desperations and consolations

  

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We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost ... And yet, and yet ...

Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. 

Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.  


—Jorge Luis Borges
The Garden of Forking Paths, excerpts

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The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer. —Terence McKenna

  

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There'll never be a door. 

You're inside and the keep encompasses the world and has neither obverse nor reverse nor circling nor secret center.


—Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
In Praise of Darkness

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Scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth.
 

—Jorge Luis Borges

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remember(ship

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We are our memory,
we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,
that pile of broken mirrors


—Jorge Luis Borges
from Cambridge

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When misfortune confounds us
in an instant we are saved
by the humblest actions
of memory or attention:
the taste of fruit, the taste of water,
that face returned to us in dream,
the first jasmine flowers of November,
the infinite yearning of the compass,
a book we thought forever lost,
the pulsing of a hexameter,
the little key that opens a house,
the smell of sandalwood or library,
the ancient name of a street,
the colourations of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date that we were searching for,
counting the twelve dark bell-strokes,
a sudden physical pain.

Eight million the deities of Shinto
who travel the earth, secretly.
Those modest divinities touch us,
touch us, and pass on by.


—Jorge Luis Borges
this is Borges

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You don’t remember what happened. 

What you remember becomes what happened. 

—John Green

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God lurks in the gaps. —Jorge Luis Borges

  

Asahel Curtis, Ms. Nettleton

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We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. 

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.


—Annie Dillard
on the meaning of life

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To be human we need to experience the end of the world.

We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is.


—Hélène Cixous
from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

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Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. 

Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.


—Chuang Tzu
Kuang-Ming Wu version

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a brighter word than bright

   

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Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another's ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear's labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve's realm. 

The written word unfolds behind the eye into the world, world's image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see - thoughtfully.


—Dan Beachy-Quick

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A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

—Jorge Luis Borges
This Craft of Verse

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In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: 

a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out 

and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

—Czesław Miłosz
Ars Poetica

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In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

—Rumi

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out of nowhere, the mind comes forth —The Diamond Sutra

 

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If dreaming really were a kind of truce
(as people claim), a sheer repose of mind,
why then if you should waken up abruptly,
do you feel that something has been stolen from you? 

Why should it be so sad, the early morning?
It robs us of an inconceivable gift,
so intimate it is only knowable
in a trance which the nightwatch gilds with dreams,
dreams that might very well be reflections,
fragments from the treasure-house of darkness,
from the timeless sphere that does not have a name,
and that the day distorts in its mirrors. 

Who will you be tonight in your dreamfall
into the dark, on the other side of the wall?


—Jorge Luis Borges
Dream
Alastair Reid version

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Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years could pass in a moment.

Time is not a straight line but rather a labyrinth, and if you press yourself against the wall in the right place you can hear the hurried steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walk past on the other side.


—Tomas Tranströmer

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Usually people work hard to make things happen. Yet it might be that things happen by themselves, coming out of nowhere.

When you forget your carefully assembled fiction of who you are, you can find a natural delight in people, in the planet, the stones, and the trees. There is no observable limit to this beauty, and no one is excluded from it. Then, if you are fighting an enemy, you may be fighting them as well as you can, but you won’t be a true believer. You will know that an enemy is not truly other and that the fighting is some kind of misunderstanding. The worries that lead to quarrels may still be present, but they are not the main thing. 

Your problems could be a kind of dream, very powerful when you are in it, and yet a dream. You might notice that, even deep in dreaming, you are near to waking up. And the more you are awake, the kinder the world might seem.


—John Tarrant
Working With the Koan
from Bring Me The Rhinoceros
and other Zen Koans that will save your life

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… incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal. —Carlos Fuentes

  

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The fundamental illusion of humanity is to suppose 

that I am here and you are out there. 

—Yasutani Roshi

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Perhaps a god is deceiving me.

Perhaps a god has sentenced me to time, that lasting illusion. 

I dream the moon and I dream my eyes perceiving the moon.

—Jorge Luis Borges

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