Dreamtigers, first published in 1960 as El Hacedor ("The Maker"), is a collection of poems, short essays, and literary sketches by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. Divided fairly evenly between prose and verse, the collection examines the limitations of creativity.
Introduction
Borges visited Texas and lectured for a while. Borges travelled a lot, and uses myths and stories from many cultures of the world. Borges considers this book, a collection of things he wrote, as a reflection of himself, like a mosaic made of little broken mirrors.
The Maker
An ancient Greek soldier lived a simple life of sensual pleasures. He was going blind and felt terrible about it, but then vivid good memories came to him, and he understood by some weird reasoning, that death is the next big adventure.
Dreamtigers
Borges loved tigers, and when he lucid dreamed, he tried to make a tiger, but was frustrated that all his dream tigers were worse than real tigers.
Dialogue on a Dialogue
A is talking with Z about one night. A was talking with Macedonio (Borges's mentor) one night, and Macedonio fully convinced A that souls must be immortal and death is nothing serious. Someone kept playing ugly music, so A suggested that they both commit suicide to keep talking without that music.
Z: (mockingly) But I suspect that at the last moment you reconsidered.
A: (now deep in mysticism) Quite frankly, I don’t remember whether we committed suicide that night or not.
Toenails
Borges obsesses about what the heck toenails are trying to do.The Draped Mirrors
Borges, as a boy, was scared that mirrors are portals to another world, and that world might stop mimicking this world. Later, he dated a girl named Julia, who was too intense for love or sex. Borges told her about the mirror fear, and later, Julia went mad and said that Borges kept appearing in her reflections, so she draped over all the mirrors.
Argumentum Ornithologicum
If I imagined a flock of birds but no one is there to count it, then the number is not an integer. But it must be an integer, so someone counted it. I couldn't count fast enough, so God counted. Thus God exists.
The Captive
A boy was abducted and found years later. Borges wonders if he was really the same person anymore.
The Sham
Eva Perón died, and his husband Juan Perón, was mourning. Many people came to pay respects.
Borges was disgusted about this, because Juan and Eva are not their real identities, and they are just players of a historical drama for the entertainment of lower middle classes.
In fact, all historical events of the same theme (such as assassination) are really just imperfect reproductions of an original event outside of time. Platonism of historical events.
Delia Elena San Marco
Borges's friend, Delia, died. Borges obsesses about their last goodbye, and realizes that "goodbye" implies a future meeting again. Souls are eternal, and one day Borges and Delia might meet again.
To say goodbye... is like saying “today we play at separating, but we will see each other tomorrow.” Man invented farewells because he somehow knows he is immortal, even though he may seem gratuitous and ephemeral.
Delia, we will take up again this uncertain dialogue, and we will ask each other if ever, in a city [Buenos Aires] lost on a plain, we were Borges and Delia.
Dead Man’s Dialogue
Two historical figures talk about Argentinian history and political conspiracies after they died. One claims that souls reincarnate but don't retain memories or appearances. The other wonders if they are just characters in another person's dream.
The Plot
A gaucho (Argentinian legendary cowboys) was betrayed and killed just like Caesar. Borges claims that his death had a higher meaning: he is an actor in a replay of a historical drama.
A Problem
Suppose Don Quixote killed a man, what happens next?
- He keeps being deluded, thinking it's no big deal.
- He becomes shocked into sanity forever.
- He becomes shocked into more delusions to deny that he killed a man.
- Actually, the world is an illusion and nothing is actually real. Hinduism!
A Yellow Rose
Giambattista Marino the poet realized while dying: descriptions, stories, poems, about a thing, is always worse than the actual thing. Language can't perfectly reflect what they talk about.
we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it; and that the tall, proud volumes casting a golden shadow in a corner were not a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the world.
The Witness
A lonely pegan died among a Christianized England. The Saxon peganism culture died with him.
When one life ends, dies a whole world. Everything stops, and disappears, never to be viewed in the same way again. All the thoughts and memories vanish from the once living body, leaving it to rot away like a piece of trash.
It's not hard to destroy world. It takes a one well aimed shot, or even less. – MyMineAwesome
Now I will destroy the whole world – last words of a suicider.
Martin Fierro
Martin Fierro is an epic poem about the gauchos. Borges loved it.
