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Existentialist Ethics

. . . not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place. For, in a metaphysics of transcendence, in the classical sense of the term, evil is reduced to error; and in humanistic philosophies it is impossible to account for it, man being defined as complete in a complete world. Existentialism alone gives — like religions — a real role to evil, and it is this, perhaps, which makes its judgments so gloomy. Men do not like to feel themselves in danger. Yet it is because there are real dangers, real failures and real earthly damnation that words like victory, wisdom, or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win.

— Simone de Beauvoir, from The Ethics of Ambiguity

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Gloomy Passivity

A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort. It was to escape this dilemma that the Stoics preached indifference. We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free. But by doing that one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom.

— Simone de Beauvoir, from The Ethics of Ambiguity

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The Magnanimous Enemy :: J. L. Borges

Museum

Φ

Magnus Barfod, in the year 1102, undertook the general conquest
of the kingdoms of Ireland; it is said that on the eve of his death
he received this greeting from Muirchertach, king in Dublin:

May gold and the storm fight along with you in your armies,
Magnus Barfod.
Tomorrow, in the fields of my kingdom, may you have a
happy battle.
May your kingly hands be terrible in weaving the sword stuff.
May those opposing your sword become meat for the red swan.
May your many gods glut you with glory, may they glut you
with blood.
Victorious may you be in the dawn, king who tread on Ireland.
Of your many days may none shine bright as tomorrow.
Because that day will be the last. I swear it to you,
King Magnus.
For before its light is blotted, I shall vanquish you and blot
you out, Magnus Barfod.

From H. Gering: Anhang zur Heimskringla (1893)

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

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Limits :: J. L. Borges

Museum

Φ

There is a line in Verlaine I shall not recall again,
There is a street close by forbidden to my feet,
There’s a mirror that’s seen me for the very last time,
There is a door that I have locked till the end of the world.
Among the books in my library (I have them before me)
There are some that I shall never open now.
This summer I complete my fiftieth year;
Death is gnawing at me ceaselessly.

Julio Platero Haedo: Inscripciones (Montevideo, 1923)

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

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Quatrain :: J. L. Borges

Museum

Φ

Others died, but it happened in the past,
The season (as all men know) most favorable for death.
Is it possible that I, subject of Yaqub Almansur,
Must die as roses had to die and Aristotle?

From Divan of Almoqtadir El Magrebi (12th century)

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

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The Regret of Heraclitus :: J. L. Borges

Museum

Φ

I, who have been so many men, have never been
The one in whose embrace Matilde Urbach swooned.

Gaspar Camerarius, in Deliciae poetarum Borussiae, VII, 16

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]


			

	
	



			
				



	
	


		
					

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Dreamtigers Epiloge :: J. L. Borges

	


		

		
God grant that the essential monotony of this miscellany (which time has compiled – not I -and which admits past pieces that I have not dared to revise, because I wrote them with a different concept of literature) be less evident than the geographical and historical diversity of its themes. Of all the books I have delivered to the presses, none, I think, is as personal as the straggling collection mustered for this hodgepodge, precisely because it abounds in reflections and interpolations. Few things have happened to me, and I have read a great many. Or rather, few things have happened to me more worth remembering than Schopenhaur’s thought or the music of England’s words.


A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.


J. L. B


Buenos Aires, October 31, 1960.


[From Dreamtigers, by Jorges Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

			

	
	



			
				



	
	


		
					

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The Poet Declares His Renown :: J. L. Borges

	


		

		
Museum


 


 


Φ


The circle of the sky metes out my glory,

The libraries of the East contend for my poems,

Emirs seek me out to fill my mouth with gold,

Angels already know by heart my latest ghazal.

My working tools are humiliation and an anguish;

Would to God I’d been stillborn.


From the Divan of Abulcasim El Hadrami (12th century)


[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

			

	
	



			
				



	
	


		
					

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Quantum Mechanics of a Lonely Heart

	


		

		
. . . the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help from pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.


[From Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach]

			

	
	



			
				



	
	


		
					

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Giacomo Joyce :: James Joyce

	


		

		
[Numbers in brackets indicate the ends of the pages of Joyce’s original manuscript notebook.]


