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.
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