El Pulmon De La Manzana

An unexpected treat from The New York Times. Maria Kodama describes the view from Borges's window in the Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires:

A certain house in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Recoleta has a window that is doubly privileged. It overlooks a courtyard garden of the kind known here as a pulmón de manzana — literally, the lung of a block — which affords it a view of the sky and an expanse of plants, trees and vines that meander along the walls of neighboring houses, marking the passage of the seasons with their colors. In addition, the window shelters the library of my late husband, Jorge Luis Borges. It is a real Library of Babel, full of old books, their endpapers scribbled with notes in his tiny hand.

As afternoon progresses and I look up from my work to gaze out this window, I may be invaded by springtime, or if it’s summer, by the perfume of jasmine or the scent of orange blossom, mingled with the aroma of leather and book paper, which brought Borges such pleasure.

The window has one more surprise. From it, I can see the garden of the house where Borges once lived, and where he wrote one of his best-known short stories, “The Circular Ruins.’’ Here, I can move back and forth between two worlds. Sometimes, following Borges, I wonder which one is real: the world I see from the window, bathed in afternoon splendor or sunset’s soft glow, with the house that once belonged to Borges in the distance, or the world of the Library of Babel, with its shelves full of books once touched by his hands?

It is Winter in New York, but it's Summer in Buenos Aires. And you can buy sweet, aromatic jasmine at the many florist stands on the streets. It's an eminently livable city. I'd like to be sitting in a cafe now, a cafecito steaming nearby, and my notebook open.

Borges's Tiger

Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges visited the Buenos Aires zoo to watch the tigers. He wrote about them frequently, about Blue Tigers, about Dream Tigers. So first I visited Borges's childhood home at 2135 Serrano, a street now named for Borges:

And then, I walked the few blocks to the zoo. And here's what I saw:

Borges's tiger.

Buscando Borges

The infinite Aleph of Borges' 1949 story, "The Aleph," is "a small irridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness" that contains all of universal space without changing its actual size. It is in the basement of Carlos Argentino's family house near the corner of Avenida Garay and Calle Tacuari. Is the house (and the Aleph) still there? The story suggests not. Zurno and Zungi, CA's neighbors were expanding their "enormous cafe" and were going to tear down CA's house in the late 1940's. Maybe, I think, I'll just stroll over there and see whether the building is still standing. What's more, CA's lawyer, Licenciado Zurni has an office at Tacuari near Avenida Caseros which "is one of proverbial sobriety." That is two blocks south of CA's important basement. It's not a long walk.

Ample discouragement of this adventure to Plaza Constitucion arises. Everyone tells me not to show up in that barrio unless I really want to be separated from my wallet. Or my head. A NY Times Article(5/14/06; sorry no link now) seems to confirm this. The author passes the corner shielded in a moving taxi and charitably describes the site as "anonymous." He doesn't stop to get out and look around. A predominantly gray photo on Flickr (sorry no link now) clinches the deal. There is nothing to look at. Walk canceled.

Instead I select a walk on the nearby eponymous street in Palermo Viejo. Number 2135 of the street formerly known as Serrano bears a simple plaque that the building was there JLB lived a century ago (1901-1914) as an infant. It is a two-story, brick home with a sharply pointed, arched entryway. Is the front entrance Romanesque? Norma? Does that have anything to do with JLB's later interest in North European lanuages and myths? I am no expert.

Today the building's first floor is occupied by a hair salon humorously dubbed "Maldito Frizz."I imagine that JLB might be surprised by this development. And by the nearby "Cybrborges" internet store. But maybe not.

These speculations are easily resolved by taking the 3 block walk to the zoo and observing JLB's beloved Tigres. When I arrive, the tiger is lying down. After a while she gets up to stroll the cage and observe the observers. Borges would have been delighted. I certainly was.

Haiku

For Borges

A black, dream jaguar
growls and waves razor nail paws.
Still asleep, I flee.

Blue Tigers

Today WWF issued a report on tigers. Among other distressing items, there is this:

More tigers are kept in captivity in the U.S. than are left in the wild -- and there are few regulations to keep these tigers from ending up on the black market. The largest numbers of captive tigers are in Texas (an estimated 3,000+), but they are also kept in other states

Soon, if you go looking for tigers, there may not be any to find in the wild. Just in the zoo. You'll be able to watch them walk in circles and growl and snarl. You'll have to imagine, if you can, what it would be like to encounter one while you were walking in the brush:



But I digress. Jorge Luis Borges was really interested in, in fact obsessed with tigers. In his story Blue Tigers the narrator, a professor of logic, searches for a Blue Tiger that was reportedly found in the Ganges Delta. He doesn't find the tiger. Instead, the local villagers send him on a series of wild goose chases by telling him that the tiger has been sighted in various places in the area. He never finds the tiger. No blue tigers. No yellow tigers. No white tigers. Instead he finds something fantastic: "stones of the spawn," blue stones whose behavior defies logic, science and mathematics. But he never finds any tigers, blue or any other color.

When I first read the story, I thought the unsuccessful search for the Blue Tiger was not a big problem. There were, I thought, other tigers to be found. If a Blue Tiger weren't found, that was fine. You could go into the jungle and find other tigers. Thousands of them. Maybe they wouldn't be blue, but at least you could find a tiger if you wanted to.

But now the missing Blue Tiger, the one not found in the story, has become a bigger problem. A far bigger, more worrisome one. Soon, humans will have made common tigers as rare as blue ones in Borges stories. And we will be devastatingly poorer for our reckless and stupid conduct that killed them off. When we act like that, we humans don't deserve anything as wonderful, as fierce, as wild, as beautiful as a tiger.

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.

Hypocrisy Watch: Excuses By Fundies, The Death of A Doctor

My wonderful phone company, Credo, sent me the following:

"Tiller the Baby Killer."

That's how FOX News host Bill O'Reilly referred to Dr. George Tiller who was murdered in cold blood Sunday while he attended church.

Tiller's crime? He provided healthcare to women. Including abortion.

Salon.com reports that FOX's "O'Reilly Factor" has featured attacks on Dr. Tiller on no less than 28 episodes:

"He's guilty of "Nazi stuff," said O'Reilly on June 8, 2005; "a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida," he suggested on March 15, 2006. "This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao's China, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union," said O'Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006.

What happened Sunday was devastating. And it might not have happened if it wasn't for the hate mongering of Bill O'Reilly and others.

There are two things you can do.

1. Sign our petition to Bill O'Reilly. Ask him to take responsibility for creating an atmosphere in which the assassination of Dr. George Tiller comes as no surprise. And tell him to stop spreading hateful rhetoric which encourages violence against doctors who provide reproductive healthcare for women.

2. Make a donation to Medical Students for Choice in honor of Dr. George Tiller. We must lift up a new generation of doctors who are willing and able to provide reproductive healthcare to women.

This Epistle to the Subscribers made sense to me. I signed petitions and I sent $$. I thought about it. It made sense, sort of: Billo spews garbage, crazy persons ingest garbage, garbage in garbage out, crazy person kills doctor who provides abortions. So it might go. But, alas, it didn't make that much sense, because if somebody believes that the life of a fetus is precious, how much more precious is the life of a doctor? Even a doctor who allegedly commits cardinal sins. Have we gone insane, I wondered.

Then I had the pleasure to re-read a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Sect of the Thirty." The members of the sect are literal, they are deep fundamentalists. They read the Bible literally. Borges explains how they read this Biblical text, Luke 24-25:

Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls? The text forbids saving, for If God so clothe the grass, which is today in the field and tomorrow is cast into the over; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith? And seek now what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind

This leads to no saving, and throwing away one's clothing, and going naked, and not planting crops, and so on. Members of the Sect follow this full throttle, the consequences be damned.

