Impossible Things, Things Like Health Care

Jorge Luis Borges (photo by Diane Arbus)

Some of Jorge Luis Borges's stories seem to be mined from that deep dream filled gap between being awake and being asleep. It's a magical space: vivid events occur that are at once as real as they are impossible. If the sleeper wakes, sometimes the impossibilities are revealed. And then there's wondering: how could anything that defies physical reality appear to be so real.

In "The Disk," a story from The Book of Sand (El Libro de Arena)(1975), the impossible object is the "disk of Odin":

"It is the disk of Odin," the old man said in a patient voice, as though he were speaking to a child. "It has but one side. There is not another thing on earh that has but one side. So long as I hold it in my hand I shall be king."

Ordinarily, objects are in three dimensions. Here one appears that has only a single side. Of course, it would be more or less invisible. And physically impossible on earth.

This, of course, is not entirely correct. The Moebius strip, discovered in 1858, has only one side and one boundary component. But that's not important to the story.

The person with the disk eventually "opened his hand, and [the narrator] saw the gleam of the disk in the air." But when he returned to where the disk was released, he couldn't find it. And he's been looking for it for years. In other words, the disk of Odin vanishes like a dream.

This kind of impossibility sometimes possesses far larger objects.


Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino tells us of this "Invisible City":

When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddenly find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the Medusa-shaped chandeliers. If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk a semi-circle and you will come into view of Moriana's hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sack cloths, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, behind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam.

From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other.

Alas, the city is a two dimensional solid, another escapee from the chasm between waking and dreaming.

In the moments between sleep and wakefulness these objects seem tangible to me. The city is flat, but it's a city. The disk glimmers. I know I'm dreaming, but I try to remember to hold onto the dream so that I will be able to examine it more fully when I am awake. But as I awake, as my sleep falls away, the fallacy arises, and the object I am clenching so tightly in my fist, disappears. What was it? I wonder, how could that be? What was that? But it's gone.

All of this is so reminiscent of the Lankavatara Sutra, "Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise."

Which brings me ever so reluctantly to the elusive dream of a national, single payer health care system. In the dream, I am drinking rum and playing dominoes and smoking a cigar. My friends and I are quite intoxicated and it's very warm out. Somehow, my empty glass falls off the table, lands on the cement walkway, and shatters. Somehow, probably because of the drinking and the joking, I cut my hand deeply on the glass when I try to pick up the shards. My hand hurts, and it is bleeding badly. My friends are surprised that there's so much blood, so they wrap my hand in a bandage, and we head on foot, weaving and staggering, for the emergency room which is luckily only two blocks away. When we enter, a man sitting at a desk says to me and my friends, "I see you've cut your hand. Please come with me so we can take care of it. You can wait here. He'll be right back." And then, mirabile dictu, he takes me in and takes care of my hand. Just like that. I'm out of the ER in 20 minutes with 3 stitches and a nice, heroic, white bandage. It seems strange to me. Nobody asks me questions about insurance or citizenship. Or intoxication. They don't ask me or my friends to pay for anything. When I wake up, I realize it was a dream. It's impossible. I must have been in Cuba.

Again, The Problem Of Reality

I'm fascinated and return again to mysterious objects. This time it's an entire city.

Italo Calvino tells us of this invisible city:

When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddenly find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the Medusa-shaped chandeliers. If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk a semi-circle and you will come into view of Moriana's hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sack cloths, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, behind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam.

From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other.

Alas, the city is a two dimensional solid, another escapee from the chasm between waking and dreaming.

This might remind you, as it does me, of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Disk," a story from The Book of Sand (El Libro de Arena)(1975), in which we find the "Disk of Odin":

"It is the disk of Odin," the old man said in a patient voice, as though he were speaking to a child. "It has but one side. There is not another thing on earh that has but one side. So long as I hold it in my hand I shall be king."

In the moments between sleep and wakefulness these objects seem tangible to me The city is flat, but it's a city. The disk glimmers. I know I'm dreaming, but I try to remember to hold onto the dream so that I will be able to examine it more fully when I am awake. But as I awake, as my sleep falls away, the fallacy arises, and the object I am clenching so tightly in my fist, disappears. What was it? I wonder, how could that be? What was that? But it's gone.

Zobeide, An Invisible City

Italo Calvino tells us in Invisible Cities:

From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.

This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The city's streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten.

New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something from the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape.

The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.

And so, because we are chasing something or someone that cannot be caught, we think it's a good idea to build a trap. So she won't escape. And we build ugliness. How much better it would be to see whether we could re-enter the dream at another time and try again to resume the pursuit. Or do we mistakenly believe that we cannot step into the same dream twice. And that we should make our dreams and metaphors out of concrete, so that they can be easily recovered.