FruitFly

Compass. Jorge Luis Borges. I knew Borges as a short story writer before I discovered he wrote poetry also. His short stories are excersises in applied metaphysics: he often starts with an idea, an abstract one dealing with tenous entities or concepts, such as time, eternity, infinity, alternate grammars and philosophies, paradoxes and universal symbols. And then with almost mathematical rigour delineates a concrete world where these ideas and concepts exert a shaping power almost akin to fate. As if fate wore many masks, and was given over to playing games. His most famous short story is perhaps Tlon, Uqbar, Obis Tertius, which tells of an enormous enterprise undertaken by a secret society of scientists, philosophers, engineers, theologians, linguists, etc, to write a multi volume encyclopaedia of an imaginary planet, detailing its history, its peoples, differing cultures, languages, plants, animals, religions…The encyclopaedia is released gradually, and its seduction is such that its contents soon come to supplant reality itself, which is remade in the image of the encyclopaedia. Borges is fond of the conceit that reality is somewhere written. In a library we may not have access to, or which may be the universe itself in an unintelligble language. Unintelligible…to us. His poetry is likewise preoccupied with the ramifications of ideas, and I think he is at his best in a form which matched and answered to his need for precision: the sonnet. Artifacts and the figures of various craftsmen appear regularly in his poems, as if he himself acknowledged an affinity with these in his own poetic procedures. He’s like a watchmaker, but it is not simply time he wishes to record, but riddles, labyrinths, mirrors, days and eternity, the mystery of being. These are all intellectual puzzles that he tries to engineer into these marvellous devices in an attempt to observe their inner workings, perhaps to break their code. Very often, however, his sonnets end by indicating something beyond themselves, something supra-rational. It is a maneouvre that abdicates to a greater mystery, and one that he made more frequently with advancing years. I don’t think he would have agreed with Bertrand Russell, who asserted that the world is simply ‘brute fact’. Like Milosz, he craved a day of comprehension.
(Compass)