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| Alex Cox - October 1996 |
Alex Cox - My Last Movie (my blog)
My repeated melancholy caused by the memory of the death of my Rosemary on 9 December 2020 keeps me on my bed with a next to no desire to read a novel from beginning to end. The closest I get is perhaps one or two Borges poems or one short story. That keeps me sane.
A few days ago I noticed the last two paragraphs of his La muerte y la brújula, published in1942, (in Spanish only the first word in the title of a novel, poem or short story is capitalized). The story is an elaborate and confusing one. Here is that paragraph in both Spanish and English (my translation):
Aguárdeme después en D, a 2 kilómetros de A y de C, de nuevo a mitad de camino. Máteme en D, como ahora va a matarme en Triste-le-Roy.
Para la otra vez que me mate – replicó Scharlach – le prometo ese laberinto, que consta de una sola línea recta y que es invisible, incesante. Retrocedió unos pasos. Después muy cuidadosamente, hizo fuego.
Wait for me in D, two kilometres from A and C, again halfway on the path. Kill me in D, like you are going to kill me now in Triste-le-Roy.
For the next time that I kill you – Scharlach responded, I promise you that labyrinth, which is but a straight line that is invisible and never ends. He retreated a few steps. Then, very carefully he fired.
A brújula in Spanish is a magnetic compass. Originally the word came from Latin via the Greek and it means box. In the Borges story the compass does not appear physically. It is but a metaphor.
My story on all of this will start with the fact that in 1958 in my freshman year at St. Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas I was obsessed with flying saucers. I had read that the presence of one would affect the nearby magnetic field. I went to an army surplus store and bought a large compass. To it I attached a little bell that was battery powered. I managed to open the compass and put two stops on either side of North. My setup worked only too well. As the large tractor trailers that passed by the nearby Congress Avenue affected the magnetic field and my bell would ring in the middle of the night. Brother Vincent de Paul,C.S.C. our dormitory prefect, put a stop to my experiment.
In 1984 American film director, Alex Cox launched his film Repo Man which made Harry Dean Stanton a star. In 1996 Cox came to Vancouver and at the Pacific Cinematheque he presented us with his film The Death and the Compass that was based on the Borges short story. The film was in English but absolutely Borgesian. Consider that Cox filmed it in Mexico City and a large part of the film was done inside one of the then dirtiest of all oil refineries, one in Azcapotzalco.
I was able to take some portraits of him in my studio and we became friends.
Now with the advantage of Google and Youtube you can find the film.
But there is more. Cox must have fallen in love with Mexico as he made a film in Spanish (and he has a part in the film) called El patrullero which is about a young police academy graduate who has to learn to deal with corruption. And yes that film is also available in Youtube.
All these unlikely films are really a manifestation of Borgesian labyrinths.
Another blog about a Borges story that connects with Memphis
