Borges, again

I go back again and again, to Jorge Luis Borges and his jewel-like stories, essays and poems. So many glinting facets in such elegant, miniature creations! So much effortless mastery of literature and philosophy, such love of English poetry, so many tigers.

 El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo, desgraciadamente, es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges.

"Time is a river that sweeps me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that destroys me, but I am the tiger; It is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges."

At the start of Borges' story "Ragnarök" there is this excellent counsel for those who must deal with sleep monsters:

"The images in dreams, wrote Coleridge, figure forth the impressions that our intellect would call causes; we do not feel horror because we are haunted by a sphinx, we dream a sphinx in order to explain the horror that we feel."

He is fascinated with the theme of the double, and blames this on his love of R.L.Stevenson). A couple of his stories of the double made an especially strong impression on me because I came to them just after re-reading Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia where – in his descent into madness – he thinks that his dark double is getting married to the woman he loves, though she is already dead.

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.

Watercolor by Gisela Robinson. 

 

Dreaming of the Tiger

This marvelous sculpture, titled "Dreaming of the Tiger", is located at Hupao (Tiger) Spring, in the mountains of Hangzhou, China. The wonderful photograph is from Sh1019 on Wikimedia Commons.
     When a friend sent me the link just now, I recalled how, especially in the early days of my public teaching of dreamwork and shamanism, many people who came to my workshops told me that they had been inspired by dreams of tigers. One woman reported a recurring dream theme, of roaming in a forest of tigers searching for a white tiger. When at last she found the white tiger, it had the face of a man. "Your face, Robert," she insisted when she met me for the first time.
    The tiger is the great ally of shamans in Central and East Asia, and for as far back as I can remember, tiger has stalked through my dreams. I lost the connection once, when I decided to live on a vegetarian diet for a few weeks. I can say with absolute certainty that the tiger is not a vegetarian!
     Some 20 years ago, a Colorado artist started carving a whimsical face of a tiger with cat's eyes and open jaws. He told me, when he met me for the first time at a dream research conference in Santa Fe, that he had not known why he was making this sculpture until he met me. "I know this tiger is for you, but now I must dream how to finish it." He incubated a dream of guidance, and the dream tiger showed him how to place the head (which you can see in the happy snap here) on top of a shaman's rattle staff.
     I placed it at the center of one of my workshops. A man froze in the doorway, staring into the open jaws. "I've come to the right place," he announced. He explained, in introducing himself to the circle, that he had dreamed again and again of a tiger that was trying to force him along a scary forest path. He did not want to go because of all the danger he sensed in the shadows. But in the climactic dream, the tiger tore at his flesh, as well as his clothes, obliging him to stagger, bleeding, all the way along the trail to a clearing.
     When the tiger had driven him to the place where it wanted him to be, it licked his wounds, which were instantly healed. The dreamer discovered that he had been brought to a place of training. He was to be trained as a jet fighter pilot who would know how to use his new skills to defend those in need of protection. In the elastic time of the dreamspace, he completed his training and earned his wings in that single night.
      "I am here now to manifest the dream," he told us. "I have come to earn my wings as a dream pilot." And so he did.
       In that dream story, we see something else about dream tigers. They are fierce, but they are good. 

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright 
In the forests of the night, 
What immortal hand or eye 
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Yes, William Blake said it right. Yet Tiger is also a wonderful ally in healing, especially soul recovery healing. Our lost boys and girls, who may not trust our adult selves to keep them safe and make life fun, readily embrace Tiger, and I have seen it bring many of them home.