Yesterday I wrote about an essay by Borges titled Feeling in Death. A good companion piece to that essay is the poem The Cyclical Night, La noche ciclica. The poem expresses many of the same sentiments as Feeling in Death:

Night after night sets me down in the world

In my blood: Laprida, Cabrera, Soler, Suárez…
…
Squares weighed down by a night in no one’s care
Are the vast patios of an empty palace,
And the single-minded streets creating space
Are corridors for sleep and nameless fear.
…
In my human flesh, eternity keeps recurring.

Que es de los arrabales. Una esquina remota
Que puede ser del norte, del sur o del oeste,
Pero que tiene siempre una tapia celeste,
Una higuera sombría y una vereda rota.

Ahi está Buenos Aires. El tiempo que a los hombres
Trae el amor o el oro, a mí apenas me deja
Esta rosa apagada, esta vana madeja
De calles que repiten los pretéritos nombres

De mi sangre: Laprida, Cabrera, Soler, Suárez…
…
Las plazas agravadas por la noche sin dueño
Son los patios profundos de un árido palacio
Y las calles unánimes que engendran el espacio
Son corredores de vago miedo y de sueño.
…
Vuelve a mi carne humana la eternidad constante.

“life is too impoverished not to be immortal.”

In 1928 Borges wrote a short essay titled Sentirse en muerte, Feeling in Death. He would come back to this essay over the years, incorporating it into two later essays. The first was “A History of Eternity” published in 1936. The second was “A New Refutation of Time” written in the mid-1940s. While both of these essay are long, complicated, philosophical discussions, Feeling in Death is a lovely, meditative piece that should not be overlooked.

I think that Feeling in Death must have been a very important essay to Borges for it captures his wanderings among the streets of Buenos Aires, an activity that consumed many of his nights and days before he became blind. It’s unfortunate that Feeling in Death is buried in these other essays that are seldom read. So, I’m going to take this opportunity to include here most of Feeling in Death:

“I wish to record an experience I had a few nights ago….I remember it thus: On the afternoon before that night, I was in Barracas, an area I do not customarily visit, and whose distance from the places I later passed through had already given the day a strange savor. The night had no objective whatsoever; the weather was clear, and so, after dinner, I went out to walk and remember. I did no want to establish any particular direction for my stroll; I strove for a maximum latitude of possibility so as not to fatigue my expectant mind with the obligatory foresight of a particular path. I accomplished, to the unsatisfactory degree to which it is possible, what is called strolling at random, without other conscious resolve than to pass up the avenues and broad streets in favor of chance’s more obscure invitations. Yet a kind of familiar gravitation pushed me toward neighborhoods whose name I wish always to remember, places that fill my heart with reverence. I am not alluding to my own neighborhood, the precise circumference of my childhood, but to its still mysterious outskirts; a frontier region I have possessed fully in words and very little in reality, at once adjacent and mythical. These penultimate streets are, for me, the opposite of what is familiar, its other face, almost as unknown as the buried foundations of our house or own own invisible skeleton. The walk left me at a street corner. I took in the night, in perfect, serene respite from thought. The vision before me, not at all complex to begin with, seemed further simplified by my fatigue. Its very ordinariness made it unreal. It was a street of one-story houses, and though its first meaning was poverty, its second was certainly bliss. It was the poorest and most beautiful thing. The houses faced away from the street; a fig tree merged into shadow over the blunted streetcorner, and the narrow portals — higher than the extending lines of the walls — seemed wrought of the same infinite substance as the night. The sidewalk was embanked above a street of elemental dirt, the dirt of a still unconquered America. In the distance, the road, by then a country lane, crumbled into the Maldonado River. Against the muddy, chaotic earth, a low, rose-colored wall seemed not to harbor the moonlight but to shimmer with a gleam all of its own. Tenderness could have no better name than that rose color.

“I stood there looking at this simplicity. I thought, undoubtedly aloud: ‘This is the same as it was thirty years ago.’ I imagined that date: recent enough in other countries, but already remote on this ever-chaging side of the world. Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for it a small, bird-sized fondness; but there was probably no other sound in the dizzying silence except for the equally timeless noise of crickets. The glib thought I am in the year eighteen hundred and something ceased to be a few approximate words and deepened into reality. I felt as the dead feel, I felt myself to be an abstract observer of the world; an indefinite fear imbued with knowledge that is the greater clarity of metaphysics. No, I did not believe I had made my way upstream on the presumptive waters of Time. Rather, I suspected myself to be in possession of the reticent or absent meaning of the inconceivable word eternity. Only later did I succedd in defining this figment of my imagination.

“I write it out now: This pure representation of homogenous facts — the serenity of the night, the translucent little wall, the small-town scent of honeysuckle, the fundamental dirt — is not merely identical to what existed on that corner many years ago; it is, without superficial resemblances or repetitions, the same. when we can feel this oneness, time is a delusion which the indifference and inseparability of a moment from its apparent yesterday and from its apparent today suffice to disintegrate.”

