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Morton Marcus: He said, from Argentina: THINGS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN I think of the things that might have been, and were not, the treatise on Saxon mythology that Bede did not write, the

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unimaginable work that Dante glimpsed fleetingly when the last verse of the Comedia was corrected. History without the afternoon of the cross and the afternoon of the hemlock. History without the face of Helen, man without the eyes,

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which have shown the moon to us. In the three day, labored days of Gettysburg, the victory of the self, the love we do not share. The vast empire which the Vikings did not wish to [be] found, the world without the wheel, or without the rose. The

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judgment of John Donne on Shakespeare, the other horn of the unicorn, the fabled bird of Ireland, in two places at once, the son I did not have, things that might have been. They are the work of the subject of tonight's Poetry Show, Jorge

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Luis Borges, the great Argentine poet and prose writer, and that is why you hear the tango in the background. And the poem I just read illustrates the idea of possibilities that Borges continually saw and was looking forward to. To him, his theme

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was time and the complex nature of reality, his stories examined man's relationship with these aspects of his existence, often pointing out the absurdity of traditional beliefs while proposing intriguing and sometimes fantastic

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alternatives. He is absolutely enthralled by the idea of the identity of the self, or the double. He has said that many times, he suddenly observed himself from afar doing an action. And one of his most famous pieces is called, "Borges

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and I," and illustrates this and I will read it for you now. Why a program on Borges, however? Because today, August 24th, is his birthday. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1899 on this day, and here to illustrate his idea. And I think

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that his importance for us is that he makes us, as all great writers should, look at our world and wonder, look at our world with new eyes that gives us possibilities that enrich us and bring us back to the quick excitement of existence and its

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mysteries. He says in: BORGES AND I It's to the other man, to Borges, that things happen. I walk along the streets of Buenos Aires, stopping now and then,

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perhaps out of habit, to look at the arch of an old entranceway or grillwork gate. Borges, I get news through the mail and glimpse his name among the committee of professors, or in a dictionary or biography. I have a taste for hour glasses, maps,

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18th century typography, the roots of words, the smell of coffee, and Robert Louis Stevenson's prose. The other man, that Borges, shares these likes but in a showy way that turns them into stagey mannerisms. It would be an

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exaggeration to say that we are on bad terms. I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can weave his tales and poems. And those tales and poems are my justification. It is not hard for me to admit that he has managed to write a few

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worthwhile pages, but these pages cannot save me perhaps because what is good, no longer belongs to anyone, not even the other man, the other Borges, but rather to speech, or tradition. In any case, I am fated to become lost once and for all.

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And only some moment of myself will survive in that other man. Little by little I have been surrendering everything to him, even though I have evidence of his stubborn habit of falsification and exaggerating. Spinoza held that all things try

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to keep on being themselves: a stone wants to be a stone, and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself, if it is so that I am someone. But I recognize myself less in his books than in those of others, or then in the laborious

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tuning of a guitar. Years ago, I tried ridding myself of him and I went from myths of the outlying slums of the city to games with time and infinity, but those games are now part of Borges and I will have to turn to other things. And so my life

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is a running away and I lose everything and everything is left to oblivion. What to that other man? Which of us is writing this page? I do not know. Some of the conundrums of Jorge Luis Borges, a man who is really

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credited with being the person who, if not founded, certainly made magic realism the mode of South American writing. Julio Cortazar, a fellow Argentinian, was certainly an acolyte of his writing in Europe, and every major South American writer has

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acknowledged him. In fact, it was generally thought through the 70s that Borges would easily win the Nobel Prize before he died, that did not happen. And everyone is perplexed about that, but there are many great writers who did not win the

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Nobel Prize. His great time was in the end of the 60s. His first English books were- certain stories and collections were published in this country in 1962. And through the end of the 60s, or mid 60s into the 60s and through the 70s, he enjoyed his

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greatest vogue. Now you can still find one or two books by him in bookstores. I would urge you certainly to go find them, if not so much for his poetry, his stories. And I hope to read one or two of his stories tonight, they are electrifying,

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delightful, mentally titillating, and they are awesome. They really make you gasp with the ways he can turn things inside out. To him, this world is really a series of endless labyrinths and permutations. We literally are

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living in a time that is simultaneous with other times at this very moment where things are happening that are the exact opposites that are happening now. Therefore our life does not end, it just continually repeats itself in other times. He has a

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short prose piece in which we famously remember Julius Caesar when he's being killed suddenly realizes that one of the people who is knifing him is Brutus, who was his godson. And he says, of course, "Et tu, Brute?" "You too, Brutus?" and then he

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immediately moves fifteen centuries later to Buenos Aires where a thief is being knifed by other thieves on a street corner of the slums of Buenos Aires, and recognizes his grandson and says to him, "You too, my dear? You also?" and dies, says

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Borges, not knowing that he had to die merely to repeat the same rhythm and the same pattern which continually repeats itself through history. And of course, what we're talking about here is myth. If Borges is anything, to me he is a fabulist, the maker

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of fables that will take us continually back to our own sense of where we are in time. Let me read you one of those parables. This is the "Parable of the Palace." And this, of course, is talking about the great palace in China,

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supposedly, the Forbidden City, but, Borges is sort of making this up. And it's called, "The Parable of the Palace." The amazing part of his marvelous formal style in Spanish is what he can evoke, and notice how he evokes in a page this incredible

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construct. THE PARABLE OF THE PALACE That day, the Yellow Emperor showed the poet through his palace. As they moved on, they left behind them one after

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another, the first western terraces, that like gradins of an almost boundless amphitheatre, sloped toward a garden whose metal mirrors and intricate juniper borders prefigured the labyrinth. They lost themselves in it, gaily at

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first, as if consenting to a game and later not without misgivings for its straight avenues underwent a very slight but continuous curvature and secretly were circles. Toward midnight, their observation of the planets and the opportune

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sacrifice of a turtle enabled them to extricate themselves from that seemingly bewitched region, but they did not free themselves from the feeling of being lost, which accompanied them until the end. Afterward they passed through antichambers

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and patios and libraries and a hexagonal drawing room with a water clock. And one morningm, they made out from a tower a man of stone, later lost to them forever. In sandalwood canoes, they crossed many glittering rivers, or a single river many

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times. The imperial retinue would pass by and the people would prostrate themselves before them. But one day they arrived at an island in which someone did not prostrate themselves because he had never seen the Son of Heaven, and the

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executioner had to behead the man. Their eyes looked with indifference on the black-haired heads and the black dances and complicated gold masks. What was real would confound itself with what was dreamt or rather, the real was one of the

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configurations of the dream. It seemed impossible that the earth should be anything other than gardens, watercourses, architectural and other forms of splendor. Each hundred steps, a tower cut the air. To the eye, their color was identical.

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Though first one was yellow, and the last scarlet, so delicate with a gradations, and so long the series throughout this endless palace. It was at the foot of the penultimate tower that the poet

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who had seemed remote from the wonders that were a marvel to all others, recited the brief composition that today we link indissolubly to his name, and that, as the most elegant historians repeat, presented him with immortality and death. The

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text of his poem has been lost. There are those who believe that it consisted of a line of verse, others of a single word. What is certain and incredible is that all the enormous palace was in its most minute details there in the poet's poem with each

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illustrious porcelain and each design on each porcelain and the penumbrae and the light of each dawn and twilight and each unfortunate or unhappy or happy incident, and the glorious dynasty of mortals, of gods and of dragons that had inhabited it

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from the unfathomable past. Everyone in the retinue was silent, but the Emperor exclaimed, "You have robbed me of my palace!" and the executioner's iron sword cut the poet down.

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Others tell the story differently. There cannot be any two things alike in the world. The poet had only to recite the poem, they say, when the palace disappeared, as though abolished and obliterated by the last syllable of his own work. Such

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legends are, to be sure, no more than literary fictions. The poet was the emperor's slave and died as such. His composition fell into oblivion because it merited oblivion and his descendants still seek, and will not find, the word that defines the

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universe. That is Jorge Luis Borges who we are talking about tonight and we will be reading his poems and one or two short stories by him. More of these conundrums of Borges in a poem, which is

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called, "Chess." And I take it that every one of you know the movements of chess and the movements of the chess pieces, so I won't go through that here. The bishop of course moves at a slant. The king is very tenuous, the queen you know is the real