And Jesus' admonition Let the dead bury the dead, Borges points out, "condemns the showy vanity of our funerary rites", but it also leads members of the Sect to the belief that dead bodies will actually be buried by spirits of the dead. Hence, no burials. No funerals. Rotting bodies. Vermin eating bodies. Stench. Putrifaction. Pestilence. And public health crises.

I have no intention of spoiling the story. That would be unfair to you. Suffice it to say that the members of the Sect of the Thirty would read the proscription in the Sixth Commandment (Exodus 20:13; Deuteronomy 5:17) literally, "Thou shalt not kill." They would not kill insects, or ants, or animals. Or people. They would not kill anything. There would be no exceptions for killing alleged "killers" either extra-judicially (like Dr. Tiller) or judicially (like Troy Davis). That distinction would be beyond their understanding. As it is beyond mine. Killing would be proscribed. Isn't that what the text says? "Thou shalt not kill" has no provisos, no exceptions, no quibbling, no excuses.

What then are we to make of the assassination of Dr. Tiller? Does it have anything at all to do with fundamental belief systems? Or hypocrisy? Or is it something else entirely? I suspect it is. I suspect it is a species of national, widespread, terrorist mental disease. What else, I ask, can it be? How can the thoughts exist simultaneously in a sane mind that "killing fetuses is wrong" and "those who kill fetuses are justifiably killed?" How can the "killers" of fetuses be condemned and the killers of doctors be called heroes? How can killing to end killing make sense, either as vigilantism (Dr. Tiller) or state killing (Troy Davis)? If killing is wrong, isn't killing always wrong? Will the person who killed Dr. Tiller answer these questions? Will his supporters? Will the news media? I doubt it. I suspect that applause for the killer will continue. And that the rest of us will continue to be stunned, shocked into silence.

I propose this to you for your consideration: There needs to be a new category in the DSM IV, that compendium of recognized mental illnesses, for this. I leave to you naming it. Our society has been breeding a specific kind of dangerous mental illness, and the assassination of Dr. Tiller proves it. Some members of our society have become unglued in their delusions, their religiosity, their violence, and the rest of us stand by in shock and horror as they play out their colossal hypocrisy.

The Mirror And The Mask

Carrowkeel

I thought I wrote this article before. But when I was in Ireland last week, I wanted to show it to a friend, and I couldn't find it here. I carefully searched this blog; it had to be here, but it was not. How, I wondered, could I be so confused. How could I have such a clear recollection of something I had written, only to find out that, in fact, I hadn't written it at all. Was my memory playing tricks on me? Maybe I thought I would write this piece, but never did it? Hardly. I remember making revisions. I'm disturbed by this. I have no explanations.

In the Book of Sand (El Libro de Arena) (1975), Jorge Luis Borges gives us insight in "The Mirror And The Mask" into what it takes to be a great, wandering poet. The King of Ireland, having won an important battle, wants the poet to write a poem about the victory. Would the poet undertake this task and make both the King and the poet immortal? Does the poet have the necessary gifts? The poet responds:

Yes, great king, I do," answered the poet. "I am Olan. For twelve winters I have honed my skills at meter. I know by heart the three hundred sixty fables which are the foundation of all true poetry. The Ulster cycle and the Munster cycle lie within my harp strings. I am licensed by law to employ the most archaic words of the language, and its most complex metaphors. I have mastered the secret script which guards our art from the prying eyes of the common folk. I can sing of love, of cattle theft, of sailing ships, of war. I know the mythological lineage of all the royal houses of Ireland. I possess the secret knowledge of herbs, astrology, mathematics and cannon law. I have defeated my rivals in public contest. I have trained myself in satire, which causes diseases of the skin, including leprosy. And I also wield the sword, as I have prove in your battle. There is but one thing that I do not know: how to express my thanks for this gift you make me.

After the poet successfully completes this initial task, the king speaks:

I accept this labor. It is another victory. You have given to each word its true meaning, to each noun the epithet bestowed upon it by the first poets. In all the work there is not an image which the classics did not employ. War is 'the fair cloth wov'n of men' and blood is 'sword-drink.' The seas has its god and the clouds foretell the future. You have marshaled rhyme, alliteration, assonance, scansion, the artifices of erudite rhetoric, the wise alternation of meters, and all with greatest skillfulness. If the whole of the literature of Ireland should-- omen absit-- be lost, well might it all be reconstructed, without loss, from your classic ode. Thirty scribes shall transcribe it, twelve times each."

What competence. What gifts. What language. But of course, of course, of course things take a turn toward the infinite in the story. Borges after all is the writer. I will not spoil it for you. It deserves to be read in full.

My point here is incredibly modest: I loved this story before I ever saw Ireland. And now, having seen Ireland, I love it all the more. Amidst all of the island's antiquity, and its long, oral tradition, a story about the love of language and writing fits surprisingly and beautifully.

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.

Mightier Than A Sword

In Jorge Luis Borges's story, "The Mirror And The Mask," a poet is commanded by the king to write a poem about a battle. He responds by reciting his abilities:

For twelve winters I have honed my skills at meter. I know by heart the three hundred sixty fables which are the foundation of all true poety. The Ulster cycle and the Munster cycle lie within my harp strings. I am licensed by law to employ the most archaic words of the language, and its most complex metaphors. I have mastered the secret script which guards our art from the prying eyes of the common folk. I can sing of love, of cattle theft, of sailing ships, of war. I know the mythological lineage of all the royal houses of Ireland. I possess the secret knowledge of herbs, astrology, mathematics, and canon law. I have defeated my rivals in public contest. I have trained myself in satire, which causes diseases of the skin, including leprosy. And I also wield the sword, as I have proven in your battle. There is but one ting that I do not know: how to express my thanks for this gift you make me.

And now, do we think of writers and poets as having developed these kinds of mythic skills, or do we think of them instead as miserable scribblers who churn out commercial pulp in their pursuit of a paycheck? Or is it something in between? All I can say is that to me the former is far more fun to read. And more fun to try to produce. It's another reason for not quitting a day job.

Dr. Doolittle

Borges continues to delight and amaze me. In his story, Shakespeare's Memory (La Memoria de Shakespeare)(1983), we find the following:

"In Punjab," said the major in the course of our conversation, "a fellow once pointed out a beggar to me. Islamic legend apparently has it, you know, that King Solomon owned a ring that allowed him to understand the language of the birds. And this beggar, so everyone believed, had somehow come into possession of that ring. The value of the thing was so beyond all reckoning that the poor bugger could never sell it, and he died in one of the courtyards of the mosque of Wazil Khan, in Lahore."

What happened to the ring? It was lost, it's in some secret hiding place in the mosque, it's on the finger of someone living where there are no birds. The story continues,

It was at that point that Daniel Thorpe spoke up. He spoke, somehow, impersonally, without looking at us. His English had a peculiar accent, which I attributed to a long stay in the East.

"It is not a parable, " he said. "Or if it is, it is nonetheless a true story. There are things that have a price so high they can never be sold.

The story will eventually explain Thorpe's "peculiar accent." And much more. And the ring that allows the wearer to understand the language of the birds will be turned into a metaphor for something equally improbable, but for me, the story kindled the desire for such a wonderful decoder ring.

It is the earliest of Spring here. The birds have returned from their long winter travels. I can hear them singing. Whenever I hear them I wish, beyond all hope, that I had that long, lost ring of King Solomon, that I knew what the birds were saying, that I could hear about their journeys to Central America, that I could hear about their lives.

The Disk

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.

It's so reminiscent of the Lankavatara Sutra, "Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise."

Next Wonderful Writer You Might Not Have Heard Of : Adolfo Bioy Casares

As promised, my next WWYMNHHO essay (in about 2 weeks or so mas y menos) will be about Adolfo Bioy Casares' novel The Invention of Morel, a short, intense, brilliant novel. Both Borges and Octavio Paz described the novel as "perfect." It is a small gem (100 pages +/-).

This little notice is here at kj's suggestion. Folks may want to read the book before the essay, and discuss it in the comments to the essay. Maybe WWYMNHHO can be our version of the Algonquin Round Table. Or Gertrude Stein's living room.

I'm stoked.

Wonderful Writers You Might Not Have Heard Of: Cesar Aira

Cesar Aira

Maybe this should be an occasional series. I don't really know how many wonderful, creative Latin American writers' works I have come to admire, which strangely have received utterly insufficient notice in the US. These would include works by writers with too few English translations, and works revered in their writers' own countries, but virtually unknown in the US. The authors of these works, like the one in this essay, are the writers you might not have heard of.

Wiki tells the basics about Cesar Aira:

César Aira (born on February 23, 1949 in Coronel Pringles, Buenos Aires Province) is an Argentine writer and translator, considered by many as one of the leading exponents of Argentine contemporary literature, in spite of his limited public recognition.

He has published over fifty books of stories, novels and essays. Indeed, at least since 1993 a hallmark of his work is an almost frenetic level of writing and publication –two to four novella-length books each year.

Aira has often spoken in interviews of elaborating an avant-garde aesthetic in which, rather than editing what he has written, he engages in a “flight forward” (fuga hacia adelante) to improvise a way out of the corners he writes himself into. Aira also seeks in his own work, and praises in the work of others (such as the Argentine-Parisian cartoonist and comic novelist Copi), the “continuum” (el continuo) of a constant movement forward in the fictional narrative. As a result his fictions can jump radically from one genre to another, and often deploy narrative strategies from popular culture and “subliterary” genres like pulp science fiction and television soap operas; on the other hand, he frequently deliberately refuses to conform to generic expectations for how a novel ought to end, leaving many of his fictions quite open-ended.

I have to cite the Wiki and include the link because this is potentially confusing territory when it comes to Latin America literature. I don't want you to think I'm following in the footsteps of Roberto Bolano's novel, Nazi Literature In The Americas, which followed in the gigantic footsteps of Jorge Luis Borges, and that I'm possibly writing a review of a fictional writer's book that was, in fact, never really written. But could have been. Or that I'm following Ricardo Piglia's example and providing you with a fictional piece I'm attributing to someone (Piglia chose Roberto Arlt in his wonderful novel, Assumed Name) who didn't write it, when, in fact, I did. But I digress.

Cesar Aira is real. Rest assured of that. And he's an incredibly gifted, prolific writer, whom you might not have heard of.

An Episode In The Life Of A Landscape Painter, written in 2000, is a beautiful, short (87 pages), brilliant, gem of a novella. It was a great read. I can't believe that so few people in the US know of the book or of its writer.

A jacket blurb:

An astounding novel from Argentina that is a meditation on the beautiful and the grotesque in nature, on the art of landscape painting, and on one experience in a man's life that became a lightning rod for inspiration.

The novella is about a fictional trip of Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858), an actual painter, and a painter colleague of his, to the pampas of Argentina to paint landscapes which, according to the theories of Alexander von Humboldt, will achieve a "physiognomic totality" of places he paints. Unfortunately, along the way, a grotesque and dreadful accident intervenes (you'll not get the details of this from me) and the accident completely and savagely changes Rugendas and his art and the journey. Rugendas is physically destroyed by the accident, but he continues nevertheless to paint.

Aira tells the story compellingly and unemotionally. His writing, even in translation, is elegant and fluid. And it's true that it goes ever forward. The book is a short, eye opening masterpiece. I am delighted to have found it, and I consider it in the class of Juan Rulfo's seminal work, Pedro Paramo. I consider it a "must read."

As far as I can tell, only two of Aira's novellas have been translated into English. The other is How I Became A Nun. What a sad state of affairs.

Whose Buenos Aires Is This Anyway?

