I am Not-Being Aristotle

In footnote 2, page 71, Chapter 3 SOT:

Had Straka lived to review my final revisions of this translation, he likely would have quarreled with my choice to use oblivion here. His original phrasing translates directly as not-being, which I find nonsensical. How can one fail to be? If one is, one is. (Of course, the philosopher—and curiously popular Straka candidate—Guthrie MacInnes could no doubt fill up several volumes addressing such matters. I have concluded, though, that it is far better simply to be than to obsess over what, who, or even whether one is.)

"Not-being" must come from Aristotle's Theory of Act and Potency.  For Aristotle, "being" is the actualization of potential.  A monkey can be described as having fur and a tail, other creatures can have fur and tails. These characteristics have the potential for the monkey, but only once the characteristics are united to form the monkey does the monkey become actualized.

For Aristotle, potentiality is the possibilities that any given thing can be said to have, but he acknowledges that these possibilities are not all equal; some possibilities are more likely to lead to actualization. Potentiality may have a strong tendency to occur on its own or could be the result of chance. As described by Sachs: 

The man with sight, but with his eyes closed, differs from the blind man, although neither is seeing. The first man has the capacity to see, which the second man lacks. There are then potentialities as well as actualities in the world. But when the first man opens his eyes, has he lost the capacity to see? Obviously not; while he is seeing, his capacity to see is no longer merely a potentiality, but is a potentiality which has been put to work. The potentiality to see exists sometimes as active or at-work, and sometimes as inactive or latent.

I find it interesting that the Greek work for possibility is the root word for a number of other tantalizaing words.  It makes me wonder if the munitions explosion was the dynamite or impetus for an actualization of some sort.  I also wonder if Hobbes' and Locke's use of the word "power" is related in some way too in reference to "The Power 15" ad in the pages of the McKay's review.

Dunamis is the ancient Greek word for possibility or capability. Depending on context, it could be translated "potency", "potential", "capacity", "ability", "power", "capability", "strength", "possibility", "force" and is the root of modern English words "dynamic", "dynamite", and "dynamo".  In early modern philosophy, English authors like Hobbes and Locke used the English word "power" as their translation of Latin potentia.

Actualization is the process of becoming; it is the fulfillment of possibility; and within it exists a paradox. 

In a sense, a thing that exists potentially does not exist, but the potential does exist.

Actualization or a unity of possibilities is the expression of being for Aristotle.  Also interesting is Aristotle's idea of not-being.

If, then, some things are always combined and cannot be separated, and others are always separated and cannot be combined, while others are capable either of combination or of separation, 'being' is being combined and one, and 'not being' is being not combined but more than one. Regarding contingent facts, then, the same opinion or the same statement comes to be false and true, and it is possible for it to be at one time correct and at another erroneous; but regarding things that cannot be otherwise opinions are not at one time true and at another false, but the same opinions are always true or always false.

For Aristotle "'not being' is "being" not combined but more than one."  More than one? Could it be that we have just gotten a hint from Straka or Caldeira that there is no single person who writes under the identity of Straka?  A collective of possibilities that could also be a collective of writers?  Because what are writers?  In reality, aren't they truly the scribes of all possibilities, realities and worlds by actualizing potentiality when putting paper to ink?

(8/17/14 grammar edits and tags added)

The espionage of the Black 19?

One of the comments of Mystimus' blog pointed to Robert Ludlum.  It started as a joke, I tweeted a comment about Jason Bourne being a lot like our favorite amnesiac.  I thought it was a total wagtail.

Then I saw one of his books mention Salonika in the summary page on amazon.com. On a whim, I googled "robert ludlum dahomey" and got a hit.  And I kept getting hits for the most of the other locations. This list may be incomplete and some may be incorrect, please let me know if you see something I missed.

