You were asleep. I wake you.
The vast morning brings the illusion of beginning.
You had forgotten Virgil. Here are the hexameters.I bring you many things.
The four Greek elements: earth, water, fire, air.
The single name of a woman.
The friendship of a woman.
The friendship of the moon.
The bright colors of the atlas.
Forgetting, which purifies.
Memory, which chooses and rediscovers.
The habits which help us feel we are immortal.
The sphere and the hands that measure elusive time.
The fragrance of sandwalwood.
The doubts that we call, not without some vanity, metaphysics.
The curve of the walking stick the hand anticipates.
The taste of grapes and of honey.
REVERSE:
To wake someone from sleep
is a common day-to-day act
that can set us trembling.
To wake someone from sleep
is to saddle some other with the interminable
prison of the universe
of his time, with neither sunset nor dawn.
It is to show him he is someone or something
subject to a name that lays claim to him
and an accumulation of yesterdays.
It is to trouble his eternity,
to load him down with centuries and stars,
to restore to time another Lazarus
burdened with memory.
It is to desecrate the waters of Lethe.
From Section III: "Waiting for the Night," in Poems of the Night by Jorge Louis Borges.
I'm not entirely sure why I've chosen a poem for a post that is long overdue. Just having finished the second chapter of the Dissertation--that too on orientalist poetry and its accompanying scholarship--I'm wondering more than ever why I'm insisting on staying out of my warm, prosy, comfort zone. Here is Jorge Louis Borges, the first Latin American writer I've ever written anything on, and the first twentieth-century figure on this blog. So lots of firsts. At the same time, I wanted to use a text that expressed seconds, thirds, repetition, the grey of endlessness, and though I knew I would find it in the twentieth century, no prose piece I loved enough came to mind. I'm such a novice here though, that the first times might win, and Borges might not have to be my Lazarus. I may have mentioned before that I was introduced to Borges by the wonderful, erudite EK, who read me "Conjectural Poem" to prep me for my first solo lecture on Dante. These firsts don't end, do they?
The untitled poem belongs to what EK and several other Borges scholars understand to be the last phase of the poet's life: well after blindness had overtaken him, at a moment when he was waiting, perhaps, for the lasts, the finals. It's not unclear in the way that it's written: Borges' companion speaks to him in the "obverse," the front, the face, of the "illusion" of wakefulness, of rising from sleep. In the "reverse," we hear the blind poet for whom the act of waking is the act of surrender to his own prisons. The most obvious contrast in these two voices, of course, is that of their syntax. The friend, or lover, speaks in positives, with the idea that there will be another sentence, many other sentences, in fact. Borges, on the other hand, drags, slurs, attempts to explain, hitting finally upon the idea of desecrating the sacred state of unconsciousness, and amnesia. I'll get to that later on, but for now I want to try and understand the nature of the contact the two sets of verses make with each other. That is to say, to they conflict, contradict, butt violently, or just converse, crustily, grumpily, even irritably at moments? As much as my soul would prefer the former set, there's an odd kind of peace to be found in giving the second situation a chance. She knows, I'm suggesting here, that he hates it. She wakes him anyway, she knows he can't remember the poetry that sustains him, so she tells him the sounds. She reminds him he's not dead yet because there is always doubt, just as there is the certainty we crave in the prose of the walking stick. And yet, she doesn't know. She's terribly outside, and he's speaking at her, not with her, and certainly not to her. She is the memories, the lifetime, the name, the person that he used to be--all of which weighs upon him in conscious moments.
Is he suicidal, wishful of death, this poet who would much rather be in a dreamless slumber? Is there a state that between death, and dreaming sleep that we crave, or that perhaps heals us, absorbs us into a space where blindness doesn't matter anymore? Or is it so very simple-- all he wants is forgetfulness, a blankness which rids him of all that he is, all that he wanted to be, without the promise of a rebirth, a renewed existence? And is he so very strange to want it? Borges, of course, is at this point in his life dealing with the loss of his sight, possibly comfortable in the endless night of his own body. But what about the person who reads each word of the page--where does he find himself on the locus of the page? I'm going to argue here that we, or I, or you, the readers, are the space where the two speakers encounter each other. In other words, this is a poem that is not just trying, but in fact, is struggling, desperately clawing to find meaning in its two parts--the common ground between which is only possible in the mind of the affected reader. For me, surprisingly, the poem seems to be defending repetition, the mundane, the over-and-over-again. She may not know him anymore, but she'll keep at it. They "tremble" together when he is woken, as a we, not just a solitary, sleeping, blind poet anymore. To tremble, then, is to be imbalanced, to be alive, to be afraid, to feel. Fear, the most important of the lot, is the stuff of survivors.
