Borges and me
The other one,” Jorge Luis Borges alludes to himself in “Borges and I,” perhaps his best known and most frequently anthologized work. That “other one, the one called Borges,” the author writes, “is the one things happen to”—the one credited with the impressive, larger-than-life achievements that we read and hear about.
Of course, Borges is talking about one person only—himself. At first, we suspect that he is onto one of his tricks, using a puzzle to seduce us into staying with his tale.
But after a while we suspect the seriousness of the intent, and we begin to ask about the person of the one talking, who strives to put a distance, where normally we find none, between himself and the one carrying his name, from whom the speaker must be set apart. For the record, it is the speaker who walks the streets of Buenos Aires, who stops to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on a gate, and who has a fondness for hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, the scent of coffee, the prose of Stevenson. All of which, to be sure, the other one likewise shares, although in a vain way, the speaker adds. And no, they are not hostile to each other. In fact he lives to support Borges so that the latter may keep writing, for in turn his writing validates the speaker’s existence. Yet Borges’ literary achievement cannot save him, because “what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition.”
When he passes away, only “a moment” (the memory?) of himself will survive in Borges, into whom he will gradually disappear.
Clearly, it is a complicated relationship, and a philosophical one, the speaker adds, mentioning Spinoza, who put forward the yearning of things to continue as they are—the stone as stone, the tiger as tiger—forever. Although less in the writing than in other things, the speaker will persist in Borges, who has made his own the themes that had obsessed the former—“the games with time and infinity”—such that the speaker would now have to look for others. In all, the speaker considers himself a loser, left without a choice, except between Borges and oblivion.
In the end it is not clear if it is Borges himself speaking. “I do not know which of us has written this page,” the prose poem concludes.
This kind of writing was typical of the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges. While we might be tempted to dismiss the prose poem as another finger exercise in the genre, we likewise might ask who we really are, if we are not more than the often automatic stream of thoughts, words and emotions, and impulses, that make up our conscious and subconscious selves.
There are times when I look at “Borges and I” as a heuristic exercise to gain self-knowledge, not too different from the Johari window, which helps one explore both the well-lighted and dark rooms within one’s personality.
I find that, in the exercise, the questions to be answered evoke those that Jesus put forward to his disciples.
Mark writes that, as they travelled to Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” To which, the reply was John the Baptist, Elijah, or one of the prophets.
After that Jesus asked them directly, “But who do you say that I am?” To which, Peter replied, “You are the Messiah.”
Jesus was merely testing if the disciples’ knowledge of him was accurate. It was not as if he did not know his identity, and was asking around about it, for in fact already at age 12 he was definite about his mission, which was why he told Joseph and Mary, who had been searching for him in the Temple, that he had to be about his Father’s business.
My intuition is that in that knowledge, in their knowledge of Jesus’ true identity, lay their knowledge of their own selves.
The Borges in the prose poem has the “perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things”—a reference perhaps to the writer’s propensity for wool-gathering, to imagine and fantasize. Into this Borges eventually yielded the Borges of daily life, the matter-of-fact Borges of the useful and convenient, until ultimately there was only one Borges, Borges the writer.
This was the goal of Christ’s disciples—to become like him in everything. As Paul of Tarsus exclaimed, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”
God grant that Paul’s desire should become mine. And then I could begin this piece with—“The other one, the one called Christ…” And end it with—“I do not know which of us has written this page.”
