Borges
and I
The
other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through
the streets of Buenos Aires
and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an
entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and
see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like
hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the
prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns
them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that
ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges
may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort
for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot
save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but
rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish,
definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by
little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his
perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza
knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants
to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself
(if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books
than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I
tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to
the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I
shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose
everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I
do not know which of us has written this page.
-
Jorge Luis Borges
~
Everything
and Nothing
There
was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of
those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic
and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At
first he thought that all people were like him, but the astonishment of a
friend to whom he had begun to speak of this emptiness showed him his error and
made him feel always that an individual should not differ in outward
appearance. Once he thought that in books he would find a cure for his ill and
thus he learned the small Latin and less Greek a contemporary would speak of;
later he considered that what he sought might well be found in an elemental
rite of humanity, and let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June
afternoon. At the age of twenty-odd years he went to London. Instinctively he had already become
proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would
not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to
which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being
another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other
person. His histrionic tasks brought him a singular satisfaction, perhaps the
first he had ever known; but once -the last verse had been acclaimed and the
last dead man withdrawn from the stage, the hated flavor of unreality returned
to him. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamberlane and became no one again. Thus
hounded, he took to imagining other heroes and other tragic fables. And so,
while his flesh fulfilled its destiny as flesh in the taverns and brothels of London, the soul that
inhabited him was Caesar, who disregards the augur's admonition, and Juliet.
who abhors the lark, and Macbeth, who converses on the plain with the witches
who are also Fates. No one has ever been so many men as this man who like the
Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality. At times he would
leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his work, certain that it
would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his person he plays the part
of many and Iago claims with curious words "I am not what I am". The
fundamental identity of existing, dreaming and acting inspired famous passages
of his.
For
twenty years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he
was suddenly gripped by the tedium and the terror of being so many kings who
die by the sword and so many suffering lovers who converge, diverge and
melodiously expire. That very day he arranged to sell his theatre. Within.. a
week he had returned to his native village, where he recovered the trees and
rivers of his childhood and did not relate them to the others his muse had
celebrated, illustrious with mythological allusions and Latin terms. He had to
be 'someone: he was a retired impresario who had made his fortune and concerned
himself with loans, lawsuits and petty usury. It was in this character that he
dictated the arid will and testament known to us, from which he deliberately
excluded all traces of pathos or literature. His friends from London would visit his retreat and for them
he would take up again his role as poet.
History
adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and
told Him: "I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and
myself." The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: "Neither am
I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and
among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one."
-
Jorge Luis Borges