Borgess Rilkian Temporality Ten years after Rilkes death Jorge Luis Borges wrote his Historia de la Eternidad

in Argentina. Recounting the pagan, Christian and modern understandings of time, Borges reminds the reader of the Gnostic influence upon the Christian understanding of eternity. The Gnostic belief that God the father preceded both the son (the word made flesh) and the spirit nullified the concept of the trinity. The Churchs refutation of this heresy resulted in a new understanding of eternity. Aeternitas est merum hodie, est immediate et lucida fruitio rerum infinitarum (eternity is simply today, it is the immediate and lucid enjoyment of the things of infinity) (27). The reason that this notion of eternity is coupled with the doctrine of the trinity is quite simple. If there is no unity of the three, that is if Christ is not identifiable with God, then Jesus is but an accident of history. He would be incapable of offering divine redemption. The whole notion of Christianity would lose its timeless eternal character. 271 The trinity creates a notion of eternity in which all three divine aspects are an eternal unity not subject to the fleeting nature of time. All three coincide together. There is no vacant God acting before time. Thus eternity is not just the absence of time rather the contemporary and total intuition of all fractions of time (29-30). Borges also connects this to the expression of Yahweh in the Hebrew Scriptures as I am who am, to Boethius notion that aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota et perfect possession (eternity is all of life perpetual and perfect possession), and to the idea that eternity is an attribute of the unlimited mind of God (31-32). Eternity is a product of Gods perception, or even of his imagination or possible imagination. Borges irony is not lost on the reader when he writes: El universo requiere la eternidad. Los telogos no ignoran que si la atencin del Seor se desviara un solo segundo de mi derecha mano que escribe, sta recaera en la nada, como si la fulminara un fuego sin luz. Por eso afirman que la conservacin de este mundo es una perpetua creacin y que los verbos conservar y crear, tan enemistados aqu, son sinnimos en el Cielo (36). This notion of divine conservation / creation is the same as Rilkes only it has been secularized. The world is a constant creation of God. It never ceases. Eternity is the ceaseless activity of divine intelligence experiencing all things (even the possible) simultaneously. Borges compares this theological notion to the idea that something similar exists for the artist. Eternity is now the contemplation of the artist. This is like Schopenhauers negation of the will (a product of time) through art. It is the Promethean Gnostic wrestling the perpetual creativity away from God and granting it to poetic imagination. This is very similar to Rilkes attempt to make the visible invisible through art, preserving it forever. Gesang ist Dasein and Orpheus is ein zum Rhmen Bestellter. Rilke is conserving the past by bridging it to the immediacy of the present. Rilkes 272 Gnostic duality is the necessity of eternity in his universe. Human eternity is poetic imagination. And that imagination is the unifier (Orpheus) of Sein and Bewutsein. Marquard contends that modern human beings cannot endure the absoluteness of God. Rilkes poetry suggests that the artist cannot do without it. Borges ends his history of eternity by expressing his own idea in terms of a unity of experience. Eternity, which was once the product of the mind of God, is now the product of the poet. Eternity becomes the invisible perception of unity with the world. As Borges says regarding an intense experience of a place that he has not visited in many years:

La escribo, ahora as: Esa pura representacin de hechos homogneos noche en serenidad, parecita lmpida, olor provinciano de la madreselva, barro fundemental no es meramente idntica a la que hubo en esa esquina hace tantos aos; es, sin parecidos ni repeticiones, la misma. El tiempo, si podemos intuir esa identidad, es una delusin: la indiferencia e inseparabilidad de un momento de su aparente ayer y otro de su aparente hoy, bastan para desintegrarlo (43). Borges locates eternity in the ability to unite past, present and future into the immediacy of an intense experience caught in a poetic moment. This is in essence the idea that Rilke conveyed to his Polish translator regarding the elegies eleven years earlier in 1925: Lebens- und Todesbejahung erweist sich als Eines in den Elegien. Das eine zuzugeben ohne das Andere, sei, so wird hier erfahren und gefeiert, eine schlielich alles Unendliche ausschlieende Einschrnkung. Der Tod ist die uns abgekehrte, von uns unbeschienene Seite des Lebens: wir mssen versuchen, das greste Bewutsein unseres Daseins zu leisten, das in beiden unabgegrenzten Bereichen zu Hause ist, aus beiden unerschpflich genhrt...Die wahre Lebensgestalt reicht durch beide Gebiete, das Blut des gresten Kreislaufs treibt durch beide: es gibt weder ein Diesseits noch Jenseits, sondern die groe Einheit, in der die uns bertreffenden Wesen, die Engel, zu Hause sind (Briefe 3: 896). 273 It is clear that Rilke has a two-world dualism at heart that he wishes to unite into one super-polar consciousness. God no longer inhabits the other side of art, only the angels remain. The poet will conjure up Orpheus to join the two. The infinite imagination of God that made the universe whole is now the domain of the artist and the modern individual that can internalize experience and time into personal eternity. Rilkes eternity proves impossible without the Gnostic isolation, a Deus absconditus of personal time.