator Where nothing’s certain He has not read for Many many years Tired of solitude He awaits the savior Who may come Noah’s dove Perhaps a rainbow Armed with a sword Aeneas comes Minotaur acquiesces To be once again With all that is


Borges believed the best communication was in conversation illustrated with stories. Conversation is more intimate than a lecture. His lectures were talks rather than set pieces or rhetorical performances with a beginning middle and end. He enjoyed responding to questions. I see him now conversing with Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Melville…. When I read him, I feel we are in dialogue. The breadth and openness of his writing lead to discussion even in his absence. “I have only my perplexities to offer you.” “Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that doesn’t imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he was trying to say that the visible world can be seen entire in every image, just as Schopenhauer tells us that the Will expresses itself entire in every man and woman. The Kabbalists believed that man is a microcosm, a symbolic mirror of the universe….”


“Whatever we may believe or think about issues like immortality, infinity, eternity, the migration of souls, God, gods, ghosts and related concepts and intuitions, we are intrinsically constrained by the facts of birth and death with no rational, evidentiary facts available for what we were before our birth or what we will be after our death. Faith remains available among the world’s many religions and other beliefs. On the other hand, equally relevant, is the infinite capability of our imagination, our thoughts to wander beyond the limitations of our senses and our life span.” “If we are something, we are our past, aren’t we? Our past is not what can be recorded in a biography or in the newspapers. Our past is our memory. That memory can be hidden or inaccurate—it doesn’t matter. It’s there, isn’t it? It can be a lie but that lie becomes part of our memory, part of us.” “At any second you could be Cain or the Buddha, the mask or the face.”
to fill today’s need memories create the past yearn for the future
Deeply influenced by the various translations of the Arabian Nights, he saw the tales as expanding an imaginative world of stories with magical universes and reality indistinguishable from one another. In reading various translations, he did not critique their relationship to the originals. As with all translations, each one brought its own sensibility, its own interpretation that added to the wealth of material already available. He felt the same way about his own readers. They had every right to have whatever interpretation of his work appealed to them. Each interpretation added to his works. “Art and practice are so mysterious that opinions are unimportant; I don’t think intentions are important either. What counts is the work and the work is by its nature mysterious. The poet works with words but the dictionary meanings of words are of least importance. What is really important is the atmosphere of words, the connotation and the cadence of words, the intonation…one is dealing with intangible and extremely mysterious elements.” “I did not chose those themes they chose me….A writer should let the themes seek him out he should start by rejecting them and then, grown resigned to them, he can write them down and pass them on to others.” “… anything could be a stimulant for a poet. All experience should simulate. There’s a passage in The Odyssey where the gods gave misfortune to man so that subsequent generations had something to sing about.” “Walter Pater said that all the arts aspire to the condition of music. That is, one can tell the plot of a story, perhaps even give it away, or that of a novel, but one cannot tell the story of a melody, however straightforward it may be.” “…language does not match up to the complexity of things. I think that the philosopher Whitehead talks of the paradox of the perfect dictionary, that is, the idea of supposing that all the words that a dictionary registers exhaust reality. Chesterton also wrote about this, saying that it is absurd to suppose that all the nuances of human consciousness, which are more vast than a jungle, can be contained in a mechanical system of grunts….”


Time and Infinity Creation is sacred in all moments including its present moment. Creation is sacred in the infinity that extends from this moment into the past. Creation is sacred from this moment into the future. Creation and our place in it become the center like the circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. Each of us stands in this center at any moment in time. “Why not say that this present moment has an infinite past behind it, an infinite yesterday, and that this past also passes through this present? At any given moment, we are at the center of an infinite line, in whatever place of the infinite center we are in the center of space, for time and space are infinite.” In the modern world, time is linear, an arrow forever moving in to the future, rising out of history, driving in to the present and in to the future. This idea often conflates with the concept of progress toward a superior future with political, religious, spiritual, or technological improvements and implications. This sense was very strong in the Victorian era where it was integrated with Christian beliefs and the inevitable righteousness of European civilization. Many other forms of time are not linear. Times intersect with one another and do not have the sense of inexorable history marching forward. “There is time, the endless mystery of being and the elusiveness of certainty.”


where ever you stand is the infinite center of past and future
For many Christians, there is creation, Eden, the fall of creation linked to the fall of humanity through original sin and ever approaching Armageddon, a final and conclusive battle between the forces of good and evil. The Christian God is infinite and separate from creation. For many religions including the worship of the Goddess in its many forms, creation itself is sacred. The Goddess is immanent in the world. The world is sacred. The Goddess is one with the world. We and the Goddess are stewards of creation. There are also Christians, Muslims and members of other faiths who see a responsibility to be in accord with nature. For Aboriginals, there is neither redemption nor a fall from paradise. All of creation and all moments are sacred and extend infinitely. The same is true for many other belief systems and groups including many First Nations in North America. Spinoza considered God to be manifest in nature and therefore natural law was at the heart of religious belief. Evangelical and other literal Bible interpreters have lost sight of this historic connection which also existed in the Medieval church in the general sense that God would not create something that was not natural and rational. In trying to establish the historic truth of religious belief, the links to nature and the cosmos are lost. The world of nature and natural can be integrated with the world of r religion. “In the seventeenth century, humanity was discouraged..it exhumed the belief in a slow and fatal degeneration of all creatures because of Adam’s sin.” It was epitomized by Pascal who “hated the universe and yearned to adore God, but God was less real to him than the hated universe. He lamented that the Firmament did not speak; he compared our life to the ship wrecked on a desert island.”
morning light has come you awaken from my dream my dear Shakespeare 
We are all dreamers: “there is an instant when its existence is gravely endangered and that is the shuddering instant of day break, with those who are dreaming the world are few and only the ones who have been up all night retain, ashen and barely outlined, the image of the streets that later others will define.” In describing the work of P’u Sung-ling a 17th century writer, he captures aspects of his own work, he “…manages to invisibly weave a world as unstable as water and as changing and marvelous as the clouds. A kingdom of dreams…the corridors and labyrinths of night mares. The dead return to life, a stranger who visits turns into a tiger, the apparently beautiful girl is merely a piece of skin on a green faced demon. A ladder climbs into the sky…” “The story goes that (Shakespeare) shortly before or after his death, when he found himself in the presence of God, he said, “I who have been so many men in vain want to be one man only, myself.” The voice of God answered him out of a whirlwind: ‘Neither am I what I am. I dreamed the world the way you dreamt your plays, dear Shakespeare. You are one of the shapes of my dreams: like me you are everything and nothing.”


For Borges, “Heaven and Hell 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 space 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 work: That is, they live to scheme, to lie, and to impose their will on others. Swedenborg tell how a ray of celestial light once fell into the depths of Hell; the damned perceive it as a stench, an ulcerated wound, a darkness‌. Regardless of baptism, regardless of the religion professed by their parents, all children go to heaven, where they are taught by the angels. In the celestial state, a man and a woman who loved each other will form a single angel.â€?