Author: Sineokov

by

The Game of Chess :: J. L. Borges

I

In their grave corner, the players
Deploy the slow pieces. And the chessboard
Detains them until dawn in its severe
Compass in which two colors hate each other.

Within it the shapes give off a magic
Strength: Homeric tower, and nimble
Horse, a fighting queen, a backward king,
A bishop on the bias, and aggressive pawns.

When the players have departed, and
When time has consumed them utterly,
The ritual will not have ended.

That war first flamed out in the east
Whose amphitheatre is now the world.
And like the other, this game is infinite.

II

Slight king, oblique bishop, and a queen
Blood-lusting; upright tower, crafty pawn —
Over the black and white of their path
They foray and deliver armed battle.

They do not know it is the artful hand
Of the player that rules their fate,
They do not know that an adamant rigor
Subdues their free will and their span.

But the player likewise is a prisoner
(The maxim is Omar’s) on another board
Of dead-black nights and of white days.

God moves the player and he, the piece.
What god behind God originates the scheme
Of dust and time and dream and agony?

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

by

The Hourglass :: J. L. Borges

It is well that time can be measured
With the harsh shadow a column in summer
Casts, or the water of that river
In which Heraclitus saw our folly,

Since both to time and destiny
The two seem alike: the unweighable daytime
Shadow, and the irrevocable course
Of water following its own path.

It is well, but time in the desert
Found another substance, smooth and heavy,
That seems to have been imagined
For measuring dead men’s time.

Hence the allegorical instrument
Of the dictionary illustrations,
The thing that gray antiquaries
Will consign to the red-ash world

Of the odd chess-bishop, of the sword
Defenseless, of the telescope bleared,
Of sandalwood eroded by opium,
Of dust, of hazard, of the nada.

Who has not paused before the severe
And sullen instrument accompanying
The scythe in the god’s right hand
Whose outlines Duerer etched?

Through the open apex the inverted cone
Lets the minute sand fall down,
Gradual gold that loosens itself and fills
The concave crystal of its universe.

There is a pleasure in watching the recondite
Sand that slides away and slopes
And, at the falling point, piles up
With an urgency wholly human.

The sand of the cycles is the same,
And infinite, the history of sand;
Thus, deep beneath your joys and pain
Unwoundable eternity is still the abyss.

Never is there a halt in the fall.
It is I lose blood, not the glass. The ceremony
Of drawing off the sand goes on forever
And with the sand our life is leaving us.

In the minutes of the sand I believe
I feel the cosmic time: the history
That memory locks up in its mirrors
Or that magic Lethe has dissolved.

The pillar of smoke and the pillar of fire,
Carthage and Rome and their crushing war,
Simon Magnus, the seven feet of earth
That the Saxon proffered the Norway king,

This tireless subtle thread of unnumbered
Sand degrades all down to loss.
I cannot save myself, a come-by-chance
Of time, being matter that is crumbling.

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

by

Poem about Gifts :: J. L. Borges

Let none think that I by tear or reproach make light
Of this manifesting the mastery
Of God, who with excelling irony
Gives me at once both books and night.

In this city of books he made these eyes
The sightless rulers who can only read,
In libraries of dreams, the pointless
Paragraphs each new dawn offers

To awakened care. In vain the day
Squanders on them its infinite books,
As difficult as the difficult scripts
That perished in Alexandria.

An old Greek story tells how some king died
Of hunger and thirst, though proffered springs and fruits;
My bearing lost, I trudge from side to side
Of this lofty, long blind library.

The walls present, but uselessly,
Encyclopedia, atlas, Orient
And the West, all centuries, dynasties,
Symbols, cosmos and cosmogonies.

Slow in my darkness, I explore
The hollow gloom with my hesitant stick,
I, that used to figure Paradise
In such a library’s guise.

Something that surely cannot be called
Mere chance must rule these things;
Some other man has met this doom
On other days of many books and the dark.

As I walk through the slow galleries
I grow to feel with a kind of holy dread
That I am that other, I am the dead,
And the steps I make are also his.

Which of us two is writing now these lines
About a plural I and a single gloom?
What does it matter what word is my name
If the curse is indivisibly the same?

Groussac or Borges, I gaze at this beloved
World that grows more shapeless, and its light
Dies down into a pale, uncertain ash
Resembling sleep and the oblivion of night.

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

by

A Hero for Our Time :: Walter Kirn explains the lasting appeal of Lebowski’s Dude

In 1998, when the Dude shuffled into the nation’s movie theaters wearing a bathrobe, slurping White Russians and licking the residue of 10,000 joints from the fringes of his filthy mustache, there was no way for us to know what he’d become: the first, most convincing cinematic superhero for an age of quagmire and stalemate. Compared to the Dude, the typical superheroes of our day feel less and less reassuring, and even ominous. Billionaire playboys who mask their true identities while turning themselves into gigantic armored flying boners aren’t the solutions to violence, we sense, but embodiments of the traits that cause it.