That could have been the subtitle of Williamson’s biography of Borges. The Irish writer Colm Tóibín, who knows Buenos Aires very well, explains the situation:

Borges, it is true, spent much of his life hanging out with women who would neither sleep with him nor marry him. The advantage for any biographer is that if you throw a stone in Buenos Aires you are likely to hit one of these women or their many descendants, or indeed their books of memoir. Since there is nothing much to do in the city, other than bang saucepans together as a protest against government policy, discussing Borges’s love life has become as popular as polo.

Of course, Tóibín is being facetious. There are a few more things to do in Buenos Aires.

The article by Tóibín in the London Review of Books is superb, providing a great overview of the life of Borges including the women in his life. Tóibín also talks about Borges’ friend the writer Bioy Casares, who was a notorious womanizer. As well as the women who were maids to Bioy and Borges. Interesting stuff.

If you think that you will never get around to actually reading the Williamson biography, then do read the Tóibín article which is much more than about the women of Borges. It’s the best single article on the life of Borges, written by one of the best contemporary writers today.

the fiction of Time destroyed,
free from love, from me.

desbaratada la ficción del Tiempo,
sin el amor, sin mi

…Borges, Anticipation of Love, Amorosa anticipación

“Then I reflected that all things happen to oneself, and happen precisely, precisely now. Century follows century, yet events occur only in the present; countless men in the air, on the land, and sea, yet everything that truly happens, happens to me. Después reflexioné que todas las cosas le suceden a uno precisamente, precisamente ahora. Siglos de siglos y sólo en el presente ocurren los hechos; innumerables hombres en el aires, en la tierra y el mar, y todo lo que realmente pasa me pasa a mí.”

“The Garden of Forking Paths”, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, is the best story by Borges. It’s certainly the story with the most interesting plot and it’s very readable, even to the person who finds Borges a little dull and challenging.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” is a mystery story on the surface but it is also a story that contains many famous Borgesian elements such as an infinite book, labyrinths, and multiple dimensions. If you’ve been following this blog series, then you have noticed that a lot of Borges stories deal with the aspect of time.

Because of the nature of the plot, I’m not going into much detail about this story. Like a lot of stories by Borges you will want to read the story at least twice since the ending changes your perspective and understanding of the story. Also, there are some paragraphs that you may have to read very closely in order to really understand what is the garden of forking paths.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” has obtained cult status among those interested in interactive fiction. The story explains, better than just about anything, the possibilities inherent in interactive fiction. Indeed, in my readings on digital media and computer gaming, Borges is cited quite often for his groundbreaking perspective.

“Little by little, a man comes to resemble the shape of his destiny; a man is, in the long run, his circumstances. Un hombre se confunde, gradualamente, con la forma de su destino; un hombre es, a la larga, sus circunstancias.”

“The Writing of the God”, La Escritura del Dios, is about a man in prison. Specifically, the man is an Aztec priest but it’s not really that relevant to the story. This is another one of those stories by Borges where you read the story not so much for the entertaining plot but for the meaning.

In the cell next to the prisoner is a tiger. Okay, at this point you know that you’re in a Borges story. Through a small opening in the wall the man can glimpse the tiger for a brief period every day. The man comes to believe that a message from god is written on the stripes of the tiger.

Borges raises a very interesting question in this story: “What sort of sentence, I asked myself, would be constructed by an absolute mind?” [¿Qué tipo de sentencia (me pregunté) construirá una mente absoluta?]

Borges was a strong agnostic. While he doesn’t attack conventional religions directly in this story, the question makes me wonder about the famous statements attributed to the Christian God through the words of Jesus…anyway, back to Borges.

“The Writing of the God” has other Borges characteristics, such as a dream within a dream within a dream. The prisoner eventually has a vision of God, an enormous Wheel made of water and fire. The Wheel was “made of all things that shall be, that are, and that have been, all intertwined, and I was one of the strands within that all-encompassing fabric.” [Entretejidas, la formaban todas las cosas que serán, que son y que fueron, y yo era una de las hebras de esa trama total].

Borges also makes a point of noting that evil is also part of that all-encompassing Wheel.

Through this vision the man comes to understand the writing on the tiger and that the man himself can become omnipotent, released from prison, and become immortal simply by speaking the words aloud. I’ll leave the conclusion of the story for you to read.

As I was re-reading the “The Writing of the God” the other night, I remembered the image of a divine Wheel that also exists in an essay by Borges. In “A New Refutatin of Time” Borges quotes from an Indian philospher on a 5th century Buddhist text: “Just as a rolling carriage wheel touches earth at only one point, so life lasts as long as a single idea.”

“A New Refutatin of Time” was written by Borges in the mid-1940s. We know from the Williamson biography that Borges spent several years composing “The Writing of the God”, which was published in the El Aleph collection in 1949. (Like many of Borges collected stories, the story might have first appeared in the magazine Sur but I don’t have the full chronology in front of me). So, the essay and the story are good companion pieces for reading.

In “A New Refutatin of Time”, the paragraph just before the mentioning of the Buddhist wheel is a quote from Schopenhauer, one of Borges favorite philosophers: “No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life, and is a possession that no misfortune can take away.”

