Gospel & Universe 🎲 Almost Existential

In the Shadow of Borges

In the White Room - Ulysses, Son of Laërtes - Ithaca

🎲

In the White Room

In the white room with black curtains near the station […] I’ll wait in this place where the sun never shines / Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves  (“White Room,” Cream, 1968)

In the humid white room, the long white room with black chairs and a fan that swishes the hot air around and makes alot of noise; in the sweltering white room with nothing on the walls but acres of eggshell white, I hear the damp plodding of a lecturer’s voice. The man at the front of the room is dressed in a black frock. He has skinny arms and legs, and reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s character J. Alfred Prufrock.

At the beginning of Eliot’s famous poem, J. Alfred embarks on an epic quest for meaning, suggesting that he's a modern-day Virgil who will lead us through the mezzo del cammin of our lives. Yet J. Alfred can’t make it beyond his own insecurities and circumlocutions. He’s the embodiment of the Modern Crisis of Meaning. At the end of the poem, Prufrock knows he’ll never embark on the epic journey. He’ll only be able to imagine mermaids singing to each other. He knows that they'll never sing to him. The poem ends with him imagining himself drowning somewhere in the Mediterranean.

At the front of the classroom J. Alfred is talking about Jorge Luis Borges, but I can barely hear a word he's saying. Occasionally, fragments of words make it through the humid air, with an é and an ón every now and then at the end of a sentence. The fringes of his black frock are waving in the air. J. Alfred's reading the first paragraph of Borges’ 1939 essay, “Pierre Menard: Author of Quixote.” I recognize some of the words as through a rectangular chamber in the sea.

It all feels alot like five years ago, when my friend Roderigo took me with him to several classes at the University of Buenos Aires. Here I am trying to understand German philosophy in Spanish…

Five years later I’m back in this magical city, having signed up for a class on Borges. Yet the professor’s muttering at the far end of a loudly-ventilated room. About twenty minutes into his lecture, I insert my left earplug and listen to a playlist called Journeys Toward an Acid Rock. The playlist started with Cream’s “White Room” and Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” moved through whiter shades of pale, ascended into a surreal universe of tangerine trees and marmalade skies, and climaxed with Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses.” The final song pitted a bleak winter against the blue and green colours of the sea, blinding the poet’s eyes with trembling mermaids.

Trapped in the white room of Academia, I long for the sky and open sea. I’m hoping to spot a siren (or at least a scantily-clad sunbather) off the starboard bow.

J. Alfred, on the other hand, is still on the second paragraph. I can tell this because he has the text in front of him and he’s writing every fifth word on the board. He's telling the class that in “Pierre Menard” Borges plays a clever metafictional game designed to make the reader rethink what it means to read a text.

In the convoluted style for which he's famous, Borges creates a narrator who comments on an imaginary French writer called Pierre Menard, to whom the narrator ascribes a number of ‘visible works.’ The narrator lists these from a) to s), and then ascribes to Menard an ‘invisible work,’ by which he means a partial re-writing of Don Quixote. The narrator tells us that Menard learned Spanish, immersed himself in the Spanish culture of the early 1600s, and then re-wrote parts of Don Quixote. He didn't write the text by remembering it (although he had a vague recollection) but rather by immersing himself in the times and spirit of Cervantes.

The narrator asserts that Menard’s invisible work is “subterranean” and “eternally heroic.” He argues that it transcends mere plagiarism, and that it enriches the original because of its simultaneous remembering and forgetting of cultural history from Cervantes’ time to that of Menard. One might call it, The Forgotten Remembrance of Things Past.

Borges’ essay is a clever way of suggesting that historical distance, combined with scholarly and imaginative interaction with the past, will enrich a reader’s response to a great work of literature. The essay also urges us to ask ourselves how our understanding travels from the past to the present. This can of course be applied to the work at hand: If we take the original text of Quixote as the starting point (A) and an understanding of “Pierre Menard” as the destination (B), how do we get from A to B?

