Borges, my last of '11, my first of '12. "Someone," a poem

It seems the right thing, to remember the last poem I read in 2011, and to make it my first in 2012. It's from one of my bedside collections the past few months, Poems of the Night, a selection from three of Borges' books.

"Someone" ("Alguien" in Spanish) is from A Gift of Blindness, 1958-1977.

Like someone, I live with "reasons more terrible than a tiger." Please note and admire how Jorge Luis Borges defines our crouched fears as impossibly muscular.

This morning I jimmied a flyer for an Occupy Language event that will be held on January 26, 5-7:30, at the Bowery Poetry Club, and in hunting for a quote looked no further than James Baldwin. Every legend, moreover, contains its residium of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

"...to control..." the universe seems too colonial, but "describing it," is just the ticket, a ticket I buy. Borges describes.

Someone

A man worn down by time,

a man who does not even expect death

(the proofs of death are statistics

and everyone runs the risk

of being the first immortal),

a man who has learned to express thanks

for the days' modest alms:

sleep, routine, the taste of water,

an unsuspected etymology,

a Latin or Saxon verse,

the memory of a woman who left him

thirty years ago now

whom he can call to mind without bitterness,

a man who is aware that the present

is both future and oblivion,

a man who has betrayed

and has been betrayed,

may feel suddenly, when crossing the street,

a mysterious happiness

not coming from the side of hope

but from an ancient innocence,

from his own roots or from some diffused god.

He knows better than to look at it closely,

for there are reasons more terrible than tigers

which will prove to him

that wretchedness is his duty,

but he accepts humbly

this felicity, this glimmer.
____________
Jorge Luis Borges, A Gift of Blindness, 1958-1977, in Poems of the Night, Penguin, 2010. (Many translators are listed.)

James Baldwin: identifying with their Savior

Not to make James Baldwin about me, but, well, I copied this James Baldwin quotation into my journal in 1975. I haven't held onto all of my journals. So many were filled with emotional tedium, important at the time to get out, but not worth saving.  

Never lost is my love of James Baldwin. By love I don't mean to trivialize. Baldwin's grace and skill--he's such a good writer--are bright and shining and have helped to make me human. I copied this into my journal, no doubt because my friends weren't in the temple.

Hypocrisies among the Big Three religions of the West are gruesomely obvious. Fear is base and rampant and as Baldwin says, "in the temple." The lies are institutional and fought well every day.

As a final note, however, "the temple" isn't always the institutions, which can do good. And hanging out only with publicans and sinners has its own limitations. I don't hold Baldwin, me or you to these two paragraphs, but focus on their portion of truth this morning.


But what Christians seem not to do is identify themselves with the man they call their Savior, who, after all, was a very disreputable person when he was alive and who was put to death by Rome, helped along by the Jews in power under Rome. And everybody forgets that.

And so in my case, in order to become a moral human being, whatever that may be, I have to hang out with publicans and sinners, whores and junkies, and stay out of the temple where they told us nothing but lies anyway.

James Baldwin, Rap on Race, 1971.