Today's New York Times has an article with slideshow by Maxine Swann about her life in Buenos Aires. She moved there about 10 years ago. The article concentrates on apartments and neighborhoods. It is, after all, in the Home and Garden section. It doesn't mention a single Argentinian writer or poet. I wish it did. If she were writing about my Buenos Aires, she would have to.

At any rate, I don't think of her City at all as Ricardo Piglia's Buenos Aires. Or the Buenos Aires in his novel, The Absent City. Or Borges's. Or Roberto Arlt's. Or the Buenos Aires in Arlt's novel, Mad Toy. And no, this isn't my Buenos Aires either.

In my Buenos Aires in addition to the Obelisk (above) and 9 de Julio, there are many references to and an acknowledgment of the literary canon, the writers. The neighborhoods are remembered by the books they appear in. The streets also. The cafes. The street corners. And there's an aggressive pride in this. Of course, you're supposed to know this stuff. How could you not? You might ask how I, who have read about but never been in these writers' Buenos Aireses, could be excessively proud of these references. You might as well ask whether these writers have been in my Buenos Aires, or if they're just part of its ornamentation, the backdrop for its events.

The Aleph

Just when I was losing touch with a glorious Springtime, the sounds of the red wing blackbirds, the chorus of bullfrogs, the sun, just when the world was inexorably collapsing into a single point of focus on Borges' Zahir, I lucked into the antidote, Borges' short story from the same collection, The Aleph. The Aleph is the antidote to the Zahir.

Beatriz Viterbo, who dies and whom Borges mourns, has a cousin, Carlos Argentino Daneri, whom Borges gets to know over time. Argentino is an awful, pretentious, pedantic, boring, self aggrandizing poet. His own criticism of his poetry is overwhelmingly self indulgent; his poetry, in a word, terrible. Eventually, Argentino explains to Borges that Argentino's neighbor is trying to take over his home to expand a cafe, but that this cannot be permitted to happen because it will prevent Daneri from finishing an exhausting, pedantic, pretentious poem he's working on. The poem plans on describing every place in the world in excruciating detail. At this time he's working on the part called "Australia."

And how is Argentino getting the information for this? From an Aleph, something in the basement of the house that allows one to see the entire universe from every point of view all at once. The Aleph, it seems, shows everything and everywhere. It's infinite. It is everything.

Told this, Borges is convinced that Daneri is crazy after all, but he decides to have a look. And, of course, he observes the Aleph, and it's true, he sees the entire universe all at once. But because he wants to get even with Daneri, even though he's stunned by what he sees, Borges denies seeing anything. He says that there was nothing there to see. This, of course, leads to the demolition of the house and the loss of the Aleph.

A postscript has Daneri winning an important poetry award anyway. And Borges's research reveals that the Aleph in Daneri's former basement wasn't the only one. In the Amr mosque in Cairo there is a stone pillar that contains the entire universe. This Aleph cannot be seen, it can only be heard.

The antidote to one-pointed concentration is everything everywhere all at once.

The Zahir

Jorge Luis Borges (photo by Diane Arbus)

I seem to have been infected by “The Zahir” (“El Zahir”), a 1949 short story by Jorge Luis Borges. I’ve read it three times in the past week, and I keep coming back to it and thinking about it. In fact, I’m having trouble forgetting it. I’m not sure how to leave it behind, how to get it out of my mind.

Borges’s story is about a Zahir, in this case a coin, that has the power to obsess so thoroughly that over time one forgets everything except it. Borges’s story mentions other Zahirs, a tiger, an astrolabe, the bottom of a well, and a vein of marble in a column of a mosque. Everything on earth has the power to be a Zahir, but according to the myth, only one thing at a time is permitted to do so.

Borges receives the coin as change in a bar where he buys a brandy. He decides to get rid of it, spending it for another brandy in a bar he’s never been to before on a street he will not remember. The coin is gone. But it’s not. He cannot forget it. And the more he tries to forget it, the stronger it becomes.

Is this an unusual phenomenon? Apparently not. Maybe writing this brief entry will help me.