Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

Of Memory - Jorge Luís Borges & Thorton Wilder

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Jorge Luís Borges - Photograph Giselle Freund

Salomon saith. There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

Francis Bacon: Essays LVIII.

Does a neuron, or small set of neurons, fire only when responding to the visual image of Jennifer Aniston? An Argentine neuroscientist, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga provides an answer in his recent book that explores the relationship between the work of Jorge Luis Borges and modern forays into the workings of memory. Searching for the Jennifer Aniston neuron

Mediante su memoria el poeta puede descifrar lo invisible.

Jorge Luís Borges - El inmortal

Through memory the poet deciphers the invisible.

I may have crossed paths with the soon to be blind man in 1964, 65 when I frequented the English bookstore Pigmalion on Avenida Corrientes in Buenos Aires. Jorge Luís Borges bought hundreds of books there. In 1964 my literary tastes were humble and while I knew of the existence of the man my curiousity stopped right there.

Judging by the date on my first Borges book, Ficciones, 1969 I made up for some lost time. In 1969 I had been married to my Rosemary for one year and both of us were giving English lessons at several American companies. One of then was Colgate Palmolive. I remember distinctly in using Ficciones in one of my classes that featured intelligent marketing executives. Once a week we would do simultaneous translation from Spanish into English of one of the stories in Ficciones. Since equality of the sexes was not something I thought about in those days I used a different technique in a class, also at Palmolive that involved executive secretaries (not yet called by the improved epithet of assistants). In that class for several months I taught them to use their nasal passages in such a way that without them knowing I was teaching them to speak with a Texan accent.

These days, in fact today, when my Rosemary noticed that I was in a pretty low fit of depression she told me, “The problem with you, Alex, is that you spend too much time thinking about the past, of your childhood, of your mother and father, of your Buenos Aires garden, of your grandmother, of all your dogs and cats and parrots, of your Melián friends, of Mexico, of the Argentine navy, of the Pampa and prickly pear cactus in the state of Mexico and palm trees in Veracruz. She didn’t go on with the litany of my memories. I thought about it.

If I am to understand correctly the ending of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (an Osimous Theatre production we saw on Saturday night) the tragedy of the living is that they take everyday occurrences lightly and only remember their importance (particularly the ones that are not when happening) when they are dead. And the dead, in preparation for whatever follows death do their best to forget.

I feel that in spite of Rosemary’s criticism I am doing well in remembering and savouring all that past while at the same time attempting to reconcile it all with my present and a shortened future to come.

In the last few years I read a poem or a short story by Borges once a week. We know that for a time, beginning in 1955 Borges was the Director of the Argentine National Library.

Roberto Baschetti, El Viejo Faro, Sept 2013

In September of 2013 I met Roberto Baschetti, who works at the Argentine National Library. Since then, knowing of my interest in Borges, he sends me packages including books, pamphlets and magazines on all things Borgesian. Baschetti’s interest lies in the period when Juan Domingo Perón and wife Evita where in charge in Argentina. But that does not prevent him from scouring the National Library for stuff that might (and it does) interest me.

I live in a city of the Northern Hemisphere. Of late I feel, as my friend Argentine painter Juan Manuel Sánchez used to say, like a penguin in the arctic. But if I slip a CD of Argentine Tango (my fave is Mi Buenos Aires Querido with Daniel Barenboim and Rodolfo Maderos and yes it has a six tangos by Piazzolla) in my Malibu I am far away into a past but paradoxically a present, too, not here, but over there. I seem to live in several worlds at the same time, all interconnected by memory. A labyrinthian memory of which Borges would approve.

The sound of Spanish, like the sound of those other Romance languages, Italian, French and Portuguese has a music to my ears. Even shouted obscenities, in Spanish can sound like poetry.

Consider to remember and its not too close variant (with a different meaning) to memorize. A person with a good memory could be memorious but that word is seldom used. And yet it is used as translation to one of Borges’s most famous stories (from Ficciones) Funes el Memorioso, translated as Funes the Memorious.

Spanish is kinder to memory. We do have memorizar to memorize and recordar to remember. In fact recordar is used most of the time because it sound prosaic and it is. Marcel Proust’s famous En busca de tiempos perdidos (translates as in search of lost time). In Spanish there is another word for memory and to remember. That word is memorar (to remember) and to do it over and over there is the beautiful rememorar.

The story Funes el memorioso has a wonderful sound and meaning in Spanish that will not translate.

Funes el memorioso is about a young man in Uruguay, 19 who has fallen off a horse and has become paralyzed. In exchange for that Ireneo Funes has instant and all inclusive memory for everything. He is able to see the minute difference in clouds seconds before and after. He suffers constant insomnia as he cannot stop from noticing the details of the wall by his bed.

Funes, we are told, by the protagonist who stands in for a young Borges, is incapable of Platonic ideas, of generalities, of abstraction; his world is one of intolerably uncountable details. He finds it very difficult to sleep, since he recalls "every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which surround him".

Funes quotes a passage from Pliny the Elder to Borges:

ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum.

This is from Pliny's Naturalis Historia, Book VII, Chapter 24, on memory. The full passage is:

ars postremo eius rei facta et inventa est a Simonide melico, consummata a Metrodoro Scepsio, ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum,

which means that an art of memory was devised by the poet Simonides and perfected by Metrodorus of Scepsis, so that nothing heard is not repeated in the same words.

In Spanish Borges writes:

Pensar es olvidar diferencias, es generalizar, abstraer. En el abarrotado mundo de Funes no había sino detalles, casi inmediatos.

To think is to forget differences, to generalize to abstract. The overflowing world of Funes could not contain but details immediate one.(my translation)

Borges also tells us of a project of Funes to remember the moments of his youth. They pile up. He gives up.

In a recent email, the library man Roberto Baschetti has told me that the corner café in Bellavista where we would have our morning coffee with medias lunas (by the train station to town) has closed its doors. I can remember a lot about it and our good times chatting about politics, Boca Juniors (a football club) and yes, Borges.

Baschetti's packages, like the memories of Funes are piling up. Some of the magazines have photographs of Borges as a very young man and many more rare ones I had not seen before. It seems now as I get into bed to read Ficciones that the man I never crossed paths on Avenida Corrientes is so much part of my life now that my memory of him is so real. I have many recordings. I can hear his voice as I read. And best of all I now know that Marcel Proust's In Search of a Lost Time with its plural in its Spanish translation to Tiempos Perdidos is an apt reminder that being a memorioso isn't all that bad.

Funes El Memorioso in Spanish

Funes the Memorious PDF file in English.

Link to: Of Memory - Jorge Luís Borges & Thorton Wilder