Borges
Prompted by the Borges radio shows I linked to yesterday, here's a piece on Borges I wrote a while back, plus a couple of his later poems and a few links to some of his works currently online.
Over time I have come to accept Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s idea of Borges as a master of evasion, both in his oneiric, ephemeral short stories and too in his oddly tragic escapist life. His admittance in a late poem called ‘Remorse’ that ‘I have commited the worst sin a man can commit/I have not been happy’ might be typical of Borges’ melancholy self-dramatisation but his late essay ‘Blindness’ based on a lecture given in 1977, a period in which he was running as fast as ever, suggests a more noble version of Borges’ evasive aesthetic.
Borges delivered the lecture during a period of intensive travelling, when he was virtually omnipresent in North American Universities. It was period in which his veneration was reaching new levels, thus he could give a lecture that began by detailing his own ‘modest blindness’ and go on to discuss other lionized blind sages, such as ‘Homer, Milton and Joyce'. Borges’ own blindness had been foreseen, in that his father and grandmother had both died blind, ‘who both died blind - blind, laughing, and brave’. It had been a slow process of degeneration, one that he acknowledged as debilitating, but not one that should ‘be seen in a pathetic way’, for it enabled a different way of seeing, a strange movement, a different way of life: embedded in blindness was a metaphor for sight. So the ‘slow nightfall, that slow loss of sight that lasted more than three quarters of a century,’ that ‘began when I began to see’ contained an inherent capacity for sight of a different kind, a new way of seeing that allowed strange figures to dance and play and gave light a new, distinctive form. ‘People generally imagine the blind as enclosed in a black world…I who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist…vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind’. What we have then is a fundamental blurring, a vague haziness: full sight not replaced by its opposite, but by a spectral luminosity; not something as simple as sight turned in on itself, or sight removed completely but altered, realigned, allowing for a space of possibility. Borges, remembering a line from Rudolf Steiner said that something ending should be thought of as something beginning, and that ultimately blindness should be figured as ‘a way of life: one of the styles of living’.
There’s a deliberate poignancy here, not a gawky shame - Borges as anti-Gaucho – but a contemplative acceptance a variation on Pascal’s dictum that ‘all men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone,’ a sense that in blindness Borges had found a way of accepting himself, the latest manifestation of the wandering blind sage, a mode of withdrawal he’d long sought in the anxious labyrinths of his fictions.
THE JUST
A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South,
a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a colour and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well
though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets
of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of
Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.
Elegy
Oh destiny of Borges
to have sailed across the diverse seas of the world
or across that single and solitary sea of diverse names,
to have been a part of Edinburgh, of Zurich, of the two Cordobas,
of Colombia and of Texas,
to have returned at the end of changing generations
to the ancient lands of his forebears,
to Andalucia, to Portugal and to those counties
where the Saxon warred with the Dane and they mixed their blood,
to have wandered through the red and tranquil labyrinth of London,
to have grown old in so many mirrors,
to have sought in vain the marble gaze of the statues,
to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias, atlases,
to have seen the things that men see,
death, the sluggish dawn, the plains,
and the delicate stars,
and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing
except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires
a face that does not want you to remember it.
Oh destiny of Borges,
perhaps no stranger than your own.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
The Lottery in Babylon
The Library of Babel
The Circular Ruins
The Aleph
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