"People think life is the thing but I prefer reading” --Borges
Several years ago, life necessitated that I come down from the the ziggurat.
And, so I put down my books.
I put down the books I was writing. I put down the books I was reading. Even my spoken conservations suffered. Across Adonis' vast empire--both East and West-- my exchanges with people began to take a form not unlike what we see in the "mommy blogs"-- an unending dictation of what I did last weekend.
And then I met Voltaire.
He said, "People like us, we need an inner life."
It was like receiving an electric shock, and I was reminded of the words of Anais Nin that I had cherished so long ago. She had said:
... You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you
are living. Then you read a book..., or you take a trip, or you talk with
Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families.
They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."
Actually, before remembering this, an image her famous wooden house appeared before my eyes. I imagined it set in the French countryside-- on a very shady plot of land; I imagined the dark green color of her shutters to be the same color of the tall poplar trees in her garden. This was the house that she loved to write in; to think in; to imagine in. I had imagined it a million times before. She described it thus:
My house is two hundred years old. ...There are eleven windows showing between the wooden trellis covered with ivy. One shutter in the middle was put there for symmetry only, but I often dream about this mysterious room which does not exist behind the closed shutter.
When I look at the large green iron gate from my window it takes on the air of a prison gate. An unjust feeling, since I know I can leave the place whenever I want to, and since I know that human beings place upon an object, or a person, this responsibility of being the obstacle when the obstacle lies always with one's self.
I chose the house for many reasons.
I had a sense of preparation for a love to come. Like the extension of
canopies, the unrolling of ceremonial carpets, as if I must first create a
marvelous world to house it, in which to receive adequately this guest of honor. It is in this mood of preparation that I pass through the house, painting a wall through which stains of humidity show, hanging a lamp where it will throw Balinese shadow plays, draping a bed, placing logs in the fireplace. Every room is painted a different color. As if there were one room for every separate mood: lacquer red for vehemence, pale turquoise for reveries, peach color for gentleness, green for repose, Grey for work at the typewriter.
From these recollections about Anais Nin's house in the French countryside, my thoughts next turned to Borges' Library.
What is the library of all libraries, it represents the universe itself.
A great man of learning, Borges was not only the librarian of the National Library of Argentina but was also the blind librarian who presided over the labyrinthine library in the Name of the Rose as well.
In a universe where books and reality overlap, Borges was a busy man.
We are told that the Library of Babel contained not only every book in the world, but every possible book in the world. All printed in identical print and bound in identical red jackets, the books were lined up on unending shelves in an unending progression of hexagonal galleries which were composed of floor to ceiling books. In addition to the bookshelves, each gallery had a small bathroom and closet (where one could sleep standing up, he explains).
Travelers wandered the galleries searching and reading; reading and searching. The problem is that because of the great glut of information all the books remain totally useless to the librarians; that is because, "a library containing all possible books, arranged at random, is equivalent (as a source of information) to a library containing zero books."
And yet I have hope.
For, indeed, I wander around that library all the time. Last night, groggily traipsing on one of the library's upper galleries a big heavy book fell from the top shelf and landed right on my head.
Ouch!
Ah, Borges!
Opening the book, I turned to my favorite story of all: Averroes' Search. It is, I think, the most beautiful story in the world. Our man in Al-Andalus: Averroes-- he is so one-minded; so absorbed in his task of translating Aristotle into Arabic that he is annoyed recalling a dinner appointment he has that evening. A famous traveler, who claims to have traveled all the way to the Kingdom of Sin (known to us as China), had arrived in Cordova and was to dine in the home of Mr. Farach, the city's great scholar of the Koran.
Working from a translation of a translation, Averroes' task was enormous. That evening, two words in particular were troubling him deeply. The words were tragedy and comedy.
In very much the same way as the Ottoman miniaturist, Master Effendi, who was struggling to understand the Renaissance paintings he had seen in Venice, Averroes had no way to understand the concepts of tragedy and comedy for they simply did not exist in his world. In fact, it wasn't just Averroes for no one in the entire world of Islam could fathom their meaning, as theater did not exist. Scouring the pages of the great philosophers of East and West, Averroes was at a loss.
That is until he met the traveler back from Sin.
The three gentleman: a traveler, a Koranic scholar and the smartest man in the world, sat down to an evenings's meal. At first their conversation turned to the rose garden. Everyone knows this is my favorite scene in the story as I'm always trying to re-tell it. Farach, the traveler, notes that, "The learned Ibn Qutaiba describes an excellent variety of the perpetual rose, which is found in the gardens of Hindustan and whose petals, of a blood red, exhibit characters which read, 'There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.'"
The traveler goes on to tell of something fantastic he saw in Sin Kalan (Canton):
One afternoon, the Moslem merchants of Sin Kalan took me to a house of painted wood where many people lived. It is impossible to describe the house , which was rather a single room, with rows of cabinets or balconies on top of each other. In these cavities there were people who were eating and drinking, and also on the floor and also on a terrace. The persons on this terrace were playing the drum and the lute, save for some fifteen or twenty (with crimson-color masks) who were praying, sing and conversing. They suffered prison, but no one could see the jail; they traveled on horseback, but no one could see the horse; the fought, but their swords were of reed; they died and then stood up again."
Do you get it?
Of course, the traveler had been taken to a Chinese theatrical performance. Think Chinese Opera. Think Kabuki-za.
Averroes and the Koranic scholar-- even the traveler who had seen it with his own eyes-- have no real way to comprehend the concept as in their world, theater and story-telling did not yet exist.
And we thought Heidegger's's translator had problems? Indeed, the story does not have a happy ending.
Borges ends his story with the following words:
I remembered Averroes who, closed within the orb of Islam, could never know the meaning of the terms tragedy and comedy. I related his case; as I went along, I felt what that god mentioned by Burton must have felt when he tried to create a bull and created a buffalo instead. I felt that the work was mocking me. I felt that Averroes, wanting to imagine what a drama was without ever having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd than I, wanting to imagine Averroes with no other sources than a few fragments from Renan, lane, and Asin Palacios.
And there you have it: a woman who is imagining Borges, who is imagining Averroes, who is imagining Aristotle.
(Picture: the Minaret of Samara; thought by some to be the ancient Library of Babel)
Melvyn Braggs, Borges
...inspired from a conversation with a lady in a castle town
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