Note: I’ve not yet verified that either of Borges quotes from the Visuddhimagga or Schopenhauer are accurate or yet another instance of Borges composing his own quotes; regardless, the statements are interesting.

There are a lot of Web sites focused on Borges. For the student and researcher the best site is the Borges Center at the University of Iowa. The site is available in English, French, and Spanish.

In their Borges Studies Online section are a number of excellent resources including articles as well as a few entire books. Most of the material is in Spanish but there are a few very good resources listed that are freely available in English.

One item that all readers of Borges should download is A Dictionary of Borges (PDF). This 270 page book written by Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes is completely available and a very enjoyable book to browse. While some of their definitions of places in Buenos Aires are not what I would say, the book is written for the person who has never been to Buenos Aires or doesn’t know much about the city or Argentine culture and history.

Another wonderful book available from the same site is by Beatriz Sarlo, Borges: A Writer on the Edge. It is also available in Spanish. I’m going to be talking more about Sarlo’s book in another posting.

Both of these works are out-of-print and very difficult to locate in print. So, it is great that these resources are available to everyone without having to track down a physical library. The copyright of the books are held by the authors and it’s very kind of them to allow the University of Iowa to make these works available.

More libraries, publishers, and universities should make out-of-print books available, particularly when the copyright is held by the author. All scholarly authors are likely to agree to that. Of course, maybe Google Books will eventually make the full text of the scholarly works that they scanned available someday. That will be a great asset for education in the developing world. (No scholarly writer is getting rich from royalties and only a very few creative writers ever make more than their advances). I can tell you that even here in Buenos Aires it is very difficult to find scholarly books in English and very few of these scholarly works are ever translated into Spanish. As a librarian, I’m passionate about expanding open access to scholarship.

Adrogue

Originally uploaded by sabor: limalimon.

Just to the south of the city of Buenos Aires is the small town of Adrogué. Borges spent a lot of time in Adrogué in the first part of his life. His family would go there often for the summers. According to the Williamson biography, Adrogué is also where Borges contemplated suicide at least once, possibly twice.

Adrogué is also the title of a beautiful poem by Borges that captures his feeling for the town, some lines:

On the far side of the doorways they are sleeping,

I, who am time and blood and agony.

Duermen del otro lado de las puertas

Aquéllos que por obra de los sueños

Son en la sombra visionaria dueños

Del vasto ayer y de las cosas muertas.

…

El antiguo estupor de la elegía

Me abruma cuando pienso en esa casa

Y no comprendo cómo el tiempo pasa,

Yo, que soy tiempo y sangre y agonía.

Libraries, labyrinths, and the fact that anything is ever written are constant themes in the works of poems. Here are a few lines from the poem “Alexandria, A.D. 641”. The date refers to the year that the great library at Alexandria was destroyed.

Unceasing human work gave birth to this
Infinity of books. If of them all
Not even one remained, man would again
Beget each page and every line,
Each work and every love of Hercules,
And every teaching of every manuscript.

Las vigilias humanas engendraron
Los infinitos libros. Si de todos
No quedara uno solo, volverían
A engendrar cada hoja y cada línea,
Cada trabajo y cada amor de Hércules,
Cada lección de cada manuscrito.

Towards the end of the poem, in typical Borges fashion, it is revealed that the first person narrator of “Alexandria, A.D. 641” is Caliph Omar, who ordered the destruction of the library. Yet, the concept of continually rebuilding the “infinity of books” also stands outside the history of the library of Alexandria and re-appears in several of other works by Borges.

Honestly, I keep wanting to find reasons to dislike Borges, to find evidence that he’s overrated. But from a literary perspective, the more I read, particularly the obscure works, the more I realize that he really was one of the truly great writers.

In the last two postings I mentioned that both The Circular Ruins and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius are largely based on metaphysical idealism. Borges examined this topic in several of his essays. Now, I know this sounds like dry, boring stuff and, actually, that’s not far from the truth but the essays are essential to understanding Borges. Even Borges once described himself as “an Argentine adrift on a sea of metaphysics.” But, undoubtedly, some of his best writings are in his essays.

In The New Refutation of Time, written in the mid-1940s, Borges quotes the philosophers Berkeley, Hume, and Schopenhauer, as well as Bernard Shaw and a fifth-century Buddhist text. Fortunately, Borges rewards the reader with this observation:

Our destiny…is not terrifying because it is unreal; it is terrifying because it is irreversible and iron-bound. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

Borges follows the observation and closes the essay with a revealing quote from the 17th-century German mystic Angelus Silesius :

Friend, this is enough. Should you wish to read more,
Go and yourself become the writing, yourself the essence.

“He understood that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake.” [Comprendió que el empeño de modelar la materia incoherente y vertiginosa de que se componen los sueños es el más arduo que puede acometer un varón.]

“The Circular Ruins” is my favorite story by Borges. The imagery leads to an ultimately terrifying revelation about reality.

The last five words of “The Circular Ruins” may have you deciding to re-read the entire story.