Borges at Eighty: Conversations
Page 19
COFFA: Similarly dreams, which are often put together with the other metaphors of circular regress or a regress—
BORGES: In time.
COFFA: Yes, ad infinitum, where dreamers—
BORGES: That Saint Augustine called “the circular labyrinth of the Stoics.” They have history repeating itself all the time. I remember that very fine poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, based on the same idea:
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
You have been mine before….
The poem consists of three stanzas and is called “Sudden Light.” When you suddenly feel that all this has already happened. What the French call déjà vu.
COFFA: Is it the case that through the use of these metaphors you are often trying to destroy the commonsense belief in the nature of the world that surrounds us?
BORGES: Progress.
COFFA: No. I didn’t mean to ask about progress. Are you trying to create the impression that the world is not this solid—
BORGES: But really, I can bring myself to disbelieve in space. You might imagine a spaceless world, a world of music, for example. A world made entirely of sounds, of words, and of what they stood for. But I cannot imagine a timeless world. And yet, twice in my life I have had the experience of being in a timeless world. That was given me only twice throughout my life. I had been very unhappy one day—I felt suddenly that I was outside time. I don’t know how long that lasted. It was a very strange experience.
COFFA: In your stories there are persons who manage to solve the riddle of the universe. As you say, if anyone has written on paper the answer to the riddle, Schopenhauer has. In your stories there are some people who succeed.
BORGES: They succeed, but I don’t! They succeed as fancy characters. But I have no solution to propose.
COFFA: I’m not going to ask you. I only wanted you to comment on something funny that happens to these people when they solve the riddle of the universe.
BORGES: Of course they can’t express it because I can’t express it for them. They find out the answer but I don’t know it, so I’ve got to concoct something to account for their silence.
COFFA: You’ve given the answer but I’m going to ask the question anyhow. It seems to me that the two opposite cases of the same situation are Carlos Daneri in the “Aleph” who, by observing the aleph, finally manages to observe the sun. Then he tries to say what he saw and writes a very nonsensical poem.
BORGES: Very nonsensical. Like most poets.
COFFA: On the other hand, there is Tzinacán, the magus of the pyramid of Qaholom, who also in some sense solved the riddle of the universe, but he decides not to talk…
BORGES: The reason is that I can’t talk, since I don’t know it.
COFFA: Is that really all that it is? Is it a trick?
BORGES: I’m afraid it’s a trick. What can I do about it? I wrote that story oh so long ago.
COFFA: Shall I read the last paragraph? You’ll like it.
BORGES: Thank you. Yes, I hope I do. I wrote in a very baroque style in those days. It’s a story about a leopard, no?*
COFFA: Yes. There is a leopard in it. It is the story about this priest or magus of the pyramid of Qaholom.
BORGES: Then in the end he feels the power of god, of one of his gods.
COFFA: He deciphers the script of the leopard.
BORGES: He’s an Aztec I think, as far as I remember.
COFFA: Yes, that’s right.
BORGES: He had to be an Aztec because I needed a jaguar.
COFFA: “Let the mystery written on the tigers die with me.”
BORGES: Yes, because I think of the skin of a leopard as being writing.
COFFA: “He who has glimpsed the universe, he who has glimpsed the burning intentions of the universe cannot think of one man, of one man’s trivial happiness or sorrows,” even though that man be himself.
BORGES: He is thinking of evil.
COFFA: “That man has been he, but now it does not matter to him.”
BORGES: Because now he is transfigured and the revelation is in somebody else. He no longer cares for the particular individual he was before he got there.
COFFA: There are these two people who uncover the riddle of the universe. One of them tries to talk and says the most idiotic things one could think of.
BORGES: The other one chose silence because I can’t find any words for him.
COFFA: Not only that but he adopts a Schopenhauerean view of the world.
BORGES: I suppose that to him the word is ineffable, it’s unspeakable, no? And he is right, because all words need something shared. If I use the word yellow, and if you have never seen yellow, you can’t understand me. And if I know the absolute, and you haven’t, you can’t understand me. That’s the real reason. All words imply a reality or an unreality shared by the speaker and by the hearer or by the reader and by the writer. But in many cases, in the case of ecstasies, that can only be told through metaphors, it cannot be told directly. It has to be told through metaphors. That is the reason why the mystics always resort to the same metaphors. A metaphor may be conceptual or a mystic might talk in terms of the grape or the rose or of fleshly love also. Even the Persian mystics do, the Sufis.
COFFA: There is a philosopher who is very influential and who has been strongly influenced by the people you like most, Schopenhauer and Maltner, a philosopher you very much love. I mean Wittgenstein—
BORGES: Wittgenstein, of course, yes.
COFFA: —who claimed that the most important philosophical distinction to draw is a distinction between what can be said, which coincides with what can be thought, on the one hand, and what one might hope can be said, which philosophers are trying to say in their professional confusion, throughout their lives, but which can only be shown. The distinction is between saying and showing.
