NIghtmares of a Borgesian Dickian sufferer in Silence

So one of the problems with doubling is that it obscures the mystic’s desire for achieving oneness, but perhaps herein lays the difference between the mystical life and mystical writing. The project of Borges and Dick is not to achieve oneness with God, but to leave his apprehension a problem of ineffability. Since, as the Cabbalists intuit, nothing can be known about God, and since one is forever languishing in the lower world, the notion of a higher self only occurs within the framework of projected realities. Since these realities never coalesce into a canonical reality, identification with God can only come through this divine halving that leaves the inhabitants of any particular reality destined for a hellish fate. With the double constantly on a journey to find the meaning for his existence as a single individual, he never becomes aware that salvation can never occur because he is incapable of fusing with his other half. And then, as in Borges’ story “The Theologians,” he discovers that he is actually one man with a dual self, the mistaken belief that his difference from that other is important only serves to make his life an immersion in illusions, something that ultimately makes his life meaningless.

This real risk that meaninglessness can be the only available method of explanation for his existence makes for the hell the individual finds himself in. But, is it important to have an explanation for everything? As human beings, we are reason machines and we will fill in the gaps in our knowledge even when it is totally irrational to do so. Dick and Borges would like to show that this process of recovering meaning rationally is not only unfulfilling but also bound to end in disappointment, since there really is no meaning to be had without a mystical perspective. Meaning and meaninglessness oppose each other as difficulties which interpreters of the narratives of Borges and Dick have to face. In fact, the burden of the reason machine to make sense of their narratives will only end in frustration without the realization that the two writers really are not invested in any sense of clarity. The presence of recognizable surroundings orients the reader to the worlds being created, but the damage to reason will result in a plunge into something that is not recognizable at all. Without the realization that perplexity is the motive force behind the construction of the narratives, no sense can be made of the texts. So the application of a mystical reading becomes the only way to rescue the reader from the damnation of not being able to know anything.

Since mysticism really rejects the assumption that reality is inherently knowable, that God is a universally recognizable agent, a strict definition of God through any systematized theology becomes incoherent. The God that mystics are interested in rejecting is the God that reveals himself in the handiwork of humankind’s conceptual theorizing. The limits of logic line the limits on freedom with a veil that can only be penetrated by experience, not language. And yet, the mystical writer, the form of a mystic who must use language to demonstrate his mystical intuitions, either consciously or unconsciously uses the principle of existential jeopardy to show those limits as a project that risks a fall into meaninglessness. Exactly how to find meaning while facing this problem of the unknowable comes in the embrace of the paradox that reality is real despite the fact that we cannot know that it is real. The ambiguity of non-knowledge produces a desire in the reader to get it straight, to find that “window” into the writer’s mind that will reveal the right reading, even though that window is clouded by its indiscernible view.

Understanding Dick and Borges comes with a price. The search for a straightforward answer to any of the questions their narratives pose must be sacrificed for a method that is the other of reason, the fall into despair. This “other” is the ghostly presence in the text of the higher world that cannot reveal itself except the language of the mystical writer’s method creates a comforting space for that other world to revel in. But, since the notion of a comforting space only exists in an ellipsis, the relationship between the lower and higher worlds actually make the notion of the double a necessary agent for the integration of the two. In Dick, we see these momentary fusions, as in the case with Fat and Dick, Timothy and Bill, and Emanuel and Zina, only lead to chaos in the ensuing reality that cannot withstand the affront to its internal logic. Mysticism, as the premonition that nothing can be known about God except through a recognition of the limits to comprehensibility, forces the mystical writer into an uncomfortable position to show that their narratives are not just exercises in hypothetical reasoning.

The mystical writer must construct his narrative with the problematic of ambiguity in meaning paramount in any form of explanation that both reveals the absence of God and hides the production of doubt with a commitment to forming coherence while, at the same time, conforming to a view of the universe that can consistently explain why the mystical approach remains silent on the issue of an objectively existent deity. The subjective nature of the approach to divine understanding orients the narratives toward difficulty as the only way the authors can reveal the true nature of their intention. But the problem of meaning seems so insurmountable that uncovering the truths that the narratives seek to present becomes something that the vexing interpretive difficulties that result from this approach must be dealt with using a schema that proves there is indeed a meaning to be had. By obscuring meaning in the problem of the double as a feature of unverifiable reality, the mystical approach uncovers the unconcern that Borges and Dick have for the epiphany of the reader to contribute to the process of uncovering meaning of any sort.

Just where the narrative intentions are coming from becomes something nearly impossible to locate. The multivarious sources seem omnipresent as blockages to the interpreter who may give up on the interpretative enterprise altogether and assume that the text prevaricates not just on the imaginary world contained in the narrative, but also on the whole business of their being any consistent dedication to the construction of sense making at all. Hence the fall into nonsensical approaches, that the narratives really intend to obfuscate just for the sake of misleading, may lead the interested reader into a misreading of the intention of the story to explore meaningful literary enterprises. We see this tendency toward misreading with the apparent intention of Borges to reduce reality to a nothingness that then paralyzes the characters in his stories with a sense that there is no escape from the hells they exist in.