The students are taking notes and sticking their hands into the air. The instructor on the other hand isn't in the least interested in the location of their arms. He hasn’t asked them a single question, unless one counts the rhetorical one he answered immediately. Instead, he’s leading us methodically, socratically to Prufrock’s overwhelming question. But he still won’t allow us to ask, What is it? 

The students seem to be under the impression that they're here to submit to his methods and his explanations, as if they were sponges in a white box of space two stories above Avenida Corrientes. Yet I suspect they're here for three entirely different reasons. First, they're here to explore a range of perspectives, not just to be coaxed toward the secret of one interpretation. Second, they're here to explain Borges to themselves by themselves. If Borges means anything, he means unnumbered corridors into the library, unnumbered passageways into the labyrinth, unnumbered dreamscapes into the circular ruin.

The stranger dreamed that he was in the centre of a circular amphitheater which was more or less the burnt temple; clouds of taciturn students filled the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest ones hung at a distance of many centuries and as high as the stars, but their features were completely precise. (“The Circular Ruins,” 1939)

If Borges means any one thing, he means that one can't reduce the complexity of the world to one thing. In celebration of this principle, I put the other plug into my ear, at which point Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” sucks up all the stray sounds in the vicinity, the és and the óns gulped into the fusion of an imploded giant sun.

Third, the students are here to enter into Borges’ questioning of reality by questioning Borges himself. They don't have to praise Pierre Menard just because the Borgesian narrator does. They're not compelled to lay a solemn black rose on Menard’s gravestone. Rather, they're free to raise him from his grave and make him answer a question or two. To lift the heavy plates of movable type that sealed his fate. To question Fate itself. Good old Pierre has been lying long enough in a white box, overseen by a preacher in a black frock.

It's time to loosen the earth above him. It’s time to doodle in the margins. It’s time for the footnotes to creep higher and higher until the text disappears.

The rhythm of my pen-strokes follows the rhythm of the staccato voice that’s riding on choppy waves down the narrow white corridor of the room. I hear the underlying cadence but not the meaning of the words, a technique I learned from looking down the throats of Derridean theorists. Deep within the larynx, before the words cram themselves up against the gums and teeth, I transliterate, pre-emptively, the words of J. Alfred into an improved version of what he might be trying to say. I can't hear what he's saying anyway, given that my ears are numbed by the whirl of the white fan and that I’m stepping into a boat that’s waiting on the river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies.

The first thing I transcribe pre-emptively is subterranean. A minute ago I heard the word distinctly. J. Alfred projected it clearly into the air, as if he finally realized that all we have to hear with are our ears. He stressed it as if Borges had really meant to write that word and hadn’t been thinking of a better word. Yet doesn’t subterranean imply Gutenberg’s grave, at the head of which lies a heavy plate, promising the freedom of moveable type, yet pressing ever-downward on the soul?

Anyone who has pondered the implications of the grave, or who has travelled with Poe down the fault-line of a manor into a mountain lake, would know that Borges wrote subterranean because he was suffering from a head injury at the time he wrote “Pierre Menard.” Even if one has never been walled up between shaking bedrooms in the House of Usher, this information is in all the anthologies. Even Wikipedia mentions Borges’ head injury. Yet what the literary historians leave out is what can be deduced from living in a time that has crumbled into the tarn. In such a place, invented facts are more valuable than pedestrian ones. Looking back at the ruins of Sodom, you can almost taste the salt.

At the time Borges was writing, the city engineers were working on the subway, or ferrocarril subterraneo. The construction work created an intermittent yet continual hammering deep underneath Borges’ usually calm Café Richmond on Calle Florida (they were drilling and hammering all the way from Catedral to Tribunales, on what would become the D Line). This infernal pounding set up vibrations in Borges’ unconscious mind, and took the railcar of his thoughts down one track when he was really wanting to go up another.

This series of unfortunate events led him to write subterranean when he meant to write subaquatic. If Borges’ brain had been working properly, he would've known that when people are six feet under the ground they're dead, but when they're six feet under the water they can swim. What's more, Pierre Menard never lived in the first place. How could he end up dead under the ground? “Pierre Menard” is a short story, not a funeral dirge.

