The Aleph

(image from wikipedia) 

"O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space..."Hamlet, II, 2

"But they will teach us that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans (as the schools call it); which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hic-stans for an Infinite greatness of Place."Leviathan, IV, 46

And so opens Borges' short story The Aleph.  Borges was a prolific writer, poet and translator (he even translated Hesse's The Glass Bead Game).  In the few short stories I've read, mathematical references and references to works, people, places, both fictional and real, abound.  

In The Aleph, the narrator has never stopped morning the loss of his unrequited love, Beatriz Viterbo, who died in February, 1929.  Every April 30, on the anniversary of her birthday, he goes to her house and pays his respects, a habit he starts in the year of her death.

I recalled that the thirtieth of April was her birthday; on that day to visit her house on Garay Street and pay my respects to her father and to Carlos Argentino Daneri, her first cousin, would be an irreproachable and perhaps unavoidable act of politeness.

Although Daneri annoys the narrator, 

Carlos Argentino was pink-faced, overweight, gray-haired, fine-featured. He held a minor position in an unreadable library out on the edge of the Southside of Buenos Aires. He was authoritarian but also unimpressive. Until only recently, he took advantage of his nights and holidays to stay at home. At a remove of two generations, the Italian "S" and demonstrative Italian gestures still survived in him. His mental activity was continuous, deeply felt, far-ranging, and -- all in all -- meaningless. He dealt in pointless analogies and in trivial scruples. He had (as did Beatriz) large, beautiful, finely shaped hands. For several months he seemed to be obsessed with Paul Fort -- less with his ballads than with the idea of a towering reputation. "He is the Prince of poets," Daneri would repeat fatuously. "You will belittle him in vain -- but no, not even the most venomous of your shafts will graze him."

Later in the narrative, Daneri comes to our protagonist, agitated, and announces the family home is going to be torn down.  Daneri reveal the Aleph to the narrator and offers to show it to him.  Daneri describes the Aleph, "He hesitated, then with that level, impersonal voice we reserve for confiding something intimate, he said that to finish the poem he could not get along without the house because down in the cellar there was an Aleph. He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points."   The Aleph is in the cellar, where Daneri has a dark room, presumably where he develops negatives and prints. 

First a glass of pseudo-cognac," he ordered, "and then down you dive into the cellar. Let me warn you, you'll have to lie flat on your back. Total darkness, total immobility, and a certain ocular adjustment will also be necessary. From the floor, you must focus your eyes on the nineteenth step. Once I leave you, I'll lower the trapdoor and you'll be quite alone. You needn't fear the rodents very much -- though I know you will. In a minute or two, you'll see the Aleph -- the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our true proverbial friend, the multum in parvo!"Once we were in the dining room, he added, "Of course, if you don't see it, your incapacity will not invalidate what I have experienced. Now, down you go. In a short while you can babble with all of Beatriz' images.

...On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos...

I found an interesting essay by Susana Medina, Hallucinating Spaces, or the Aleph.

Cellars have long been associated with the unconscious, with irrational fears, fears that cannot be rationalised: it could be said that the criminal cellar belongs to the Western collective unconscious. If cellars should send a reader of Borges to Poe, Bachelard, a good reader of the latter, posits the cellar as a place where dark aspects of the psyche can be accessed, explored and integrated. Bachelard tells us that ‘If a house is a living value, it must integrate an element of unreality’, that ‘thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if a house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated’. One of Bachelard’s aims was to ‘study a few ultra-cellars which prove that the cellar dream irrefutably increases reality’, since a cellar ‘is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces... When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths’. Carlos Argentino’s house contains an element of unreality. His cellar is dark. But it contains all the places in the world, thus all the lamps, all the lights that illuminate all those places. Carlos Argentino’s perfect alibi for going undisturbed into the cellar was to start up a dark-room. ‘Sr. Danieri was in the cellar, as he always was, developing photographs’. A dark room, a space where images emerge with pretences of faithfully representing the real, or where a negative can be technically constructed, re-constructed or deconstructed in infinite ways. A dark room has as a neighbouring concept that of the ‘camera obscura’, which painters have used primarily for topographical detail (the Aleph partakes of some of its qualities, seemingly a transparent surface on which images are projected in a dark room which happens to be lit by the innumerable lights that emerge from the Aleph, which in turn would lead us to representational theories of the mind conceived as a tabula rasa, or mirror as in Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, or Hume).

The aleph is the first letter of the 22 letter Hebrew alphabet and derived from the West Semitic word "ox."  The aleph is a letter representing a space between vowels or a glottal stop and is also used to represent the number 1.  The aleph, in a sense, is the negative space in language, in words.  It was the letter carved in the Golem that brought it to life. The aleph is used for cardinal numbers used to describe infinite sets as first described by Georg Cantor.  In Hermeticism, the Hebrew alphabet is the mystical alphabet.  "It’s the language of creation power, beginnings and desire made."

Is S. Doug Dorst's Aleph?  A shining sphere that is also a glass bead and part of a great game, the center of the sphere that is everywhere and circumference nowhere to be found?  The place where it all begins, the space on the game board where we make our first move with an "Italian S" and 19 steps?

(8/9/14 edited format, grammar, and tags added)