*


Who? A pale face surrounded by heavy odorous furs.

Her movements are shy and nervous. She uses quizzing-

glasses.

Yes: a brief syllable. A brief laugh. A brief beat of the

eyelids.


Cobweb handwriting, traced long and fine with quiet

disdain and resignation: a young person of quality.


I launch forth on an easy wave of tepid speech: Sweden-

borg, the pseudo-Areopagite, Miguel de Molinos,

Joachim Abbas. The wave is spent. Her classmate, re-

twisting her twisted body, purrs in boneless Viennese

Italian: Che coltura! The long eyelids beat and lift: a

burning needleprick stings and quivers in the velvet

iris.


High heels clack hollow on the resonant stone stairs.

Wintry air in the castle, gibbeted coats of mail, rude

iron sconces over the windings of the winding turret

stairs. Tapping clacking heels, a high and hollow noise.

There is one below would speak with your ladyship.


/ [1] /


She never blows her nose. A form of speech: the lesser for the greater.


Rounded and ripened: rounded by the lathe of intermarriage and ripened in the forcing-house of the seclusion of her race.


A ricefield near Vercelli under creamy summer haze. The wings of her drooping hat shadow her false smile. Shadows streak her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey wheyhued shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes


/ [2] /


A flower given by her to my daughter. Frail gift, frail giver, frail blue-veined child.


Padua far beyond the sea. The silent middle aga, night, darkness of history sleep in the Piazza delle Erbe under the moon. The city sleeps. Under the arches in the dark streets near the river the whores’ eyes spy out for forni-cators. Cinque servizi per cinque franchi. A dark wave of sense, again and again and again.


Mine eyes fail in darkness, mine eyes fail,

Mine eyes fail in darkness, love.


Again. No more. Dark love, dark longing. No more. Darkness.


Twilight. Crossing the piazza. Grey eve lowering on wide sagegreen pasturelands, shedding silently dusk and dew. She follows her mother with ungainly grace, the mare leading her filly foal. Grey twilight molds softly the slim and shapely haunches, the meek supple tendonous neck, the fine-boned skull. Eve, peace, the dusk of wonder . . . . . . . Hillo! Ostler! Hilloho!


/ [3] /


Papa and the girls sliding downhill, astride of a to-boggan: the Grand Turk and his harem. Tightly capped and astice, boots laced in deft crisscross over the flesh-warmed tongue, the short skirt taut from the round knobs of the knees. A white flash: a flake, a snowflake:


And when she next doth ride abroad

May I be there to see!


I rush out of the tobacco-shop and call her name. She turns and halts to hear my jumbled words of lessons, hours, lessons, hours: and slowly her pale cheeks are flushed with a kindling opal light. Nay, Nay, be not afraid!


/ [4] /


Mio padre: she does the simplest acts with distinction. Unde derivatur? Mia figlia ha una grandissima ammira-zione per il suo maestro inglese. The old man’s face, handsome, flushed, with strongly Jewish features and long white whiskers, turns towards me as we walk down the hill together. O! Perfectly said: courtesy, benevo-lence, curiosity, trust, suspicion, naturalness, helpless-ness of age, confidence, frankness, urbanity, sincerity, warning, pathos, compassion: a perfect blend. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!


This heart is sore and sad. Crossed in love?


Long lewdly leering lips: dark-blooded mollusks


/ [5] /


Moving mists on the hill as I look upward from night and mud. Hanging mists over the damp trees. A light in the upper room. She is dressing to go to the play. There are ghosts in the mirror . . . . . Candles! Candles!


A gentle creature. At midnight, after music, all the way up the via San Michele, these words were spoken softly. Easy now, Jamesy! Did you never walk the streets of Dublin at night sobbing another name?


Corpses of Jews lie about me rotting in the mould of their holy field. Here is the tomb of her people, black stone, silence without hope . . . . . Pimply Meissel brought me here. He is beyond those trees standing with covered head at the grave of his suicide wife, wondering how the woman who slept in his bed has come to this end . . . . . The tomb of her people and hers: black stone, silence without hope: and all is ready. Do not die!


