My Bustle, the Literary Frame
This entry speaks of forking paths. More specifically The Garden of Forking Paths. Crossroads, but more accurately the kind that is a bifurcation, where two diverging directions surface ahead, while turning back on your heels is an impossibility. I found a volume of Jorge Luis Borges’ stories on my desk at work one day. I knew whom it was from. Men wanting to step over from casual friendship to courting, dip their toes by bringing by books and stories, interviews and poems. They learn words in my native tongue to surprise me as if to say: “I care about who you are, here, look at these books and see who I am”. By now, so predictable is this behavior that I suspect the existence of a lost manual of which pages were randomly scattered. Or, is it I who dismiss and walk around oblivious to any other cues, or men, except those who cause me to raise a brow.
In the short story, Dr. Yu Tsun shoots Stephen Albert. Presumably it is one of many possible outcomes. As professor Albert explains to Yu Tsun minutes before his death:
The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pen conceived it. In contrast to Newton or Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one other for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist and not I; in others I and not you; in others both of us. In the present one, which the favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost.”
The Garden of Forking Paths Wikipedia page cleverly observed:
This idea is remarkably similar to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was not proposed until over a decade after the writing of this story.
Borges was a writer, a mind, ahead of his times. The biographical story studded with graceful readings of his poetry appears in the documentary Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
Jorge Luis was my husband before I had blossomed. On a balmy island of Oahu wanting to calm my mind after an argument, I scanned titles and authors’ names in a bookstore, searching, meandering, needing, lacking. I was pacified at last while leafing through the pages of the Spanish publication of Seven Nights as if the inspired transcribed lectures were capable of transferring some of the author’s insights to his incidental namesake.
A literary antonym of Borges is possibly Pablo Neruda. Contemporaries, born in neighboring countries, their backgrounds differ. One born to an educated middle class family in Buenos Aires, the other a son of a railway worker having grown up in a remote town south of Santiago. Their life stories involve travel and prolonged periods of living abroad, Borges as a youngster, Neruda in his early adulthood, a fact which influenced both their writings respectively. Borges wrote short stories, essays and poems depicting richly layered internal world where reality and fiction interwove. In his concise style not a word may be missed since each is deliberate or carries a cross-cultural reference. Neruda - a poet by birth by his own account, whose lingering compositions are often as elaborate as short stories, had a facility for words. His profuse stream of consciousness, some critics argue, may have produced a few lesser poems. The five volume Obras Completas contains 6000 pages.
An Argentine, in many ways uncannily like the postmodernist master, with his frequent use of “conjecture”, his anxiety about the “infinite”, superior intelligence and a reluctance to pair bond, came to me as I sat on a grassy knoll newly arrived to sunny California, reading Isabelle Allende’s Daughter of Fortune in its French edition. He asked whether I read the book in French because of the Latin, lingual proximity to Spanish (original version) and what I thought of the book. I answered, my heart unsuspecting and complacent, that the novel was exceedingly melodramatic and French was just one of the languages I wanted to brush up on.
One pertinent difference between Neruda and Borges is not stylistic but temperamental. While J.L. Borges retreated from the outside world, lived in semi seclusion and spoke of constant underlying melancholy, Pablo Neruda though shy and introspect in his youth, interacted and engaged. His wonder and poetic expression encompassed everything from salt, artichoke and lemon, the smallest of things, to the drama of human existence and the tragedy of men’s actions. He used his writing unabashedly to serve his political convictions and to propagate his vision of justice. Pablo Neruda: The Poet’s Calling is an independent documentary in the works, crafted in California and narrated in Spanish by Isabel Allende. A couple of clips are available online here and here along with a few select interviews .
Neruda dripped into my inbox, trickled, flowed and floated me. Revolutionary hoarse whisper brimmed my bath tub. San Francisco’s streets came alive with people, buildings and hotels housing personal biographies, insignificant, except to those whose lives they described.
The universality of Neruda’s love poetry is sensually palpable to all men and women of flesh across the divides of geography and culture.
In You the Earth is a favorite among favorites in Captain’s Verses.