But the nightmare of the inescapable labyrinth actually uncovers the idea that despite the fact that the spaces for action are haunted; the existential dilemma facing the imprisoned individual becomes the whole reality of his existence. Albert Camus explains this phenomenon in the Myth of Sisyphus, who, in his damned condition finds meaning in the pure fury of the struggle to attend to his repetitive task and respond to the situation with a happiness born out of the absurdity itself (123). His stone that he has to move becomes the whole meaning for his existence, and the differentiation between heaven and hell becomes removed by his acceptance of the eternal nature of his search for meaning, something that can be found in the very struggle itself. The paradox of finding heaven in hell can be compared with the imperiled selves of Borges and Dick, who never find the salvation they seek, but somehow survive their ordeals because there is a mystical meaning for what they do.

This form of mysticism that is both a rejection of God and an embrace of the “hope” for God means that the interpreter must accept the contradiction between the two viewpoints as a comfortable position for the mystic who knows he can never know the actual personality of God, but finds meaning in the search for that God even though the mystic realizes the absurdity of the situation. This is an issue that really places the narratives of Borges and Dick beyond a mere repetition of mystical points of view, so that, in an end analysis, we can read them as a kind of mystic who is interested in “anti-wisdom. Ehrman comments on this position in the following way: “Ecclesiastes is a kind of “anti-Wisdom” book, in the sense that the insights it gives run contrary to the traditional views of a book like Proverbs, which insists that life is basically meaningful and good, that evil is punished and right behavior rewarded…On the contrary, life is often meaningless, and in the end, all of us—wise and foolish, righteous and wicked, rich and poor—all of us die. And that’s the end of the story” (190). This form of mysticism paints a path where even the typical mystic refuses to go since it seeks to extend the boundaries of even this almost heretical position to an even more flagrant disregard for the conclusions of this already difficult route to meaning.

We can see evidence for this in the Borgesian notion that the characters in his story, the themes of his narratives, really don’t allow for transcendence of their situations as an escape; they remain trapped in uninhabitable places. The non-transcendence of Borges’ narrative intentions paradoxically transcends the mystical desire for transcendence of the mundane, but Borges accepts this burden of absurdity by erasing the distinction between the higher and lower worlds even as he accepts they are distinct; he has no desire to commit to their existence, but instead, he prefers to lay emphasis on the danger of living in a meaningless world as a purpose in itself.

In Dick we see that the ironic salvations of his characters leave them forever separated from the immanent God, and in their immersion in the unresolved conflicts of their existence they never realize that the circumstances of their entrapment in uninhabitable worlds actually serves as an impossibility of ever changing into a higher existence precisely because to do so would refute the narrative intention to expose the mysticism inherent in their confused mental states, which is actually the natural state of their never ending imperilment. This situation of non-transcendence in the midst of the mystical revelation of there actually being higher and lower worlds holds the characters in thrall to a form of cruelty that serves as a twisted form of love. There is always the hope of meaning coming down the pipe, but the asymptotic nature of its nonoccurrence never erases the prophecy that it could come.

Thus Dick’s acquaintance with Gnosticism and Borges’ cabbalistic influences situate the narrative intentions of these two writers as a way to inform their narratives with particular mystical traditions that seem most congenial to the construction of their pretensions to truth. Dick and Borges rely on the assumptions of these mystical traditions to serve as a template for discovering the meaning of their narratives in the appearance of meaninglessness. With the threat of meaninglessness in place, the reader can wonder if there are any truths to be had, but they are there. Dick and Borges want the reader to join with them in the recovery of truth. By disposing with more “conventional” readings that the reader may be more acquainted with, approaching other literary enterprises becomes more informed. This uniqueness inhering in the project of meaning in Borges and Dick makes them ripe for a mystical reading, since it is only in mysticism that contradiction and paradox have a congenial home. In fact, we can make the rather strong claim that, without this recognition of Borges and Dick as mystical writers, their works cannot be understood without distorting the actual pretensions to truth that don’t seem to be there otherwise. The problem of meaning is successfully dealt with once the two poles of meaning and meaninglessness are properly contextualized as an essential recognition that they may in fact be indistinguishable from each other once we realize that they are successfully blended by a mystical reading.

The double arises as a premonition that the higher and lower worlds of religious reality need the dual perspective on the self to explicate the hidden truths just as there is a hidden God. Once we reconcile truth to falsehood as a double recognition of the imperative of the hiddenness of God to remain so far removed from human understanding, we have a situation where Dick and Borges become comprehensible as mystical writers who desire to confuse and mislead, but only in the service of revealing that higher truth: we are all damned to living in an uninhabitable world because the forces of evil and the reality of death make the only form of acceptable immortality the effacement of the distinction between heaven and hell.