Every time you pick up one of his short stories, or read through one of his poems, you feel like you’re setting forth on an epic journey to mysterious, undiscovered lands. (I’m still freaking out about Hampton Sides’ fabulous The Wide Wide Sea, where Captain Cook is sailing hither and yon, from darn near pole to pole, in this wooden ship—a wooden world, actually—encountering new peoples, sometimes hostile, almost always magical, and moving through these uncharted spaces as if he were mapping the universe!)
That one person?
I have learned more about mystery and magical moments from him than from almost anyone. Here is a poet whose poems can read like a novel, a short-story prose master whose stories can read like poems.
Borges enters mental climes that are almost always uncharted.
Think of it! His short stories unfold like novels, and he is careful—or perhaps un-careful—to unfold his tales with an agreement between writer and reader that, in these worlds, anything is possible. Conversations grounded in the “real” world suffer incursions from the utterly fantastical, as if the fantastical, too, were simply another part of reality.
He takes a seeming observation of a biblical text in “Matthew 25:30” and turns it upon himself—and upon us—as both a warning and a spur to encouragement.
He moves freely through history, creates his own myths, and places them among the logical occurrences of everyday ancient life—though some of these encounters are utterly frightening, as in the creepy “The Lottery in Babylon.” A detective story about a series of murders becomes an entangling metaphysical nightmare in “Death and the Compass.”
And then you have “The Aleph.”
A perfect point from which one can behold all of existence.
And where is this perfect point found?
Under someone’s basement stairs!
So, from time to time, I invite you to wrestle with me and my mentors—to see where Terra Firma, Broken Shackles, The Peerers and Level 1757 found some of their inspirations.
That Borges bulks large as the master I wrestle with most means little in this space, because we will revisit him again and again and again. And as all of us go on questing and grappling with life in this chimerical world, perhaps here is an open door to a place of refuge and wonder—and a moment’s respite from the heavy press of events that swell around us.
A companion for the journey?
I thought I’d share with you one of the greatest, most head-expanding composers America ever produced.
Let’s do this.
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