Subject
"Time and personal immortality in J.L Borges,
H.Bergson and W. James in relation to V.Nabokov's Ada and Pale
Fire."
H.Bergson and W. James in relation to V.Nabokov's Ada and Pale
Fire."
From
Date
Body
Dear List,
Dallying on from Beckett towards Borges, I was surprised to learn from the latter that, as with the nabokovian Beauchamp-Campbell in Pale Fire, also Edgar Allan Poe offers a sophisticated substitution of names in his novel "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym". Common readers, like me, may ignore that the novel's title carries a name that is a variation of Edgar Allan Poe's own [Arthur is Edgar (Saxon), Allan is Gordon (Scottish) while "Pym and Poe are equivalent"].
I selected a few sentences from the five classes Borges delivered in Argentina, in 1978, because it seems to me that they weren't translated into English and they bear a close relation to some of the opinions expressed by Shade and Van Veen about Time, the transmigration of the souls and personal immortality.
Borges's freely-associative recitations of English poets or terse sentences by known philosophers enriches the audience's feelings about how ideas can be transformed by Art but, unfortunately, my summary and translation do no justice to Borges's flowing and erudite style. I hope, though, that some of his quotations will be of interest to the List, particularly in the context of Van Veen's teachings about time and psychology.
In his first lesson(*1) Borges observes that William James in"The Varieties of Religious Experience"(*2) has declared that "personal immortality is a minor issue in comparison to the big philosophical problems of Time, External Reality and Knowledge." For Borges, even when St. Thomas of Aquinas concludes that "Intellectus naturaliter desiderat esse semper," the hypothesis of a personal, not humanity's nor any cosmic immortality can still be dismissed since, if time is infinite, infinity must embrace all present moments - including the one in which he, Borges, is stating this idea to the assembled crowd at the University of Belgrano by addressing "each and every one" in the room, instead of "all the students"(that's only an abstraction), thereby placing that moment at the center of an imaginary line that links past, present and future. Turning to Pascal for whom, if the universe is infinite it must be like a sphere whose circumference lies everywhere and its center is nowhere, hes adds: "Why not say that any moment carries an infinite past and that this past flows through the present? At any moment in time we are at the center of an infinite line." (Van Veen's "amphiteatric vision of time").
According to Borges, John Donne sings "to the progress of the infinite soul," (*3) because he believes in its transmigration and, in more recent times, as in Bernard Shaw's "life force," or in Henri Bergson's "élan vital," we may discover ideas that maintain that life is, in essence, a desire for ressurrection. "Why do we need to imagine that we are going to carry our memory to go on in another life? This is simply a literary resource." he exclaims (*8). "Things will go on living in ouselves, independently of our remembering them consciously," before he adds: "Let's suppose we only possess one, instead of the known five senses - and that it's hearing. In these circumstances the visual world disappears along with the tactile, olfactory and gustatory sensations making Space disappear too, even if people can still communicate and exchange words or music. Time however remains in these circumstances because time is succession, measurable by the beats in music or in speech.Human consciousness, according to Bergson, is always going through a succession of moments. For him Eternity must is the sum of all our individual past moments but it also has to encompass every past moments that have been experienced by all conscious beings. Cf. John Shade and Van Veen on visual space and sonorous time (*4 ). For Arthur Schopenhauer the succession of experiences must happens in a gradual way because a full presentation of reality would be unbearable. For him, our idea of the future must correspond to our wish to go back to the beginning should we recognize that, having emerged from eternity, successive time will tend to return to eternity . Interspersed in his presentation Borges quotes Dante G. Rossetti in relation to a "nostalgia for the earth," as it may be experienced by a soul in heaven that is pining for a lost, still-living lover (*5), Tennyson's heraclitean lines, "Time is flowing in the middle of the night" (*6) and William Blake's vision of Time as a the gift from Eternity." (*7).
....................................................................................................................................................
*1 - In the collected lessons presented in "Borges Oral"(1979) translated as "Cinco Visões Pessoais" Editora Universidade de Brasília (1996),Cap 2 "A Imortalidade"
*2 - James finds consciousness to be a stream rather than a succession of "ideas." Its waters blend, and our individual consciousness - or, as he prefers to call it sometimes, our "sciousness" - is "steeped and dyed" in the waters of sciousness or thought that surround it. Our psychic life has rhythm: it is a series of transitions and resting-places, of "flights and perchings" (PP 236). Faced with the tension between scientific determinism and our belief in our own freedom or autonomy, James argues that science "must be constantly reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes, and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claims at all" (PP, 1179).Religious experiences connect us with a greater, or further, reality not accessible in our normal cognitive relations to the world: "The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' world" (V, 515).
