Borges, the Double and Dreams Deferred

 

I return again and again to the works of Jorge Luis Borges, my favorite essayist and short story writer and one of my favorite poets. I share his fascination with the theme of the double. Like Borges, I am intrigued by the possibility that we can encounter our past, future and parallel selves. For me, based on my social life in dreaming, this is a certainty. I and once published a story ("The Other Again") which borrows the structure of Borges" story "The Other", just as he borrowed the ideas and form of a story by Kurd Lasswitz ( which he reviewed in an essay titled "The Total Library") in order to to craft his celebrated "Library of Babel".*

Borges attributed his fascination with the double to his love of R.L.Stevenson. In one Borges story (“Borges and I”), he feels empty and abandoned, while watching a second self write his stories and claim his fame. In another (“August 25, 1983”), as a man already 70, he walks from a station to a hotel at night to find he has already checked in, to room 19, a number with great significance. The clerk recognizes him with difficulty. 

He goes up to the room and finds his older self, now blind and 84, staring up at the ceiling, with an empty bottle nearby. His older self tells him he has come here to die – he says to commit suicide – and tells Borges things he will do before he arrives at the same situation. When Borges denies that this is what his future holds, his older self insists that things will proceed as he says, but that when the younger Borges reaches this point, he will remember the encounter, if at all, only as a faded dream.

In stories like this, Borges is dreaming on paper. He gives us his opinions about dreams in an essay misleadingly titles "Nightmares" (since nightmares are not the main content). Here he teases us with the thought that life itself is a dream, La vida es sueño:

"For the savage and for the child, dreams are episodes of the waking life; for poets and mystics, it is not impossible for all of the waking life to be a dream. This was said, in a dry and laconic fashion, by Calderón: 'Life is a dream.' It was said, with an image, by Shakespeare: 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on.' And splendidly by the Austrian poet Walter von der Vogelweide, who asked, 'Ist mein Leben geträumt oder ist es wahr?' – have I dreamed my life or is it real?"

Yet as far as I am aware we don't have Borges' dream journal, perhaps because he did not keep one. I read Edwin Williamson’s long biography of Borges and found that the dreams are mostly missing. There’s mention of an early and recurring nightmare, in which Borges does not know where he is or who he is, a dream that may have anticipated his blindness but extends to his existential condition. There are a couple of references to nightmares in his later years – of being terrified by a dream that oppressed him in a book-lined basement in a professor’s house in East Lansing, so he had to be moved to a hotel; of a terrible dream in which he is crucified and glimpses a she-wolf as his oppressor. But nothing, really, about the dreams that may have inspired and fueled the poems and stories. 

Did Borges really dream only on paper? If so, this might account for his uncertainty about whether there is an afterlife, something that weighed on him into his final days. His father – who went blind long before him – sometimes spoke of his longing for death in the sense of being totally “extinguished”. Borges, bitterly and recurringly rejected by women and disappointed in love, and tied to the clumsy body of a failing, eventually sightless animal, also yearned for this, and often thought of suicide. Feeling close to his own death, three years after the death of his boyhood friend from Geneva, Maurice Abramowicz, Borges wrote 

I cannot tell whether you are still someone
I cannot tell whether you can hear me  [2]

Yet the next year in a Greek taverna in Geneva, when a certain song was playing, Borges experienced an epiphany. The song declared that while the music played, you could enjoy the love of Helen of Troy; while the music played, Ulysses could go home to Ithaca. In this moment, Borges knew that Maurice was alive and present, and raised his glass in a toast to his friend. “Tonight I can weep like a man,” he wrote that same night, “ because I know there is not a single thing on this earth which is mortal and which does not project its shadow. Tonight you have told me without words, Abramowicz, that we should enter death as we might enter a fiesta.” [3] 

Borges was now released to imagine – in a burst of visionary optimism after all the black despair – a world created by dreamers. In his prose poem “Someone Shall Dream” (“Alguien sonará”) the future “shall dream dreams more vivid than our waking life today. It shall dream that we can work miracles, and that we won’t carry them out because it will be more real to imagine them. It shall dream worlds so intense that the voice of a single bird could kill us.” 

References

1. Jorge Luis Borges, "Nightmares" in Seven Nights trans. Eliot Weinberger (New York: New Directions, 2009)

2. "Elegy" quoted in Edwin Williamson, Borges: A Life (New York: Viking 2004) p.468

3.“Abramowicz” in Los Conjurados. Quoted in Williamson p. 470

My story "The Other Again" is published in Here, Everything is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss (Excelsior Editions). 

"Borges Twinned": Digital play by RM