Dreamtigers

L’ARTEFICE (****)

I rumori della piazza restano indietro, entro nella Biblioteca. In modo quasi fisico sento la gravitazione dei libri, l’ambito sereno d’un ordine, il tempo disseccato e conservato magicamente. (13)

Una delle mie insistenti preghiere a Dio e al mio angelo custode era quello di non sognare specchi. So che li sorvegliavo con inquietudine. Temetti, a volte, che cominciassero a divergere dalla realtà; altre, di vedere sfigurato in essi il mio volto da strane avversità. (21)

Il giorno, fedele a vaste leggi segrete, va movendo e confondendo le ombre nel povero recinto… (39)

Lento nella mia notte, la penombra
vana tento con la canna indecisa,
io che mi figuravo il Paradiso
sotto la specie d’una biblioteca. (60)

Dio ha show more creato le notti che si colmano
di sogni e le figure dello specchio
affinché, l’uomo senta che è riflesso
e vanità. Per questo ci spaventano. (68)

Ariosto m’insegnò che nell’incerta
luna albergano i sogni, l’imprendibile,
il tempo che si perde, l’impossibile
o il possibile, ch’é la stessa cosa. (74)

Guardare il fiume ch’é di tempo e acqua
e ricordare che anche il tempo è un fiume,
saper che ci perdiamo come il fiume
e che passano i volti come l’acqua. (102)

Limiti
Tra i libri della mia biblioteca (ecco, li guardo)
ce n’é qualcuno che non aprirò più. (106)

Epilogo
Un uomo si propone il compito di disegnare il mondo. Trascorrendo gli anni, popola uno spazio con immagini di province, di regni, di montagne, di baie, di navi, d’isole, di pesci, di dimore, di strumenti, di astri, di cavalli e di persone. Poco prima di morire, scopre che quel paziente labirinto di linee traccia l’immagine del suo volto. (110) show less

“Impressions, momentary and vivid, would wash over him” and then they wash over the reader.

I have the Collected Fictions (with copious translator's notes), but am splitting my review of that into its components, listed in publication order: Collected Fictions - all reviews.

Dreamtigers, aka The Maker, is the fifth, published in 1960, and I’m including reviews of two pieces published under the title Museum, and the four prose pieces from In Praise of Darkness, published in 1969.

Brevity and Blindness

These pieces have many of the same elements as previous ones, but are mostly short – very short indeed. Each is a bubble of an idea, rather than a story. They’re intriguing, enticing and thought-provoking as always, but I slightly show more prefer the longer forms contained in The Garden of Forking Paths, Artifices and the Aleph. Part way through, I thought this collection may get only 4* from me, but the final pieces tipped me over well into 5* territory.

Those in Dreamtigers were published five years after Borges became completely blind, which may be a factor (he never learned Braille), and the loss and confusion of blindness is mentioned explicitly and tangentially in several. Mentions of mortality feel more imminent and personal than in his earlier writings.

The Afterword anticipates that after a lifetime drawing the world, “A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face”. (Borges lived another 25 years after this, during which time he continued to write and publish.)

DREAMTIGERS / THE MAKER 6*

This is a collection of impressions, like a prose poem describing a prose poem. It’s written in the third person, but like many of Borges' writings, the protagonist is a version of the author – especially as this refers to the (recent) horror of blindness. Although it’s described in unemotional terms, I wanted to shed a tear on his behalf:

“Gradually, the splendid universe began drawing away from him; a stubborn fog blurred the lines of his hand; the night lost its peopling stars, the earth became uncertain under his feet. Everything grew distant, and indistinct.”

Dreamtigers

Having loved tigers as a child (they're a recurring presence is Borges' writings), he is unable to summon them in his dreams. How much of what we dream of ever comes true? How much of that is fate, and how much our own fault?

A Dialog about a Dialog

A short, recursive discussion, wondering whether suicide is the way to prove (or disprove) immortality.

Toenails

A paragraph comparing their pointlessness with the fact they will outlive the author. But we all die, so are our lives pointless too?

Covered Mirrors

A childhood fear of mirrors is passed on to another, with sad consequences.