/ [6] /


She raises her arms in an effort to hook at the nape of her neck a gown of black veiling. She cannot: no, she cannot. She moves backwards towards me mutely. I raise my arms to help her: her arms fall. I hold the websoft edges of her gown and drawing them out to hook them I see through the opening of the black veil her lithe body sheathed in an orange shift. It slips its ribbons of moorings at her shoulders and falls slowly: a lithe smooth naked body shimmering with silvery scales. It slips slowly over the slender buttocks of smooth polished silver and over their furrow, a tarnished silver shadow . . . . Fingers, cold and calm and moving . . . . A touch, a touch.


Small witless helpless and thin breath. But bend and hear: a voice. A sparrow under the wheels of juggernaut, shaking shaker of the earth. Please, mister God, big mister God! Goodbye, big world! . . . . . . . Aber das ist eine Schweinerei!


/ [7] /


Great bows of her slim silver shoes: spurs of a pampered fowl.


The lady goes aspace, aspace, aspace . . . . . Pure air on the upland road. Trieste is waking rawly: raw sunlight over its huddled browntiled roofs, testudoform; a multitude of prostrate bugs await a national deliverance. Bellumo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife: the busy housewife is astir, sloe-eyed, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand . . . . . Pure air and silence on the upland road: and hoofs. A girl on horseback. Hedda! Hedda Gabler!


The sellers offer on their altars the first fruits: green-flecked lemons, jeweled cherries, shameful peaches with torn leaves. The carriage passes through the lane of canvas stalls, its wheel spokes spinning in the glare. Make way! Her father and his son sit in the carriage. They have owls’ eyes and owls’ wisdom. Owlish wisdom stares from their eyes brooding upon the lore of their Summa contra Gentiles.


/ [8] /


She thinks the Italian gentlemen were right to haul Ettore Albini, the critic of the Secolo, from the stalls because he did not stand up when the band played the Royal March. She heard that at supper. Ay. They love their country when they are quite sure which country it is.


She listens: virgin most prudent.


A skirt caught by her sudden moving knee; a white lace edging of an underskirt lifted unduly; a leg-stretched web of stocking. Si pol?


I play lightly, softly singing, John Dowland’s languid song. Loth to depart: I too am loth to go. That age is here and now. Here, opening from the darkness of desire, are eyes that dim the breaking East, their shimmer the shimmer of the scum that mantles the cesspool of the court of slobbering James. Here are wines all ambered, dying fallings of sweet airs, the proud pavan, kind gentlewomen wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths, the pow-fouled wenches and young wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clip and clip again.


/ [9] /


In the raw veiled spring morning faint odours float of morning Paris: aniseed, damp sawdust, hot dough of bread: and as I cross the Pont Saint Michel the steel-blue waking waters chill my heart. They creep and lap about the island whereon men have lived since the stone age . . . . . Tawny gloom in the vast gargoyled church. It is cold as on that morning: quia frigus erat. Upon the steps of the far high altar, naked as the body of the Lord, the ministers lie prostrate in weak prayer. The voice of an unseen reader rises, intoning the lesson from Hosea. Haec dicit Dominus: in tribulation sua mane consurgent ad me. Venite et revertamur ad Dominum . . . . She stands beside me, pale and chill, clothed with the shadows of the sindark nave, her thin elbow at my arm. Her flesh recalls the thrill of that raw mist-veiled morning, hurrying torches, cruel eyes. Her soul is sorrowful, trembles and would weep. Weep not for me, O daughter of Jerusalem!


I expound Shakespeare to docile Trieste: Hamlet, quoth I, who is most courteous to gentle and simple is rude only to Polonius. Perhaps, an embittered idealist, he can see in the parents of his beloved only grotesque attempts on the part of nature to produce her image . . . . . . . . . . . Marked you that?


/ [10] /


She walks before me along the corridor and as she walks a dark coil of her hair slowly uncoils and falls. Slowly uncoiling, falling hair. She does not know and walks before me, simple and proud. So did she walk by Dante in simple pride and so, stainless of blood and violation, the daughter of Cenci, Beatrice, to her death:


. . . . . . . . Tie / My girdle for me and bind up this hair / In any simple knot.