The Dude’s approach to conquering evil was to let it conquer itself while he takes a bath or crashes on the sofa. There was no fight he couldn’t run away from and no challenge he couldn’t brush aside. His testosterone, it seemed, had turned to two percent. His motto, “Take it easy, man,” was no inflammatory call to battle but a brilliant reminder that, in times of stress, one always has the option of not stressing. In its own way, the Dude’s lifestyle offers of radical critique of America’s tension-wracked, self-defeating culture. He doesn’t have an adjustable-rate mortgage, the only ID he carries on his person is a supermarket discount card, and it’s hard to imagine him wearing out his fingers hitting “refresh” on Perez Hilton’s Website every time Denise Richards serves Charlie Sheen with another 16-page petition.

The Dude’s lesson, in its heroic essence, is that as long as grown-up men don’t get out of their pajamas – or, if they do, immediately don bowling shoes – the world will be a better place. That his hotheaded best friend, Walter, disagrees with him bums the Dude out, of course, but not profoundly. The militaristic nut deserves some latitude. Of the countless haunted Vietnam vets served up by Hollywood over the years, Walter is the most volatile yet lovable, a hand grenade in the shape of a stuffed bear.

The friendship between the Dude and Walter is founded on the law of basic loyalty, which may be the only law the Dude respects. Eventually, when things heat up, the peacenik joins forces with the psycho, the draft dodger lines up with the GI, and the festering wounds of Vietnam are truly and spiritually healed. Blessedly, this healing doesn’t require a full-scale bombardment of Iraq, which was thought by some politicians at the time to be the most effective way to recapture the national self-confidence lost in the rice paddies of Nam. No, what brings the Dude and Walter together is their discovery of a common enemy. If the pair of them represent two species of the trampled grass-roots American, then the wheelchair-bound, Cheney-esque millionaire Lebowski is a pressurized tank of social herbicide. Lebowski isn’t fussy about destruction; he wants to clear the ground of bums and oddballs so he can smoothly roll across it, unimpeded, unopposed.

If the movie is about anything (and plenty of folks thought it wasn’t when it came out, though now there are some who think it’s about everything), it’s a satirical repudiation of the deadly male obsession to level, flatten and lay waste so as to lord over what remains. This phallic triumphalism spooks the Dude. Fears of castration assault his porous psyche like armies of chattering, wind-up, joke-shop teeth. A hungry ferret is tossed into his bubble bath. A fumbled joint nearly incinerates his pants. Mimes with gigantic scissors invade his dreams. In the meantime, Lebowski’s performance-artist daughter, Maude, is plotting to discard him like a turkey baster once she’s managed to water her parched womb with his precious bodily fluids. And then, of course, there are all the toppling bowling pins, scourging the Dude’s subconscious with every strike.

That the Dude can decline to engage with such assaults on the ramparts of his masculinity is one of his distinctive superpowers. It elevates him above his strutting counterparts like Batman and Iron Man, whose costumes center on a bulging codpiece. The Dude is a softy for the most part, while Batman and Iron Man strive incessantly for the grandiose tumescence that makes our world so dangerous in the first place. The Dude understands this fateful truth. The pushy hard-ons of the elites were precisely what got us into Vietnam and then, years later, sent our soldiers against Saddam Hussein, first to cut him down to size, and then, when that operation didn’t satisfy, to cut him into bits.

The Dude won’t have it, though. He rejects absolutism in all its forms, embraces half-assedness, and even grants Walter a final sloppy hug despite the fact that his shellshocked outbursts have indirectly killed their bowling partner. The Dude is not Jesus, but if he were to meet the Son of God, he’d let him finish the last roach from his stash. If ours is truly “a world of pain,” as Walter repeatedly asserts and the nightly news bears out, then the Dude is one of those saintly underachievers, those holy screw-ups, who make it somewhat bearable. His greatest powers are not to use his power and to acknowledge – serenely, without resentment – that, in the end, he doesn’t have much power.

Forever may he stagger. Long may he weave.

By Walter Kirn

[Page 41 inset to The Decade of the Dude: How The Big Lebowski – the Coen brothers’ 1998 stoner caper starring Jeff Bridges as an L.A. slacker called the Dude – became the most worshipped comedy of its generation, a great article by Andy Greene, Rolling Stone issue 1060 >> September 4, 2008]

by

The Chemicals Between Us

It may be, indeed, that the differences between us lie not so much in the nature of our respective experiences as in our fashion of describing them.

— A. J. Ayer, from Philosophical Essays

by

It’s Hard to Forgive Others for Being Like Ourselves

For Kundera the way to overcome the urge to domination is to realize that everybody has and always will have this urge, but to insist that nobody is more or less justified in having it than anyone else. Nobody stands for the Truth, or for Being, or for Thinking. Nobody stands for anything Other or Higher. We all just stand for ourselves, equal inhabitants of a paradise of individuals in which everybody has the right to be understood but nobody has the right to rule.

