just want someone to say to me, I'll always be there when you wake.

Jan 21, 2006 10:09

It's the other one, it's Borges, that things happen to. I stroll about Buenos Aires and stop, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance or an iron gate. News of Borges reaches me through the mail and I see his name on an academic ballot or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson's prose. The other one shares these preferences with me, but in a vain way that converts them into the attributes of an actor. It would be too much to say that our relations are hostile; I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges may contrive his literature and that literature justifies my existence. I do not mind confessing that he has managed to write some worthwhile pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because the good part no longer belongs to anyone, not even the other one, but rather to the Spanish language or to tradition. Otherwise, I am destined to be lost, definitively, and only a few instants of me will be able to survive in the other one. Little by little I am yielding him everything, although I am well aware of his perverse habit of falsifying and exaggerating. Spinoza held that all things long to preserve their own nature: the rock wants to be a rock forever and the tiger, a tiger. But I must live on in Borges, not in myself -- if indeed I am anyone -- though I recognize myself less in his books than in many others, or than in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and I passed from lower middle-class myths to playing games with time and infinity, but those games are Borges' now, and I will have to conceive something else. Thus my life is running away, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other one.

I do not know which of us two is writing this page.
~ "Borges and I", from Jorge Luis Borges' Dreamtigers, 51; translated by Mildred Boyer

"Yeah, yeah," Ashley said. "See, in class we were talking about how, like, that's him talking to this girl, right? Only I don't see it that way at all."

"No?" I said. "Well, how do you read it?"

"I think he's standing in front of a mirror," she said. "And it's like he's this person cut in half, you know, it's like he's got this half of him that everybody thinks is cool, like he's Mister Fun Hog, but in fact he's totally scared of everything. It's like he's got this person he's invented and then there's this other person who's really him and he's trying to talk to this other person, trying to, like, convince him to get the hell out of there."

I nodded. "So you feel that J. Alfred Prufrock is torn in half?"

She looked at me as if I hadn't read the poem. "The fuck yes," she said. "Don't you?"

I nodded again. "I do. ... So is he crazy?"

"Crazy?" Ashley said. "Hell no. Everybody feels like that. Don't they?"
~ Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There, 6-7

...

PS. I updated Shataina like a week ago. Sorry I forgot to mention it. Dustin and I've been writing a damn lot of other stuff (turns out 30,000 words is roughly equivalent to 5 or 6 20-page papers, and it's all due by February 3). A more timely announcement to shataina, as always.

You know how long Shataina is at this point -- in the smaller font? 278 pages. I win.
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