OMNES ARDENT

You will even find people who will give you the argument that censorship is good for artists because it challenges their imagination. This is like arguing that if you cut a man’s arms off you can praise him for learning to write with a pen held between his teeth.

Nothing is as it has been, and I miss your face like Hell. And I guess it’s just as well, but I miss your face like Hell.

I wish I was a slave to an age-old trade, like riding around on railcars and working long days. Oh, Lord have mercy on my rough and rowdy ways. Lord have mercy and my rough and rowdy ways.

A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.

Then the revelation occurred … that 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 - as his vanity had dreamed - a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the world.

Magnus Barfod, in the year 1102, undertook the general conquest of the kingdoms of Ireland; it is said that on the eve of his death he received this greeting from Muirchertach, king in Dublin:

May gold and the storm fight along with you in your armies, Magnus Barfod.
Tomorrow, in the fields of my kingdom, may you have a happy battle.
May your kingly hands be terrible in weaving the sword-stuff.
May those opposing your sword become meat for the red swan.
May your many gods glut you with glory, may they glut you with blood.
Victorious may you be in the dawn, king who tread on Ireland.
Of your many days may none shine as bright as tomorrow.
Because that day will be the last. I swear it to you, King Magnus.
For before its light is blotted, I shall vanquish you and blot you out, Magnus Barfod.

It’s the other one, it’s Borges, that things happen to. I stroll about Buenos Aires and stop, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance or an iron gate. News of Borges reaches me through the mail and I see his name on an academic ballot or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-centry typography, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson’s prose. The other one shares these preferences with me, but in a vain way that converts them into the attributes of an actor. It would be too much to say that our relations are hostile; I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges may contrive his literature and that literature justifies my existence. I do not mind confessing that he has managed to write some worthwhile pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because the good part no longer belongs to anyone, not even to the other one, but rather to the Spanish language or to tradition. Otherwise, I am destined to be lost, definitively, and only a few instants of me will be able to survive in the other one. Little by little I am yielding him everything, although I am well aware of his perverse habit of falsifying and exaggerating. Spinoza held that all things long to preserve their own nature: the rock wants to be rock forever and the tiger, a tiger. But I must live on in Borges, not in myself - if indeed I am anyone - though I recognize myself less in his books than in many others, or than in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and I passed from lower-middle-class myths to playing games with time and infinity, but those games are Borges’ now, and I will have to conceive something else. Thus my life is running away, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other one.

I do not know which of us two is writing this page.

The Internet makes protest effortless, and therefore weightless.

The art of game design, like the art of writing, is to communicate non-simple things simply.