William James (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/ -
(it' almost absurd to suppose that: the word "perching," used by William James to describe the flowing rythms of the mind will indicate that it was used as a technical term only because it receives a pair of quotation marks in the cyber-article I explored. However I'll risk the suggestion that, because Nabokov was familiar with the ideas of William James (Cf.Steve Blackwell's "The Quill and the Scalpel"# or B.Boyd's comments about "organs and orgitrons"in his book on "Ada"), perhaps his repeated use of "perch" in "Pale Fire" may serve to introduce us to a whiff of jamesian metaphysics. I counted its emergence 6 times. The first on JS's line 70, for a mockingbird; the next to line 872 for the "right word". Then, in CK's notes for lines 47-48 about Sybil, in line 238 to indicate a seagull and then to queen Disa on note to 433-34. Finally we find John Shade's "porch or perch" in note to line 991. btw: "perch" also appears at least ten times in Ada, including the perch as a substantive fish. A perching raven is present in Poe's famous poem. Besides, ."to perch" must be a fairly common English term - and in a "preterist" family in particular! ).
*3 - On the Progress of the Soul by John Donne
"The world is but a carcass; thou art fed
By it, but as a worm, that carcass bred;
And why shouldst thou, poor worm, consider more,
When this world will grow better than before,
Than those thy fellow-worms do think upon
That carcass's last resurrection?
Forget this world, and scarce think of it so,
As of old clothes, cast off a year ago.
....
Think thyself labouring now with broken breath,
And think those broken and soft notes to be
Division, and thy happiest harmony.
Think thee laid on thy death-bed, loose and slack,
And think that but unbinding of a pack,
To take one precious thing, thy soul, from thence." #2
*4 - Ada or Ardor: "Space is related to our senses of sight, touch, and muscular effort; Time is vaguely connected with hearing (still, a deaf man would perceive the 'passage' of time incomparably better than a blind limbless man would the idea of 'passage'). 'Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears,' says John Shade, a modem poet...Space flutters to the ground, but Time remains between thinker and thumb, when Monsieur Bergson uses his scissors. Space introduces its eggs into the nests of Time: a 'before' here, an 'after' there - and a speckled clutch of Minkowski's 'world-points.' ...I cannot imagine Space without Time, but I can very well imagine Time without Space. 'Space-Time' ...One can be a hater of Space, and a lover of Time....We have suggested earlier that the dim intervals between the dark beats have the feel of the texture of Time...Because of its situation among dead things, that dim continuum cannot be as sensually groped for, tasted, harkened to, as Veen's Hollow between rhythmic beats; but it shares with it one remarkable indicium: the immobility of perceptual Time. "
*5 - I didn't find the lines but here is another poem about a mystical sense of déja-vu:
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell;
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
(in 'Sudden Light', 1881)
*6 - The Mystic by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:"...he hath felt/The vanities of after and before/.../For him the silent congregated hours,/Daughters of time, divinely tall.../...Upheld, and ever hold aloft the cloud/Which droops low hung on either gate of life,/Both birth and death; he in the centre fixed,/.../He often lying broad awake, and yet/Remaining from the body, and apart/In intellect and power and will, hath heard/Time flowing in the middle of the night..."
*7 - "Eternity is in love with the productions of time."
* 8 - Pale Fire (523-535)
"I'm ready to become a floweret
Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.
And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life...//
Are found in Heaven by the newlydead."
# - "the mind's history does not obey any deterministic laws; the known "physical" world tends to include patterns and discontinuities that are best termed metaphysical. I have argued that he had essentially idealist convictions, embracing possibilities that come from beyond the world of sense experience. These are not claims one expects to hear about a scientist, although as we have seen, Nabokov was preceded by other major scientists with a similar metaphysical bent (William James, Oliver Lodge, Arthur Eddington, and physicist-manqué Henri Bergson, to name just a few). In this Conclusion, I will explore the paradox of the anti-causal scientist, meanwhile placing Nabokov within the context of later discussions of science vs. anti-science and affirming Nabokov's place in the first camp, rather than the second." (S.Blackwell)
#2 Pale Fire
(209- 220) "What moment in the gradual decay
Does resurrection choose? What year? What day?
Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape?
Are some less lucky, or do all escape?
..........................................
