Happy Birthday, Jorges Luis Borges

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Jorge Luis Borges, born on this day in 1899

Infinite.

The Hoyt Library in Saginaw, Michigan was one of the infinite gifts of my youth ...

A POEM of GIFTS

May no one slight, with tears or a reproach,

This declaration of God’s mastery,

That, with sublime irony,

Gave me at once books and the night.

He vested those lightless eyes

With guardianship of the city of books,

Even though they can read

But senseless passages in the library of dreams,

Where sunrises give way to zeal. The day

Lavishes them in vain with infinite books,

Toilsome like the manuscripts

That perished in Alexandria.

Of hunger and of thirst (or so goes the Greek legend)

A king once died amidst fountains and gardens;

Aimless and unrelenting I tire the confines

Of this blind vault of a slender library.

Encyclopedias, atlases, the East

And West, centuries, dynasties,

Symbols, the cosmos and cosmogonies,

Afford us the walls, albeit uselessly.

Slow by my shadow, I explore the

Hollow penumbra with a tottering crosier,

I, who imagined Paradise

Under the figment of a library.

Something unnamed, certainly not

Random fate, governs all this;

Somebody else has already received in hazy

Evenings the many books, and their shadow.

As I rove through the slow galleries,

I happen to feel with sacred horror that

I am the other, the dead one, who must have

Ambled his days past, in a similar vein.

Who between the two writes this poem of

A plural me albeit of just one shadow?

Who cares about the word convoking me

If the anathema is one and indivisible?

Groussac or Borges, I behold this dear

World both distorting and dying down

Into a pale, vague ash, all too

Similar to both slumber and oblivion.

Jorges Luis Borges

Grants.

EMBARKING on the STUDY of ANGLO-SAXON GRAMMAR

I, after fifty generations

(Time opens such gulfs out to us all)

Return to the far bank of a mighty river

The Norsemen's longships never reached,

To the harsh, hard-wrought words

Which, with a tongue now long gone to dust,

I used in the days of Northumbria and Mercia

Before becoming Haslam1 or Borges.

Last Saturday, we read how Julius Cæsar

Was the first to come from Romeburg to unveil Britain;

Before the grapes grow back, I shall have heard

The nightingale of the riddle

And the elegy spoken by the twelve

Warriors round their king's burial mound.

To me, these words seem symbols of other symbols,

Variants of German or English-to-be,

But they were once images of the actual

Used by a man to proclaim a sword or the sea;

Tomorrow they will come alive again,

Tomorrow, fyr will not be fire, but rather that lot

Of tamed and changeling god

Whom none can face without feeling an ancient fear.

Glory be to the unending weft

Of cause and effect

Which, before showing me the mirror

In which I shall see no one or some other,

Grants me this perfect contemplation

Of a language at its dawn.

Jorge Luis Borges, 

Chance.

I had no wish to take any determined route on that stroll; I attempted, rather, a maximum latitude of probabilities in order not to wear out expectation with an obligatory anticipation of a single one of them. I was able, within the imperfect limits of possibility, to walk, as they say, at random. I accepted, without any conscious prejudice but that of avoiding the wider avenues and streets, the most obscure invitations of chance.

Jorge Luis Borges, from A Personal Anthology

Paradise.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a Library.

Jorge Luis Borges, from "The Library of Babel"

Rips.

“Mythos, in Greek,” said Borges, “is not a story that is false. It is a story that is more than true. Myth is a tear in the fabric of reality, and immense energies pour through these holy fissures. Our stories, our poems, are rips in this fabric as well, however slight.”

Jay Parini, from Borges and Me

Happy Birthday, Jorge Luis Borges

A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it.

Jorge Luis Borges, born on this day in 1899, from Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Including a Selection of Poems

A conversation with Buckley from the February 1, 1977 airing of Firing Line ...

If I say, for example, that "the moon is the mirror of time," that’s a fine metaphor, don’t you think?

Paradise.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges

Phenomenon.

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.

Jorge Luis Borges, from The Wall and The Books

Exists.

The terrifying immensity of the firmament’s abyss is an illusion, an external reflection of our own abysses, perceived “in a mirror.” We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our heart.  If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls.

Léon Bloy, translated by Jorge Luis Borges, from "The Mirrors of Enigma"

Endure.

The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species -- the unique species -- is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.

Jorge Luis Borges, from The Library of Babel

Time.

YOU LEARN

After some time, you learn the subtle difference 

between holding a hand and imprisoning a soul;

You learn that love does not equal sex,

and that company does not equal security,

and you start to learn ...

That kisses are not contracts and gifts are not promises,

and you start to accept defeat with the head up high and open eyes,

and you learn to build all roads on today,

because the terrain of tomorrow is too insecure for plans

and the future has its own way of falling apart in half.

