Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver

 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.

I like “Tales of Brave Ulysses” so much that I put it at the end of the playlist 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 Borges’ café in Buenos Aires, with its wooden interior, Italian coffee, and large windows that look out into the sunny street and onto some of the most beautiful women on the planet. I understand the appeal of milongas and the tango poetry of Homero Expósito and Homero Manzi, yet I can also see 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 … But the professor is explaining the modern crisis of meaning, telling us that we can’t go from start to finish, or even from one point to the next, so easily.

Old Rex 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 Old Rex'’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. Old Rex is 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 may work in theory, but not in fact: clearly one can go from A to B to G to S to Z. Yet the conundrum does express the old truth, the more you know, the more you know you don't know. For 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, imagining that math tells you that you can never reach any one of them. Or, you can take a boat from Marseilles to Ithaca, to the coast of Turkey, or to Cairo if you want to. Sitting in a cafe and looking up at the pyramids, you can think about that spot of time and place east of Marseille, on the cement barrier. You can in fact go from A to B, and then back from Cairo to Marseille. Your problem then won’t be about time and distance, but about memory.

You’re the same person, but new memories make you a slightly different person. You can then wonder how many points of change have taken place over the years. At that point you’ll drop the Greek geometry for good, and pick up Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and ask yourself, What does it mean to go from wrestling with Gilberte to wondering exactly many girls Albertine slept with when she said she was in love with only you?

Then, just as you come to realize what G meant and what A might mean, and just as you almost come to a conclusion about what it all meant, A disappears.

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Back in the White Room, the students are drifting underneath the heavy waves Old Rex is making above their heads. I can see them because I’m ten feet beneath them (because of the lace on Albertine’s dress and the wah-wah pedalling of Eric Clapton). Not that I can get from A to B any better than they can, theoretically at least. In truth, I’ve given up on that entirely, and am thinking about madeleines and tea.

I 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 is 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

Old Rex 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 Z, 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 Old Rex 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 the fact: 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. We can never escape the Greeks, their crazy notions of Alpha to Omega, and their philosophers of the endless question: Pyrrho of Elis and Socrates of Athens. The only thing that really matters is whether or not we hear mermaids singing in the deep.

Old Rex is reaching the conclusion (a girl in a pink miniskirt 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 with the pink nails 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 the teacher 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 we’ll all come face to face with the ebb and flow beneath the shallow waves on which the glow worms float. Whether on Poe’s Tarn or Homer’s Mediterranean, at some point we'll drop into the depths where the giant mammals drift, ponderous, inexplicable, past the mouth of the underwater cave.

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

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Next: 🧚 The Brave Little Tailor

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