BORGES: I think of art as being an allusion. I think that you can only allude to things, you can never express them. This is of course against Bendetto Croce’s theory. I can only allude to things. I may mention the moon but I cannot define the moon. But I may mention it, and that’s allowed me, if I do it in an unobtrusive way.
COFFA: Perhaps your Tzinacán hero was of the same persuasion.
BORGES: I know very little about him.
COFFA: About as much as anyone else. But I would like to read you the last paragraph of a short story of yours, “The Wall and the Books.”
BORGES: It’s an essay really, not a story. But in a sense a story also.
COFFA: I have been told that you have blurred the distinction between the essay and the story, that thanks to you we no longer know where one stops and the other begins.
BORGES: And between verse and prose. I keep swaying to and fro.
COFFA: So I’ll read the last paragraph.
BORGES: I’m all agog.
COFFA: “The tenacious wall, which at this moment, and at all moments, casts its system of shadows over lands I shall never see—”
BORGES: “System” is a good word because you have something regular and at the same time unknown. “System of shadows.”
COFFA: “—is the shadow of a Caesar who ordered the most reverent of nations to burn its past.”
BORGES: He was the first emperor, Shih Huang Ti, the Chinese emperor.
COFFA: It is plausible that this idea moves us in itself, aside from the conjectures it allows. Generalizing from the preceding case, we could infer that all forms have their virtue in themselves and not in any conjectural “content.” This would concord with the thesis of Bendetto Croce. Already Pater in 1877 had affirmed that all arts aspire to the condition of music, which is pure form. “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights, and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to
say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.” I wonder if you have anything to add to this.
BORGES: I can only say that I agree, although I wrote it ever so many years ago. I have that feeling every now and then. But I get it especially when I look on the sea or on a plain or mountains, perhaps, or when I hear music. I feel I am about to receive something but I cannot express it. Yes, I have that feeling.
*“Street hoodlum,” translated elsewhere as “streetcorner man.”
*Book III, stanza 21, lines 110–11.
†“A Second Childhood,” lines 27–30.
*In the story it is a tiger.
AFTERWORD
GENIUS OF THE WORD
After the bloody war in the Malvinas in 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom, Jorge Luis Borges was asked, who was right? Borges was deeply Argentine, from an old conquistador and criollo background, yet with an English grandmother. He was an Anglophile professor of Old English and a learned friend of Whitman, Melville, and Chesterton, but also a leading democratic personality in the Radical Unitarian party that opposed the estancieros, the ruling great landowners. During World War II he condemned his nation’s support of Mussolini and fascism; after the Dirty War he attended the trials and denounced the junta generals as criminals for their kidnapping, torture, and murder of thousands of opponents. Whom should he favor? The Argentine dictatorship or belligerent Maggie Thatcher’s England? Addicted to gallows humor, Borges declared, “The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.”
Only rueful Borges could turn war’s futility into mad metaphor.
In books and conversation paradoxical Borges comes from a single generating source. The printed page and spoken word are a composite entity. In Borges’s brilliant self-deprecating parable “Borges and I” (Borges y Yo), Borges’ public persona of books and biographical dictionaries is distinct from the man who walks the streets of Buenos Aires and likes hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson. In the end he says, I can’t know who is writing this, Borges or I. So too, the written and spoken word become the same, with his persona and his person.
Borges’ writing presents a public self whom readers know; his conversation reveals the self he presents to friends in interviews, recordings, formal lectures, and informal chats (charlas). His voice orally discloses the creative act and becomes a recorded text. In antiquity it would be unthinkable to separate the Sophist tongue of the peripatetic Socrates heard in the streets of Athens from the one set down by his brilliant scribe Plato in the “Crito” and the “Apologia.” Our access to the dialogic genius of sages—Laozi, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Isaiah—comes through the artistic diligence of their scribes. With respect to Borges, his identity as revealed by voice and pen is experienced by a legion of friends and casual audiences, and recording devices. Borges at Eighty: Conversations is the spoken logos.
Borges’ mid-life blindness seals this union of tongue and pen. He must dictate all his texts, bringing a melodic fluency into every later work. He largely abandons the essay that requires scholarly snooping, but does dictate stories, prose poems, and poems. Whether sitting in a car or walking down the old Federalists streets by the Río de la Plata, his fabled encyclopedic memory permits him to compose and polish a sonnet or tale in his head before dictating it to an assistant. (He drops us into uncontrollable memory in his mythic story “Funes the Memorious,” about a young Uruguayan gaucho who, after falling from a horse, cannot forget anything, from the first wink of creation to each blinking tree leaf in his orchard. But remembering every contiguous detail, he is also incapable of abstraction “and not very capable of thought.” Borges confesses before an audience in New York, “I have created only one character in my fiction, Funes, and that’s me.”) The unity of Borges as speaker and writer is constant. To permit a schism between speaker and writer would subvert Borges’ literary miracle.
