The Letter That Makes No Sound

There is a cellar on Calle Garay that no longer exists. Zunino and Zungri pulled it down shortly after a man lay on his back on its floor, in the dark, his eyes fixed on the nineteenth step, and saw the universe. The man was called Borges, or so he called himself in the story, and he left an account of what he saw with an honesty literature seldom allows itself: he admitted he could not tell it. All language, he explained, is an alphabet of symbols whose use presupposes a past that the speakers share; how, then, could he pass on to others the infinite Aleph, which his fearful memory could scarcely take in?

That question is the subject of this essay, and the traditional answer is harder than Borges's: it cannot be passed on, and not for want of words. What was seen in that cellar did not belong to the order of what passes from hand to hand. It was something else, more dazzling and poorer.

A cellar, a stair, the dark

Let us begin with what the story does well, which is a great deal, and which Borges perhaps did without intending it. To see the Aleph one must go down. Not climb a tower or a mountain: descend into a cellar, in an old house, and lie on the floor, in the dark, in a precise position. Carlos Argentino Daneri gives the instructions with the care of an officer of the rite: darkness is indispensable, the eye must grow used to it, one must look at a given point on the stair.

Any Mason recognises the pattern. Before the light, the chamber of reflection: a narrow, black room where the candidate is left alone. And on its walls, seven words the candidate reads without knowing they are a map: Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem. Visit the interior of the earth; by rectifying, you will find the hidden stone. The descent comes before every ascent, I wrote in No Longer Divided about that formula, and Borges stages it with an exactness that chills: the Aleph is underground, in the lowest part of the house, and to see it one must lie down like a dead man.

So far the rite is whole. What is missing is a single word out of the seven, and it is the decisive one: rectificando, by rectifying. Between visiting the interior and finding the stone there is a work, and the narrator of the story does none. He goes down, lies down, looks. What he finds he does not find: it is shown to him. The stone of V.I.T.R.I.O.L. is hidden and one must reach it; the Aleph of Calle Garay is in plain view of anyone who lies down in the right place. That ease alone should have been reason for suspicion.

Seeing everything

What the narrator sees is a small iridescent sphere, of almost unbearable brilliance, two or three centimetres across, in which cosmic space is contained without any loss of size: the place where all the places of the world are, seen from every angle, without being confused. Then follows the most famous enumeration in the Spanish language: the teeming sea, dawn and evening, the crowds of America, a silver cobweb at the centre of a black pyramid, a broken labyrinth, all the mirrors on the planet and none of them reflecting him, the circulation of his own dark blood, the workings of love and the changes of death, and at last the inconceivable universe.

It is a prodigious page, and for that very reason it must be read coldly. What exactly does the man in the cellar see? He sees everything there is: every place, every angle, every thing, simultaneous and unmixed. He sees the whole of manifestation at once. He sees nothing else.