S11E1 - Borges y Yo (Borges and I)

Episode Notes

In this episode, you can hear the Moonshot Network's own Riley Hopkins reading a Juliet L'mous translation of Jorge Luis Borges' short creative nonfiction, "Borges and I." The next two weeks, IBPFC will cover A Very Jonas Christmas Movie and the history of the "Three Wise Men". Art for I'll Be Pod for Castmas is done by Ryan Jensen. Our theme is by Joey Rose Rysen. I'll Be Pod for Castmas is brought to you by the Moonshot Podcast Network.

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When things happen, it is to the other Borges.

Halfway through my journey of Buenos Aires, I stop and idle to witness the keystone of an arch, the door at the end of a hallway; and in the mail the news of Borges comes, in the list of professors, in the encyclopedia of movers and shakers, I see his name again.

My consideration for the hourglass, the atlas, 17th-century typography, etymologies, that taste of coffee or the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson, all abide; the other likes these things, but with a proffered vanity that makes them the props of an actor. It would go too far to say our relationship is hostile! I live, I continue the journey of living so that Borges may go on plotting his literature, literature that justifies me. Not for nothing he has made some pages worth their laud. But those pages that agree with me cannot save me, perhaps because what is good in there and beyond no longer belongs to anyone. Not the other, not to me, but to the art, the skill, the language, the tradition. Apart from that, nothing of me will remain, as nothing will belong, definitively. Even in those better pages of the other, little by little I have handed my life to Borges, and do so knowing his perverse habit of magnifying, consolidating, obscuring, and inventing.

Spinoza understood the constancy of persevering desire in all things; a stone would want to be a stone forever, as a tiger does a tiger. I must remain within Borges, not within myself (if I am a self at all), but I cannot find myself in his books. If I do so, it is in the song of others' pages, and in the plotting strum of a guitar. Years ago I tried to break free and escaped provincial and mundane mythologies for cosmic games of infinities and time, but those are the game of Borges now and I must find further ground untread. To this pursuit my life is set, to find and lose everything, everything belonging to oblivion and the other.

Which one of us has now written this page?