The Dreamed Tale

— J. Chr. de Vries

O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams.
— Hamlet,  Act II, Scene 2, line 273

— From the diary of Dr. Arturo Kruezéle

Ayin

“April 16, 1949 — This morning, I had an appointment with Doron Keerez, a Jewish archaeologist and a close friend, who has been researching one of the world’s oldest buildings, a temple complex located in Southeast Turkey called Göbekli Tepe. The estimated age of the complex is around ten thousand years, a period known as the Neolithic era. We agreed to meet at the end of the morning at the Italian coffee bar Faréle on Avenida Calle Juan de Garay, not far from the coast.

Presumably because we were on the ‘Calle Garay’, as we called it, the topic suddenly turned to Borges’ recently published story ‘The Aleph.’ Doron told me that he had dreamt of a second Aleph, which would be located within one of the monolithic pillars described by Borges in his 1943 Postscript of the story. Does this Aleph exist within the core of a stone? Did I see it when I beheld all things and have I forgotten it? Our brain is receptive to forgetfulness. According to Doron, or rather the dreamt Doron, somewhere in Göbekli Tepe, there might be a square plaque that grants access to the Aleph if one knows precisely how to place the 59 sacred polygons on that plaque. The polygons are situated in a hidden space next to the pillar. The polygons can be placed on the square in only one way. This must be done according to the Principle of the Bolyai—Gerwien Theorem. Boron explained that this theorem proves that a specific combination of polygons can be transformed or fitted into a rectangle with the same area as the sum of the polygons.”

Shin

“April 21, 1949 — I walked with my son Toine amidst the pillars of Göbekli Tepe, searching for that one pillar of Doron, the pillar with the real Aleph, and not the ‘false’ one from the Calle Garay. When I mentioned that it was a pity his mother couldn’t be here, he nodded absentmindedly. ‘Beatriz,’ he said after some time, without showing a trace of emotion. Toine never displayed emotions, he was not very talkative, and found it difficult to be in the company of more than two people. He didn’t attend school but received regular private lessons from a tutor I had hired and brought to our home. He had an unbelievably good memory, and his greatest hobby was solving puzzles, with the pieces turned upside down, revealing only the backs of the images. He effortlessly assembled the puzzles in an instant, without hesitation and without errors.

Suddenly, we stood before the magical plaque. Without hesitation, Toine retrieved a copper chest containing the 59 polygons from beneath a stone next to the pillar. How he knew the chest was hidden at that specific place was beyond my comprehension. He took out all the polygons from the chest, they were also made of copper: triangles, trapezoids, and diamonds, which he placed one by one with precision onto the square, fitting each piece perfectly on the surface. I heard a heavy, sliding sound, and the square slowly moved aside. An opening appeared, revealing a steep, stone staircase which was leading to a small space beneath the pillar. I grabbed my flashlight and cautiously descended the stairs until I stood in the middle of the room.

I surveyed the space for a few moments; it was completely empty. Then, I stretched out on the stairs, gently resting my head on the nineteenth step, and turned off the lamp. I closed my eyes and then opened them again. Now I reach the ineffable core of my text; here, my despair as a writer also begins. Every thought, and thus every memory, takes shape in a barrage of words that solidify into tangible truth through an alphabet of symbols. Words, words, words.

Prophets and Kabbalists sow aporias in a similar trance: to indicate the divine and infinite, Zeno speaks of an arrow that will never reach its target; Moses Cordovero writes about the original form of the Torah as an undefined text consisting of the totality of all possible combinations of the Hebrew alphabet, the sacred language; Moshe Idel, on the other hand, believes it is more akin to Aristotle’s blank writing tablet, upon which nothing is written; Diogenes the Cynic replied to a man who once told him, You know nothing, even though you are a philosopher, by saying: ‘Even if I merely pretend to be wise, that is still philosophy’; Sigwind de Kuische speaks of ‘a fire as hot as motionless ice’; Kelvin avant la lettre.

Precisely in the ninth hour, the ‘true’ Aleph appeared to me, in the undoubtedly divinely crafted holy monolith of Göbekli Tepe.

To my astonishment, the space filled with light, an ever changing-light of an almost unbearable radiance. I had to strain my eyes to be able to endure the light. Contrary to my expectations, I saw no images, only flowing shades of light.

In the middle of the space, right in front of my eyes, I suddenly saw a pitch-black sphere, with a diameter of two to three centimeters; it did resemble the Aleph, but turned out to be rather its opposite, as if it were slowly, but gradually absorbing all the light within the space. The light around me increasingly dimmed, and the movements of the shades of light became more and more directional, eventually flowing into the black sphere, like water being sucked into a drain as a bathtub empties. The variations in color became less and less diverse, with reddish and bluish hues becoming dominant. But not only did the light in the space change, I also noticed that I was having an increasing difficulty forming proper judgments about what was happening in the space, and also with me. My thoughts became less concrete, and I struggled to find words. One of the last thoughts I managed to form was that my memories were fading away. I felt the need to close my eyes to escape the pulling force of the ‘black hole,’ but my brain no longer knew how to control my eye muscles. I had lost control over almost all my muscles; I couldn’t move my hands, I no longer felt my legs. I wanted to shout. I wanted to warn Toine to get away, but immediately I had forgotten all about him. I had forgotten Beatriz, I was ultimately forgetting myself. Was this a form of dying? Or had death itself been sucked into the black void? Slowly, everything turned black, the light was gone, and the sphere as well.”

Tav

“April 22, 1949 — I felt a hand on my cheek, gently stroking it. I wanted to open my eyes, but I didn’t know how to. I felt a second hand, both hands tenderly cradling my head. I heard a soft voice calling my name, the voice of Beatriz. Slowly, it dawned on me that at least my ears were still functioning. I felt Beatriz gently turning my face to the side with her hands. I felt her gaze upon me, her face now close to mine. I pursed my lips, wanting to taste the lips of her. I moved my hands, turning them slightly to both sides, and I did the same with my feet. My muscles seemed to still be working. My thoughts began to take shape again, albeit somewhat weakly and aimlessly. On one hand, I wanted to cup her face with my hands, but at the same time, I longed to open my eyes and look at my beloved. What was holding me back? Tears flowed from my eyes, crawling across my cheeks, forming a tiny stream down my neck. I couldn’t make a sound; I cried in silence. I tried to open my mouth, but I could only manage a poor imitation of a fish. ‘I want to breathe, I want to be a fish,’ crossed my mind. I tried to slide my elbows next to my sides, so I could at least push myself upright, but I lacked the strength. My head sank back onto the pillow, and Beatriz’s hands suddenly disappeared without me noticing. I relaxed once again, and everything gradually turned dark. Then, everything was black.”

Tesha

“April 30, 1949 — Only now am I able to write down what had happened to me, after meeting Doron Keerez again at the Italian coffee bar on the Calle Garay. By telling him what I had experienced, I was finally able to make sense of it. ‘Experienced’ is not the most precise word, though, because it was a dream. Do you ‘experience’ dreams?

So I asked Doron, and he believed so, forasmuch as you took them as seriously as your waking life, or with just as much skepticism, for taking them too seriously can be deadly. ‘Did I take that Aleph too seriously?’ I asked.

‘You mean my dreamt-up story about the so-called ‘Aleph’ at Göbekli Tepe?’ He chuckled.

‘Yes, that was obviously also a dream.’

‘It’s remarkable you also dreamt about the Aleph; apparently, my dream struck a chord with you. But describe your dream first.’

As I described my dream, I suddenly realized that I remembered very little details about the temple complex. I couldn’t describe the pillar well; I didn’t recall its shape nor its color, let alone  the immediate space which was around it. I also no longer knew exactly what the space beneath the pillar looked like, or even in what condition the copper of the plaque and of the polygons were. I believe I remember vaguely a green-like color, but I might have added that later. That’s always the problem with dreams: what do you do with them when you wake up? Do you alter them?

‘You woke up because you felt Beatriz’s hands,’ Doron concluded after I had described my dream as carefully as I could.

‘And because I heard her voice. She called my name. Very clearly, as if she were truly sitting at my bedside.’

‘So that is what you were dreaming: you dreamt that you woke up, but in reality, you were still dreaming. That was your salvation. You described how all your memories were gradulally fading away, and further more how you lost all control over your muscles. You didn’t even remember how to close your eyes, so consequently you couldn’t remember the reverse either. You had forgotten how to wake up, and then you managed to devise a miraculous trick: Beatriz. You needed her to wake up.’

‘When I was finally awake for real, I remembered three words I thought I had seen somewhere in my dream, but I don’t remember where, nor how they looked like. Maybe I dind’t see them, but only heard them because I remember the sounds. They were Hebrew words. The first one sounded like Ayin, the second like Shin, and the last like Tav.’

‘Those are letters! Not words, but letters, like the ones you recite in an alphabet. In this case, indeed, the Hebrew alphabet. Ayin is the sixteenth letter, comparable to the letter ‘O’ in our Latin alphabet. Shin, the twenty-first letter, what we call ‘S,’ and Tav is the twenty-second and final letter, like our letter ‘T.’ Besides being letters of the alphabet, they also carry meaning associated with the Jewish Holy Scriptures. Ayin roughly means time or future; Shin means fire, and Tav means something like truth or completion. That seems to be applicable to your dream, but it could, of course, be a projection.’

Doron then explained that the letters also are representing numbers. The Hebrew script is so much more than our Latin alphabet. Then I had a sudden insight: I asked if the three letters, in any of the six possible combinations, could form a new existing Hebrew word without having to add other letters, including extra vowels, which are often not written in Hebrew.

‘There are actually four combinations that work,” Doron said. “For example, the combination in alphabetical order, Ayin, Shin, and Tav, yields the following word: Eshet, which means something like solid mass. That is quite fitting: it refers to your monolith, doesn’t it!’

‘Can it really mean ‘monolith?’ I asked.

‘In language, anything is possible, just like in dreams,’ Doron replied. ‘The letters Tav, Ayin, and Shin form the word Toaas, which means manufactured, crafted, or created. And its reversal, Shin, Ayin, Tav, makes the word Shaa’t, which means the hour of.’

‘The appointed hour,’ I said excitedly. ‘The hour of truth. What a great coincidence!’

‘Or projection, it’s like the I Ching. If you search long enough, you will always find a fitting explanation. But I don’t want to spoil the fun. If you wish, you could say that the three combinations I mentioned — Shaa’t, Toaas, Eshet — express the following: The monolith created in the hour of truth. That’s quite impressive, you can comfortly show up with that!’

I ignored his skepticism. ‘You just mentioned that there are four combinations that form a new word. What’s the last one?’

‘Oh, yes, I almost forgot. The last one is Tav, Shin, Ayin, which gives the word Tesha, meaning the number nine.’

I looked at him, shaking my head. ‘You probably think it’s esoteric nonsense again, but the dream I just told you about happened exactly nine days ago, and today, after exactly nine years that my Italian love Beatriz Faréle experienced her hour of truth, at precisely nine o’clock in the morning.’ He fell silent, perhaps for a reason out of politeness. So I decedied to continue, ‘Does coincidence exist in a dream, according to you? I can’t recall to have ever experienced something coincidental in a dream. Everything always happened for a self-evident reason, even if though it could be experienced as enigmatic and wondrous.’

‘I am not an expert in this field, but I suspect that dreams are not dialectical. In that case, I believe coincidence is not possible because the contradiction between rational and irrational doesn’t exist in a dream. Everything is possible and self-evident.’

‘But there is the truth of the dream and the truth of the life in which we dream. Perhaps coincidence does not exist in our dreams, but it does in our concrete lives. Then, the connections we try to discern are nothing more than attempts to ward off that coincidence, in a hopeless and tragic attempt to escape the black hole of death.’

‘That theorem of Bolyai—Gerwien about polygons which fit exactly into a rectangle is not an articulation of coincidence; it’s a proven mathematical principle. The fact that we have such principles at our disposal doesn’t prevent our attempt to escape the black hole from being tragic, but it doesn’t necessarily make it hopeless either.’ Doron Keerez, never hesitating to provide some uplifting conversation.”

JCdV — Bonnemort, April 30, 2019

Postscript

This story originated in a dream, a dream in which I imagined myself awake, engaged in the process of creating a story. It began with the autistic boy, who was puzzling with metal polygons on a copper plaque. When the pieces appeared to be fitting perfectly on the plaque, a secret space opened up. No one else had managed to do that before him. Then I wondered what could be inside that space. I immediately thought of the Aleph but also believed it had to be something diametrically different. Soon, the idea of a minuscule black hole came to me. An Anti—Aleph. After that, I fell into a dreamless sleep. I woke up two more times that night, and on both occasions, I found myself thinking about that story. When I got up the next morning to begin writing the story, which I thought I had already conceived in outline during the night, it became clear to me that I hadn’t thought it through at all; I had dreamt it all. It proved very hard to develop the two scenes. Then I decided to reread Borges’ story first.

The Aleph begins with a quote from Hamlet: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space. When I looked the quotation up in the text of Shakespeare, I noticed that the sentence, ending with a period here, actually continues beyond the word ‘space,’ with: were it not that I have bad dreams. Furthermore, I noticed in the text that this quote precisely corresponds to the 273^rd line from that second scene of the second act.

I am grateful for the knowledge provided by two of my former students: Yonatan R., who originates from Israel, and Juan A., originally coming from Buenos Aires, the city where The Aleph takes place. Yonatan helped me with the pronunciation and meaning of the words Ayin, Shin, and Tav, as well as the meaning of the four possible words that can be formed with these three letters without the addition of an extra vowel: Tesha (meaning ‘nine’), Shaa’t (meaning ‘the hour of’), Toaas (meaning ‘manufactured’), and Eshet (meaning ‘solid mass’). Juan assisted me with information about the city of Buenos Aires. The Avenida Calle Juan de Garay, the ‘Calle Garay’ in the story of Borges, runs through the center of the city towards the mouth of the Río de la Plata. It is located in the neighborhood where the Italian immigrants originally had settled, the southern part of the city center, which gradually transitions into the pampas. He also mentioned that the poems by the character Daneri are linguistically humorous. He found the Dutch translation of those poems in my edition to be well done. He has become proficient in Dutch by reading the first translation of the Bible into Dutch, the ‘Statenvertaling’ [1637], and the works of Gerard Reve.

I noticed that the first-person narrator in The Aleph is explicitly addressed as ‘Borges’ for two times in the story, which suggests that he is that ‘I’. I know of one other story where he does that: ‘The Other’. Naturally, this remains a problematic observation because a fictional character who is closely resembling the author, still must be considered as a fictional person.

CdB — Bonnemort, 28 Febrary 2023