“I knew that horror of the special duplication and multiplication of reality” and especially did not want to dream about them. “The constant, infallible functioning of mirrors, the way they followed my every movement, their cosmic pantomime, would seem eerie to me… I feared sometimes that they would begin to veer off from reality” – and sometimes they did.

Argumentum Ornithologicum

God exists because Borges does not know how many birds he saw!
Perhaps.

The Captive

Nature versus nurture and the trouble of being torn between two cultures. Is it ever possible to fit in anywhere? A boy is taken by Indians, and found years later. He’s pleased to recover a knife he hid in his house as a boy, but doesn’t want to live constrained by walls, so leaves, we know not where. “I would like to know what he felt in that moment of vertigo when past and present intermingled.”

This has echoes of Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden (in The Aleph) and The Ethnographer (lower down this review).

The Mountebank

A weird scam involving charging people to view a fake body that may be (but is not) Eva Peron!

Delia Elena San Marco

Remembering a dead lover. “Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.” I’m not sure I follow the logic of that.

A Dialog Between Dead Men

Thoughts on Argentinian history, comparing fame and their effect on posterity.

The Plot

“Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries.” Nineteen centuries after Brutus murdered Caesar, a gaucho is murdered by a godson he fails to recognise. “He does not know that he has died so that a scene can be played out again.” But why is played out again – is it necessary or inevitable?

A Problem

The innovative conceit about the second part of Don Quixote is that it was published after fraudulent sequels. Cervantes assumes that the original story was true, and that he is writing to set the record straight.

Borges’ piece extends the idea of Don Quixote being real. He imagines finding a missing fragment in which Don Quixote kills someone. But it’s a fragment, and Borges ponders how Quixote would have reacted to such an act.

The Yellow Rose

The impossibility of words to express things – which is even more poignant when you remember Borges was blind by the time he wrote this.

“He realized that it [the rose] lay within its own eternity, not within his words, and that we might speak about the rose, allude to it, but never truly express it, and that the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity had dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world’s contents.”

He considers those who may have reached full understanding by death – though he himself, lived another 25 years or so.

The Witness

When the last witness of an event dies, in what sense does it exist? (The falling tree in the empty forest, again.)

Is that a reason to do less – or more? Borges may not live on through his genes, but his thoughts and some of his memories live on in his writing. He so often pondered immortality, and he’s far closer to it than I will ever be.

Martin Fierro

Grim glimpses of civil war in Argentina.

Mutations

“Cross, rope, and arrow: ancient implements of mankind, today reduced, or elevated, to symbols.”

It’s often said that in the 21st century, we live in a very visual age (have those who say it considered Ancient Egypt?). Borges got there first.

“No one knows what sort of image the future may translate it into.”

Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote

“In the beginning of literature, there is myth, as there is also at the end of it.”

Cervantes outlived Don Quixote by only a short time: “For both the dreamer and the dreamed, that entire adventure had been the clash of two worlds: the unreal world of romances and the common everyday world of the seventeenth century.”

See also Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, which is in The Garden of Forking Paths

Paradiso, XXXI, 108

God is fragmented and scattered. Will we recognise God if we see him, or might we misinterpret someone or something else as God?

Parable of the Palace

A poet emperor gets lost in a labyrinth that has possibly magical qualities: “The real merged and mingled with the dreamed – or the real, rather, was one of the shapes the dream took.”

A poem becomes a synecdoche for the entire palace – but what if the world cannot contain two identical things?

Everything and Nothing 6*

Have you ever felt something was missing? An aching emptiness inside? This is an agonising vignette, with a twist.

“There was no one inside him… there was no more than a slight chill, a dream someone had failed to dream... [so] He trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody, so that his ‘nobodiness’ might not be discovered.”

The man meets God and discovers that God has existential issues too: “I, who have been so many men in vain, wish to be one, to be myself. God’s voice answered him out of a whirlwind: I, too, am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my dream are you, who like me are many, yet no one.”

Ragnarok

Coleridge said “We do not feel horror because we are haunted by a sphinx, we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror that we feel.”

Does that explain how one can dream the return of banished and corrupted gods?

Inferno, I, 32

If you suffer profoundly in life (perhaps by losing your sight?) would knowing there was some higher purpose to your suffering make it more bearable? Even if it did, if you then forgot the revelation, would any comfort from it remain?

