Fifty years ago, Borges, the old man, held a conversation with Borges, the young man, during a dream. This is the story ‘The other’, included in ‘The Arena Book’, of 1975. In that story, a Borges of sixty -nine years, sitting in one bank in front … to the Charles River, north of Boston, in the United States, meets a Borges Boy, who is sitting in a bank in front of the Rhone in Geneva, in 1918.
When making the summary of what awaits him, the old man makes a diagnosis that is an abbreviated geopolitics lesson: «Now, things are wrong. Russia is seizing the planet; America, locked by the superstition of democracy, is not resolved to be an empire. Every day that passes our country is more provincial. More provincial and more conceited, as if closing his eyes. I would not be surprised that the teaching of Latin was replaced by that of the Guaraní ».
The visible theme of this story is double. But the background issue is, in reality, time. The unfolding and encounter with oneself is inevitable if we insist on living and aging. The fundamental thing is what is repeated. Or, said more accurately, what reappears with similarities that can be fascinating and terrifying, but, also, that does so in a way that is never entirely identical.
That margin of error is the one that allows the two Borges of the story to hold on to the possibility that this impossible encounter is just a dream. It is what allows us to human beings, seeing that “the cyclical battle of Waterloo” is approaching, shelter the hope that this time history will be different.
This American imperialist voluntarism does not seek to stop Russia. Rather, it seems to want to pave the land
For now, Russia still wants to seize the planet. The United States as well, especially because for a month it has not been looked at the superstition of democracy and now wants to annex Greenland, return to take the Panama Canal and turn Gaza into the French Riviera de Oriente. However, this American imperialist voluntarism does not seek to stop Russia. Rather, it seems to want to pave the land.
As for Argentine provincialism and conceiting, the sperm pair of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Javier Milei have guaranteed the continuity of these features in recent years and everything seems to indicate that for the coming years as well. Spanish is the new Latin and can end up replaced by ‘inclusive language’, which is the new Guaraní.
Certainly, what happens today is discouraging and also reaches us as a grotesque roughness of the horrors of the past. “Each of the two was the Caricaturesco prayer of the other,” says Borges in his story. But it also says: “I, that I have not been a father, felt for that poor boy, more intimate than a son of my flesh, a wave of love.”
Perhaps this is what we have left: recognize ourselves as the intimate children of our past. And if we are condemned to devour ourselves, that at least we make it driven by a wave of love. Who knows if Saturn, like Borges’s Minotaur, is just waiting for someone pious to free him from his atrocious melancholy.
#Rodrigo #Blanco #Calderón #Liberate #Saturn #Melancholy