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power and the castle moves straight one way or straight another. The only thing I have to tell you that you might not understand is that chess was invented in the East and that's why it comes up in here. These are actually two sonnets joined

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in a two sonnet sequence. And this is: CHESS I. In their serious corner, the players move the gradual pieces. The board detains them until dawn in its hard compass,

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the hatred of two colors. In the game, the forms give off a severe magic, Homeric castle, gay knight, warlike queen, king solitary, oblique bishop, and pawns at war. Finally, when the players have gone in, and when time has eventually consumed

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them, surely the rituals then will not be over. In the east, this war first took fire. Today the whole earth is its provenance, like that other, this game goes on forever. II. Tenuous-king, slant bishop, bitter queen,

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straightforward castle, and crafty pawn. Over the checkered black and white terrain, they seek out and enjoy their armed campaign. They do not realize the dominant hand of the player that rules their destiny. They do not know an atom in fate

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governs their choices and controls their journey. The player too is captive of caprice, the sentence is Omar's. On another ground, crisscross with black nights and white days. God moves the player, he in turn the piece, but what god

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beyond God begins the round of dust and time and dream and our agonies? And I would like to continue this if I can find- but it looks like I am not going to find with any kind of aplomp here- There

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it is. Another poem of his that I really love, which is called, "The Other Tiger," and is about this idea of doubles. But here the idea is the imagination and the reality. The tiger is in itself beyond the poem, beyond the literary work, a vital force

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that does not think of itself. It just goes on being the tiger, hunting its prey, eating and moving. But then there is the imagined tiger of the human, of the artist. And this is just a beautifully expressed poem in this marvelous translation by

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Anthony Kerrigan and I just like to read it for you now. "The Other Tiger," and from Morris: Sigurd the Volsung this one little quote: "And the craft createth a semblance." And if you don't understand that, don't worry.

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Anyway, here is Jorge Luis Borges, our birthday poet tonight, THE OTHER TIGER. And just think of how this mind conceives of things and takes you right along with these marvelously sensuous pictures, which are at the same time

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incredibly intellectual, and mysterious. I think of a tiger, a half-white enhances the vast and painstaking library and seems to set the bookshelves at a distance from me. Strong, innocent, bloodstained, anew

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made, the tiger will move through its jungle in its morning and leave its track across the muddy edge of a river, unknown, nameless. In its world, there are no names, nor past, nor future, only the shortness of the passing moment.

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And the tiger will cross the wilderness of distance and sniff out in the woven labyrinth of smells, the smell peculiar to morning, and the scent of deer delectable. Among the slivers of bamboo, I notice the tiger stripes and I have an inkling of

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the skeleton under the magnificence of the skin which quivers. In vain, the convex oceans and the desert spread themselves across the earth between us. From this one house and a remote lost seaport in South America, I dream you,

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tiger, follow you, oh, tiger on the fringes of the Ganges. Afternoon creeps in my spirit, and I keep thinking that the tiger I am conjuring in my poem is a tiger made of symbols and of shadows, a sequence of prosaic measures, scraps

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remembered from encyclopedias, and not the deadly tiger, the luckless jewel, which in the sun or the deceptive moonlight follows its paths in Bengal or Sumatra, of love, of indolence, of dying. Against the symbolic tiger, I have put the real one

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whose blood runs hot and today in 1959, the third of August, a slow shadow spreads across the prairie. But still, the act of naming it, of guessing what is its nature and its circumstances, creates a fiction not a living creature, not one

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of those who wander the earth. Let us look for a third tiger. This one will be a form in my dream like all the others, a system and arrangement of human language and not the flesh and bone tiger, which out of reach of all mythology, paces the

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earth. I know all this, but something drives me to this ancient and vague adventure, unreasonable, and still I keep on looking throughout the afternoon for the other tiger, the other tiger which is not in this poem.