These questions are applied to a captive leopard who inspires a single line of a great poem.

Borges and I

Duality and identity. This opens, “It’s Borges, the other one, that things happen to” and ends, “I’m not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.”

JLB explores this idea in many stories, but it’s most explicit in this and The Other in The Book of Sand and “August 25, 1983” in Shakespeare’s Memory, both of which I prefer to this.

See also Jay Parini's delightful roadtrip memoir, Borges and Me, which I reviewed HERE.

MUSEUM: On Exactitude in Science

The first of two pieces from Museum. A perfect map is unappreciated, thus futile. In this case, it’s a literal (very literal) map, but what about more metaphorical ones? Perhaps we shouldn’t always dig so deep.

MUSEUM: In Memorium, JFK

The second of two pieces from Museum. Doom and inevitability: man killing man has happened throughout history and will continue.

IN PRAISE OF DARKNESS, 1969 6*

My edition of the Collected Fictions includes only the four prose elements of In Praise of Darkness, which was evidently mainly poetry.

The Ethnographer 6* (from In Praise of Darkness)

“The secret is not as important as the paths that led me to it.”

A student goes to live with Indians to learn about them and to gather material for his dissertation. The experience changes him. “He came to think in a fashion that the logic of his mind rejected.”

There’s a mystical angle, too: he learns their secret doctrine and returns to university, but resolves never to divulge it: he “could tell it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways… the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now.” How can he ever belong anywhere? But if that’s a problem, is the insularity the logical conclusion?! (I hope not.)

This has echoes of Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden (in The Aleph) and The Captive (further up this review).

Pedro Salvadores (from In Praise of Darkness)

“We see the fate of Pedro Salvadores, like all things, as a symbol of something that we are just on the verge of understanding.”

He hides in his cellar – for nine years - while his wife lives openly above.

Legend (from In Praise of Darkness)

“Forgetting is forgiving” and “So long as remorse lasts, guilt lasts.”

Cain and Abel are reminiscing, and Cain can’t remember who killed who.

A Prayer 6* (from In Praise of Darkness)

Almost unbearably poignant, bearing in mind that Borges was aged ~60 and had gone totally blind about 5 years earlier. He is attempting “a prayer that is personal, not inherited” – a conundrum he doesn’t really solve.

“Asking that my eyes not be filled with night would be madness; I know of thousands of people who can see, yet who are not particularly happy, just, or wise.”

“Time’s march is a web of causes and effects, and asking for any gift of mercy… is to ask for that link to be broken… that it is already broken.” (Shades of Ambrose Bierce’s famous definition from The Devil’s Dictionary: Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.)

“Nor can I plead that my trespasses be forgiven; forgiveness is the act of another, and only I can save myself.”

“Free will is perhaps illusory.”

“I want to be remembered less as poet than as friend.”

“I hope that oblivion will not long delay.” (It did.)

His End and His Beginning (from In Praise of Darkness)

More painful beauty about blindness and imagining (hoping for?) death, and ending with acceptance.

“Familiar faces gradually blurred and faded, objects and people slowly abandoned him. His mind seized upon those changing shapes in a frenzy of tenacity.”

And it gets worse: “He was unable to remember the shapes, sounds, and colors of his dreams… nor were the dreams dreams. They were his reality, a reality beyond silence and sight, and therefore beyond memory.”

For a long time, “He never suspected the truth; it burst upon him suddenly”, but he came to realise “It was his duty to leave all these things behind; now he belonged to this new world, removed from past, present, and future.” He endures various agonies and then realises “Since the moment of his death, he had been in heaven.

Other quotes

• “He had listened to the complex stories, which he took in as reality – without asking whether they were true or false.”

• “An actor, that person who stands upon a stage and plays at being another person, for an audience of people who play at taking him for that person.” show less

Strange and prismatic. I wish I could read this forever.

"Islam asserts that on the unappealable day of judgment every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail, and be cast out with them into the fires of punishment. As a child, I felt before large mirrors that same horror of a spectral duplication or multiplication of reality... I watched them with misgivings. Sometimes I feared they might begin to deviate from reality; other times I was afraid of seeing there my own face, disfigured by strange calamities. I have learned that this fear is again monstrously abroad in the world. The story is simple indeed, and show more disagreeable."

