February 29 - Saint Jorges Borges, Mirrorist, Labyrinthist and Librarian

Saint Jorges Borges owed his existence to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia, each finding the other satisfactory for its need.  The Aranmula kannadi in the British Museum and the 29^th volume of Saint Denis’ Systematic Dictionary of Science, Arts, and the Trades met in a eucharistic ray 22° upward and to the right of the primary apsidal crucifix in the Church of San Benito de Palermo in a suburb on the northern outskirts of Buenos Aires, begetting on August 24 1899 St. Jorges Borges and laying him at the center of a man-eating tiger lily labyrinth, out of which he had to find his way if he wished even a brief existence.

There are saints so pure they bypass flesh in entering the world.  They detour through labyrinths so arcane and musty the common citizen must balk at even a distant vision of them.  Their minds are so lush with undiscovered flowers and anarchic insects that the sound and beauty of the world beats in lesser syllables and they would die rather than not sing the garden fury they hear within.  St. Jorges Borges was such a saint.

In 1955 God bared his irony by granting him 800,000 books and darkness simultaneously.  The saint accepted the gift with grace.  On June 14 1986, having been lost in so many labyrinths, having grown old in so many mirrors, the director of La Bibliotheque Nationale de Heaven swooped St. Jorges Borges upwards on the back of a hrön and turned him into a text of infinitely shifting letters and placed him in that celestial library which contains all books that have been written, all that will, that might, and all that will never be or even thought.  He was elevated to sainthood by the Council of I on this day in 2003.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and souls.

January 23 - Saint Denis of Enlightened Largesse, Poetic Journalism and Encyclopedic Acceptance

Intelligent, ardent, effusive, eloquent, never at home, always abroad; or if it happened that he received others at his home and amid his own ideas, then he was the most open-hearted, the most hospitable of mortals, the most friendly to all men and to everything, and gave to all his circle, readers no less than authors or artists, not a lesson but a fête.  He taught us three things:  the hope for posthumous fame in this world to replace the promised immortality which theology had located in the next; the chaotic irreducible relation between all objects and concepts; that ideas must be released from their mental chains to swarm in the natural freedom of the body.

In Langres France in the eighteenth century, a girl craved knowledge.  She fell asleep praying for it.  Then she would dream, night after night, of squawking screeching birds—some eagles, some vultures; others sparrows, ostriches—spiraling up a great column to an unseen canopy in Paradise.  She’d wake in ferocious sweats, and doves and songbirds would sit on her shoulder and sing to her and comfort her.   During one especially virulent dream, as birds thicker than death were shrieking on her tomb, the girl's cranium opened, exposing her throbbing brain, and an eagle of truth dropped a significant steaming turd into it.

Other birds noisily joined--the Berlepsch's Tinamou, Rufous-bellied Chachalaca, Vanuatu Scrubfowl, Handsome Francolin, Chinese Bamboo-Partridge, Satyr Tragopan, Moustached Puffbird, Cayenne Nightjar, Reunion Solitaire, Boat-billed Tody-Bully, Crested Shrike-wit, Hairy-backed Bulbul, Scaly-breasted Illadopsis-Babbler, Palawan Flowerpecker, Uluguru Violet-backed Sunbird, Donaldson Smith’s Social-Weaver, Slut-faced Hemispingus, Violaceous-rumped Euphonia, Pyrrhuloxia, and Giant Cowbird-Bobolink--all these and thousands more deposited their avian waste into her open skull.  Nine months later, on October 5 1713, she delivered a babbling Saint Denis from her brain.

While usually journalism is antithetical to sainthood—journalists being the boors and pedants of creation—St. Denis elevated curiosity and truth-seeking to aesthetic heights and embodied philosophy for a future age.  On July 31 1784, just outside Le Coude Fou on rue du Bourg-Tibourg, while telling nested stories to passersby and plotting a revenge, St. Denis was changed to a pillar of merde and brought by Persephone Herself down to Hades, where he was placed by the most polluted section of the Styx, where he still stands.

The Council of I elevated St. Denis to sainthood on July 26 2000 after two centuries of unbroken futile debate, not through consensus but exhaustion.  We honor him today because on this day in 1797 his daughter, Angélique de Vandeul, became a fatalist, as was written up above.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.