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We have been reading and will continue to read the work of Jorge Luis Borges, born this day, August 24th in 1899, he died in the 1980s. One of the great stylists, great thinkers, and I think one of the most exciting writers of the 20th

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century, a writer who certainly has to be compared with Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, and other such writers. He speaks in parable, he speaks certainly in parody, and he is having a lot of fun and a lot of games with the traditional work of both

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East and West. He was born in Argentina, certainly, and he was interested in Argentine history especially Buenos Aires history, the history of the tango and the cutthroats, who inhabited the the sort of slum clubs where the tango was played. But at the

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same time, he was a citizen of the world. He spoke several languages, many languages, and read all of the great works of both East and West and brought them in for examination. We will read some of his short stories when I return, but right now let

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us get back to the tango, the music of Argentina, the music that Jorge Luis Borges loved so much. Borges wrote any kinds of stories that are set in many different epics, or epochs, and I would like to give two brief

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renderings of his work and I hope I can get them in. First is called, "The Secret Miracle," and it takes place in World War II. And here we go. THE SECRET MIRACLE by tonight's poet, Jorge Luis Borges, who was

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born this day, August 24th, 1899. The night of March 14t, 1943, in an apartment of the Zeltnergasse of Prague, Jaromir Hladik, author of the unfinished drama entitled, "The Enemies," of "The Vindication of Eternity," and of

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a study of the indirect Jewish sources of Jakob Boehme, had a dream of a long game of chess. The players were not two persons, but two illustrious families. The game had been going on for centuries, nobody could remember what the stakes

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were, but it was rumored that they were enormous, perhaps infinite. The chessmen and the board were in a secret tower, Jaromir (in his dream) was the firstborn of one of the contending families. A clock struck the hour for the game,

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which could not be postponed. The dreamer raced over the sands of a rainy desert, and was unable to recall either the pieces or the rules of chess. At that moment, Hladik awoke. The clangor of the rain and of the terrible clock ceased. A

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rhythmic, unanimous noise punctuated by the shouts of command arose from outside on the Zelternergasse. It was dawn, and the armored vanguard of the Third Reich, the Nazi army was entering Prague.

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On the 19th of that month in March, the authorities received a denunciation. That same 19th toward evening, Jaromir Hladik was arrested. He was taken to an aseptic white barracks on the opposite bank of the Moldau River. He was unable to refute a

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single one of the Gestapo's charges. His mother's family name was Jaroslavski, he was of Jewish blood, his study on Boehme had a marked Jewish emphasis, his signature had been one more on the protest against the Anschluss. In 1928, he had

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translated Sepher Yezirah for the publishing house of Herman Barsdorf. The fulsome catalogue of the firm had exaggerated, for publicity purposes, the translator's reputation and the catalog had been examined by Julius Rothe, one of the

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officials who held Hladik's fate in his hands. There is not a person who, except in the field of his own specialization, is not credulous: two or three adjectives in Gothic type were enough to persuade this Julius Rothe of Hladik's importance,

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and he ordered him sentenced to death, "pour encourager les autres." The execution was set for March 29th at 9am. This delay (whose importance the reader will grasp later) was owing to the desire on the authorities' part to proceed

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impersonally and slowly, if for the manner of vegetables and plants. Hladik's first reaction was mere terror. He felt he would not have shrunk from the gallows, the block, or the knife, but

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that death by a firing squad was unbearable. In vain he tried to convince himself that the plain unvarnished fact of dying was the fearsome thing, not the attendant circumstances. He never wearied of conjuring up these circumstances, senselessly

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trying to exhaust all their possible variations. He infinitely anticipated the process of his dying from the sleepless dawn to the mysterious volley. Before the day set by Julius Rothe, he died hundreds of deaths, in courtyards whose

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forms and angles strain geometrical probabilities, machine gun by variable soldiers in changing numbers, who at times killed him from a distance, and others from close up. His face, he faced these imaginary executions with a real

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terror (perhaps with real bravery). Each simulacrum lasted a few seconds. When the circle was closed, Hladik returned once more, and interminably to the tremendous vespers of his death. Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with

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our anticipation of it. With a logic of his own, he inferred that to foresee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in his weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details. Finally, as

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was natural, he came to fear that they were prophetic. Miserable in the night, he endeavored to find some way to hold flair- fast to the fleeting substance of time. He knew that it was rushing headlong toward the dawn of the 29th of the

