Circle

Today I am sitting by the window, blogging and staring at the gigantic pale yellow house next door. This thing is huge, and the owner is clearly a very wealthy Caucasian. He even has a little Alpha Romeo convertible under a heavy-gauge polyurethane sheet in his front yard, in addition to the three vehicles you see here. Christ, the gas money this guy spends per week is probably ten times what I made last year...

Yesterday I sat by this same window, watched traffic, and read this translation of a Jorge Borges short story called “The Circular Ruins” about an “anonymous gray man” in a jungle somewhere who seeks “a soul worthy of participating in the universe.” He attempts to dream this soul into being, and it ends up taking a really long time. After an initial failure, he eventually succeeds by dreaming the person one body part at a time, “with meticulous love.” It takes fourteen nights of lucid dreaming to dream the person’s aorta alone! The guy then moves on to the other vital organs, etc. until the person is complete. He also has some other dreams, one of which involves a talking animal that is either a tiger or a colt or perhaps both. At the end of the story, the dream-person comes to life as the jungle catches fire. In the final moments, the man is stricken with fear that his creation may one crippling day discover that he (the creation) is not really real, just a dream-person brought to life. Because he empathizes with his dream-person-now-brought-to-life, this terrifies the man, but he realizes simultaneously that he’s about to be burned up in the jungle fire.

At the very last minute, he realizes that he himself is only a dream-person in some other dude’s dream, and he realizes that he’s okay with that. He is burned alive in the fire, but he has no pain and actually finds himself in a state of relief. The end. It’s called “The Circular Ruins” because the man lays down to dream all of his dreams in these circular ruins deep in the heart if the jungle. But, of course, there’s a double entendre or two in there as well.

I honestly don’t know if this story is any good. But Borges has his cajones intact, because though it may sound a little The Alchemist-y, this story is full of bizarre oddities that defy gravity. He writes stuff like “toward the South, the sky turned the rosy color of a leopard’s gums.” Also, thematically it’s pretty dark and, though it seems constructed to read like a myth or fable, it offers no clear direction at all as to what’s reality and what’s not, much less does it offer any clear moral or ethical (or even immoral and unethical) answers to our own burning jungles, conflicting realities, and strange creations. It’s like an anti-parable of some kind and I dig that.

Fiction like this makes me wonder, though, about the Writer’s Workshop and how, with so many narrative styles out there, I’ll know which teachers’ and students’ opinions to trust. Maybe I’ll just know, but you know what I’m sayin’. It’s a little freaky-deaky. Like Leonard Cohen says, "I can't trust my inner feelings. Inner feelings comes and go." But ask anyone who knows and they’ll tell you that I’m kind of a discreet control freak. And since all a workshop is is a way of turning your art into a collaboration (which is what it really was to begin with, since no man is an island, et cetera, but still I tend to prefer my illusions of singular control intact), I’ve probably got some hard knocks ahead of me. I mean, yeah, I know how to not be defensive, but there is an instinct for a man to stick up for his progeny, no matter how rotten it might be. Oh snap! Maybe that’s what Borges proved in “The Circular Ruins”…(damn, it really is circular, idnit?!)