All the human dramas of Buenos Aires are soon nothing. This is especially poignant for me, since I have 0 idea what Borges was alluding to. Ituzaingó? Ayacucho? "Two tyrannies"? What the heck was Borges talking about? All those Argentinian dramas mean nothing to me even if they meant something to him.
The gushing waters of the Yangzi River pour and disappear into the East, washing away past heroes. Their triumphs and failures, all vanish into nothingness in an instant. – Romance of the Three KingdomsBut it's not entirely gone. One day in 1860s, a gaucho killed a negro. It was a little drama, which is like a small reenactment of the fundamental human dramas. Murders are small reenactments. Wars are big reenactments.
Mutations
The arrow used to kill. Now it's a symbol. Everything dies and changes. Nobody knows who the future would think of them as. A legend, a symbol, an echo?
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| Nightmareverse - I became a Legend |
Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixotes
Lots of references here. "Ariosto's geographies" is Orlando furioso, a poem that includes a visit to the moon. "golden idol of Mohammed stolen by Montalban" is a direct quote from first chapter of Don Quixote. "Montalban" is a famous fictional knight, that Don Quixote was a great fan of. "El Toposo" and "Montiel" are locations where Don Quixote adventured. Sindbad is a fictional sailor.
Borges imagines that Cervantes himself was bored by life and wanted adventures. Instead of going mad like Don Quixote, Cervantes wrote about Don Quixotes instead. In this way, a loser tries to prevent himself from becoming a bigger loser, by fantasizing about a bigger loser.
Cervantes and Don Quixote are both people stuck in a boring world wishing for myths. Funnily, they became myths themselves in the future.
Myths make people want to write and do things. Later, written and done things become myths themselves.
Paradiso, XXXI, 108
Diodorus Siculus is a Greek historian who wrote a "universal history" (a complete history of humans).
Dante's Paradiso, Canto 31, lines 106-108:
But in his thoughts says, while it is exposed,
"My Lord Jesus Christ, true God and Savior,
Was this your face then as you once appeared?"
These lines describe a pilgrim's feelings when he sees the Veronica, a piece of cloth which looks like the face of Jesus, and Christians say it's not made by human hand, and appeared miraculously. Pilgrims love the Veronica.
In Canto 31, Dante described the highest level of Christian heaven.
Dante sees an enormous rose, symbolising divine love. Christian souls live in the petals. Angels fly around the rose like bees, distributing peace and love.
Teresa de Jesus is Saint Teresa of Jesus, a Christian mystic who saw Jesus a lot. Paul and John are Christian saints and matyrs who also saw Jesus. Jesus was Jewish and was killed by Roman soldiers by being nailed to a cross.
Okay, that's all the Christian references in the story. Now for the story itself...
Some people sometimes feel like something infinite is lost. Borges proposes that if we look hard enough, there are secret messages in ordinary life, and by finding those secret messages, we could find that infinite thing that was lost. (Note how this is similar to delusion of reference and pareidolia.)
Perhaps a feature of the crucified face lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died, was erased, so that God may be all of us. Who knows but that tonight we may see it in the labyrinth of dreams, and tomorrow not know we saw it.
In a dream, I was touched by Princess Celestia, but waking up, I could not remember the dream, only a deep feeling of loss.
Parable of the Palace
Yellow Emperor is a legendary Chinese emperor.
A group of poets toured the Yellow Emperor's giant palace, and were amazed by its beauty. But at the end of the tour, a poet spoke a single word which was the minimal description of the palace. The Yellow Emperor was angry, thus the poet's head was cut off.
That poet, who found a tiny description of a great big beauty, is like a Demoscene artist.
The demoscene is a computer art subculture for making small programs that produce sound and videos.
What is the minimal description length of the universe? Maybe it's actually very small. Max Tegmark thinks that there's a simple mathematical description of all universes, and all the complexity we see are subjective. Like a fractal.
A fractal is very simple to describe, but if you zoom in far enough it can get very complex. Suppose we describe the set of all possible lives... well, I've just described it: the set of all possible lives. But suppose we describe a particular one... well, that's gonna be hard. Pinpointing one among the crowd takes a long "address", and all the complexity is in that address.
