From Mountain*7, thoughts on Borges, blindness, Borges' blindness, and a poem by Borges, a reminder that no one is too blind for a beautiful morning:
Borges delivered the lecture during a period of intensive travelling, when he was virtually omnipresent
in North American Universities. It was period in which his veneration was reaching new levels, thus he could give a lecture that began by detailing his own ‘modest blindness’ and go on to discuss other lionized blind sages, such as ‘Homer, Milton and Joyce'. Borges’ own blindness had been foreseen, in that his father and grandmother had both died blind, ‘who both died blind - blind, laughing, and brave’. It had been a slow process of degeneration, one that he acknowledged as debilitating, but not one that should ‘be seen in a pathetic way’, for it enabled a different way of seeing, a strange movement, a different way of life: embedded in blindness was a metaphor for sight. So the ‘slow nightfall, that slow loss of sight that lasted more than three quarters of a century,’ that ‘began when I began to see’ contained an inherent capacity for sight of a different kind, a new way of seeing that allowed strange figures to dance and play and gave light a new, distinctive form. ‘People generally imagine the blind as enclosed in a black world…I who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist…vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind’. What we have then is a fundamental blurring, a vague haziness: full sight not replaced by its opposite, but by a spectral luminosity; not something as simple as sight turned in on itself, or sight removed completely but altered, realigned, allowing for a space of possibility. Borges, remembering a line from Rudolf Steiner said that something ending should be thought of as something beginning, and that ultimately blindness should be figured as ‘a way of life: one of the styles of living’.
There’s a deliberate poignancy here, not a gawky shame - Borges as anti-Gaucho – but a contemplative acceptance a variation on Pascal’s dictum that ‘all men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone,’ a sense that in blindness Borges had found a way of accepting himself, the latest manifestation of the wandering blind sage, a mode of withdrawal he’d long sought in the anxious labyrinths of his fictions.
THE JUST
A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South,
a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a colour and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well
though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets
of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of
Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
>These people, unaware, are saving the world.
