Status Updates From Borges and Me: An Encounter

“Borges makes these perfect little texts, essays that are stories. It’s all poetry, a kind of spell. After reading Borges, if you miss a train, the event will feel drenched in meaning.” Alastair had taken flight, his eyes wide, his nostrils almost flaring like a bull’s before his charge, and I guessed he’d sampled his brownie mix at some point earlier in the afternoon. “Literature, after Borges, must change.”

“Anguish is pain multiplied by resistance. So they say, and I believe them. You will have to grieve.”
The word itself, grieve, puzzled me. I didn’t know how this process might unfold but guessed I would come to accept Billy’s death in due course. What choice did I have?

“ALASTAIR IS BACK,” I said as we drove out of Stirling.
“El magnífico returns! Our adventure, Giuseppe, has ended. There’s a melancholy in these endings, don’t you agree? I dislike the last pages of any good book, as I anticipate the coming losses, the vacancy.”

“No matter. Think of this: Leibniz and Isaac Newton each discovered the calculus in the same century, but they never knew each other.”
“What does that mean?”
“Ideas arise independently from the same mysterious source.”

A war is an enormous funeral, and one should proceed sadly into battle, in humility, with a bowed head, fully aware that one might never be forgiven. I knew I’d never for a second approve of any rhetoric about war that verged on the exultant. There was no glory in war, only shame for having lacked the imagination to prevent this stumble into the abyss.

...But it’s impossible to win. There’s never a total victory. That would be death. The victories of the living are partial at best. We vomit on ourselves, but we wash our shoes clean. And begin again.”

“Yes, a war between the mind and sky. Marvelous, your poet! We fight our battles over and over. For us, it’s the effort to express reality. It’s a battle. I feel sad at times, lonely and detached from reality. But the sky overwhelms me, even though I’m blind. The sun is too bright, blinding a blind man! This is the reality we encounter and wrestle into words. This wrestling is our life. ..

Was there ever a more foolish or cruel war? All the dead young men, on both sides, depressed me. What was the point?

I wanted to say something, to burrow into this unspoken area, to find a place where poetry became a kind of restoration of the self, giving as Shakespeare said a “local habitation and a name” to “airy nothing.” I knew I must say whatever I saw, looking around as well as inside of me. Description was revelation.

“I do wonder, sir: what is a poem? I mean, how would you define it?”
“A poem is the next best thing to silence,” he said.
“So why bother?” Ailith asked.
“I feel a surge of joy most days, fleetingly. The light and dark that one sees on the water in the bay. My work is this, to re-create a part of that happiness with marks on the page. The exaltation can be felt, I hope. Here and there.”
“And the sadness,” I said.

O western wind, when wilt thou blow
that the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
The lyric’s deep, lonely cry of need, at once beautiful and painful, had somehow evaded me until now, however many times I’d read it.

...Think of Beowulf. The prototype for Nessie lies there, in the figure of Grendel, a fallen angel. Envious of the light, he lived with his difficult mother in a cave. You and I have lived in this cave as well, with our difficult and exacting mothers. We bear the marks of our captivity, but we survive.”

“Mythos, in Greek,” said Borges, “is not a story that is false, it’s a story that is more than true. Myth is a tear in the fabric of reality, and immense energies pour through these holy fissures. Our stories, our poems, are rips in this fabric as well, however slight...

Tears rinsed the man’s cheekbones. And I thought these were my tears, too. He wept for me, and for all those who engage, or fail to engage, with the spirit that courses through us, throughout the universe. Exactly how we deal with our souls was at this moment the only question I thought worth asking.

“The story of two dreams is a coincidence, like horses...Now your dream, which is what you call your life, has features that coincide with mine. That’s the more astonishing coincidence. Two lives occurring in different zones, in different bodies. I have gone before you on this planet by a few decades. It’s not so long in the grand scheme. I wonder who will come after us, describing these same circles?”

The weight of the past becomes light in the amnesia of my living. I move into the present unencumbered.

He couldn’t sleep, the poor fellow, because sleep requires erasure, turning one’s back to experience. In the end he couldn’t think, only recall. To think, as you know, is to disallow differences, to generalize, to make abstractions. The activity of selection.

I followed them into town, thinking about the strange fragility of our physical lives and how tenuously we cling to these pale scraps of flesh.

I confessed the difficulty of putting the images I saw into adequate words, and he nodded eagerly.
“This is, my dear, the work before us, always. To find a language adequate to what is revealed. I’m glad you know this. I feel the same consternation quite often, trying to attach feelings to words, to summon the image and declare it pure.”

It was sad to think of Borges and his blindness and how much richness passed him by. No wonder he lived so fully in the great room of his mind.

..As we climbed into the hills, I could feel the tug of the sky, and the heathery rolling valleys and spiky peaks in the distance moved me. Now I wanted, more than ever, to write about this, to find the equivalence in language for what broke around me, here and always

I knew that the red squirrels we saw rushing about in the brush were not the gray squirrels I’d known as a boy. But I also wondered what all of this meant. The connections between words and things obviously mattered, but there was an occult relationship here, and I would need to learn the sorcery required to connect them..

He leaned close to me, a hand on my shoulder. He touched my cheek in a kindly, even fatherly way. “A strategy for survival, son,” he said. “We enter the maze, you see, as in any tale, and with luck we arrive at the point from which we began, which is always ourselves.”

...The library itself goes on forever, with no top, no bottom. There are only sides, and rows of books. But they speak to us in tongues. It’s said that every single possibility of expression will be found in this universe of books.”

“You must realize, Mr. Dunne, the universe is a library. When I was a young man, I searched the stacks of the branch near my house in Palermo, in Buenos Aires. My fondest hope was to find the single volume that would tell me everything I must know in order to survive. When I die, I hope very much to pitch myself headfirst over the railing and fall through the stacks...