Borges, Broken Elevators and Spine Licking

 

in the category of: There Are Things That Like to Happen Together

This morning I read an article by an American journalist about a visit she made to Jorge Luis Borges at his Buenos Aires apartment two years before his death. The building elevator was broken, so she had to walk up six flights of stairs to his apartment.

Six floors is better than nine, I thought, as I left my ninth-floor apartment headed for the gym (which consists of one stationary bike I set up in the basement of the building). I got in the elevator and pushed the button marked B. The elevator's only response was to rock a little. None of the buttons worked. I thought I was trapped until I pushed 9 (my floor) and the door opened, letting me return to where I started. I could take another - working - elevator down to my gym.

I have noticed the play of coincidence around my literary encounters with Borges on numerous occasions. The most amazing example was facilitated by Lucy, my literary cat. I was reading Borges and Me, a delightful memoir by Jay Parini of his travels in Scotland as a minder for the blind Argentine writer. When I put the book down on the ottoman for a moment Lucy jumped up, sniffed it, and then licked the spine, which I took as a sign of approval. I have never seen her do that before or since. .

I returned to my reading. A few pages on in the book, Parini describes his visit with Borges to the rare book room of the Carnegie Library in Dumferline. Borges took a first edition of a novel by Sir Walter Scott off the shelves, sniffed it and - to the horror of the librarian - licked the spine.

Life rhymes. In experiences of lit sync, sometimes what is first seen on paper spills into the world. Sometimes it's the other way round.

Perhaps life is even more likely to rhyme when we are dealing with poets. I spent half an hour earlier in the day translating and reflecting on the oneiric delivery of a poem by Borges.

Where Did the White Doe Come From?

It's the question with which Jorge Luis Borges opens his poem "La Cierva Blanca" ("The White Doe"). He explained elsewhere that the poem came to him. fully formed, in a dream:

“I don’t feel that I wrote that poem...The poem was given to me, in a dream, some minutes before dawn. At times dreams are painful and tedious, and I object to their outrage and say, enough, this is only a dream, stop. But this time it was an oral picture that I saw and heard. I simply copied it, exactly as it was given to me.” [*]

from La Cierva Blanca

tal vez en un recodo del porvenir profundo

te encontraré de nuevo, cierva blanca de un sueño.

Yo también soy un sueño fugitivo que dura

unos días más que el sueño del prado y la blancura.

Perhaps in a corner of the far future

I will meet you again, white doe of my dream.

I, too, am a dream that will not last much longer

than the dream of whiteness in the meadow.

[*] Willis Barnstone, With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992) p. 30.