Essay Mondays: Borges

(Each week I read four essays from Philip Lopate's anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, and write about the one I find the most compelling.)

Jorge Luis Borges has a reputation for being a very reference-heavy writer, a member of the literati who gleaned his inspiration more from other books than from real life. It's interesting, therefore, that as I was enjoying my first taste of his work—in the form of his essay "Blindness"—my chief delights were not so much dependent on his ideas or craftsmanship, but on the connections I was able to find with my own reading life. Not that Borges's craftsmanship isn't lovely. But "Blindness" is a casual essay, a lightly reworked lecture on the subject of the author's own blindness and a more general overview of literary blindness through history. Its tone is conversational, slightly digressive, and it doesn't have the carefully controlled and shepherded form that I often admire in essays written to be read. It does have some interesting observations on the reality of being blind, as in this passage:

One of the colors that the blind—or at least this blind man—do not see is black; another is red. Le rouge et le noir are the colors denied us. I, who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist, in the greenish or bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind. I wanted to lie down in darkness. The world of the blind is not the night that people imagine.

I can't help but wonder whether José Saramago read this essay before or during the composition of his own Blindness, the 1995 novel about an epidemic in which the sufferers can only see a glaring white at all times. Borges's description of being bothered by the lack of darkness when attempting to sleep, is closely mirrored by a number of scenes in Saramago's book, although Borges's luminous blue-green mist sounds more calming than Saramago's characters' intense white blaze. There is the same sense of surprise, however, at the loss of the darkness, and how disconcerting that can be, despite the common fear of the dark.

Borges goes on to discuss his reactions to the onset of his blindness; he argues that, as much as it seemed at the time to be a terrible loss, it allowed him to gain a number of things as well: he was motivated, for example, to learn the Anglo-Saxon language after losing his sight.

What always happens, when one studies a language, happened. Each of the words stood out as though it had been carved, as though it were a talisman. For that reason the poems of a foreign language have a prestige they do not enjoy in their own language, for one hears, one sees, each one of the words individually. We think of the beauty, of the power, or simply of the strangeness of them.

This is such a beautiful observation, and one to which I very strongly relate. I'm currently making my way through Emile Zola's Germinal in the original French, and am having exactly the reading experience Borges describes here: noticing the individual words, the mouth-feel and texture of them, their repetitions and significances, so much more clearly than I would in an English text. I love his description of each word standing out "as though it had been carved," because individual words in a language one is studying do have this very tactile quality—not that English words have lost their tactile quality; heaven forbid that should ever happen. But usually I am only aware of the individual words in English now and then, when a particular word choice seems apt, awkward, or intriguing. Much of the time, the language is a transparent medium through which the meaning is communicated. In French, though, each word still retains a solidity, a "thing-ness," as if, as Borges says, it were a talisman, as if one could run one's hands through the reservoir of all these tiny, textural word-objects like one would through a bag of marbles or a sack of dry beans. L'accrochage. Écraser. Les betteraves. And so on. One doesn't even need to understand their meaning to appreciate their slippery, rippling texture.

I think, more than his ostensible messages that every loss is also a gain and that being blind can actually be a benefit to artists of certain types (musicians and poets especially, since they are better able to focus their musical/poetic ear), what struck me about Borges is his deep love of language and of reading. And I wondered why I've been semi-avoiding Borges for so long. I've heard rumors that he can be overly erudite and bookish, but come on now (you must all be saying by now), I love bookish and erudite authors! I love books that dwell in the land of other books, and other art. I love Proust, and Bolaño, and Woolf, and although the jury's still somewhat out on Auster, his discussions of literature were definitely my favorite parts of his Manhattan Trilogy. So what am I waiting for?

A writer lives. The task of being a poet is not completed at a fixed schedule. No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry. I suppose a painter feels that colors and shapes are besieging him. Or a musician feels that the strange world of sounds—the strangest world of art—is always seeking him out, that there are melodies and dissonances looking for him. For the task of an artist, blindness is not a total misfortune. It may be an instrument.

(As an aside, the above made me giggle as I thought of my own craft: the designer of clothing does indeed feel continually assaulted by cuts and colors, as the poet by poetry. I often find myself distracted in social settings as I try mentally to deconstruct a knitted cable in a sweater someone is wearing, or as my mind reconstructs the shapes of the sewn flat pieces that likely went into my friend's blouse. I suppose all art forms pursue their practitioners, don't they?)

Next week: A four-way fight between Herbert Butler, E.M. Cioran, Roland Barthes, and Natalia Ginzburg.

Badge photo courtesy of Liz West: