As depth psychologist James Hillman reminds us, the term animal spirits was once used in psychological explanations throughout Western history. Referring to who goes on inside. First letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, derives from a glyph who represents ox face, or bull. A is not then for apple and fall, A is for aleph and bull.
Aleph is a fourth dimension, one that captivated Borges as a child, playing with a collection of 4-dimensional cubes, composing a bright tesseract, an infinite combination of the planes who nevertheless cannot be reduced to any sense of their supposed totality. Just as Schilder felt psyche to be a physical substance, the same could be said of aleph, an analog of a fourth dimension who would require, in this context, a fourth canal in ear, a hypercanal, vibrating to such a fine degree that they are pure energy, electricity that drives gravity.
Hillman writes that, when confronted with a great animal power, we do not sing to them, bow down, dance in their honour, rather, we interpret them. We wave an hermeneutic wand to make their force go away by transforming them into a meaning. In other words, we so often meet bull with our own bull. The power of image of bull, says Hillman, is like power of imagination themselves, Martial and Venusian vibration, earthbound and cosmogonic.
Bull is another way of channelling speculative fecundity, ways with which ecstatic moves out and enstatic moves in. Borges’s Asterion longs for ears who hear all sounds of cosmos, so who might such appendages look like?
Just as Asterion seeks to hear all sound, aleph is said to be source of all articulate sound, a perfectly spherical zero, akin to disintegration of the ego, altering balance and orientation. To hear aleph, says Gershom Scholem, is to hear next to nothing, they are preparation for all audible language, but in itself conveys no determinate, specific meaning within an infinite system of meaning devoid of specific meaning, always on the verge of translation, of doubling, of splitting.