Borges from a personal perspective (2): The Guardian of the Mirror Labyrinth

(Continued from last week's article)

Borges had an exceptional sense of play, he played with everything and anything, his entire work bears the stamp of playfulness, and it was through play that he created another world, parallel to this visible one but no less visible to the reader, in which his blindness also helped him. This Borgesian world is completely tangible, consistent, there is no haze in it of someone who increasingly ceases to see the outlines around him until he finally becomes completely blind. Dučmelić has expressed this Borgesian universe very well with his illustrations. This Borgesian-Dučmelićian cosmos is a new reality, as if it completes the blanks that were missing in this real world of ours that physically surrounds us. Perhaps that is precisely why Borges is so acceptable, because in his work he offers something that we lack, and that we need to hold on to firmly. It is not some seductive hope that eludes us, but rather a fictitious but objectified reality of the labyrinth of a distorted universe that we recognize as our own, although from it emerge beings and landscapes that are completely unknown to us, yet somehow close to us, and in which we have never really been, although they are somehow still a part of us.

Borges did not write novels, he said of his stories that they were not real stories. More than a metaphor, poetry for him was an opportunity to express feelings, perhaps even the need for sound - in any case, it was the realization of a world flooded with feelings. Thought and feeling were inseparable for him, in fact, one could say that he did not recognize the existence of intelligence without emotions. Emotion is the starting point for everything. He did not fully trust cognition based on the senses, just as he did not recognize what could be called “pure reason”. According to Borges, “a lightning message is created between what we are told and what is our affective response to it” and this is Borges’s emotional cognition that he conveyed to us through his work. Therefore, Borges’ “fantastic realism” is not just some stripped-down world of objects and cosmic desolation, but it is an objectified universe of fantasy, filled with feelings that are transmitted to the one who dives into it. Borges's cosmos has a soul.

Borges' favorite theme was the idea that life is just a dream. "I like to think of life as a dream, but a dream that is long and impersonal, like when someone just says: it is raining. There is no subject, there is only a verb, an action. So the universe should be just one verb - the verb to dream, a series of dreams without a dreamer, dreams that are dreamed by themselves. This dreaming in time represents the universe or what we call God, or reality, whatever you like. That seems quite plausible, acceptable to me. To see the whole cosmic process as something successive, to see it in a certain time, but without an actor, without anyone to control it all, like some fatal dream that dreams us at this moment"...

"I don't believe in freedom of choice. Carlisle has a sentence that is terrifying: 'The history of the world is a book that we constantly read and write, and in which we are also written'. This means - Borges continues - that we are not the ones who read and create it, but are only letters and signs in that divine book of history... Hence, freedom of will is just a mere illusion, but we need that illusion. When we look back on our past, I can accept that everything was conditioned by universal history, by that previous cosmic process. But if you tell me at this moment that I am not free, I will rebel. In order to live, the illusion of freedom of will is necessary. The idea of ​​atonement for sin is also false, because everything is predetermined. But we need to believe in order to be able to continue living"...

“For me, death is hope, an irrational certainty that I will cease to exist, that I will be abolished, erased and forgotten. When I am sad I think: 'Who cares what happened to some Latin American writer of the twentieth century'. I expect that I will be forgotten, but perhaps I am wrong, perhaps another life will continue, no less interesting than this one, but on a different plane... Now I feel a certain impatience; it seems to me that I should die and that I should die soon. I have lived too much. Besides, I feel a great curiosity. I am convinced, although I am not entirely sure of it, that death must have a certain taste, that it must be something special, something that we have never felt before. The proof of this is that I have seen many death agonies and all these people knew that they were going to die. This certainty cannot be based on rationality, but on that special taste of death that a person feels and knows that it is something that he has never felt before, but which he cannot convey to another, because only what the other has experienced can be transmitted and made available to another. Words presuppose shared experience, and in the case of death there is none."

One could talk a lot more about Borges and let him speak for himself - because, as they say, all his conversations with anyone were, in fact, just Borges' monologues. He always knew how to draw the interlocutor into the labyrinths of his thoughts, luring him like a Minotaur into his closed world of labyrinths, but not to destroy him, but to reveal to him new spaces and vistas that exist even in seemingly vicious circles with no way out. And the key to that world and the message that Borges offers us are: play, feelings, imagination - without which everything would be null and void. In other words, the world would be almost unbearable without art, and the intention of the editor of this text was to complete the image of the man "chosen by literature" and in it the themes of labyrinths, tigers, mirrors. "I didn't choose those topics, they chose me... I let the topic search for me, leave me and only then describe it. I see two ends, I know the beginning and the end. What happens between the two extremes I have yet to discover, invent..." - said Borges.

In any case, it was a good choice, whoever chose it, because Borges's only possible destiny was a "literary destiny," as he himself said. "And that means," he explained, "that it is my duty to change everything I receive, transforming it into verbal beauty." The world of shadows, understood in Plato's In a sense or just as an outline of reality in his encroaching blindness, Borges objectified and gave it the solidity of another, parallel fictional reality, probably the only possible one for him. Buenos Aires generously supported him in this with the almost fantastic atmosphere of some of its spaces. And since there are no coincidences, nor was anything accidental for Borges, Buenos Aires sought out Jorge Luis Borges to be born there on the eve of the 20th century, so that in the fantastic world of the streets of his childhood and the fenced inner courtyards that the windows of his father's library looked out onto, he could create imaginary circular buildings and labyrinths inhabited by tigers and mirrors and some strange, twisted beings in which we recognize ourselves. In the end, he returned to Geneva, where his worldview was formed and which he chose as the city of his final departure from this real world of ours, which for him was perhaps only a fictional world. He died on June 14, 1986.