The housemaid tells me that they had to take her away at once to the hospital, poveretta, that she suffered so much, so much, poveretta, that it is very grave . . . . . . I walk away from her empty house. I feel that I am about to cry. Ah, no! It will not be like that, in a moment, without a word, without a look. No, no! Surely hell’s luck will not fail me!


Operated. The surgeon’s knife has probed in her entrails and withdrawn, leaving the raw jagged gash of its passage on her belly. I see her full dark suffering eyes, beautiful as the eyes of an antelope. O cruel wound! Libidinous God!


Once more in her chair by the window, happy words on her tongue, happy laughter. A bird twittering after storm, happy that its little foolish life has fluttered out of reach of the clutching fingers of an epileptic lord and giver of life, twittering happily, twittering and chirping happily.


/ [11] /


She says that, had A Portrait of the Artist been frank only for frankness’ sake, she would have asked why I had given it to her to read. O you would, would you? A lady of letters.


She stands black-robed at the telephone. Little timid laughs, little cries, timid runs of speech suddenly broken . . . . Palerò colla mamma . . . . Come! chook, chook! come! The black pullet is frightened: little runs suddenly broken, little timid cries: it is crying for its mamma, the portly hen.


Loggione. The sodden walls ooze a steamy damp. A symphony of smells fuses the mass of huddled human forms: sour reek of armpits, nozzled oranges, melting breast ointments, mastick water, the breath of suppers of sulphurous garlic, foul phosphorescent farts, opoponax, the frank sweat of marriageable and married womankind, the soapy stink of men . . . . . . All night I have watched her, all night I shall see her: braided and pinnacled hair and olive oval face and calm soft eyes. A green fillet upon her hair and about her body a green-broidered gown: the hue of the illusion of the vegetable glass of nature and of lush grass, the hair of graves.


/ [12] /


My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.


Those quiet cold fingers have touched the pages, foul and fair, on which my shame for glow for ever. Quiet and cold and pure fingers. Have they never erred?


Her body has no smell: an odourless flower.


On the stairs. A cold frail hand: shyness, silence: dark languor-flooded eyes: weariness.


/ [13] /


Whirling wreaths of grey vapour upon the heath. Her face, how grey and grave! Dank matted hair. Her lips press softly, her sighing breath comes through. Kissed.


My voice, dying in the echoes of its words, dies like the wisdom-wearied voice of the Eternal calling on Abraham through echoing hills. She leans back against the pillowed wall: odalisque-featured in the luxurious obscurity. Her eyes have drunk my thoughts: and into the moist warm yielding welcoming darkness of her womanhood, itself dissolving, has streamed and poured and flooded a liquid and abundant seed . . . . . . Take her now who will! . . . .


/ [14] /


As I come out of Ralli’s house I come upon her suddenly as we both are giving alms to a blind beggar. She answers my sudden greeting by turning and averting her black basilisk eyes. E col suo vedere attosca l’uomo quando lo vede. I thank you for the word, messer Brunetto.


They spread under my feet carpets of the son of man. They await my passing. She stands in the yellow shadow of the hall, a plaid cloak shielding from chill her sinking shoulders: and as I halt in wonder and look about me she greets me wintrily and passes up the staircase darting at me for an instant out of her sluggish sidelong eyes a jet of liquorish venom.


A soft crumpled peagreen cover drapes the lounge. A narrow Parisian room. The hairdresser lay her but now. I kissed her stocking and the hem of her rustblack dusty skirt. It is the other. She. Gogarty came yesterday to be introduced. Ulysses is the reason. Symbol of the intellectual conscience . . . . Ireland then? And the husband? Pacing the corridor in list shoes or playing chess against himself. Why are we left here? The hairdresser lay here but now, clutching my head between her knobby knees . . . . Intellectual symbol of my race. Listen! The plunging gloom has fallen. Listen!