The choppy waves of J. Alfred’s voice surge above my head, cresting into chaotic spray as they collide with the white fan. The mist drifts downward and refreshes my senses, awakening me to the power of the sound of the waves that are flowing from my ear phones. I’m floating upward on the crests and dipping downward in the troughs. I’ve become brave Ulysses, rider of the undulating seas…

 Ulysses, Son of Laërtes

You thought the leaden winter would bring you down forever, / So you rode upon a steamer to the violence of the sun. (Cream, 1967)

I like “Tales of Brave Ulysses” so much that I put it at the end of the play list that started with “White Room.” This means that the playlist ends where it began: with the drumming of Ginger Baker and the acid guitar and wah-wah pedalling of Eric Clapton. The beginning of both songs reminds me of a dismal cafe or waiting room down a grungy corridor of the West Croydon Station. This is of course nothing like the cafés of Buenos Aires, with their wooden interiors, Italian coffee, and large windows that look out into the sunny street and onto some of the most beautiful women on the planet. Like Borges, I’m lured to the cafés of Paris and Geneva, yet these can never replace the bright corners at the end of Avenida Corrientes.

One thing that separates me from Borges is that I love experimental rock and roll. Whereas Borges lived in the crackling vinyl soundscapes of Gardel and jazz, I walk through the streets with Procol Harum and Pink Floyd plugged into my ears. I understand the appeal of milongas and Mariano Mores, of Billy Holiday and Benny Goodman, yet I understand with every fibre of my brain how the grimness of places like Croydon and Liverpool brought about the whitest shades of pale and the most colourful tints of a marmalade sky.

In two lines, “Tales of Brave Ulysses” goes from the “leaden winter” of England to “the violence of the sun.” The line that dives south from London to the Mediterranean fractures into lines of cars and trains. These converge at Marseilles and Genova, and then fan out into the Mediterranean on fishing trawlers and ocean liners, toward Ibiza and Sicily. Rounding the corner between Sicily and Malta, the steamers push toward Ithaca and Crete:

And the colours of the sea / Blind your eyes with trembling mermaids / And you touch the distant beaches / With tales of brave Ulysses

How his naked ears were tortured / By the sirens sweetly singing / For the sparkling waves are calling you / To touch their white laced lips

But the professor is explaining the modern crisis of meaning, telling us that we can’t go from A to S so easily. An uncertain creature of the early 20th century, he believes that mythic leap-frogging over borders and cities lies in the past, at some point before Darwin and the humanoid apes. Math and science trump poetry, and will use the very letters of its words against it.

J. Alfred draws a line from A to B on the board. He then puts a simple dot of white chalk between A and B. Perhaps this is a white cliff of Dover, or a calanque east of Marseille.

After the A and the B, we expected a C, perhaps standing for Cliff or Calanque. Instead, the white dot is an unexplained white chalky dot. It could be anything. And in the matter of anythings, it is most certainly Greek.

The chalky white dot is J. Alfred’s way of explaining Borges’ reference to Zeno’s paradox, which is listed under m) in Pierre Menard’s ‘visible works’:

m) The work Les problèmes d’un problème (Paris, 1917), which discusses, in chronological order, the different solutions given to the illustrious problem of Achilles and the tortoise. Two editions of this book have appeared so far; the second bears as an epigraph with Leibniz’s recommendation “Ne craignez point, monsieur, la tortue” and revises the chapters dedicated to Russell and Descartes.

In Zeno’s paradox, Achilles and a tortoise are in a race. Achilles gives the tortoise a head start, yet Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise because in the time it takes for Achilles to catch up, the tortoise must, logically, have moved a little further ahead.The instructor's making a point based on this conundrum, in a vain attempt to walk round and round the gravestone of his circular preoccupations, while all the time the double meaning of the conundrum is right in front of his nose: just as Menard will never get beyond Cervantes’ words at the beginning of the 17th Century (it will take him forever to fully grasp the dimensions of that moment in time), so the students will never get from Quixote (A) to an understanding of Borges’ “Pierre Menard” (B), because in order to get to B there are all kinds of contexts and contingencies they need to take into account. And in between each of these contexts and contingencies are a hundred more contexts and contingencies. A hundred white dots on the board, a line of calanques between us and the sea.

