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| Kenneth Branagh posing for me as Hamlet on January 10, 1997 at 3:45pm at The Hotel Vancouver |
“If it be now, ‘tis not to come: if it be not to come, it will be now: if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all” -Hamlet - William Shakespeare.
When I recently read that while reading Hamlet, I felt a sort of comforting solace as I wait for my 83d birthday at the end of August.
In the last few weeks I have been printing 81/2 by 11 inch prints and combing my files for already-printed 8x10s. I am placing them in neat black archival portfolios that I purchase at Staples. I started with two that I labelled Family I and Family II. I now have 33 of them and counting. Each folder has 24 prints. There is Dance I,II,III, Portraits I,II,III, IV, V and so on. When I eventually cease to wait, my daughters will not have to comb through boxes full of photographs. All of (or most) of my best photographs will be there for them to dispose as they wish.
I was about 11 when my grandmother María de los Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena, who was a coloratura soprano, introduced me to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an unusual way. She told me about a four-act opera Amleto by Italian Franco Faccio from a libretto by Arrigo Boito. Its premiere was on May 30th, 1865 at the Carlo Felice Theatre in Genoa. It was then performed at La Scala on the 12 of February of 1871. From that point one I was hooked on everything Shakespeare.
In 1953 we moved from Buenos Aires to Mexico City. We rented a house on Calle Shakespeare (corner with Lafayette). We had to pronounce the street name to taxi drivers as Shah-kes-peh-areh or they would be confused.
By 1965, when I was in Buenos Aires doing my two years as a conscript in the Argentine Navy, I was readin as much of Jorge Luís Borges as I could. It was then that I discovered his astounding essay on Shakespeare the man.
Everything and Nothing J. L. Borges
There was no one in him; behind his face (which even in the poor paintings of the period is unlike any other) and his words, which were copious, imaginative, and emotional, there was nothing but a little chill, a dream not dreamed by anyone. At first he thought everyone was like him, but the puzzled look on a friend’s face when he remarked on that emptiness told him he was mistaken and convinced him forever that an individual must not differ from his species. Occasionally he thought he would find in books the cure for his ill, and so he learned the small Latin and less Greek of which a contemporary was to speak. Later he thought that in the exercise of an elemental human rite he might well find what he sought, and he let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At twenty-odd he went to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself in the habit of pretending that he was someone, so it would not be discovered that he was no one. In London he hit upon the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who plays on stage at being someone else. His playacting taught him a singular happiness, perhaps the first he had known; but when the last line was applauded and the last corpse removed from the stage, the hated sense of unreality came over him again. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamburlaine and again became a nobody. Trapped, he fell to imagining other heroes and other tragic tales. Thus, while in London’s bawdyhouses and taverns his body fulfilled its destiny as body, the soul that dwelled in it was Caesar, failing to heed the augurer’s admonition, and Juliet, detesting the lark, and Macbeth, conversing on the heath with the witches, who are also the fates. Nobody was ever as many men as that man, who like the Egyptian Proteus managed to exhaust all the possible shapes of being. At times he slipped into some corner of his work a confession, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his single person he plays many parts, and Iago says with strange words, “I am not what I am.” His passages on the fundamental identity of existing, dreaming, and acting are famous.
Twenty years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he was overcome by the surfeit and the horror of being so many kings who die by the sword and so many unhappy lovers who converge, diverge, and melodiously agonize. That same day he disposed of his theater. Before a week was out he had returned to the village of his birth, where he recovered the trees and the river of his childhood; and he did not bind them to those others his muse had celebrated, those made illustrious by mythological allusions and Latin phrases. He had to be someone; he became a retired impresario who has made his fortune and who interests himself in loans, lawsuits, and petty usury. In this character he dictated the arid final will and testament that we know, deliberately excluding from it every trace of emotion and of literature. Friends from London used to visit his retreat, and for them he would take on again the role of poet.
The story goes that, before or after he died, he found himself before God and he said: “I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself.” The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: “Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons—and none.”
[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Mildred Boyer]
The above essay is amazingly fun to read. It is Borges on an unusual positive vein. More often he is a melancholic man, who as he became blind, he seemed to be waiting for that final Hamlet moment as I am.
1964 – Jorge Luís Borges
The world’s lost its magic. They’ve left you.
You will no longer share the bright moon,
Nor the leisurely gardens. There’s no longer
A single moon that’s not a mirror of the past,
A crystal of loneliness, a sun of torment.
Farewell the mutual hands and brows
Love neared. Today, you only possess
A loyal memory, and empty days.
Everyone loses (you repeat, in vain)
Only what they own not, and never
Owned, but courage is not enough
To acquire the art of forgetting.
A symbol, a rose, can tear you apart,
The cry of a guitar can kill you.
II
I’ll not be happy. No matter, perhaps;
So much else exists in the world.
A single moment is deeper, and more
Changeable than the sea. Life is short,
And though the days are very long,
One wonder still lies in wait for us,
Death, the other sea, the other arrow
That frees us from the sun, and moon,
And love. The delight you brought me.
And took from me again, must be erased.
What meant everything, must be nothing.
I have only the pleasure of being sad,
The idle habit that inclines me to seek
The South, a certain door, a certain corner.