Borges was deeply lonely in his blindness. He often told me that despite many friends his lot was to return to variations of a few main dreams and wake incompletely to the day. Though impatient with flatterers, he exulted in conversation. When addressed by an unknown voice, the blind poet had little idea who that person was. Unfailingly, he spoke to each unseen figure with intimacy and with an elevating confidence, whether to an unknown journalist, doorman, student, writer, waiter, clerk. Borges’ speech authenticates his writing as his writing does his speech. To hear him is to read him. To read him is to hear that baritone voice. During the two decades I knew Borges, I was ever surprised by how the poet gave his voice away. He was similarly obsessed with giving his books away and was adamant about possessing none of his own works in his library. If the postman came to the door with a new edition or translation of his work, he would give it to the nearest visitor. Even to the astonished postman.
Spoofing or grave, laughing or weary, Borges spoke literature in every setting. We often ate and chatted in the modest restaurant Maxim’s near his apartment on la calle Maipú. The food was good. A few aging German Nazis were habitually scheming at tables in the back. Our conversation was sweet gossip about his favorites, Joyce or Frost or Dante. Airplanes also offered an unlimited forum for talk and creation. With him for hours on a plane to and from the city of Córdoba in the Andes, I read him Donne and Hopkins, Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” and Frost’s “Birches.” He knew many of Frost’s poems by heart, and while I read, his lips recited “Acquainted with the Night” and “Birches.” I said it was impossible that parts of “Birches” were remembered by this San Francisco-born city boy who grew up in the mill city of Lawrence, Mass. He was not a farm boy who bent the birches “as he went in and out to fetch the cows.” Suddenly Borges’ dead eyes gleamed and he said he had an idea for a poem.
“Do you have a title?”
“An Impossible Memory.”
“What kind of poem? Formal or free verse?”
“Free verse. My Whitman variety.”
“How long?”
“About forty lines.”
A few weeks later I accompanied the poet to his editor at La Nación where he often published new work in the Sunday arts supplement. After bantering about his definite inferiority—in 1980 in New York at the PEN American Center Alistair Reid asked Borges, “Why do you carry such a mighty club of modesty?”—Borges gave his editor “Elegía del recuerdo impossible” (Elegy for an Impossible Memory), a poem of forty-two lines, with Whitmanesque anaphora and sweep. The same year, 1976, his “Elegy” became the initial poem of his new collection La moneda de hierro (The Iron Coin). The poet asks for the impossible memory of his mother gazing into the morning at her Santa Irene estate (she with no knowledge that her name was to be Borges); of the Danes sailing from Hengist for an island which was not yet England; of having heard Socrates in the afternoon of the hemlock, serenely examining the problem of immortality, while death rose blue from his already cold legs; of the memory that “you had said you loved me and had not slept until dawn, torn apart and happy.” All these impossible explorations derived from his discovery that Frost had invented an unlikely memory of swinging on birches.
Often we confided after midnight in the Saint James Café on Córdoba Street, eating scrambled eggs and drinking wine. Borges loved West Side Story and its Romeo and Juliet cast. He would ask me to recite the lyrics of “Frankie and Johnny” or tell me how the tango fell when it went north to Hollywood and slipped into Paris. One Sunday morning on the way to a book signing, he said he opposed suicide, yet Socrates’ “eternal sleep” was “the finest death in history.” He protested Jesus’ death as a demigod but then wrote an extraordinary poem in Kyoto, “Christ on the Cross,” detailing Jesus’ physical suffering as he hung spiked on the tau cross: “His face is not the one seen in engravings. It is severe, Jewish… the fractured man suffers and says nothing… he is not a God and feels the hard iron of the nails.” Personally, to have had the luck to know his voice wa
s to have a double Borges.
Borges was a philosophical poet who vicariously lived the lives of those whom he most admired: Heraclitus, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza. He made the Greek Heraclitus his friend, read Schopenhauer regularly in German, and identified profoundly with Spinoza, the pantheist philosopher in Amsterdam’s Jewish ghetto—a Spanish-Portuguese Jew like some of Borges’ ancestors. He evokes the modest lens maker in these lines from his poem “Spinoza,”
Here in the twilight the translucent hands
Of the Jew polishing the crystal glass.
The dying afternoon is cold with bands
Of fear. Each day the afternoons all pass
The same. The hands and space of hyacinth
Paling in the confines of the ghetto walls
Barely exist for the quiet man…
The dictated sonnets tell of the luminous yellow haze Borges perceives, his desire to see his books, the firmament, a face. One late afternoon he came over to my apartment to ask me what I thought María Kodama looked like, “since she always says her face is ugly.” He had touched her face but wasn’t sure. I told him she is beautiful and you should be grateful she even looks at you. Everything the poet did radiated from personal worlds of blindness. He took the title for “On his Blindness” from Milton’s celebrated poem of shadows and remembrance of his late deceased wife. Borges wished he could see the face of the woman whom he would marry in the last months of his life. He could not even make out his own face in the mirror. In his darkness what remained was his habit of verse as in his poem “A Blind Man”:
I do not know what face looks back at me
When I look at the mirrored face, nor know
What aged man conspires in the glow
Of the glass…
He speaks of loss: