This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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“Beyond that, I am doomed—utterly and inevitably—to oblivion, and fleeting moments will be all of me that survives in that other man.”
I am concerned with the mythological; or as the Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, often wrote about: the other Borges, for whom we often leave everything to and leave to forget everything else. In Borges, we find a scholar as much as a writer; his prose is tainted with the blood of mythology, of history, of lineage, which he peers at like a crystal, adding his own shard to its chandelier. He is fully aware of his role in history; or rather, that his own history has a role: there is a beginning to Borges and an end to Borges; there is a before Borges and an after Borges, which only appears with Borges and never again without him. Even if he would appear again, we would still remember him as Borges; even if Christ returned to this Earth, we would still compare him to his first coming—an expectation he would likely fail to meet.
But I am also concerned with Borges, because in Borges is also me, and many of us, because when the real Borges dies, only a partial Borges lives, and the rest is forgotten, and forever his partial self will haunt us with what he knew in his life and which we can never know: his love of literature, his shame at his own historical role, and his memory of his memories, which became distorted even while he lived in them.
If even Borges is doomed, what hope do we have? And if we are doomed, what hope do we have? If everything I have and savoured in this life will pass—and it will inevitably pass—such that only a spectre of my life will remain in its place, like a shadow of a nuclear blast, where a person once stood and only a silhouette remains, should I not find some effort of sadness there?
Even if death is natural, we still must grieve; even if loss is expected, we are still met with longing; and even if everything I have ever known will die, and dies with me, in the same way as Borges dies and yet wrote about the last experience of seeing Christ with their own eyes, I should still weep—having been so lucky as to have seen them, among others with my eyes, and been given by them a death which belongs only to me, and which I cherish as others might cherish me, this myth, which becomes my life.
“Little by little, I have been turning everything over to him, though I know the perverse way he has of distorting and magnifying everything.”
Borges writes about Dante Alighieri, and the other Dante Alighieri, and the other Dante Alighieri of his other Borges. In other words, there are three Dantes—the trinity of Tuscan literary faith—in Dante, Dante’s Dante, and the infinite Dante of our imaginations.
Even if Dante were forgotten, and every trace of him and his work disappeared, we would still recite his words and live in his steps, for every repetition of Dante is a reflection of a mythic superstructure on the world, from which the world can never reject but only recoil from; before Dante, our world was creating him; after Dante, our world was always him: the artist is a holy seer and art is now an inverted metaphysics—Dante can never escape from himself.
If Dante wrote on the death of a star, a universe of death would owe itself to him; if Dante wrote about death itself, the universe of every death would belong to him; and if Dante wrote about the ecstasy of life, every life would ring true with him; and likewise, if Borges wrote on how Dante is so, then every Dante must be so, and so is everything, because this is the metaphysics of Borges—therefore, it is the metaphysics of all art.
In the same way that a single phrase or word can steal from the Yellow Emperor his palace, so can a single story by Borges, or by anyone else, steal the whole from the universe itself: Jacques Lacan did not go far enough—the universe is structured like a language. Each supernova is a burst of a sonnet, every black hole is the cutting line of a cold-hearted letter, and the collision of two galaxies is but the slow-moving conflict of an Epic Cycle in the infinite courtyard of spacetime.
If it can exist, it can be written about; or more essentially, if it can be written about, it can exist and has existed and will exist: time is structured like a language, and you cannot escape time in the same way you cannot escape a word, for a word is an atom which has always existed, and when it did not, at the beginning of the universe, it was always motioning to become one.
And yet I cannot articulate my life with words; something is meant to die with my death, even if I write about it with the same words those words will circularly destroy; in this way, my life is structured like a language, but only of words with secret names, of an entire vocabulary of unutterable phrases, which nevertheless exist, because Dante and Borges have always existed, and yet if I do not have the words today, they will inevitably be created tomorrow and so will I.