(560- 567) "Precautions to be taken in the case
Of freak reincarnation: what to do
On suddenly discovering that you
Are now a young and vulnerable toad //
// Time means succession, and succession, change:"
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Dallying on from Beckett towards Borges, I was surprised to learn from the latter that, as with the nabokovian Beauchamp-Campbell in Pale Fire, also Edgar Allan Poe offers a sophisticated substitution of names in his novel "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym". Common readers, like me, may ignore that the novel's title carries a name that is a variation of Edgar Allan Poe's own [Arthur is Edgar (Saxon), Allan is Gordon (Scottish) while "Pym and Poe are equivalent"].
I selected a few sentences from the five classes Borges delivered in Argentina, in 1978, because it seems to me that they weren't translated into English and they bear a close relation to some of the opinions expressed by Shade and Van Veen about Time, the transmigration of the souls and personal immortality.
Borges's freely-associative recitations of English poets or terse sentences by known philosophers enriches the audience's feelings about how ideas can be transformed by Art but, unfortunately, my summary and translation do no justice to Borges's flowing and erudite style. I hope, though, that some of his quotations will be of interest to the List, particularly in the context of Van Veen's teachings about time and psychology.
In his first lesson(*1) Borges observes that William James in"The Varieties of Religious Experience"(*2) has declared that "personal immortality is a minor issue in comparison to the big philosophical problems of Time, External Reality and Knowledge." For Borges, even when St. Thomas of Aquinas concludes that "Intellectus naturaliter desiderat esse semper," the hypothesis of a personal, not humanity's nor any cosmic immortality can still be dismissed since, if time is infinite, infinity must embrace all present moments - including the one in which he, Borges, is stating this idea to the assembled crowd at the University of Belgrano by addressing "each and every one" in the room, instead of "all the students"(that's only an abstraction), thereby placing that moment at the center of an imaginary line that links past, present and future. Turning to Pascal for whom, if the universe is infinite it must be like a sphere whose circumference lies everywhere and its center is nowhere, hes adds: "Why not say that any moment carries an infinite past and that this past flows through the present? At any moment in time we are at the center of an infinite line." (Van Veen's "amphiteatric vision of time").
According to Borges, John Donne sings "to the progress of the infinite soul," (*3) because he believes in its transmigration and, in more recent times, as in Bernard Shaw's "life force," or in Henri Bergson's "élan vital," we may discover ideas that maintain that life is, in essence, a desire for ressurrection. "Why do we need to imagine that we are going to carry our memory to go on in another life? This is simply a literary resource." he exclaims (*8). "Things will go on living in ouselves, independently of our remembering them consciously," before he adds: "Let's suppose we only possess one, instead of the known five senses - and that it's hearing. In these circumstances the visual world disappears along with the tactile, olfactory and gustatory sensations making Space disappear too, even if people can still communicate and exchange words or music. Time however remains in these circumstances because time is succession, measurable by the beats in music or in speech.Human consciousness, according to Bergson, is always going through a succession of moments. For him Eternity must is the sum of all our individual past moments but it also has to encompass every past moments that have been experienced by all conscious beings. Cf. John Shade and Van Veen on visual space and sonorous time (*4 ). For Arthur Schopenhauer the succession of experiences must happens in a gradual way because a full presentation of reality would be unbearable. For him, our idea of the future must correspond to our wish to go back to the beginning should we recognize that, having emerged from eternity, successive time will tend to return to eternity . Interspersed in his presentation Borges quotes Dante G. Rossetti in relation to a "nostalgia for the earth," as it may be experienced by a soul in heaven that is pining for a lost, still-living lover (*5), Tennyson's heraclitean lines, "Time is flowing in the middle of the night" (*6) and William Blake's vision of Time as a the gift from Eternity." (*7).
....................................................................................................................................................
*1 - In the collected lessons presented in "Borges Oral"(1979) translated as "Cinco Visões Pessoais" Editora Universidade de Brasília (1996),Cap 2 "A Imortalidade"
*2 - James finds consciousness to be a stream rather than a succession of "ideas." Its waters blend, and our individual consciousness - or, as he prefers to call it sometimes, our "sciousness" - is "steeped and dyed" in the waters of sciousness or thought that surround it. Our psychic life has rhythm: it is a series of transitions and resting-places, of "flights and perchings" (PP 236). Faced with the tension between scientific determinism and our belief in our own freedom or autonomy, James argues that science "must be constantly reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes, and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claims at all" (PP, 1179).Religious experiences connect us with a greater, or further, reality not accessible in our normal cognitive relations to the world: "The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' world" (V, 515).
William James (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/ -
(it' almost absurd to suppose that: the word "perching," used by William James to describe the flowing rythms of the mind will indicate that it was used as a technical term only because it receives a pair of quotation marks in the cyber-article I explored. However I'll risk the suggestion that, because Nabokov was familiar with the ideas of William James (Cf.Steve Blackwell's "The Quill and the Scalpel"# or B.Boyd's comments about "organs and orgitrons"in his book on "Ada"), perhaps his repeated use of "perch" in "Pale Fire" may serve to introduce us to a whiff of jamesian metaphysics. I counted its emergence 6 times. The first on JS's line 70, for a mockingbird; the next to line 872 for the "right word". Then, in CK's notes for lines 47-48 about Sybil, in line 238 to indicate a seagull and then to queen Disa on note to 433-34. Finally we find John Shade's "porch or perch" in note to line 991. btw: "perch" also appears at least ten times in Ada, including the perch as a substantive fish. A perching raven is present in Poe's famous poem. Besides, ."to perch" must be a fairly common English term - and in a "preterist" family in particular! ).
*3 - On the Progress of the Soul by John Donne
"The world is but a carcass; thou art fed
By it, but as a worm, that carcass bred;
And why shouldst thou, poor worm, consider more,
When this world will grow better than before,
Than those thy fellow-worms do think upon
That carcass's last resurrection?
Forget this world, and scarce think of it so,
As of old clothes, cast off a year ago.
....
Think thyself labouring now with broken breath,
And think those broken and soft notes to be
Division, and thy happiest harmony.
Think thee laid on thy death-bed, loose and slack,
And think that but unbinding of a pack,
To take one precious thing, thy soul, from thence." #2
*4 - Ada or Ardor: "Space is related to our senses of sight, touch, and muscular effort; Time is vaguely connected with hearing (still, a deaf man would perceive the 'passage' of time incomparably better than a blind limbless man would the idea of 'passage'). 'Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears,' says John Shade, a modem poet...Space flutters to the ground, but Time remains between thinker and thumb, when Monsieur Bergson uses his scissors. Space introduces its eggs into the nests of Time: a 'before' here, an 'after' there - and a speckled clutch of Minkowski's 'world-points.' ...I cannot imagine Space without Time, but I can very well imagine Time without Space. 'Space-Time' ...One can be a hater of Space, and a lover of Time....We have suggested earlier that the dim intervals between the dark beats have the feel of the texture of Time...Because of its situation among dead things, that dim continuum cannot be as sensually groped for, tasted, harkened to, as Veen's Hollow between rhythmic beats; but it shares with it one remarkable indicium: the immobility of perceptual Time. "
*5 - I didn't find the lines but here is another poem about a mystical sense of déja-vu:
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell;
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
(in 'Sudden Light', 1881)
*6 - The Mystic by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:"...he hath felt/The vanities of after and before/.../For him the silent congregated hours,/Daughters of time, divinely tall.../...Upheld, and ever hold aloft the cloud/Which droops low hung on either gate of life,/Both birth and death; he in the centre fixed,/.../He often lying broad awake, and yet/Remaining from the body, and apart/In intellect and power and will, hath heard/Time flowing in the middle of the night..."
*7 - "Eternity is in love with the productions of time."
* 8 - Pale Fire (523-535)
"I'm ready to become a floweret
Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.
And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life...//
Are found in Heaven by the newlydead."
# - "the mind's history does not obey any deterministic laws; the known "physical" world tends to include patterns and discontinuities that are best termed metaphysical. I have argued that he had essentially idealist convictions, embracing possibilities that come from beyond the world of sense experience. These are not claims one expects to hear about a scientist, although as we have seen, Nabokov was preceded by other major scientists with a similar metaphysical bent (William James, Oliver Lodge, Arthur Eddington, and physicist-manqué Henri Bergson, to name just a few). In this Conclusion, I will explore the paradox of the anti-causal scientist, meanwhile placing Nabokov within the context of later discussions of science vs. anti-science and affirming Nabokov's place in the first camp, rather than the second." (S.Blackwell)
#2 Pale Fire
(209- 220) "What moment in the gradual decay
Does resurrection choose? What year? What day?
Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape?
Are some less lucky, or do all escape?
..........................................
(560- 567) "Precautions to be taken in the case
Of freak reincarnation: what to do
On suddenly discovering that you
Are now a young and vulnerable toad //
// Time means succession, and succession, change:"
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/