by Kay Ryan
I was thinking this way when I started to read them. But then something crept up on me, and it was different from the sort of searing intellectual pleasure I recall from my first reading of Borges’s fictions; it was instead a lovely lightness of spirit. Behind all the lectures I could feel Borges’s abiding dream of deliquescing into the glories of literature. At first this was hard to see because it’s mixed up with his worries about getting things a bit scrambled up, but then there it is, this big egolessness: Borges simply apprehends the inexhaustible radiance of literature and would walk into it naked and without a name, such a lover is he.
And that’s another thing: there is an emphasis upon passion in these lectures and a reliance on feelings that is, I suppose I shouldn’t say contrary to, but outside the universe of Borges’s cool, impersonal, intellectually thrilling fictions. After all, Borges is a thinker who can squander what would be a dozen other writers’ whole intellectual careers in a single story such as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” But here in these lectures Borges’s emphasis is never on the riddling intellect or the understanding or the importance of meaning—all of which he lets us know he mistrusts. He says, “When I am writing something, I try not to understand it. I do not think intelligence has much to do with the work of a writer.” He insists instead upon the physical apprehension of poetry, recalling the first impact of poetry upon him as a boy (the poem was Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”), realizing that “it was not happening to my mere intelligence but to my whole being, to my flesh and blood.” Borges is much quicker to describe his experience of literature as a reader rather than as a writer. “I think of myself as being essentially a reader,” he says. “I have ventured into writing, but I think that what I have read is far more important than what I have written. For one reads what one likes—yet one writes not what one would like to write but what one is able to write.”
Borges is a nearly cuddly anti-pedant who won’t be grand or offer himself as an authority in spite of his legendary erudition. In the first of the six lectures, “The Riddle of Poetry,” he immediately says he has no answers to the riddle of poetry. In the final lecture, “A Poet’s Creed,” he dispatches creeds, saying, “I have only a faltering kind of creed… . In fact, I think of all poetic theories as being mere tools for the writing of a poem.” He just as quickly dismisses the cherished illusion that a master masters his craft: “Every time I am faced with a blank page … I feel that I have to rediscover literature for myself. But the past is of no avail whatever to me… . I am nearing seventy. I have given the major part of my life to literature, and I can offer you only doubts.”
But for all his protestations, again and again I watch Borges lightly tip in a thought—attaching it to the page so casually that it might fall off—and feel it acquire the loveliest sticking power. For example, at one point Borges is pondering some favorite lines by Robert Frost, noticing how Frost simply repeats the line “And miles to go before I sleep” and pointing out how this leaves the reader with the feeling that the second sleep is death. He remarks upon how much more powerful this is than clearly spelling out the point about death. Then he says, just sort of by-the-by, as though this were not Borges’s own rhetorical method in these lectures, or were not the very reason that all art refreshes us: “Because, as I understand it, anything suggested is far more effective than anything laid down. Perhaps the human mind has a tendency to deny a statement.” (Note his disarming “as I understand it.”) And on goes the sweet meandering river of thought and association as Borges continues musing upon the virtue of suggestion:
When something is merely … hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination. We are ready to accept it. I remember reading, some thirty years ago, the works of Martin Buber—I thought of them as being wonderful poems. Then … I found, … much to my astonishment, that Martin Buber was a philosopher and that all his philosophy lay in the books I had read as poetry. Perhaps I had accepted those books because they came to me through poetry, through suggestion, through the music of poetry, and not as arguments.
Something that fascinates me is the constant feeling of blurring, or interpenetration, of categories throughout the lectures. One feels in Borges a kind of advanced mental permeability that’s gotten way beyond smart. It shows up in so many ways. In the Martin Buber story above, for example, Borges savors the mix-up of poetry and philosophy, delighting precisely in the vibrating borders where categories lose their meaning. The truth of beauty is always the central concern for Borges, and it is almost a plasma, everywhere and nowhere at once, and decidedly nobody’s property. Nor is poetry fixed. “Poetry is a new experience every time. Every time I read a poem, the experience happens to occur. And that is poetry.” I love that phrase, “happens to occur,” with its feeling of chance and magic and pure lack of inevitability. There is always this feeling in Borges that whatever is up is fresh—a new sensation or idea. Borges is always just now thinking something: “I am thinking,” he says, or “I thought this three or four days ago.” Every thought arises precariously and mysteriously out of nothing—though, of course, it is a nothing lavishly appointed with an array of classical, early, and modern languages and a remarkable quantity of memorized poetry.
Borges also happily blurs the distinction between literature in its original language and in translation, pointing out that poetry, rather than being what is lost in translation, is sometimes gained: “It might be said that no original is needed. Perhaps a time will come when a translation will be considered as something in itself.” For the sanguine Borges the ancient tree of literature is both the sacred blossomer and the source of cuttings that are just as good.
The poet, insists Borges, doesn’t own the beauty of his works; it passes into him from “the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless.” He is fascinated with the idea of literature as an endless series of variations on a few basic metaphors and stories, seeing the deep structure of literature itself as a sort of code, as though there were a common genetic marker that links all writers throughout time. It is the correspondences among works of literature that compels Borges, rather than the personal, biographical differences between their authors. The idea of unwitting replication—writers eternally reworking the same material—is of course familiar from Borges’s unsettling fictions, but in these late lectures it feels so human. And reassuring.
In spite of Borges’s many volumes of poetry and the fact that he considered himself a poet first, before a fabulist or essayist, I have nonetheless tended to think of him as a poet last. So it is lovely to be reminded of the fineness of his ear (educated early in English) and the delicacy of his discernment, as when, in supporting his idea that translations can surpass originals, he entertains the Latin tag “Ars longa, vita brevis.” “Here,” says Borges dismissively, “we have a plain statement… . It strikes no deep chord. In fact it is a kind of prophecy of the telegram and of the literature evolved by it. ‘Art is long, life is short.’” Much later when Chaucer has rewritten it as “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,” Borges admires how
we get not only the statement but also the very music of wistfulness. We can see that the poet is not merely thinking of the arduous art and of the brevity of life; he is also feeling it. This is given by the apparently invisible, inaudible key word—the word ‘so.’ ‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.’
Again here is Borges, never content with the idea alone, always looking after the music and feeling.
This Craft of Verse joins the timeless body of Borgesian thought whose circumference is everywhere and whose center is whichever Borges you’re reading at the time. In this particular center, Borges is keen to remind us that one cannot predict or establish how or where the beautiful will manifest itself. And it is in the end beauty that matters. “You may not agree wi
th the examples I have chosen,” says Borges. “Perhaps tomorrow I may think of better examples, may think I might have quoted better lines. But as you can pick and choose your own examples, it is not needful that you care greatly about Homer, or about the Anglo-Saxon poets, or about Rossetti. Because everyone knows where to find poetry. And when it comes, one feels the touch of poetry, that particular tingling of poetry.” Borges’s aesthetic “tingling” recalls Nabokov’s famous “frisson.” The sensation along the spine was probably much the same for these similarly exhilarating masters who grew old so differently—Nabokov becoming ever more defended and riddling, Borges becoming ever more transparent and universal.
This Craft of Verse, by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Cǎlin-Andrei Mihǎilescu (Harvard University Press, 2000)
Flying
I see Annie Dillard writing with a pen that has a dangerously generous flow; if she pauses for an instant, the ink begins spreading into the paper, branching like fine roots out into the white fibers. There is no moment not in peril of becoming permanent: “If I wish, and I do not, I can have never-to-be-repeated moments, however dreadful, anywhere and anytime,” she says in her 1982 volume of essays, Teaching a Stone to Talk.
Clearly, material is no problem for Annie Dillard; she is assaulted by it, cracked open at a tap, catapulted easily into the spheres, plunged through ring on ring of consciousness. But if material is not a problem, direction might be. How does one move on—and why bother—when all terror and beauty are manifest at every point? And how achieve a bearable voice? Well, the history of her first sixteen years provides natural direction in An American Childhood. And as to voice, that remains elastic, great-natured, and wild. Reading certain passages brings wind tears—the water forced off the surface of the eyes and straight back against the temples. You’re up there, in that open cockpit, earth the sweetest arc below. Then you stall out, or maybe there’s a vaudeville turn featuring a couple of rubes.
This is, at every bump and turn, an American childhood, and Norman Rockwell could not more lovingly render the articles of the native child’s constitution. Take the hardball: “It took a grass stain nicely, stayed round, smelled good and lived lashed in your mitt all winter, hibernating.” But, more specifically, it is an upper-class Pittsburgh childhood. Annie Dillard is the bright, healthy first child of rich, young, amusing parents. She is loved, instructed in the arts of humor and politesse, and prepared for the full glory of country-club dinner dances by way of the country-club swimming pool, the correct Presbyterian church, and the correct dancing classes where “we were foreordained to assemble, Friday after Friday, for many years until the distant and seemingly unrelated country clubs took over the great work of providing music for us later and later into the night until the time came when we should all have married each other up, at last.”
Annie Dillard enjoys every advantage God and Pittsburgh could offer a child in the fifties. She suffers no external grief greater than exclusion from the all-boy baseball team, no horror greater than having to get up close to some nuns, with “those white boards like pillories with circles cut out and some bunched human flesh pressed like raw pie crust into the holes.” It is a wonderfully fortunate childhood that paid off the way we’d hope they all would. She grows strong through private tests of a rigor only a child can impose. She stokes her passion for headlong effort, singleminded concentration, and blind rapture with the disciplines of pitching, drawing, rock and bug collecting, and detecting. Everything she picks up turns out to be “the hanging end of a very long rope.” She recognizes the words of the novelists, naturalists, poets, philosophers, and God as the revolutionary documents they are.
Until she is shanghaied by adolescence, she is a more-than-biddable child. With good reason: her parents are even more agreeable than the coeval Cleavers. Of her pretty, prankish mother, Annie Dillard says, “Mother’s energy and intelligence suited her for a greater role in a larger arena—mayor of New York, say.” Her father is the tall, dreamy scion of American Standard who at one point converts his stocks to a powerboat to solo down the Allegheny River all the way to New Orleans. The two are well matched: restless, bright, essentially conventional, with a passion for American ingenuity and a moral commitment to the well-told joke. The three daughters are delighted audience and carefully instructed understudies.
Annie Dillard throws down the white glove at about the same time that she takes up boys. Her conscience, or perhaps her nouveau intellect, compels her to quit the Presbyterian church. And not by quiet boycott; this is a written proclamation, to her parents’ horror. She, apparently alone, sees the untenable hypocrisy of the opulent church and the barefoot Christ: “After all, I was the intelligentsia around these parts, singlehandedly. The intelligentsium.”
That’s just the start. There’s a whole lot of resisting that has to be done:
In summer we girls commonly greeted each other, after a perfunctory hello, by extending our forearms side by side to compare tans. We were blond, we were tan, our teeth were white and straightened, our legs were brown and depilated, our blue eyes glittered pale in our dark faces… . It was not for me. I hated it so passionately I thought my shoulders and arms, swinging at the world, would split off from my body like loose spinning blades, and fly wild and slice everyone up.
Enter Rimbaud, drag races, and Annie Dillard’s moment in juvenile court. But however mean she feels, Annie Dillard’s history is never mean. She is amused, tender, tolerant, and, of course, repeatedly knocked out by what a rush life is.
We always hope the autobiographies of writers will show where their characteristic idées were first fixed. Annie Dillard does not disappoint. She relives a series of first scenes which isolate themes to which she will return through all her writing. We witness the first triumph of observation over terror when the five-year-old connects the bodiless monster caroming night after night off her bedroom walls to the ordinary car sounds outside; it was only the streetlight glancing off a windshield. “Figuring it out was a long and forced ascent to the very rim of being, to the membrane of skin that both separates and connects the inner life and the outer world.” The terrifying “narrative fiction” of the imagination is thus simplified, chastened, made innocent of intention through willed attention to the world beyond the window. This is a major discovery for the child and one she has to keep making.
Annie Dillard occupies the primeval jungle of childhood, lit only intermittently by reason or by beauty. We see how her sense of beauty is first linked to courage, solitude, and mystery when she describes another event from the same period. She watches from inside the warm family dining room a “transfigured Jo Ann Sheehy, skating alone under the streetlight… . Under her skates the street’s packed snow shone; it illumined her from below, the cold light striking under her chin.” Here is a child, of poor Irish lineage by day, transformed in the killing cold night to a perfect vision of beauty. “Was everything beautiful so bold?” she asks. And always the answer is yes. There is always a daring to beauty, a perfection of act lifted whole from ordinary knowledge, installed forever in the archetypes.
We see also the first emblems of the spectacular energy Annie Dillard must always strive to control when the child watches electricity gush like water from a severed power cable and burrow with wasted force down into bubbling asphalt. And we see the first intimations of the writer’s secret wealth awaiting the one child only. She finds a coin in the back-alley dirt. She knows this is only the top coin: there are more coins down there, growing more rare, mysterious, and precious layer to layer. And only she knows where to dig. “I decided to devote my life to unearthing treasure.”
These are some of the patterns all the fabric of her days will be cut to. She says of her treasure-seeking schemes, “It was the long years of these same few thoughts that wore tracks in my interior life.” But are there ever first things, first times? One senses even in her earliest memories other deeper strata of coins. One senses always that the thing that marks can, in some sense, only rema
rk; that there was an Annie Dillard spirit compact on high, which came down and entered—perhaps to its surprise—a nice blond child. Perhaps one does not become oneself at all. Surely if one does, Annie Dillard will be the last to know, whose apprehension of beauty does not shift, whose vision—which spirals out to the fringes of the universe at the drop of a hat—cannot expand.
She is pierced by the identical mystery in all her writing. This is all very well for saints, but Annie Dillard was trained at her joke-loving parents’ knees to respect a good story, watch the pacing, and hold a punch-line sacred. She is not a simple ecstatic who can let her eyes roll back in her head; she’s got to give value for money, keep the show on the road. So what is a stand-up ecstatic to do? She puts on a variety show, with lots of scene shifts and sometimes a false mustache. Her voice shifts from the stuttering of angels to the merely enraptured; from the notes of the nascent naturalist to the captions of a 1952 Life photo-essay; from the homespun to the cold-blooded observations of the young child.