Borges’ Funes the Memorius

Borges, J.L., 1954, Trans. Kerrigan, A., 1991,  Funes the Memorious. in Fictions, London: Calder Publications

Reading and finding philosophies, rolling them about and seeing what sticks. Some get too heavy. I’m reading like I’m searching out the sorest part of a toothache. Reading Borges and some bits are too tender for now. The abyss opens up too easily in a dark room behind slatted blinds.

I like the circular sense of time and space in Borges’ stories, his reverence for the metaphor, the almost mathematical nature of his construction. I like the story of Funes the Memorious. Funes, related to death (like my cypress) and (like me) stuck in a dark room remembering and failing to sleep, orchestrating complex disordered systems of pure signifiers for systems that exist purely for their ability to make order. Replacing nice organised units, and tens and thousands with the whalethe railroad and Napoleon. Is that what I’m doing in representing the tree or in representing how I feel in comparison to the tree? Making needlessly complex symbols to stand in for something that already exists? Or do these existing systems exist only in ignoring the details? Is it in repeating the details that, like Calvino’s cities, the landscape, in this case my tree, can truly begin to exist? Or by remembering every detail is there the danger of multiplying useless gestures, as benumbed the author when meeting with Funes?

Funes is bothered that a dog seen from the side at 3.14 should have a different name from a dog seen at 3.15 from the front. A dense tree from below, at midnight, dripping with half-remembered fairytales is not the same tree as that which frames my view of a flock of noisy black cockatoos, glossy and self-assured, nor that tree which is in resinous suspension in my kitchen. But, so that we can use common language we must tacitly agree [1] that what is important is a degree of generalization. That our individual memories about the dog or the tree don’t change the words we use to name it. That a tree is a tree whether it is in rain or sun, live and growing, or fallen. But what if like Fune, you remember not just every leaf on every tree, but every time you saw each of those leaves on each of those trees? What if each experience changes you as well? It makes sense that Fune made it to only 19. If only from the sheer impossibility of the abyss that opens up.  

This, as with much of what I’m looking at comes back to a German, in Nietzsche. If all the embellishments of “metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms”, are layered and repeated until we forget that they are illusions, then we are left with what we think of as the hard, unadorned metal of truth [2]. This recalls again the beautiful layered photographs of Idris Khan. In my own project if I repeat the metaphors and myths, the reinterpreting and reflection of memories and overlay them – digitally, physically, and conceptually – of a particular landscape does the resultant metal disc of truth signify the landscape, the landscape reflected in me or myself reflected in the landscape?  Fune’s face surprises him every time he sees a mirror. What changes have been made in him each time he looks to cause this shock? The horror of the creep of decay, the awareness of seconds of time ticking away, the pressure of observing and holding the memory of every single detail? Even the dawn was wary of the heaviness of this task of unrelenting specificity.

  1. Arrojo, R. Fictional Translators: Rethinking Translation through Literature
  2. Neitzsche (1873) On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
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