-I am not convinced that such activities of the mind or body can be called unhealthy.-

She speaks. A weak voice from beyond the cold stars. Voice of wisdom. Say on! O, say again, making me wise! This voice I never heard.

She coils towards me along the crumpled lounge. I cannot move or speak. Coiling approach of starborn flesh. Adultery of wisdom. No. I will go. I will.

-Jim, love! –

Soft sucking lips kiss my left armpit: a coiling kiss of myriad veins. I burn! I crumple like a burning leaf! From my right armpit a fang of flame leaps out. A starry snake has kissed me: a cold nightsnake. I am lost!

-Nora! –


/ [15] /


Jan Pieters Sweelink. The quaint name of the old Dutch musician makes all beauty seem quaint and far. I hear his variations for the clavichord on an old air: Youth has an end. In the vague mist of old sounds a faint point of light appears: the speech of the soul is about to be heard. Youth has an end: the end is here. It will never be. You know that well. What then? Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?


“Why?”

“Because otherwise I could not see you.”

Sliding-space-ages-foliage of stars-and waning heaven-stillness-and stillness deeper-stillness of annihilation-and her voice.


Non hunc sed Barabbam!


Unreadiness. A bare apartment. Torbid daylight. A long black piano: coffin of music. Poised on its edge a woman’s hat, red-flowered, and umbrella, furled. Her arms: a casque, gules, and blunt spear on a field, sable.


Envoy: Love me, love my umbrella.


/ [16] /


*

			

	
	



			
				



	
	


		
					

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That the Night Come :: W. B. Yeats

	


		

		
She lived in storm and strife,

Her soul had such desire

For what proud death may bring

That it could not endure

The common good of life,

But lived as ’twere a king

That packed his marriage day

With banneret and pennon,

Trumpet and kettledrum,

And the outrageous cannon,

To bundle time away

That the night come.

			

	
	



			
				



	
	


		
					

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To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing :: W. B. Yeats

	


		

		
Now all the truth is out,

Be secret and take defeat

From any brazen throat,

For how can you compete,

Being honour bred, with one

Who, were it proved he lies,

Were neither shamed in his own

Nor in his neighbor’s eyes?

Bred to a harder thing

Than Triumph, turn away

And like a laughing string

Whereon mad fingers play

Amid a place of stone,

Be secret and exult,

Because of all things known

That is most difficult.

			

	
	



			
				



	
	


		
					

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When You Are Old :: W. B. Yeats

	


		

		
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read and dream of the soft look

Your eyes once had and of their shadows deep.


How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true;

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.


And bending down beside the glowing bars

Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

			

	
	



			
				



	
	


		
					

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Contra “Rule Seventeen: Omit Needless Words!”

	


		

		
Brevity is a great virtue [. . .] yet it may be overestimated. The reader’s mind must be permitted to eddy around the subject. . . . [Yes, brevity is a virtue,] but we must not make a fetish of it. . . . Must one never say great big dog because great equals big? Nay, it is a mark of man’s overflowing vitality and sheer joy in emphasis to say great big dog.


— Edwin Herbert Lewis


[Courtesy of The Boston Globe]

			

	
	



			
				



	
	


		
					

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Don’t forget to bring a towel . . .

	


		

		
All great things are achieved in a light heart

— Ramtha


In formal logic, a formal signal is the signal of defeat: but in the evolution of real knowledge, it marks the first step in progress toward victory.

— Alfred North Whitehead


NASA astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell came to this conclusion on his return trip from space:

“In one moment I realized that this universe is intelligent. It is proceeding in a direction, and we have something to do with that direction. And that creative spirit, the creative intent that has been the history of this planet, comes from within us, and it is out there — it is all the same . . . . Consciousness itself is what is fundamental, and energy-matter is the product of consciousness . . . . If we change our heads about who we are — and can see ourselves as creative, eternal beings creating physical experience, joined at that level of existence we call consciousness — then we start to see and create this world that we live in quite differently.”

[From the BLEEP Book]


I am looking for a lot of men who have infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.

— Henry Ford


As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.

— Terence McKenna


Philosophy is written in this grand book — the universe — which stands continuously open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures. Without these one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.

— Galileo Galilei