Everything and Nothing
This story dramatizes Shakespeare's life. Anne Hathaway is Shakespeare's wife. Ferrex and Tamburlaine were fictional characters that Shakespeare probably knew about. Proteus is a Greek god who could shapeshift. Borges said "Egyptian Proteus", but Borges was confusing the Greek Proteus with the Egyptian king Proteus, who could not shapeshift. Richard is the character from Richard III. Iago is a fictional character in Shakespeare's Othello.
And that's all the literary references in the story. It's times like this when I really hate Borges's bookishness. Thank Celestia for Wikipedia!
Shakespeare felt like he had no personality. His friends told him that it's dumb: every human has a personality. So Shakespeare tried many things to be more normal, but nothing worked. He became an actor, then became a playwriter, so that he could play some personality. One day he got tired of this game, and retired to his hometown to find his true self. He started playing his own life, the life of a boring manager, and died.
He told God he just wanted to be himself, instead of so many selves. God replied that, just like Shakespear, He also had no true self, and simply dreamed up all the persons in the world.
Ragnarök
Ragnarök is the end of the world and death of all gods in Norse myth. Pedro Henríquez Ureña was a writer that Borges knew about. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is an English poet who dreamed a poem once, which Borges wrote about in an essay, The Dream of Coleridge.
Borges dreamed that he was at a business meeting with Ureña and others, then the gods came for a visit. The gods had been in exile for centuries and lived a very hard life, and grown old into petty criminals who would kill for a penny.
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| An old god in his natural habitat. |
So Borges and the other humans happily shot all the gods to death.
Inferno, I, 32
Inferno, Canto I, line 31-33:
And lo! almost where the ascent began,
A panther light and swift exceedingly,
Which with a spotted skin was covered o'er!
In the story, a panther is stuck in a cage until he died. One night in a dream, God came to him, gave him higher intelligence, and told him his purpose: he is stuck in a cage, so that Dante could see him and write about a panther in his great poem. The panther happily accepted his fate in the dream, but when he woke up, he was dumb again, feeling like he lost something infinite but not understanding it.
Dante was born in Florence and loved it, but he was exiled from there, because of some bitter political stuff, which filled his life with pain. He died in exile in Ravenna.
One night in a dream, God came to Dante, gave him higher intelligence, and told him his purpose. Dante happily accepted his fate in the dream, but when he woke up, he was dumb again, feeling like he lost something infinite but not understanding it.
Borges and I
"Stevenson" is Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer of adventure novels that Borges likes.
There are two Borgeses. A public one and a private one. The private one knows that he would be lost, and only the public one would survive, as a heritage of Spanish literature. The private one hates the public one, but can't escape.
Private Borges is the experiencing self, plus a bit of remembering self. (Daniel Kahneman's terms)
Public Borges is a bit of remembering self, plus all the social persona.
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| The public Coloratura and the private Rara |
Poems
Part 2 of the book is a bunch of hard poems. I hate reading hard poems so I skipped most of them. Those I did understand, I will summarize.The Game of Chess
Humans play chess. God plays humans. Who plays God?
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| Horse Wife having an existential crisis (tjpones, 2015) |
The Rain
Borges likes the rain and misses his dead father.On the Effigy of a Captain in Cromwell’s Armies
The Borges
Borges knows little about his ancestors, who he doesn't care about anyway.On Beginning the Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar
Borges tries to study Old English grammar but kept getting distracted by all the Old English legendary dragons and stuff.Museum
In this section are a bunch of texts that Borges pretended that to be quotations, but actually he wrote them.On Exactitude in Science
In this story, Borges talked about an empire, where the art of mapping was so good, that the map of a single province was as big as a city, and the map of the empire, as big as a province. In time, those huge maps were not big enough for the mappers, and they drew a map of the empire which was exactly as big as the empire. The following generations, who didn't like mapping that much, saw that that vast map was useless, so they just threw it out. In the deserts of the west, still today, there are broken pieces of the map, used by animals and beggars for shelter. Other than that, nothing is left in this world about the ancient mappers' attempt to map the empire.
And I "summarized" this story by essentially reproducing all of it, just like how the mappers mapped the empire with a map that was the size of the empire.
Poems
A bunch of boring poems.
Epilogue
Borges says that this book is actually pretty monotonous in theme, because it's so personal, and his personal life is pretty boring. Also he loves Schopenhauer.A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
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