Thy letters have transported me beyond the ignorant present, and I feel now the future in the instant.
So says Macbeth, and look what happened to him when he took the Weird Sisters seriously. Borges has a different approach: he recognises an overwhelming present that blazes for an instant only and then is immediately subsumed by an inexorable, immutable, and rather sinister usurper the past.
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 that literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to admit that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages can not save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no-one not even him, but 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, even though I am 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, the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges (if it is true that I am somone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in 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 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.
Borges, even in translation, writes such luxuriously precise sentences, where the tempo and balance is exquisitely in harmony, that, in my view, his prose counts as poetry. This gorgeous piece of writing, “Borges and I” encapsulates his smooth and deadly style that slides into the flesh effortlessly like an assassin’s stiletto. The sentence that begins “Spinoza knew” seems to me the very perfection of writing that Joseph Grand is struggling to achieve for the opening sentence of his novel in Camus’ “The Plague”.
In this piece Borges contemplates the transitory nature of the present in regard to our conscious understanding of self. We live entirely within the present, our actions and thoughts once committed are irrevocable. Borges posits that our achievements and humiliations are consequently no longer ours but are usurped by another, a corporate and public being known by the name of Borges. In that this being is the one that is recognised and interacts with others it has a stronger claim to that title than has our conscious self trapped as it is within an instantaneous moment, mute, deaf and blind.
Borges’ view is an optimistic one perhaps, his present self is dismissive of his past self. His present self complains of his past self’s tendency to lies and exaggeration. There is a self-regard in this, the implication being that his present self is above such corruptions. His present self exercises that longing to persist in their being though he must be aware that what he is presently in the act of creating is unlikely to be of significantly greater import or beauty than he has previously achieved. On the other hand there is an acknowledgement that the creation of an archive brooks no repetition and the discipline of innovation is a requisite.
It is interesting I think that Borges’ attitude here is one of resentment, even spite (that viscious “may contrive”) to his former self. He presents the passage of time as a process whereby he is relinquishing himself to posterity. His past self, rather than his future self is a usurper of his crown of the conscious present. Borges does not see himself in this piece as in the process of forging his future self in the furnace of experience. And yet this is surely his raison d’etre; as an artist he develops further through experience and experimentation to create the future self that might regard his previous attempts with a hopefully tender condescension.
Perhaps Borges feels that his work, once exposed to public criticism through the passage of time is invariably corrupted. The boats of work having been cast adrift have only poor defences against the ravages of stormy seas and tyrannical pirates. In denying their authorship he is exculpating himself of not providing them with an effective defensive arsenal. They begin to mean what others want them to mean and the Borges who created them no longer exists to mount defense at a distance.
I would love to read some companion pieces to this. Past Borges replying to present Borges. An introduction of future Borges. Alas Borges never wrote such pieces or perhaps they lay hidden somewhere in the Garden of Forking Paths or within Tlon, Uqbar or Orbis Tertius.
