Yareah Magazine

Barbara Fitz Vroman

Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry reveals him as a man struggling and often agonized by an inward split in his soul. He was in love with the now. He invokes it over and over again exquisitely in such lines as, “the first jasmine of November... the smell of a library or sandalwood...the smoothness of a filed fingernail...a tiger printing a track along the muddy banks”. Yet, always right after he lovingly caresses the now, the materiality, the seeming solidness, awe and wonder of existence, he immediately feels compelled to erase any reality to the words that try to mirror his now. He mourns, even as he denounces the existence, the apparent realness in which we humanly exist.

The mystic in Borges continually revealed to him the impermanence of all that he beheld with such love, which meant to him that it did not exist. Just as over and over again he celebrates the creation before his eyes, over and over again he denies it with such words as dream, absent, abstract, fading away, shadow, withdraws, lost, blur, fleeting.
He often uses the metaphor of water or river. In his poem, We are the Time. We are the Famous, he declares:
We are the water, not the hard diamond, the one that is lost, not the one that stands still.
And:
Everything said goodbye to us, everything goes away.
It’s quite possible that much of this feeling of continual loss was caused in a large part by poor eyesight, and the eventual blindness that he inherited from his father. For he ends this particular poem with:
However there is something that stays
However there is something that bemoans.
Which could well be a description of his own state in his final blindness, when color and form had completely been denied him. His poem Adam Cast Forth, can also be interpreted as a poignant expression of his blindness.
“Was there a Garden, or was the Garden a dream?
Amid the fleeting light, I have slowed myself and queried,
Almost for consolation, if the bygone period
Over which this Adam, wretched now, once reigned supreme.

Might not have been just a magical illusion...”

He goes on to conclude:
“Yet, it is much to have loved, to have known true joy,
To have had---if only for just one day—
The experience of touching the living Garden.
And in this particular poem he does in one stanza affirm the reality that he has so often declared suspect. Referring to the Garden he wonders,
“Might not have been just a magical illusion
of that God I dreamed. Already it’s imprecise
in my memory, the clear Paradise,
But I know it exists, in flower and profusion.”
If Borges poems were informed and ignited by his failing sight and eventual blindness, they nevertheless address all of us who have adequate eyesight, nudging us to the realization of how many ways there are to be blind besides the physical.
He explored some of these ways in The Other Tiger. He acknowledges that the only real tiger he knows is one constructed in his own mind, born of stories and pictures he has read and seen. A tiger of symbols only.
“To the tiger symbols I hold opposed
The one that’s real, the one whose blood runs hot
As it cuts down a herd of buffalo
And that today, this August third, nineteen
Fifty-nine, throws its shadows on the grass.
So his poetry demands of us the answer to, how many of our truths also are based on symbols, what we’ve read or heard, and not on the experience where the hot blood runs? Borges searches for what he calls “the third tiger”, and so must we.

BIOGRAPHY

Barbara Fitz Vroman http://www.barbarafitzvroman.com/ Journalist and writer. Her first novel was co-authored with Peggy Hanson Dopp, “Tomorrow is a River”. Her second novel, “Sons of Thunder”, led to Ireland and their 1898 rebellion against the English and the amazing-story of Father John, the real life priest of a small Irish village who led a peasant army against the English armed only with pikes and scythes. The third novel, “Linger Not At Chebar”, is set on Burna… You can read about the last one “The Experiment” in her website http://www.barbarafitzvroman.com/