1. Dahomey- The Janson Directive
2. Salonika- The Gemini Contenders (another drifting twins reference?)
3. Calais (Pas de Calais)- The Gemini Contenders, The Tristan Betrayal, The Prometheus Deception, The Sigma Protocal
4. Ypres- no mention that I can find yet
5. NV- Nevada in The Aquitane Progression
6. Taranaki- no mention, but I did find a Ludlum's Valley in New Zealand.  New Zealand does make an appearance in The Matarese Circle
7. Odessa- The Odessa File
8. Galway- despite numerous mentions of Ireland and Irish in several of Ludlum's books, no action takes place there in any of his books.  Is that why nothing happened in Galway 1831? 
9. Bijapur- The Bourne Objective takes place in the capital city, Bangalore, of Karnataka.  Bijapur can be found in Karnataka, too 
10. Adana- no mention, but Turkey can be found in four of the Bourne novels and in The Hades Factor
11. Rio Negro- The Sigma Protocol 
12. Barkol- no mention that I can find yet 
13. Tangier-  The Janson Directive mentions Tangier Island, Virginia
14. B___-  mentions a "B-team" in The Lazarus Vendetta
15. Los Angeles- The Lazarus Vendetta
16. Tripoli-  The Prometheus Deception, The Hades Factor, The Janson Directive
17. Berlin/Danzig- Berlin in The Scarletti Inheritance
18. New York- The Ambler Warning (there may be others) and it should be noted that Ludlum was on the NYT bestseller's list several times. 
19. Toronto- The Lazarus Vendetta

(8/15/14 edited for grammar and tags added) 

Vevoda's Cellar or Events in Time and Space

Update: I think I have them figured out, I put Berlin/Danzig back together, took out Standefer and realized that there were two locations listed on the copyright notice page.  That makes 19 total. And after I updated this post, I remembered that geekyzen had found some additional info on Calais for me. That's been added too.


I know there had been some discussion as the whether the vintages in Vevoda's relate the Eotvos Wheel as a cipher.  Maybe they are, but it just occurred to me that all the wines of Vevoda's wine that we know start with word noir, or the french word for black, and there have been 19 of them possibly identified on the SFiles22 blog.  The first 11 come direct from Vevoda's cellar, but on page 262, Eric notes that the five cities and dates listed are similar to the markings on the barrels and Eric makes a note about "Standefer 2010" as a joke in relation to the other vintages.  Could these be related to Straka's novel The Black Nineteen in some way as also noted by MJCarp at SFiles22?

1. Noir Calais 1912: Fictional riot that takes place in 1912 at Calais, France in SOT.  Calais built the monument Le Pluviose in 1912 to commemorate the death of 27 when the steamer Pas de Calaise accidentally cause the submarine, Pluviose, to sink in May 1910, and the monument was not dedicated until 1913.  Per gz: Fourteen people were killed in a coal mine explosion at the Clarence Coal Company at Pas de Calais, France.
2. Noir Ypres 1915: Ypres, Belgium. Second battle of Ypres during World War I, notable because the it was the first time that the Germans used poison gas on a mass scale. 
3. Noir NV:  Still not sure on this one, as noted in the comments on the SFiles22, state codes weren't in use yet, so I haven't tracked this one down yet.  (edited to note: it was discussed in the comments that the NV might be an abbreviation to denote current events.  I'm not sure and would like to research some more before I come to a conclusion.)
4. Black Taranaki 1863:  The Second Taranaki War was a conflict between the Maori and New Zealand government. 
5. Noir Odessa 1871: The Odessa pogrom, one in a series of violence targeting the Jews in Odessa, a city in Ukraine. 
6. Noir Dahomey 1840: Dahomey was an African country ruled by a monarchy in what is now Benin.  Dahomey was involved in the profitable slave trade. In 1840, Dahomey attempted to take over Yoruba territory.
7. Noir Galway 1831:  This one is interesting doesn't appear to reference an act of violence.  The Wardenship of Galway was dissolved by the Church of Ireland in 1831.  Edmund Ffrench was the last warden.  Galway may also reference the tribes of Galway, a group of a powerful families that ran Galway until the late 19th century.  A magistrate does note that something was happening in Galway in 1831, but the details were not given in The Edinburgh Review.
8. Noir Bijapur 1791: Doji Bara famine in South Asia.  An El Nino event caused a drought in the area from 1791-1792.  In one estimate, famine and disease may have contributed to the deaths of 11 million people. 
9. Noir Adana 1909: The Adana Massacre occurred in Adana Province of the Ottoman Empire against the Armenian population there.
10. Noir Rio Negro 1879:  Basically a state-sponsored land grab from the indigenous populations, in 1878, a massive campaign started to clear the land between the Negro River and the Alsina Trench by armed forces. 
11. Noir Barkol 1756:  Refers to the Qing Dynasty's annexation of the area formerly controlled by the Zunghar Khanate. In 1756, the Chinese emperor ordered the death of all men in Barkol or Suzhou.  The murdered men's wives and children were given to soldiers in the emperor's army. 
12. Tangier (Jun) 1905:  The First Moroccan Crisis refers to Germany's support of Morocco as an independent state, but the support damaged Germany's relations with France and the U.S.  The crisis reached a peak in June 1905, and is considered a contributing factor to WWI. 
13. B___ (Oct) 1906:  Unable to locate, still researching. 
14. Los Angeles (Dec) 1910:  Llewellyn Iron Works bombing was preceded by a bombing of the Los Angeles Times in October and resulted in the arrest and conviction of labor leaders. 
15. Tripoli (Sep) 1911:  The Italo-Turkish war was Italy's attempt to assert it rights over parts of what is now Libya.  It marked the use of the first aerial bomb dropped from an airplane. 
16. Salonika (Thessaloniki) (Mar) 1912:  Geekyzen and Jillp have brought it to me that Salonika is an alternate name for Thessaloniki.   And in 1912 Greece sunk an Ottoman ship, the Feth-i_Bülend in the harbor of Thessaloniki.
17. Berlin/Danzig 1908:  The line from Berlin to Danzig(Gdansk) is a rough border for the Polish corridor.  The German Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia confiscated land and evicted the ethnic Polish population (although this was reversed in 1925). 
18. New York 1949:  (from the SOT copyright notice) Airplane crash on October 28th in the Azores.  The plane was headed for New York.  Also, the Peekskill riots happened in 1949.
19. Toronto 1949:  (from the SOT copyright notice) The SS Noronic disaster, a fire started in a linen closet and was fueled by the lemon scented furniture polish which led to several fatalities.  

(edit: minor grammar/spelling fix)
(1/27/2014 added additional places and dates)

Monkey's Marginalia, No. 8 or Books Uncovered and Masks Removed

1. On the Eotvos Wheel website, one of Guthrie MacInnes' books, A Swindle of Cowbirds (1966), is listed. The book is reputed to have been published in 1966.  It just occurred to me today why the title sounded so familiar.  Please let me direct you to A Confederacy of Dunces.  Written by John Kennedy Toole, it is considered a comic masterpiece (and by me, too).  Sadly, Toole did not live to see his novel's success.  Toole had been working with a publisher and after several revisions, the publisher rejected the novel.  Toole ended his correspondence with the publisher in 1966.  In 1969, Toole committed suicide.  It was the only due to efforts of Toole's mother that the book was published posthumously.

2. Essad Bey, this is one authorship controversy that Dorst has never mentioned (to my knowledge) but seems to be the stuff S. is made of.  Essad Bey is believed to be Lev Nussimbaum and according to Tom Reiss, author of The Orientalist, Nussimbaum probably used the pseudonym Kurban Said.  Nussimbaum, though prolific, liked to play fast and loose with the facts, so much so, that his non-fictions works are considered garbage today by serious academics.  All of them. There is also some question as to whether he enlisted the help of additional authors due to the large number of books that are attributed to him.

Another interesting thing of note is that he started using the name Essad Bey to write for Die literarische Welt (The Literary World) in 1926.  His politics were far-right; he was considered required reading in Nazi Germany until his Jewish heritage was discovered;  and he was even contracted to write a biography of Mussolini until the nature of his origins came to light.

3.  It was through Essad Bay and Tom Reiss' book that I came across another authorship controversy.  Ali and Nino (1937) by Kurban Said. The players in this drama are:

• Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels von Bodmershof.  Although her niece asserts the baroness's authorship, the baroness could have easily gained control of the copyright in Nazi Germany since Nissumbaum, as a Jew, would have had no legal right to assert his ownership of the book as its author. 
• The book is partially written by Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli with Nussimbaum filling the rest with passages cribbed from his prior writings. 
• The book is plagiarized from The Snake's Skin (1926) by Grigol Robakidze.  

4.  And finally, The Snake's Skin appears to echo the idea found in Borges' The Aleph, except the entire world is not found in space at the 19th step in the cellar, but within the book itself.  From wikipedia.org:

The novel The Snake’s Skin is about entire universe, where the space is complete and united. The scene takes place at the entire planet: the West and the East; Russia, Europe and finally Robakidze’s motherland – Georgia. Here one may also find an imaginary world of American billionaire living in his villa at Mediterranean Sea along with various prominent artists.
There is only one tense in the The Snake’s Skin – present, but it includes past and future as well. The main thing is reality, but myths and legends are part of this reality. The way of thinking is not only particularly human, but at the same time metaphysical and idealistic.
The personages of the novel do not live in the particular time period, or represent persons with concrete nationality. The author describes generalized citizen of the world that gets transformed into a particular person or in other words, returns to his roots (actual father, motherland), oneself, and the God. This is an adventure of Archibald Mekeshi’s soul taking place throughout the centuries.

Disappointingly, it appears that a English translation isn't available.

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

Signe Rabe Spied?

I was playing around today, it kept twitching my mind the Hamlet line "king of infinite space" and the SOT chapter title "Birds of Negative Space."  I put the two lines one on top of the other and checked the letters that fell in between.

I was able to come up with the following:

• SFEE (as in S. feels?)
• OIS (O is..?)
• SOFIESE (?)

Despite the fact that perhaps I was on the right track, I wasn't able to continue the cipher in any meaningful way.  It then occurred to me that Signe Rabe could be found in the chapter title.  

The anagrams I came up with are 

• SIGNE SPIED VACATE FOR B(some as yet unknown location, perhaps Brazil, Brussels, Belgium, Britain?)
• SIGNE SPIED VACATE ORB F(ORB is an airport code in Sweden), so I am thinking it would read SIGNE SPIED VACATE ORB, F. 
• SIGNE RABE SPIED TO CAVE, F. 

I think the first two are the most plausible, but my brain hurts so I need to call it day. 

edit: sometime in January I commented on Mystimus' blog that it could also rearrange to:
SERIN 5(E) SAVED TIAGO, FC.  There were two left over letters, B & P, which when put together could be a reference to BP Oil.




(8/9/14 edited for grammar, updated with new anagram solution, and tags added) 

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)

Monkey's Marginalia, No 7

The Monkey's Marginalia or the stuff too brief for its own post.

1. Iron gall ink was the primary ink in use for writing and art up until the 19th century.  Requiring high tannic acid vegetable sources in order to precipitate the reaction with iron sulfate, oak and wine were often used to make the ink.  The the resulting ink was acidic, not very stable and would most likely speed up the break down of the paper it was written on.

2.  I did find a real Grimshaw.  Beatrice Ethel Grimshaw was a travel writer, adventuress, and novelist who eventually settled in New South Wales, Australia.  Another excellent site on Grimshaw here.

3.  C. S. Lewis was a member of the Inklings, a loose collective of writers and intellectuals.

4.  The cover for Hesse's Siddhartha (1st English translation, I think)  bears a striking resemblance to SOT's cover as does one of the editions of The Glass Bead Game.

5.  Still looking for the Lenten reading reference advertisement and not having much luck, but I have found a potential candidate, although I am not completely convinced.

6. Aesop's Fables, The Peacock and the Magpie

"The Birds once met together to choose a king; and, among others, the Peacock was a candidate. Spreading his showy tail, and stalking up and down with affected grandeur, he caught the eyes of the silly multitude by his brilliant appearance, and was elected with acclamation. The Magpie then stepped forth into the midst of the assembly, and thus addressed the new king: "May it please your majesty, elect to permit a humble admirer to propose a question. As our king, we put our lives and fortunes in your hands. If, therefore, the Eagle, the Vulture, and the Kite, should make a descent upon us, what means would you take for our defense?" This pithy question opened the eyes of the Birds to the weakness of their choice and they canceled the election."

(8/9/14 edited for grammar and tags added)