Part II

If we look at the Notebooks as a search for a work»
able explanation of perception, Brigge‘s problem
might be stated, ”How is experience possible in a
world of surfaces whose presence is cbmmunimted
through the medium of space and Whose inter-rela-
tionships and separate identities are determinedand
defined by this space, ineffable and incomprehensible
in itself?” In Part I, we learned that if Brigge is to
solve his silemma, his vision will have to shift and
approach a compositional principle which western
thinkers have often regarded mystical, or at best,
“negative". According to thatprinciple, the similar-
ities and differences, the location and dimension of
a thing are net seated in the thing itself but in a set
of relationships we use to qualify the thing as it
encounters the space in and around it, and hence
other things in the spatial medium. In other words,
we learn to know a thing through a process of
exclusion which tells us what the thing is not, what
categories it falls to satisfy. The aesthetic impli-
cations of the principle are important for Brigge,
too, since he must recognize that harmony and
disharmony cannot be predicated of a thing, since
they are functions of its similarities or differences
to other things, or as a whole to its parts. Like it
or not, the artist must make himself aware of the
importance of spatiality: the living, breathing, ten~
sion-filled emptiness conducting the energy which
binds things, and which in turn owes its aliveness to
their presence.

Brigge’s frustration at the end of Book II is that,
recognizing this spatiality, he tries to incorporate
it into his art. This incomprehensible spatiality,
which we will call "x", and art are decidedly
“other". The word “reflection" impliesabouncing-
off, net a penetration ofa thing. One cannot reflect
on “x"; it has no surface. But the artist must be
aware of "x”; hence his reflections will fall into
place and take on comprehensibility. The following
diagrams may make my point more accessible.

Brigge* " ‘ ‘ ‘ P
(H g _

”Artifact ("a“)

This represents simple reflection, of the mostbasic
perceptual kind. It requires no understanding of
anything but artifact as surface, and it equips a
person to get about in the world with a minimum of

difficulty. . < \

This is a complex perceptual experience of an arti-
fact. “B" represents the surface of, say, a statue.
"A" represents the hollowness inside the surface
and “C" the void surrounding it. Brigge has still

Borges Twice Translated

The gray strong webwork of his artifice
Unhinges worlds. The paller of his storm,

A living cage, an elemental firmness,
Spreads atop the dying thought, transformed.
Kn altered word well-hidden, cloudrinlocked,
A false or chance encounter on a page

Of Beowulf; alien, fierce, unfrockcd.

An altered sentence, kindling Grendel's rage,
Aﬂoat like smoke in darklocked rooms.
Through what device or grim vague prism,
What eyes of stone, what pallid looms,

What palsied hand or livid system,

Shall the world inspect or weave or clasp
This timescape where the grapser is the grasp?

merely "reflected" off the surface ”13", but the
awareness of “A" and, ”C” bring him into the
composition, since he Is also in "C" and therefore
in a relationship with ”B". "B" comes torepresent
more than a surface- it is a compromise between
the pressures of ”A" from the inside and ”C" from
the outside. It defines two shapes, and neither is its
own. It is thatwhichseparates two spaces and defines
them conversely. It is visible tension.

It is possible that this tension, in some human
beings, is not stable, that "A" will be too big to
contain, or "C" too much to withstand. One example
is the man with St. Vitus’ Dance, whose internal
energy (”imprisoned malady") destroyed his equili-
brium, “flinging dance-force out of him in among
the crowd." (P. 66) Another is Nikolai Kusmith,
who was obsessed with the passage of time, dissied
by the romtion of the earth, and felled by the angle of
inclination of the earth's axis, all external spatial
forces that his body could not resist. (Pp. lSlVZ)
Brigge himself comes to realize the awful fear of
those for whom non- Being has become an object of
virtual perception. He feels the terror of the blind,
whose vision must stop at the insides oftheir eyelids
(P. 179); he is horrified when, as a child, he visits
the Countess Schulin and notices her sniffing for
“ghosts" which he fears she will discover seeping
out of him (P. 128); he cannot bear Abalone's
singing because the sound of music lifts him out of
himself (P. 109); he fears to witness death because
something passes out of the dying and into him
(P. 143), something similar to the air above Count
de Lingy's tomb, “in which sheer life had been
freed." (P. 189) The agonizing question for Brigge
is whether he will be able to endure these energies,
or whether he will be destroyed by the attempt to
understand them and use this understanding in his
art. Before we judge Brigge's success or failure we
will take as an example of his art his interpretation
of the ”Parable of the Prodigal Son" at the con-
clusion of the Notebooks. The Prodigal Son, from
his birth, was kept in totalignorance ofhow to love~
he was wholly beloved. This meant that, deprived
of direction, he was molded into the shape of the
object of his lovers' love, fashioned by their expecr
tations, preconceived, renderedartifact.They could
see him, but he was himself deprived of the sight of
them. “They have the best of it; they keep in the
shadow, while on him alone falls, with the light, all
the shame of having a face." (P. 212) Their leve
does not ”pierce” him, but stops and is reflected
at his surface, leaving in him no hope that that in
him will be released which is metatart; his spac-
iousness. And so the Prodigal Son left his home,
determined not to be loved and likewise never to
love, for he refused to inflict on anyone the pain that

the basement

between the rows of ancient bundled books
(turned so long ago

now yellow without return)

under the somber greywhite of fluorescent
(where day and night

do not go)

i heard

the terrible roar

ofa heartbeat stopped

-—David Mura

had scarred and misshaped his own being. In his
solitude, he discovered that God could sustain his
love, for God is the only being from he need fear
no return of it. He began to extend his love toward
God, but found it difficult because of the remoteness
and distance to be covered: “the density of what had
to be mastered slowed him up." (P. 214) This is not
surprising in someone who up until now had been
artifact and hence had no grasp of spatiality. An
artifact, beloved, need not know what love is. The
struggle to force tentacles of love outside ofhimself
showed the Prodigal Son “how trivial and careless
up to new all the love had been which he thought to
have achieved. How none of it could have come to
anything, because he had net begun to work at it and
make it real.” (P. 215) He became aware ofhis
"inner life" and began examining and trying to
understand this thing which had never been pierced,
this thing of which he had been no more cognizant
than his lovers had been. And so he returned home
and tried to achieve his unaccotnplished soul, his
unused childhood. He returned home willing with all
his heart to go outside himself, to risk loving, to
receive in himself all that had reflected off him,
all that he had not worked to make real. But they
would not let him; they misunderstood and extended
to him all the "trivial and careless" love he'd
grown to despise. But he did not let himself become
artifact this time, "for he recognized more clearly
from day to day that the love of which they were so
vain and to which they secretly encouraged one
another, had nothing to do with him.” (P. 216)

For two people to love reciprocally or to share an
aesthetic experience is for them to occupy the same
space. One who sees is a lover, but one who sees
compositionally is loving what he sees. If the objeCt
of his vision is returning that vision, their glances
will meet somewhere in between, charging their
mutual spatiality, and neither will be rendered sur-
face or artifact. The Prodigal Son’s inability to return
love made the love he reﬂeCted trivial because
interior and eXterior were polarized on either side
of the object of the love: surface. He could neither
sense nor make his lovers aware ofhis inner and his
ecstatic selves. But the Prodigal Son \vastlte Winner:
he knew that his surface had nothing to do with him,
whereas his lovers did not, and they probably knew
as little about themselves.

Of course» Brigge did net fail in his struggle to
withstand his violent encounter with the composi-
tional principle. He survived in much the same way
that the ProdigalSondids~badlyscarredandperhaps
forever solitary in his insistence on perfeCt love,
perfect understanding of his art and of the “[le
incomprcliensibility that surrounds it and is forever
seeping into the corners.

 