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month, the day of his death. He reasoned aloud: "I am now in the night of the 22nd. While this day lasts (and for six nights more) I am invulnerable, I'm immortal. I will not die until the 29th." The nights of sleep seemed to him deep dark pools in

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which he could submerge himself. There were moments when he longed impatiently for the final burst of fire that would free him for better or worse from the vain compulsion of his own imaginings. On the 28th of the month, as the last sunset was

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reverberating from the high barred windows, the thought of his drama, "The Enemies" deflected him from these abject considerations. Hladik had rounded forty years of age. Aside from a few

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friendships and many habits, the problematic exercise of literature constituted his life. Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or

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planned. All the books he had published had left him with a complex feeling of repentance. His studies of the work of Boehme, of Ibn Ezra, and of Fludd had been characterized essentially by mere application, his translation of the Sepher

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Yezirah by carelessness, and fatigue, and gesture. "Vindication of Eternity," another book perhaps had fewer shortcomings: the first volume gave a history of man's various concepts of eternity, from the immutable Being of Parmenides to

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the modifiable past of Hinton; the second denied (with Francis Bradley) that all the events of the universe make up a temporal series. Arguing that the number of man's possible experiences is not infinite, and that a single repetition suffices to prove

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that time is a fallacy. Unfortunately, the arguments that demonstrate this fallacy are equally fallacious. Hladik was in the habit of going over them with a kind of contemptuous perplexity. He had also composed the series of expressionist

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poems. To the poet's chagrin, they had been included in an anthology published in 1924, and no subsequent anthology but inherited them. From all this equivocal, uninspired past, Hladik had hoped to redeem himself with his drama in verse,

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"The Enemies" which he had not finished. Hladik felt the verse form to be essential because it makes it impossible for the spectators to lose sight of irreality, one of art's requisites.

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The drama observed the unities of time, place, and action. The scene was laid in Hradčany, in the library of Baron Roemerstadt, on one of the last afternoons of the 19th century. In the first scene of the first act, a strange man visits

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Roemerstadt. (A clock was striking seven, the vehemence of the setting sun's rays glorify the windows, a passionate familiar Hungarian music floated in the air). This visit was followed by others; Roemerstadt does not know the people who are

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importuning him, but he has the uncomfortable feeling that he has seen them somewhere perhaps in a dream. They all fawn upon him, but it is apparent, first to the audience and then to the Baron, that they are secret enemies in league to ruin him.

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Roemerstadt succeeds in checking or evading their involved scheming, and the dialogue mention is made of his sweetheart, Julia Von Weidenau, and a certain Jaroslav Kubin, who at one time pressed his attentions on her. Kubin has now

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lost his mind and believes himself to be Roemerstadt. The dangers increase. Roemerstadt at the end of the second act is forced to kill one of the conspirators. The third and final act opens. The incoherencies gradually

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increase: actors who had seemed out of the play reappear, the man Roemerstadt killed returns for a moment. Someone points out that evening has not fallen: the clock strikes seven, the high windows reverberate in the western sun, the air carries an

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impassioned Hungarian melody. The first actor comes on and repeats the lines he had spoken in the first scene of the first act. Roemerstadt speaks to him without surprise, the audience understands that Roemerstadt is the miserable Jaroslav Kubin.

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The drama has never taken place: it is the circular delirium that Kubin lives and relives endlessly in his new insanity. Hladík had never asked himself whether this tragicomedy of errors was preposterous, or admirable, well thought out or

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slipshod. He felt that the plot I have just sketched was best contrived to cover up his defects and point up his abilities and held the possibility of allowing him to redeem, symbolically, the meaning of his life. Hladik had

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finished the first act, and one or two scenes of the third. The metrical nature of the work made it possible for him to keep working it over, changing the hexameters, without the manuscript in front of him. He thought how he still had two

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acts to do and then he was going to die very soon. He spoke with God in the darkness. If in some fashion I exist, if I am not one of your repetitions and mistakes, I exist as the author of this play of mine, "The Enemies," I've not finished. To

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finish this drama, which can justify me and justify you, oh, Lord, I need another year. Grant me, oh, God, these days, you to whom the centuries and time belong, grant me the time to finish this play. This was the last night, the 28th of March,

