JORGE LUIS BORGES WITH THE FINISH LINE WRITERS, GLOUCESTER , MA

ME: Welcome Señor Borges? May we imagine that you are here with us at the Gloucester Writers Center and that we are having a conversation?

JLB: You may imagine anything. You are a writers, are you not?  But, please, Señora, call me Jorge. It is good for me to be remembered. So you have been wishing to meet me?

ME. Well, I must admit Señor, I mean Jorge, I barely knew you existed until very recently, but now that I have read a little about you….

JLB: Ah! Then we have something in common, as ”I myself never knew if I actually existed.”

S. That is exactly why I am drawn to you. I feel that way sometimes as a writer between the thin veil of reason and imagination, reality and fiction.

JLB: Si si, si, my point—well one of my points. My work has been described by one critic as “irrealty.” You are experiencing what has become known as the “Bogesean conundrum”: "whether the writer writes the story, or it writes him.”

ME: Or “her?” So, yes, It was when I found what you said about writing that I knew I had to meet you.

JLB: You mean instead of Stephen King? Are you referring to my statement that, “I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.”

ME:. Yes, that’s it! I see your point. Who are we, fundamentally, if we are everything we have experienced, known or have ever been? 

JLB: “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”

ME: “I Am the Walrus,” I loved that song—a man of your stature and erudition quoting the Beatles?

JLB: As you say, Señora, you barely knew I existed, so your reaction is understandable. The essence of life and the universe to me is “an inexplicable maze, a labyrinth: I have only my perplexities to offer you.” I said that when I was almost 70 years old.

ME: I just turned 70 myself, and I too am filled with perplexities, which keep me in wonder and doubt. I am agnostic—sometimes! 

JLB: Which simply means that, “all things are possible, even God. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. I have given the major part of my life to literature, and I can only offer you—doubts.”

ME: I can say the same—living for literature, or at least with literature all my life, which is more real to me than most things—the body of truth in it clothed in fiction. So, you mean to say you did not live by any one religion or system of thought?

JLB: I have lived in many countries, experienced many cultures, read and understood many philosophers. The most significant influence in my life was father’s library with its thousands of books. I have not thought to find answers to my questions or solutions to the enigma of being human, so I enjoy everything and employed everything as esthetically enjoyable constructs.

ME: Your thinking, and your writing remind me that, at times, I feel it is not I who is writing, as if  what comes to me is latent in my DNA, waiting to be expressed, but randomly…or maybe from somewhere else—again perplexities and doubt. Not that I am in your league, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t presume to…

JLB: Gracias, but, Señora, there is no league—only labyrinths, mirrors and dreams.

ME. Oh, I don’t know what to say about that, do you mean in writing?

JLB: I mean in life, even for Shakespeare. Have you read, my “Everything and Nothing”?

ME: No, but I heard about it when I was listening to a New Yorker Fiction podcast in the introduction to one of your stories.

JLB: Really, I am mainstream now? I invented hypertext, did you know?

ME: What? I have to look that one up. Hmm and I am not sure you are mainstream exactly, but I wouldn’t be the one to ask. I do remember reading one of your stories when I was in college,  “Funes the Memorious,” about a young man who is haunted by his memory of absolutely everything he has ever seen and experienced.

JLB: Si si, So you have read something of mine and now heard of others. So, tell me about that New Yorker Fiction podcast.

S. Well, the story on the podcast was your “Shakespeare’s Memory,” and  made me think about…hmm, I guess it made me think about and understand more about irreality.

JLB: Ah, my story about a man who is given the gift (and curse) of having all of Shakespeare’s memories which displace his own. Wonderful, and you will read my “Everything and Nothing”?

ME: Yes, I will as soon as I get back to reality—whatever that is, right?

JLB: Right. I will briefly summarize it, if I may to you and  your fellow writers: Jane, Dan, Barbara, John, Stacey, Cindy 1 and Cindy 2, as it contains the essence of how I think about the relationship between writers and writing—creators, and creations.

ME: Yes, please do; we’d love to hear it.

JLB: It involves Shakespeare, who he was and perhaps his own search for  a fundamental identity. We know him by his works, but little of his so-called real life. First, he was as an actor, and content to play someone else, but was that enough? No, he then imagined, moved, thought, spoke and felt through his characters in the plays—hundreds of them, many of whom also disguised themselves as others. He created “all possible shapes of being.” After twenty years of “controlled hallucination” he returned to the “village of his birth, where he dictated his final will, which excluded every trace of emotion and his life-long literary gifts.

In  “Everything and Nothing.” I wrote, “the story goes that before or after he died, he found himself before God and said: ‘I who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself.’ The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: ‘Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons—and none.”

ME: I will have to take that into my "ponder heart," as Grace Paley would have said. Thank you, Jorge Luis Borges, for being with the writers in Gloucester tonight, and for your life and work of imagination and inspiration. It was an honor--even in its unreality.

JLB: De nada, es un placer—to exist once again in the present among the living, rescued from death's oblivion to speak to fellow writers—seekers wandering in and recording life's labyrinth of everything and nothing.

CATCHING THE STARS

Fran thought about the multitude of days she had taken the same elevator to the 10th floor. She again walks down the hall to the blue door to put the key into the lock, but for the last time. Today is the final day for her Play it Again sheet music store in New York City, maybe the last one in the country. It has been a cherished space for here and for conductors, composers, musicians, opera singers and others for almost 40 years. They came, not only to buy music, but also to visit Fran, to exchange ideas and experiences, and to share the inspiration of music which, for Fran, was the foundation of the world.

    Some thought Fran’s stewardship of the thousands of sheets of classical music, many rare, made her comparable to a maestro herself, orchestrating the vast collection: organizing, moving, expertly arranging, according to composer, composition, or by other more subtle aspects only she knew about and could convey to those who frequented her shop. Uncanny were her insights and intuitions.

    She had met and served world-class figures, and so many other extraordinary and ordinary “guests,” as she called all her customers. They talked and laughed with her, always charmed by her dark eyes and flash of a smile that could seemingly fill the space with light. Mostly, they wondered at the esoteric nature of Fran’s knowledge of music and of her collection. But, with the advent of the internet, more affordable are readily available downloads, and concerts are now performed with music loaded onto laptops instead of from touchable paper on stands, so no need for a brick and mortar shop. And so Fran had been preparing for some time for the inevitable oblivion of hers, and all that its wares represented. Nevermore, or rarely, will musicians have that sensuous experience of seeing music on paper, holding sheets in hand, turning pages, or even tucking them away somewhere until remembered, or found again in a file or on a shelf, like treasured old books.

    Some few customers who had heard about the shop's fate came by as often as they could in the last few months, if only to visit Fran in her quiet universe of unheard music and take in the ambiance of that space: a certain slant of light in the afternoon; a mood of anticipation, like a concert hall before the conductor walks on and the overture begins. There was also light in Fran’s whole being for the love of music yet to be discovered, played and heard by others. She had become affectionately known as, “the beating heart and soul of classical music.”

    Last week, when interviewed by a nice young man from the New York Times about the impending closure, she told him that her shop was, “a place where there was one of everything. I just love that moment when you put something on the counter and the person goes: ‘Ah! I can’t believe you have this.'” But, she always did, even if the "guests" did not know exactly what they wanted or needed. Her hands deftly lifted each sheet tenderly to lay before them, pointing out the uniqueness of a score and all the subtleties of a particular version—like a mother knows so well the virtues and foibles of each of her children.

    Over the years, new visitors were not only amazed to learn of the scope and depth of the colossal collection, but were also curious about the inexplicable basket of eggs and bunches of rosemary, sage and basil on the front desk. Frequent visitors knew that, while Fran lived in the city, she also had a little farm in western Massachusetts where she raised chickens and tended vegetable gardens. Her guests often carried out freshly-gathered eggs or herbs wrapped in newspaper, along with their sheet music and receipts—always handwritten in pencil by Fran herself, all part of what she called her “little stage,” happy that every day she got to “do her act.”

    When visitors began to dwindle to just a few, then often not even one all day, she felt herself at the edge of a cliff about to fall over.

    Today, Fran turns the key for the last time to the familiar sounds of the creaking door and tinkle of a bronze bell, which in the last few days had not stopped ringing. Dozens of friends and well-wishers braved the wintry weather to visit the shop to say farewell--some for the first time, but all for the last. She now stands disoriented at the door. Although she had anticipated this day for months, even years, she seems unable to step across the threshold. For a moment, she thinks she hears the strains of all of the music she loves—symphonies, fugues, concertos and sonatas emanating from the hidden notations within the stacked leaflets inside. At last, she takes a deep breath and the last step into the familiar silence, except for the muffled sound of traffic far below. She scans the space in her own farewell. There is nothing to be done, except to finish up some paperwork and wait for the movers who will come later today to take the boxes of treasures away to be archived at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.

    If she herself could create a composition to accompany this day, it would be a lamentation for the passing of an era. Yet one has been creating itself in her heart and will resonate there ever after. Instead, she listens to Mendelsshohn's Hebrides and, as always, the strains transport her to another time and place.

    She is a young woman in a summer long ago on the isle of Uist in the Outer Hebrides. Living in a small crofter’s cottage with the MacKays, who had welcomed her as part of their family. Living and working with them she learned many new things: how to collect seaweed, tend gardens, shear sheep—and about living a simpler life. Most of all, she learned to observe, to pay attention. While at first she experienced the stark landscape as remote and austere, in contrast to the one she had known in the vast city along the Hudson,  day by day she began to notice the subtlties of color on land and sea, to feel the purity of air, to bask in brilliant sunlight and to hear the distant rhythm of the sea. There was comfort, too, in the daily rhythms of the day and season.

    Upon her return, she wanted to live part of her life in that simpler way. She eventually was able to acquire the farm in the Berkshires. Although she had never thought of her work there as her true purpose in life--that was in the city, in this shop on West 54th Street. Still, she knows the farm sustains her, brings a kind equilibriam and peace she had learned that summer and has never forgotten, and believes it lives in her as clearly and vividly as does music.

    Throughout this day she listens to Mendelssohn's The Hebrides and welcomes her last “visitor,” in the form of the bright memory of the isle of Uist--which always brings joy and solace. The evening before she left Scotland, she spent with the MacKays. As the sun went down, they took a simple meal together, drank whisky, recited and sang Robby Burns’ poetry and songs. Filled with sadness, she spoke to the MacKays in gratitude for all the wild and beautiful things: Eagles flying high above the wide drifts of flowers beyond the white sand beaches; the thatched-roofed cottages with their driftwood or whalebone timbers, the lovely low stone walls; and the kindness and generosity of the Hebridean people.

    “I will never forget any of it, or you,” she promised.

    “You haven’t seen everything yet, Lass," said Mr. Mackay. "Come with us now, but keep your eyes closed."

    She was led out by the two older children on a narrow path approaching the sea to the sound of slow waves washing ashore. When she opened her eyes, she saw infinite bright stars perfectly reflected from the heavens all across the calm water.

    

    Fran never returned to the Hebrides, but on this day in her beloved shop, as on many days since, her thoughts return to "catching the stars," that night--a memory of magic--wading into the sea, cupping the stars in her hands, even as they slipped through her fingers back into the dark water.