The dilemma is exactly as Borges articulated it: we have both dreamed of a number of birds, but is it a finite or infinite number of them? If the birds are finite, then God must exist, because he knows their number; if the birds are infinite, then God must not exist, because he does not know their number; and if we know there are less than ten birds, but not-nine-birds, not-eight-birds, not-seven-birds and so on, then God must exist: there is no such thing as not-nine-Birds, and therefore, there is no such thing as not-words because God must know their number.
“I shall endure in Borges, not in myself (if, indeed, I am anybody at all), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others', or in the tedious strumming of a guitar.”
I am closer to the elder Borges; he writes as if he has all time in the world; or rather, that he once had all the time and now no longer, and thus has lost its sense of value. He is always in motion to somewhere, always pacing to someplace, always recalling that he read Schopenhauer or Spinoza; he only alludes to what he has read, he no longer explains the details—the details do not matter.
And if he recalls Spinoza or Schopenhauer, he has recalled as many of them as exist in space: an infinite number of balding Jewish and German philosophers, such that you could point to any star and you will inevitably find them there, whether before or after.
But this is neither here nor there. I am reminded at the very moment he mentions Schopenhauer or the Summa Theologica (1485) by Thomas Aquinas, of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man (1951), and the moment before the eponymous tattooed man awakes and inevitably murders the narrator. Somewhere in there I have found Schopenhauer; somewhere in there, I have found Borges and his eighty-six years of dreams.
And the Elder Borges only dreams in Borges, not in other dreams, but he remembers dreams as though he were dreaming, and he dreams as if he were remembering; there is no great rush to finish his stories. His dreams are not dreams in the same way that the moon is no longer the moon after Shakespeare, but only Diana. Likewise, our dreams are no longer dreams but Borges, and they remain Borges in the same way that our memories belong to Proust, even when each monument to them has fallen—in turn, Borges and Proust belong to us, although this is nothing new to say.
“I am not sure which of us it is that's writing this page.”
Borges would have always been Borges; and Borges would have always wrote Borges. In the infinite library of the universe, Borges occupies a space known as Borges, because Borges would have always been Borges, and I too would have always written what I have written, and what I will write I will inevitably write, as if every word I have written and were to write were accounted for in the infinite library of myself, and yet plucked out and given form in the finite library of my life—even Borges was a finite Borges, and not the infinite Borges of his real speculation.
If Borges would have always been Borges, there is still no loss of infinity: the infinite Borges exists and so does the infinite I. Given enough time, I would still not have written every book in existence, but I would have written every book of myself, both the truths and falsehoods, the minutiae and the eternal, and the past and future, because when Borges wrote of Borges, did he write for the Borges of the past or for the Borges of the future? Or did he write for the other Borges, which occupies us now, and which is all we have left of him? And when I write of myself, am I writing because I know this will become my past work or because it is to become my future?
Impassable time: I feel that even if Tlön were not created, it has always been there and been real; there are no objects and there is no work I must write, but a passage of time which I must endure, like Borges and the future Uqbar, and endure it for the rest of my life.
Like a gravitational pull, I am drawn to the orbit of his fate; like Borges, who was led in a circle, as if each of his words were always premeditated to fall into their place, to always have produced the other Borges for which he left behind his life, I contemplate as Borges contemplated the role of ourselves in history, as if we were condemned to watch our own steps towards death—inescapably aware—and yet claim in this effort what we must do: we must live, produce our few shillings of art, out of the infinite library of ourselves, and come to terms with this role as gracefully as we can.
And thus, I, Borges, claim my place in infinity, because I would always have been Borges and Borges would always have been us, and the artist has always existed, and if not, we would eventually have created them, like how we have eventually become Borges and Borges has eventually become us.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.
“Jacques Lacan did not go far enough—the universe is structured like a language. Each supernova is a burst of a sonnet, every black hole is the cutting line of a cold-hearted letter, and the collision of two galaxies is but the slow-moving conflict of an Epic Cycle in the infinite courtyard of spacetime.”
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This is beautiful beyond words