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the most dreadful night of all, but ten minutes later, sleep flooded over like a dark water. Toward dawn, he dreamed that he had concealed himself in one of the naves of the Clementine Library. A librarian wearing

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dark glasses asked him, "What are you looking for?" And Hladik answered: "I am looking for God." The librarian said to him, "God is in one of the letters, on one of the pages of one of the 400,000 volumes of the Clementine. My fathers and the

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fathers of my fathers have searched for this letter. I have grown blind seeking it." The old man removed his glasses, and Hladik looks over his eyes which were dead eyes. A reader came in to return an atlas. "This atlas is worthless," he said and

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handed it to Hladik, who opened it at random. He saw a map of India as in a daze, suddenly sure of himself he touched one of the tiniest letters on the map. A ubiquitous voice said to him, "The time of your labor has been granted." At this point,

00:39:22.730 - 00:39:37.580

Jaroslav Hladik awoke. He remembered that men's dreams belong to God, and than Maimonides had written that the words heard in a dream are divine when they are distinct and clear and the person

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uttering them cannot be seen. Hladik dressed. Two soldiers came into the cell and ordered him to follow them. From behind the door, Hladik had invisioned a labyrinth of passageways, stairs, and separate buildings. The reality

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was less spectacular. They descended to an inner court by a narrow iron stairway Several soldiers, some with uniform unbuttoned, were examining a motorcycle and discussing it. The sergeant looked at the clock. It was 8:44. They had to

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wait until it struck nine. Hladik, more insignificant than pitiable, sat down on a pile of wood. He noticed that the soldiers' eyes avoided his. To ease his wait, the sergeant handed him a cigarette. Hladik did not smoke. He accepted it

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out of politeness or humility. As he lighted it, he noticed that his hands were shaking. The day was clouding over. The soldiers spoke in a low voice, as though he was already dead. Vainly, he tried to recall the woman of whom Julia von Weidenau

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was the symbol. The squad had formed and stood at attention. Hladik, standing against the barracks wall, waited for the volley of gunfire. Someone pointed out that the wall was going to be stained with blood. The victim was ordered to step

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forward a few paces so it wouldn't be. Incongruously, this reminded Hladik of the fumbling preparations of photographers. A big drop of rain struck one of Hladik's temples and rolled slowly down his cheek. The sergeant shouted the final

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order. The physical universe came to a halt. The guns converged on Hladik, but the men who would have killed him stood motionless. The sergeant's arm eternalized, an unfinished gesture. On a paving stone of the courtyard, a bee

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cast an unchanging shadow. The wind had ceased as in a picture, Hladik attempted a cry, a word, a movement of the hand, he realized that he too was paralyzed. Not a sound reached him from the halted world. He thought: "I am in hell, I am

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dead." He thought: "I am mad." He thought: "Time has stopped." Then he reflected that if that was the case, his mind would have stopped, too. He wanted to test this: he repeated without moving his lips Virgil's mysterious Fourth Eclogue. He

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imagined that the now remote soldiers must be sharing his anxiety. He longed to be able to communicate with them. It astonished him not to feel the least fatigue, not even the numbness of his protracted immobility. After an

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indeterminant time, he fell asleep. When he awoke, the world continued motionless and mute, the drop of water still clung to his cheek, the shadow of the bee to the stone. The smoke from the cigarette he had thrown away had not dispersed, it hung in the

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air. Another day went by before Hladik understood. He had asked God for a whole year to finish his work, The Enemies, his omnipotence had granted it. God had worked a secret miracle for him. German lead would kill him, at the set

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hour, but in his mind a year would go by between the order and its execution. From perplexity, he passed the stupor, from stupor to resignation, from resignation to sudden gratitude.

