A Universal History Of Iniquity

"....he consorted with prostitutes and poets and with people even worse...."

The Temptation Of St. Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.

Jorge Luis Borges
Fictions

The business of being a prophet falls under the career capital market of winner-take-all. Only those who have the best cryptic and pithy sayings are the ones who get all the customers. Remember, it isn’t so much about telling the truth directly like Cassandra but the way you sort of obviously state the truth so that the recipient of your advice can still twist it to suit his massive ego. Think Macbeth, think Oedipus, those are career-defining clients.

Since prophecy is such a competitive market, going blind is always a plus. Think Milton, think Tiresias….it was just a solid financial decision from Jorge Luis Borges to permanently switch to the mind’s eye. He sat sitting somewhere in a library, not the Library of Babel some bibliophile’s idea of paradise where truth seekers vault over bookshelves and scamper across infinite hallways looking for The Book which only has truth printed on its sacred pages. No, he was stuck in some Argentinian library with some cushy government job, forced to perform the mandatory required two hours of work a week. Any more and the fellow librarians would go what are you doing are you trying to ruin this good thing of ours?

Is it any wonder that this bookish and shy man would retreat into himself, picturing his home—a library—as the Aleph, a point in space that contained all other points? The books themselves are portals to other dimensions.

Borges postulated that all literature, no matter the genre, is in the end autobiographical. To express oneself and to try to express the whole are ineluctably reduced to the same thing. The writer is admitting that though his writings are depicted as a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe they are also the guide to the creator of the universe’s guide—which is Borges.

Borges's first collection of short stories A Universal History Of Iniquity deals with the sumofa bitches who thought they could get away with pulling off gross injustices. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. Written like pieces of nonfiction with some greater organizing principle just out of reach—which of course it is because that principle is Borges’s mind which the stories offer us glimpses into.

When Borges was depressed, a hopeless romantic dealing with another unrequited love affair, he would go for long walks in the most dangerous barrios in Argentina.

Whether profiled against a backdrop of blue-painted walls or of the sky itself, two toughs sheathed in grave black clothing dance, in boots with high stacked heels, a solemn dance—the tango of evenly matched knives—until suddenly a carnation drops from behind an ear, for a knife has plunged into a man, whose horizontal dying brings the dance without music to its end. Resigned, the other man adjusts his hat and devotes the years of his old age to telling the story of that clean-fought duel. That to the least and last detail, is the story of the Argentine underworld.

Jorge Luis Borges
Monk Eastman, Purveyor Of Iniquities
A Universal History of Iniquity

Or in the story of the 47 Rōnin where the lord of the castle of Ako, was forced to commit seppuku after slashing the emperor’s etiquette teacher for being a dick, but this was akin to slashing the emperor since all the servants of the emperor were the emperor in that Japanese way of allusions, a direct result of a country’s mind which had meditated on the course of courtesy for three hundred years and thus raised into a mystical field of study.

The 47 Rōnin thus took an oath to make the etiquette teacher seppuku his ass, and they did all sorts of unspeakable acts of debauchery and even baser actions like consorting with prostitutes….even poets…. The moment the etiquette teacher lowered his guard (both literally and metaphorically) they stormed his villa and were forced to slit his throat at daybreak after he spent the whole night refusing to seppuku himself. The surviving Rōnin were tried by the court of law and yup you guessed it—they were all forced to commit some seppuku which they all gladly did. One guy who even insulted the Rōnin when they were in their Francisco d’Anconia drinking phase felt so bad about it that even he went to their graves just to apologize with compensatory seppuku.

Borges ends that story with a little personal note that the man of letters versus the man of action must feel….

This is the end of the story of the forty-seven loyal retainers—except that the story has no ending, because we other men, who are perhaps not loyal yet will never entirely loose the hope that we might one day be so, shall continue to honor them with our words.

Jorge Luis Borges
The Uncivil Teacher Of Court Etiquette
A Universal History Of Iniquity

In today’s day and age where we insist that slavery is wrong and unethical, we cannot imagine how those cruel and barbarous Romans allowed it. Let’s just not search for contemporary slavery while we are high-fiving ourselves for our alleged superiority. Borges as the unnamed narrator of these pieces of history does an excellent job of setting the right tone where our unspeakable was their reality and vice versa. He maintains this cool and subtle humor and irony throughout the short stories

—The Prophet delegated the wearing details of governing to six or seven adepts. He was a scholar of meditation and of peace—a harem of 114 blind wives attempted to satisfy the needs of his divine body.

—He himself performed a ritual which our defeated general’s choose not to observe—he committed suicide.

—The almost child who died at the age of twenty-one owing a debt to human justice for the deaths of twenty-one men—”not counting Mexicans.”

Jorge Luis Borges
A Universal History Of Iniquity

Borges remains that puzzling enigma, a man who was not comfortable revealing his true self but okay with showing you ten thousand fragments and letting you figure it out. He disguised his autobiography as nonfiction and mixed in fictional elements till we can’t tell what’s what.