Lost & Found : Alicia Barnes

 

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

There was a particular lolling afternoon a few weeks ago which I devoted to learning more about Steve Winwood. I downloaded “Back in the High Life,” “Valerie,” and “Higher Love,” (quite giddily-frankly) and tracked his career online. I was interested to find that in his hit song, “While You See a Chance,” Winswood accidentally overdubbed “nothing left” with “no one left” and also deleted the drum track introduction, thereby having to replace it with a “now iconic” keyboard introduction. (This information comes solely from wikipedia and answers.com. For the sake of authorial accountability, I tried to find a more reliable source for this information, but failed. Surprisingly, there’s not an abundance of Steve Winwod websites.) Now, I’m not an expert in sound recording, but it seemed amazing to me that even had he accidentlly overwritten something in the production process, some former draft wouldn’t exist that he could access—it seemed amazing that these versions really were completely lost forever.

I’m a person who loses things often; I’ve lost my keys, my phone, my wallet, and four digital cameras. With its frequency, this habit evolved from annoying to comical and quirky to worrisome. It now makes me question my sanity and ability to function as a normal adult person. Ironically, I lost this piece--or rather, its predecessor. As I sat down to revise this piece’s nearly-completed ancestor, I opened the Word document and found to my horror that it was only notes and quotes from my reading. Like Mr. Winwood, I had been had by technology. I can only hope that also like Mr. Winwood, this improvisational intro will prove “iconic.”

It disturbs me when things are lost forever, whether it’s somewhere in physical space or somewhere in that mind-boggling intangible digital territory. But the sharpest feeling of loss always comes with the realization of the irreversible passage of time and if you’ve ever read Jorge Luis Borges, you know that its impossible to read his work without thinking about time’s existence or non-existence The first time I read Borges was when I read his short story “Garden of the Forking Paths” freshmen year of college in a comparative literature class. This is arguably Borges’ most popular story, and in it he suggests that time is not synchronous, as we often imagine it to be, but that each moment contains an infinite number of possible futures that are all fulfilled simulaneously in multiple universes. This completely blew my mind and I read Labyrinths shortly after.

Labyrinths is an English-language collection of short stories, essays, and parables, that (Borges being Argentinian) were previously published in Spanish. I recently reread it, thinking less about the man or the stories than about what they suggested about time. Borges writes of the same subjects frequently: time, obviously, but also of reality, immortality, obsession. I also find myself writing constantly about the same things. For example, I write often of my writing habit as a defense against my forgetful mind; it seems I always have fresh material.

It’s evident from Borges’ writing that he was a devoted reader and not only because he draws heavily on what he’s read and writes passionately of his favorites in philosophy and literature (Valery, Hume, Cervantes, etc.). In “The Waiting,” Borges distinguishes people who read novels as seeing themselves as characters in a work of art. His love for literature, in particular, is apparent in the way he creates his own fictional worlds. In “The Secret Miracle” a prisoner on the eve of his execution asks God for one more year to complete writing his play (what he considers to be his masterpiece). In the morning, as he stands in front of the firing squad, he gets his wish and time freezes, but he is also frozen. Time has stopped everywhere, except for in his mind, which is where he is forced to live his last year and complete the work. Yet, instead of this being a terrible and ironic punishment, it “held the possibility of allowing him to redeem (symbolically) the meaning of his life.” I suspect that Borges, like many writers I know, couldn’t help but see his life through the lens in which he reads literature, searching for meaning in the slightest daily occurrence, and that he used his writing to edit the things that in our waking reality are untouchable. In the story, the only time that passes for the prisoner is within his head, but it grants him sanity to know he has constructed his life into some kind of comprehensible symbol. Throughout his life, Borges gradually lost his eyesight, due to hereditary retinal detachment. When he could no longer read or write without assistance, his work shifted to the poetic form, because he could memorize a whole piece before he could find somebody to record it. In this light, Borges’ parallels to the prisoner become even greater.

Borges writes often of the vertiginous thought of infinity, not within the scope of the world, but within our own minds. In “Funes the Memorious” he writes about a paralyzed man who is doomed to remember every detail of every day of his life. In “Emma Zunz,” he writes of a girl for whom “the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world and it would go on happening endlessly.” The characters in these stories are extreme examples, but all of our brains work like this to a degree. They continue to tread certain inveterate paths. As we grow up, we make habit of not only our actions, but our thoughts; we get used to thinking of ourselves a certain way, of categorizing our experiences and filing away our memories in a certain way, of writing about the same things. It is this idea of mental repetitions that Borges uses to refute synchronous time in “A New Refutation of Time.” These recurrences of thought within a person are enough to convince Borges of the inexistence of successive moments in time.

Borges believes that our notions of time and the world are completely self-invented. In “Avatars of the Tortoise” he says, “we have dreamt [the universe] as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time, but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.” It is these inconsistencies that plague Borges. He writes again and again of the search for a common order in the universe through the limited material of our own experiences and how even attempting this search can lead to madness. In “The God’s Script,” he tells the story of a man confined to life imprisonment who becomes convinced that the key to the arcana of the universe is contained somewhere in his memories.

But whether or not our universes and our concept of time is real, we are aware of the irretrievability of passed time. As a writer, I’m not guaranteed that the things I write will last. I may lose them in a fire, a la Ellison (allegedly); I may forget to save them on my hard drive; or they may simply be forgotten, deemed insignificant or destroyed years from now. This is an unsettling thought. But it is only another manifestation of a larger terror: that there are places and people we can never go back to. I know that time is real because as I grow up, this thought aches just a little more. Borges ends his refutation of time with the admission that even if time is false, it is inescapable:

“Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny…is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

By the way, The Borges Center, which has had homes at the University of Aarhus (Denmark) and most recently, The University of Iowa has recently moved to The University of Pittsburgh (www.borges.pitt.edu/english.php). The center was created to unite scholars from all around the world who are studying Borges in an international project. Among other goals, the Center compiles a biblographic database of works written by or about Borges and publishes half-yearly the journal Variacciones Borges, which defines itself as “a journal of philsophy, semiotics, and literature.” How exciting that this has found such a home so close by!

 

 

Alicia Barnes graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2007. She recently returned from teaching English in Prague and is so happy to be back in Pittsburgh.  She is now working as a writer and blog coordinator at ModCloth.com. She is currently overhearing two people passionately discuss apple butter!