*

Elements of what we call language penetrate [so] deeply into what we call reality that the very project of representing ourselves as being mappers of something language-independent is fatally compromised from the start.

*

Accept the position that we are fated to occupy [. . .] the position of being beings who cannot have a view of the world that does not reflect our interests and values.

*

Like relativism, but in a different way, Realism is an impossible attempt to view the world from nowhere.

*

[All of the above are Richard Rorty quotes]

by

No Such Thing as Language

We should realize that we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around the world generally. For there are no rules for arriving at passing theories that work. . . . There is no more chance of regularizing, or teaching, this process than there is of regularizing or teaching the process of creating new theories to cope with new data — for that is what this process involves.

There is no such thing as language, not if a language is anything like what philosophers, at least, have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned or mastered. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language users master and then apply to cases . . . We should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.

— Donald Davidson, from “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”

by

On Rigor in Science :: J. L. Borges

Museum

Φ

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography reached such Perfection that the map of one Province alone took up the whole of a City, and the map of the empire, the whole of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps did not satisfy and the Colleges of Cartographers set up a Map of the Empire which had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point by point. Less Addicted to the Study of Cartography, Succeeding Generations understood that this Widespread Map was Useless and not without Impiety they abandoned it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and of the Winters. In the deserts of the West some mangled Ruins of the Map lasted on, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in the whole Country there are no other relics of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suarez Miranda: Viajes de Varones Prudentes, Book Four, Chapter XLV, Lérida, 1658.

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

by

Existentialist Ethics

. . . not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place. For, in a metaphysics of transcendence, in the classical sense of the term, evil is reduced to error; and in humanistic philosophies it is impossible to account for it, man being defined as complete in a complete world. Existentialism alone gives — like religions — a real role to evil, and it is this, perhaps, which makes its judgments so gloomy. Men do not like to feel themselves in danger. Yet it is because there are real dangers, real failures and real earthly damnation that words like victory, wisdom, or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win.

— Simone de Beauvoir, from The Ethics of Ambiguity

by

Gloomy Passivity

A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort. It was to escape this dilemma that the Stoics preached indifference. We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free. But by doing that one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom.

— Simone de Beauvoir, from The Ethics of Ambiguity

by

The Magnanimous Enemy :: J. L. Borges

Museum

Φ

Magnus Barfod, in the year 1102, undertook the general conquest
of the kingdoms of Ireland; it is said that on the eve of his death
he received this greeting from Muirchertach, king in Dublin:

May gold and the storm fight along with you in your armies,
Magnus Barfod.
Tomorrow, in the fields of my kingdom, may you have a
happy battle.
May your kingly hands be terrible in weaving the sword stuff.
May those opposing your sword become meat for the red swan.
May your many gods glut you with glory, may they glut you
with blood.
Victorious may you be in the dawn, king who tread on Ireland.
Of your many days may none shine bright as tomorrow.
Because that day will be the last. I swear it to you,
King Magnus.
For before its light is blotted, I shall vanquish you and blot
you out, Magnus Barfod.

From H. Gering: Anhang zur Heimskringla (1893)

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

by

Limits :: J. L. Borges

Museum

Φ

There is a line in Verlaine I shall not recall again,
There is a street close by forbidden to my feet,
There’s a mirror that’s seen me for the very last time,
There is a door that I have locked till the end of the world.
Among the books in my library (I have them before me)
There are some that I shall never open now.
This summer I complete my fiftieth year;
Death is gnawing at me ceaselessly.

Julio Platero Haedo: Inscripciones (Montevideo, 1923)

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

by

Quatrain :: J. L. Borges

Museum

Φ

Others died, but it happened in the past,
The season (as all men know) most favorable for death.
Is it possible that I, subject of Yaqub Almansur,
Must die as roses had to die and Aristotle?

From Divan of Almoqtadir El Magrebi (12th century)

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

by

The Regret of Heraclitus :: J. L. Borges

Museum

Φ

I, who have been so many men, have never been
The one in whose embrace Matilde Urbach swooned.

Gaspar Camerarius, in Deliciae poetarum Borussiae, VII, 16

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]


			

	
	



			
				



	
	


		
					

				 by 			

				
Dreamtigers Epiloge :: J. L. Borges

	


		

		
God grant that the essential monotony of this miscellany (which time has compiled – not I -and which admits past pieces that I have not dared to revise, because I wrote them with a different concept of literature) be less evident than the geographical and historical diversity of its themes. Of all the books I have delivered to the presses, none, I think, is as personal as the straggling collection mustered for this hodgepodge, precisely because it abounds in reflections and interpolations. Few things have happened to me, and I have read a great many. Or rather, few things have happened to me more worth remembering than Schopenhaur’s thought or the music of England’s words.


A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.


J. L. B


Buenos Aires, October 31, 1960.


[From Dreamtigers, by Jorges Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]