"It was at the foot of the next-to-last tower that the poet-- who was as if untouched by the wonders that amazed the rest-- recited the brief composition we find today indissolubly linked to his name and which, as the more elegant historians have it, gave him immortality and death. The text has been lost. There are some who contend it consisted of a single line; others say it had but a single world. The truth, the incredible truth, is that in the poem stood the enormous palace, entire and minutely detailed, with each illustrious porcelain and every sketch on every porcelain and the shadows and the light of the twilights and each unhappy or joyous moment of the glorious dynasties of mortals, gods, and dragons who had dwelled in it from the interminable past. All fell silent, but the Emperor exclaimed, "You have robbed me of my palace!" And the executioner's iron sword cut the poet down.

Others tell the story differently. There cannot be any two things alike in the world; the poet, they say, had only to utter the poem to make the palace disappear, as if abolished and blown to bits by the final syllable. Such legends, of course, amount to no more than literary fiction. The poet was a slave of the Emperor and as such he died. His composition sank into oblivion and his descendants still seek, nor will they find, the one word that contains the universe."

"Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for."

Reading Borges requires a certain faith, a suspension of disbelief, like religion or astrology. If you're not into it I'm sure all this comes off as tedious, pretentious, and overblown. BUT! If you have the patience I promise this book will send you straight down the rabbit hole. If anything, this collection left me sad to live in a world so big and beautiful and to have still never finished Don Quixote (nor even started the Divine Comedy):

"Tradition has it that, on waking, [Dante] felt he had been given-- and then lost-- something infinite, something he would not be able to recover, or even to glimpse, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of man." show less

I read a book while sitting in 24C in a big metal flying tube. A book written by Borges or dreamed by Borges or maybe it was just my dream, a dream about Homer or Shakespeare. It may also have just been symbols that I glanced at that only I could decipher in my own simple way. Could be the symbols were just forgotten memories or the stripes of tigers or falling rain. I dreamed this book. And I dreamed that I saw the face of Borges.

'A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lives traces the image of show more his face.'

I touched a face sitting in 24C in a big metal flying tube... show less

Borges is always said to be immersed in literature, to be a product of literature itself, and he certainly imagines himself that way. But is "literature" the right word for what crowds his imagination? The literature that appears is often in the form of the fantasized lives of prominent authors (Shakespeare's retirement, Cervantes's double). Most of the allusions are to myths, legends, and stories, from the Greeks onward, with a smattering of non-Western sources. These are airy figures, signs of eternity, archetypes, emblems of infinite time and space. They are more like the allusions in Cavafy or than the allusions in, say, Milosz. Borges wasn't swimming in an ocean of literature, but drowning in an ocean of philosophy and myth.

It show more helps to re-imagine Borges without the supposed erudition. If you subtract away the proper names, what remains? Dreams and secret signs of deep time, deep fame, deep cultural oblivion. It is vastly romantic, at times very close to bombast. The strongest pieces in this book are brief stories without any ponderous cultural weight (a spectacular page called "The Captive") and honest reflections on the disproportion between his enormous desire for fame and his withered private self ("Borges and I").

I don't think I'll be returning to Borges anytime soon. The Pessoa of "Do Livro do Desassossego" is far more honest and careful, less easily seduced by fame, and less likely to find solace in celestial fantasies and the supposedly rich loam of deep culture. show less

Of the two parts of Jorge Luis Borges--dreamtigers I would prefer the first--more or less made up of prose poems. As I get older I seem to appreciate more and more his somewhat acerbic but penetrating seeing into of things. The precision of his prose seems to always leap logically forward--it is almost inevitable-like in each and every word leading to a conclusion--with never a word more than needed--but still retaining a deep seated mystery into the interior realms of being. I would have preferred that all Dreamtigers was like the first half--not that the more standard kind of poetry (with rhyming and often in the sonnet form) of the second half is bad--a lot of it is very good--it is just my preference for the former. In any case the show more book overall is both insightful and often even a fun book to read. Apparently if the editors of it are to be believed it was one of Borges' favorites of his own work. Anyway it is well worth the read. show less

Me atrevo, indecoroso y con ignorancia consciente, a decir que es el mejor libro para conocer a Borges. Al que está detrás de su litratura, y a los Borges que son ella.