And you learn that if it’s too much

even the warmth of the sun can burn.

So you plant your own garden and embellish your own soul,

instead of waiting for someone to bring flowers to you.

And you learn that you can actually bear hardship,

that you are actually strong,

and you are actually worthy,

and you learn and learn … and so every day.

Over time you learn that being with someone

because they offer you a good future,

means that sooner or later you’ll want to return to your past.

Over time you comprehend that only who is capable

of loving you with your flaws, with no intention of changing you

can bring you all happiness.

Over time you learn that if you are with a person

only to accompany your own solitude,

irremediably you’ll end up wishing not to see them again.

Over time you learn that real friends are few

and whoever doesn’t fight for them, sooner or later,

will find himself surrounded only with false friendships.

Over time you learn that words spoken in moments of anger

continue hurting throughout a lifetime.

Over time you learn that everyone can apologize,

but forgiveness is an attribute solely of great souls.

Over time you comprehend that if you have hurt a friend harshly

it is very likely that your friendship will never be the same.

Over time you realize that despite being happy with your friends,

you cry for those you let go.

Over time you realize that every experience lived,

with each person, is unrepeatable.

Over time you realize that whoever humiliates

or scorns another human being, sooner or later

will suffer the same humiliations or scorn in tenfold.

Over time you learn to build your roads on today,

because the path of tomorrow doesn’t exist.

Over time you comprehend that rushing things or forcing them to happen

causes the finale to be different form expected.

Over time you realize that in fact the best was not the future,

but the moment you were living just that instant.

Over time you will see that even when you are happy with those around you,

you’ll yearn for those who walked away.

Over time you will learn to forgive or ask for forgiveness,

say you love, say you miss, say you need,

say you want to be friends, since before

a grave, it will no longer make sense.

But unfortunately, only over time…

Jorge Luis Borges

Happy Birthday, Borges

The ART Of POETRY

To gaze at a river made of time and water

And remember Time is another river.

To know we stray like a river

and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream

that dreams of not dreaming and that the death

we fear in our bones is the death

that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol

of all the days of man and his years,

and convert the outrage of the years

into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset

a golden sadness--such is poetry,

humble and immortal, poetry,

returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face

that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.

Art must be that sort of mirror,

disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,

wept with love on seeing Ithaca,

humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,

a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,

passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same

inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same

and yet another, like the river flowing.

Jorge Luis Borges, born on this day in 1899

Titan.

Firing Line from February 18, 1977 ... "Borges: South America's Titan"

The discussion about technique from 9:00 to 36:00 is well worth the time ...

Beyond.

Alberto Manguel on Borges and the impossibility of writing ...

It is a fact that the fundamental paradox of language is apparent in almost every culture.  In Islamic thought, the letters of the alphabet have an independent, divinely decreed will effected before pen is put to paper and over which the scribe has no control.  In the 16th century, Tulsidas, the greatest of Hindu poets, argued that the reality of fiction is always other than the reality of the material world world and overrides it.  In Zen Buddhism, the instantaneous illumination, or Sartori, is always both within and beyond the grasp of words. So, in all these cases, as of course in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the rightest impossibilities appear to be essentially two: to conceive properly and to put properly the concept into words.  The writer's craft is therefore twice constrained by the limits of imagination, which require faith to provide the evidence of things not seen, as St. Paul had it, and by the limits of language which require writers to rely on, what Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief, of their readers and listeners ...

Gilds.

DREAM

If dreaming really were a kind of truce

(as people claim), a sheer repose of mind,

why then if you should waken up abruptly,

do you feel that something has been stolen from you?

Why should it be so sad, the early morning?

It robs us of an inconceivable gift,

so intimate it is only knowable

in a trance which the nightwatch gilds with dreams,

dreams that might very well be reflections,

fragments from the treasure-house of darkness,

from the timeless sphere that does not have a name,

and that the day distorts in its mirrors.

Who will you be tonight in your dreamfall

into the dark, on the other side of the wall?

Jorge Luis Borges

Accepted.

Ribarz, Quince Branch, n/d

I had no wish to take any determined route on that stroll; I attempted, rather, a maximum latitude of probabilities in order not to wear out expectation with an obligatory anticipation of a single one of them. I was able, within the imperfect limits of possibility, to walk, as they say, at random. I accepted, without any conscious prejudice but that of avoiding the wider avenues and streets, the most obscure invitations of chance.

Jorge Luis Borges

Happy Birthday, Borges

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

Jorge Luis Borges, born on this day in 1899

Paradise.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorges Luis Borges

Paradise.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges