Thought on Borges: I can see why he was spurned so many times. What did you say about Adam? Lots of whining.

The Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries featured Eros as a very original god, but not quite primordial, since he was the child of Night (Nyx).[2] Aristophanes (c. 400 BC), influenced by Orphism, relates the birth of Eros and then of the entire human race:

At the beginning there was only Chaos, Night (Nyx), Darkness (Erebus), and the Abyss (Tartarus). Earth, the Air and Heaven had no existence. Firstly, blackwinged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Darkness, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Love (Eros) with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in the deep Abyss with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light.[6]

“Have you ever read Milton, Captain?”

The only letter that had refrained from urging its claims was the modest Alef, and God rewarded it later for its humility by giving it the first place in the Decalogue.

The title work, “The Aleph”, describes a point in space that contains all other spaces at once. The work also presents the idea of infinite time… The story continues the theme of infinity found in several of Borges’ other works, such as The Book of Sand.

Which also links to your John Dee related(?) “a sharp, stable point becomes the parent, and king of all the planets”.

The fluid metaphor, foreshadowed in the letters to Fliess and observable in the Language of Flowers Dream, intensified during Freud’s articulation of the theory of libidinal energy. In the correspondence, Freud had associated the menstrual migraine with periodicity, toxic emanations, and olfactory stimuli; a further characteristic of the menstrual migraine was its inability to “discharge”: the toxic effects were “produced by the sexual stimulating substance when this cannot find sufficient discharge.”

There are numerous references to a menstrual economics of buildup and discharge in his early remarks about menstruation; in an 1896 letter to Fliess he argued that “during menstruation and other sexual processes the body produces an increased Q of these substances and therefore of the stimuli.” The increased Q, or excitation, generated a language of buildup and discharge, of damming and facilitation. These scientific abstractions — substance, Q, increase, discharge, libido — formulated and refined during the 1890s, have Fliessian reverberations; it seems fairly certain that during the height of his association with Fliess, Freud had assimilated a good deal of Fliess’s theory of periodicity and that menstruation became a hidden metaphor in many of his later theories and in his dreams. The scientific language used to express his theory of menstrual migraine and menstrual increase in the above passages is also the language used by Fliess in the theory of periodicity. This mutual way of thinking became, in the conceptualization of the sexual instincts, intertwined with Freud’s writings on the menstrual stages in women’s lives; it simultaneously affected his theory of libido.

The term “libido” is one of the most difficult in Freud’s vocabulary; although many psychoanalytic critics use the word to imply something like “sex drive,” in Freud’s writings “libido” is surrounded by an aura of indeterminacy. In a letter to Fliess dated 17 December 1896, he called it a “28-day anxiety substance,” a definition that reiterated Fliess’s concept of menstrual periodicity. “Anxiety,” Freud wrote, “would arise through the somatic deployment of the female 28-D substance if the sexual discharge is denied to it.” His exploration of menstrual discharge climaxes in this letter — the same letter in which he hoped to blend his contributions with Fliess “to the point where our individual property is no longer recognizable.”