I will never have said everything I have to say about Borges. Each glimpse I get of him, behind his elaborate Potemkin villages, reveals something new, the blind man palpating the elephant, Beethoven with his ear to the soundboard.
On this reading, he reveals himself to me as the first Bokononist, winkingly proclaiming "It is nothing but foma! All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies." It is beyond dispute that Vonnegut knew and drew from Borges' works. It is a shameless and atextual leap for me to say that Borges is Bokonon, but there. I have said it. Such Foma!
Pierre Menard and Tlon Uqbar wear different faces in El Aleph, but their fingerprints are everywhere. There is always Foma floating on Borges' Latte [please clap], a ludicrously elaborate parallel world of invented places and invented scholars to study them. None of this is real, not Uqbar, not Tarnowitz, and not Droctulft. They are all the third best thing, the orbis tertius, of the three-body problem. It is the nature of this third best thing that it is the only thing we can talk about, however. "'Cuando se acera el fin,' escribió Cartaphilus, ‘ya no quedan imagénes del recuerdo; sólo quedan palabras’” (El inmortal, 29). Words are not real; they cannot be, for that is their nature. "Lo que vieron mis ojos fue simultáneo: lo que transcribiré, sucesivo, porqie el lenguaje lo es" (El Aleph, 205)
But the kcymaerxthaere that Borges creates is not merely Middle Earth or Westeros. Those worlds have their own parallels to ours, but they float over it, detached, and secure in their fiction. Borges' alternate universe is strategically tied to ours in such a way that every name he drops has a chance of existing in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Each offhanded pin tacked to our reality with "actual" names and places serves to highlight the vast canopies vaulting away from our grasp. This reality, the actual, the action, has more of a claim to exist than the words which describe it. If the "palabra"is the third best thing, the "acto" is the second best thing. "Mejor dicho un instante de esa noche, un acto de esa noche, porque los actos son nuestro símbolo" (Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz, 69). The fact is the finger pointing at the moon: slightly more real that the awestruck, "Look!" that announces it, but still not the moon itself. It is still just a symbol, and like all symbols only real to the extent that it is ours, that we all see it and agree on what it means.
What is the moon, then? What is El Aleph, el jaguar (as in "La escritura del dios"), that each of Borges' third-best scholars search for and, in some cases, find? What are all the battles, the mutilations, the embarrassments for? I cannot tell you, and neither can Borges. He can, however, tell you that he cannot tell you. "Como Cornelio Agrippa, soy dios, soy héroe, soy filósofo, soy demonio, y soy mundo, lo cual es una fatigosa manera de decir que no soy" (El inmortal, 24). The eye cannot see itself, the sun cannot feel its own light, and the mind that thinks will always be at least two steps away from being known. You only exist by virtue of that which you are not, that which is outside you, including your own thoughts and especially your words. I am a Cartesian well, a mind beyond subject and object, trapped forever between wave and particle. "Quizá en mi cara estuviera escrita la magia, quizá yo mismo fuera el fin de mi busca" (La escritura del dios, 147). The moment I am anything else is the moment that ends the search, and with it ends all moments.
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