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He had no document but his memory. The training he had acquired with each added hexameter gave him a discipline unsuspected by those who sat down and forget temporarily incomplete paragraphs. He was not working for posterity, or

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even for God, whose literary tastes are, in fact, unknown to him. Meticulously, motionlessly, secretly, he wrote in time his lofty invisible labyrinth of words. He worked the third act over twice. He eliminated certain symbols as over-obvious,

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such as the repeated striking of a clock, the music. Nothing hurried him. Hladik omitted, he condensed, he amplified. In certain instances, he came back to the original version. He came to feel an affection for the courtyard, the barracks, one of

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the faces before him modified his conception of Baron Roermerstadt's character. He discovered that the weary and cacophonies that bothered Flaubert so much are mere visual superstitions: weakness and limitation of the written word,

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not the spoken. And finally, Jaroslav Hladik concluded his drama: he had only the problem of a single phrase. Finally, he found it. At that moment, drop of water slid down his cheek. He opened his mouth in a maddened cry, moved his face, dropped

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under the quadruple blast of the gunfire of the firing squad. Jaroslav Hladik died on March 29th, at 9:02 am. And that was a story by Jorge Borges, the subject of tonight's show from the first selection actually of his work, which is,

00:45:29.320 - 00:45:46.720

"The Labyrinths." There are a variety of collections of his work, both his poems- one that is out from Grove Weidenfeld which you can find in paperback, it's called, "A Personal Anthology," includes some of his best stories and poems, ones

00:45:46.720 - 00:46:10.330

that he wanted to save, half of which I've read tonight. My favorite collection is an amazing collection done by Emir Rodriguez Monegal who is a friend of Borges and Alastair Reid and it is called, "A Borges Reader." It was put out by

00:46:10.360 - 00:46:32.800

Dutton. I have been unable to find it for years but it is just chock-full of information about him, an enormous amount of collection of essays, short stories, and poems. And I have, you know, just five minutes to go and so I will read some more

00:46:32.920 - 00:47:17.980

poems by Borges. And one of my favorites because it again makes you think, and certainly does it in a way that is extremely inspiring and makes you wonder about the reality you can perceive in things. It's a wonderful little prose poem he

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wrote, and he is one of the fine prose poets of the 20th century, "The Witness." And what it talks about are these ends of time that we don't think about. And notice the beginning of this piece is when Christianity has just come to England. And this

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is during early medieval times, probably around 600 AD, I would say, and it's called, "The Witness," and listen to where he goes with this. Listen to how he can evoke so much in so short a space.

00:47:52.390 - 00:48:07.910

THE WITNESS In a stable that stands almost within the shadow of the new stone church, a gray-eyed, gray-bearded man stretched out amid the odor of the animals, humbly seeks death as one seeks

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sleep. The day faithful to vast secret laws, little by little shifts and mingles the shadows in the humble nook where he lies. Outside are the plowed fields and a deep ditch, clogged with dead leaves, and an occasional wolf track in the

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black earth at the edge of the forest. The old man sleeps and dreams, forgotten. The Angelus, the bells of the noon service awakened him. But now the sound of the bells is one of the habits of evening in the kingdoms of England. But this

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man, as a child, saw the face of a Woden, a holy dread and exaltation, the rude wooden idol weighed down with Roman coins and heavy vestments, the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn, this man will die, and in him, will die,

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never to return, the last eyewitness of those pagan rituals. The world will be a little poorer when this Saxon dies. Events far-reaching enough to people all-space, whose end is

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nonetheless told when one man dies, may cause us to wonder. But something, or an infinite number of things, dies in every death, unless the universe is possessed of a memory, as a theosophist have supposed. In the course of time, there was a

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day that closed the last eyes to see Christ. The Battle of Junín and the loves of Helen each died with the death of some one man or woman. What will die with me when I die? What pitiful or perishable form will the world lose? The voice of Macedonio

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Fernandez, the image of a Roman horse in a vacant lot at Serrano and Charcas streets when they meet? Or just the memory of a bar of soap in the drawer of a mahogany desk? Tonight, we have celebrated the birth of Jorge Luis Borges. And

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I hope that you have enjoyed the work and we'll look into his books, that is J-O-R-G-E-S, first name, L-U-I-S and the last name is, B-O-R-G-E-S, Borges. I also want to say that in the next show tonight, on "Book Before Bedtime," Rebecca Clarke

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reads, "The Little Cousins," by Ashley Taylor. This is Mort Marcus, saying I hope you enjoyed this show. You are listening to KUSP Community-Sponsored radio in Santa Cruz for the Monterey Bay on 88.9 FM on your dial. Stay

00:51:35.920 - 00:51:38.050

tuned for "A Book Before Bedtime."