Buenos Aires Zoo

Tigre sketched by Borges when he was 4

Las palabras son símbolos para recuerdos compartidos.

Words are symbols for shared memories.

Jorge Luís Borges

We live in an Anglo-centric north America.  Mexico somehow is not a part of it as Spanish is spoken there.

What that especially means in this 21^st century is that the literature from the Río Bravo (Grande to the Anglos) down to the tip of South America is overlooked. Few know that one of the most inventive novels ever written anywhere was Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch) published in 1963. It can be read as is or you can take the author’s suggestion of skipping chapters and going back and forth. Unlike Canadian writers you can find Cortázar reading or being in videos (over 150 of them) in YouTube.

The supreme Argentine writer/poet was Jorge Luís Borges. I crossed paths with him once. I was buying a book in English at a store on Corrientes called Pigmalion in 1966. There was an older man, half blind also buying books.But I was too stupid to realize that it was Borges.

I liked to linger on a bench opposite the tiger cage at the Buenos Aires Zoo in my Argie Navy uniform not knowing then that Borges often sat there as he, too, liked tigers and ignored lions.

In my 6096 blogs I often combine my photographs with poems by poets I like. You might note that I have many associated with Emily Dickinson or William Carlos Williams. But there are many with connection to Borges, Cortázar and other Latin Americans.

I have no doubt that in Vancouver I may have the largest collection of books by Borges and Cortázar. I think who might want them once I have met my oblivion. Don Stewart of MacLeod Books told me he was interested. But then he would sell them one at a time. My Borges and Cortázar collection should all be together in one place.

Now thinking about all my blogs I can relate them to the Borges quote above. Because of the Twitter/X algorithm my feed has lots of stuff in Spanish including one that has Borges quotes.

This one affected me. Borges seems to write obvious stuff like, “In order to remember you must first forget.” But you don’t have to dig any deeper to realize that what he is stating is wonderful.

I can look at my Rosemary’s writing in her many notebooks where she listed he to-do-stuff and I can dig deeper (Borges style) and recognize the shared memories.

 The obvious somehow is not so obvious until Borges makes it so.