Zeno’s analogy is less a paradox or hidden truth than a conundrum or dilemma, since the logic doesn’t really work in fact: clearly one can go from A to B to C in a straight line. Yet the analogy does express, in a mathematical form, the old truth, the more you know, the more you know you don't know. Within every breadth of understanding lies a thousand and one points in between. Each divided distance, however small, can be divided again. And again, and again, ad infinitum. You can sit on a cement barrier east of Marseilles and look out at faraway islands. You can take a boat from Marseilles to Ithaca, to the coast of Turkey, or to Cairo if you want to.

Back in Buenos Aires, the students are drifting underneath the heavy waves the professor's making above their heads. I can see them because I’m ten feet beneath them (because of the fan and Eric Clapton’s wah-wah pedalling). Not that I can get from A to B any better than they can. In truth, I’ve given up on that entirely. I’d rather watch their legs drifting above me, especially the smooth white legs of the girl who's sitting beside me but who's also floating above me, skimming the blue sky off the starboard bow. Her name must be Electra, daughter of Oceanus. She's no longer listening to the preacher. Instead, she’s looking at her cell phone, stretching her light pink arms, and tapping her blue pen. Her fingernails are also light pink. She's a dolphin in the blue shallows, her blue skirt undulating in the currents above. Perhaps she's here to learn what these waves are made of, and why she's been swimming and drifting, drowning and resurfacing all her life.

Ithaca

J. Alfred Prufrock is getting toward the end of his journey. He’s reached the part where Pierre Menard is wading through the lesser known works of Cervantes, in a sort of initiation to his invisible works. Electra’s cell phone's out again. She’s been swimming for a long time now. I suspect that despite her present boredom she’ll continue to swim. She’ll press on with Borges, despite A to B, despite Alpha to Omega, and despite the sway of the currents lifting and dropping her body this way and that. She’ll dive down, through currents that are cold and blue, to a cavern where she’ll meet an underwater writer in a café on the corner of Libertad and Santa Fe. The writer promises to swim with her in the oceanic currents of a faraway world, and to climb up the chalky cliffs and look outward onto the square shafts of light.

Meanwhile in the classroom J. Alfred is drawing frantic circles with letters in the air. Like Captain Ahab, he's taking the class downward on his spiralling journey. Half the sailors are enthusiastic yet frightened (the ones near the prow who can hear him). The other half are ready to abandon ship (the ones at the stern who are more or less making it up as he goes). Yet there's no escaping it: what we understand will lead us to what we don't understand, and what we don't understand will lead us toward more obscure levels of insinuation. The only thing that really matters is whether or not we hear mermaids singing in the deep.

Alfred J.'s reaching the conclusion (it's 9:40 and one girl in a pink shirt has left the room). He continues talking, and others are stretching and scratching. Some, closer to the front, catching the waves, are also laughing uneasily at his convoluted jokes.

The man lectured his pupils on anatomy, cosmography, and magic: the faces listened anxiously and tried to answer understandingly, as if they guessed the importance of that examination which would redeem one of them from his condition of empty illusion and interpolate him into the real world. (“The Circular Ruins,” 1939)

Yet the dolphin in white sandals isn't amused by his final flourish, his final attempt to make some sort of connection with the human beings in front of him. The dolphin and I are comfortable together in our underwater cave, reading the obscure meanings of Borges. We can't even hear him anymore. Electra’s looking at her copy of the text and her watch. She's also texting notes to Aristotle in hexameter.

At some point the audience will come face to face with the ebb and flow beneath the shallow waves where the glow worms float. Whether on Poe’s Tarn or Homer’s Mediterranean, at some point they'll drop into the depths where the giant mammals drift, ponderous, inexplicable, past the mouth of the underwater cave.

They'll all be tossed overboard one way or another, and spiral down through the watery rabbit hole, to find themselves twenty thousand leagues under the sea, there where Moby Dick lumbers beneath their dreams.

🎲

Next: The Status Quo

Back to Top

Table of Contents - Annotated Contents - Layout - Core Beliefs