Philosophy on “borrowed being” (Hegel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Philosophy-

Religion-One-1827/dp/0520060202″>Lectures On the Philosophy of Religion):

Existing things, the developments of the natural and spiritual world, take manifold forms, and have an infinite variety; they have a being which differs in degree, force, strength, content; but the being of all these things is not independent, but is supported by, dependent on, something else, and has no true independence. If we attribute a being to particular things, it is only a borrowed being, only the semblance of a beinabsolute self-sustained Being, which is God.

Science on “borrowed life” (Luis P. Villarreal, “Are Viruses Alive?”):

[A] virus seems more like a chemistry set than an organism. But when a virus enters a cell (called a host after infection), it is far from inactive. It sheds its coat, bares its genes and induces the cell’s own replication machinery to reproduce the intruder’s DNA or RNA and manufacture more viral protein based on the instructions in the viral nucleic acid. The newly created viral bits assemble and, voilà, more virus arises, which also may infect other cells.

These behaviors are what led many to think of viruses as existing at the border between chemistry and life. More poetically, virologists Marc H. V. van Regenmortel of the University of Strasbourg in France and Brian W. J. Mahy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recently said that with their dependence on host cells, viruses lead “a kind of borrowed life.”

Pop culture on “borrowed love” (S.O.S. Band, “Borrowed Love“):

It’s 3:01 in the morning
another sleepless night

I feel your presence with me and it doesn’t feel right.
And then it starts flowing through me
from my feet right to my head

Then I scream, calling out your name

I want you back in my bed
my bed.

What could make me think
that I could live on borrowed love ?

Being as borrowed from the supreme being. Life as borrowed from life. Love as borrowed from a lover.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

9 replies on “A Quick Note on Borrowing”

  1. Indubitably indeed, as we borrow burritos from the Mexican, he borrows our intestine in equal measure. And yet what of the black man? We borrow our histories of whatnot and interconnected being, save yet not for stories of unrecognized, ordinary cisgendered identities. The “crow”, as it were, is not with the “tree”–if you assume parallel constructions 😉 And yet our thesis remains: Who will save the working class?

  2. Superseding all forms of borrowing: The borrowed book that isn’t returned. Likelihood of unreturnability increases if book is out of print, was purchased in a foreign country, signed by author, or given by cute ex-boyfriend.

  3. @2 One might concur, vis-a-vis our temporal situationality (from a certain worldview) in regard to Helegian librarians. And yet the fact remains: Borrowed burdens beget bulging buttocks begging to burst burgeoningly forth. Who can approach Mudede’s genius?

  4. @3 I realize that The Book is merely an ephemeral construct of our brief moment in time, that the pages on which the words are typed are no more “real” than a rainbow or the glitter shit from a unicorn, but lo, I am but a superficial bitch who wants her fucking copy of “Travels With Myself and Another” by Martha Gellhorn, purchased in Nairobi in 1985 with the price marked in shillings, back. Dammit.

  5. I am connected only loosely, by a skein of thought, of assumed and unearned associations (“I have lied, I have fibbed, I have cadged and wheedled in the night”, as so memorably will run the lyric to Macklemore’s upcoming single “Drowning in Nostalgia for Five Minutes Ago”) to the motherfucker who hasn’t returned Gellhorn’s ur-text, her African proto-edition without which “Sex at Dawn” might (who can say?) have been just another pamphlet yellowing in the rack at some Newfoundland uni health center […] and yet I must

    break

    from this to declare here to Brenda, not just my dear Brenda who doesn’t read Slog but to all Brendas of the book-desaparecidista class or category or stratum, I say: where is my goddam hardback “Fearless Jones” with the beautiful dustjacket photo of the male torso in a workmanlike wife-beater t-shirt?

    Hmm? I bet you never even read it, just tucked it into a seatcushion somewhere in your tumbledown Snohomish County schloss. You asshole.

  6. Life as borrowed from life? So, for example, when you eat meat, you’re “borrowing” life from the animal from which it came or taking it? Perhaps a bad neighbor who never returns tools and lawn equipment, but claims to “borrow,” nonetheless. As to borrowing life from the “supreme being,” we’ve no need for that hypothesis.

    Much like the invalid inference of each human needing a mother to humanity itself needing a mother, we see the continental enthusiast and “technician” as a poet unconcerned with the banality of coherence. Very difficult to move from the dependency relationships on which organisms rely to function to…”life borrows life,” even with the fact that viruses reliance on a host to replicate. And moreso, the erotic musings (deeply erotic…lol) of hegel to “scientific fact”–a man who denied the findings of newtonian dynamics based solely on a priori imagination. No, but he was the philosopher king.

  7. What is a skein, really, but a metaphor for the thought-web of the subconscious, connecting the bookless who walk among us? If we were to channel the Lama Minchin, he would probably say, “fuck the motherfucking fuckers and their motherfucking mothers, who would dare to not return our motherfucking books.” Word.

    @Ken …You are both perceptive and handsome.

    @gus …why, good morning, of course! (suck it, NoFun.)

  8. The hegelian dialectical exchange between sandwich and not-sandwich is synthesized in manwich (neither sandwich, nor, arguably, food or even food-like, but inexplicably consumed at times by talking deli meats). Bologne bologne bologne bologne bologne! I smell the beginnings of a graduate thesis, and it smells a lot like ass, pot, and other people’s money–which is the best kind.

    Villarreal posits that viruses are a key mechanism in biological evolution. It’s quite fascinating, so don’t let this stream of consciousness fool ya.

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