Gradually, in this way, she came into possession of what was already hers.I wasn’t sure what I was trying to convey. Maybe it was the ceaseless aroma of eucalypti in the gardens of a villa of infinite symmetry; maybe it was the humid garden saturated with time that forked, time that diverged, converged or ran parallel to each other, unawares, for centuries; maybe I was trying to capture the invisible persons of all times, busy in that saturated garden in their multiple forms. I know I wrote about someone who woke from sleep and wasn’t sure if she dreamt, while the day and night turned above her. She mistook dusk for dawn. I know I wrote about someone who had arrived with no past and no future in the ‘unanimous night’, dragging herself nauseous and bloodstained to the circular ruins.
I know there are no new metaphors –none that matters I mean
– so I am only a mirror, reflecting back in a slightly different light what has
been said already (and will be said again). We spend most of our time repeating
things. That’s why it’s possible, for Borges in this quote to form time into a circle
in a sentence – with no awkwardness at all in grammar or tense. That
possibility was always there, in the language, in our psyche.
But inside that labyrinth, at its centre, what I really
wanted to convey was the depression, the mourning that we are all engaged in,
constantly, because of the selves that die every minute we are alive. You yearn
most for the things that were once intimately yours, you crave and you search
but you cannot come into possession of what was already yours; you cannot catch
up with the selves you’ve already lost. They are always ahead of you, in a
circle, in earth’s gravity, in orbit, falling away from your grasp. So you fall
together continuously. You mourn because there is no way to change that fate, you
cannot escape time’s progression.
Except in dreams. They discovered that the brain doesn’t just respond, it anticipates and it creates a world for our selves to inhabit before that world has had a chance to intrude. It is its own mirror. So in dreams you are reunited with your selves, the things that were already yours; big vivid dreams that take up the whole day – or even a whole lifetime. But then you wake up and have to actually live again. Wouldn’t you be exhausted? Wouldn’t you think, you had lived two lives? And which one makes a deeper impression? There is a part of me that can’t tell the difference.
