Jorge Luis Borges: Conductor Extraordinaire

This portion of the web journal dedicated to discussing my friend Dr. Oppermann will be focused mainly on a dream I had last night.

In the dream I was driving on the 405 freeway heading South. Oppermann was speaking to me, a disembodied voice on the telephone. He informed me that he had just seen the famous Argentine poet/magician Jorge Luis Borges conducting a symphony orchestra. Oppermann said distinctly: "Well, in comparison to Borges, Barrenbaum, Salonen, Karajan and even Bernstein looked adipose." Within the dream itself I suddenly remember that I had just had a dream of Borges alluding to "The Secret Miracle": I kept on alluding to the comparison of how Borges and Marxists needed to keep giving each other a good kick in the pants to wake up to their insufficiencies. I wanted to tell Oppermann that a friend of mine had helped me connect the moment when we bring Borges to our working class work, our exposure to poverty and deprivation... is like bringing Enrico Caruso to the Amazon... I wake thinking of Herzog's Fitzcaraldo as a courageous act of individuation.

After I wake and think of the dream I feel remorse that I had such ambivalence to respond to Oppermann's journey to London and his discussion of "Injustice and ..." with the simple and cruel phrase "So what on it?" Such a phrase shows nothing but my own insecurity and insufficiency. It was a fine dream Oppermann had that day in London. It pisses me off to hell that I couldn't be there to celebrate it as well. I love showing my own stupidity at times, my shortsightedness in front of another man's genuine moments of genius. I hope that that passage in "the Travels of Dr. Oppermann" is read for just such a form of stupidity, guilt and cheekyness... although Oppermann would frown on the guilt. It is what had to be said. I cannot re-write that passage, for fear that it would only sanitize the bloody ambivalence that I as a human being feel for my dear friend: I love him and sometimes I hate him. And once again it is the place of literature if it is to write of a sense of it's own being that it should write somehow to it's own despair... the view is that somehow life will escape and make it through the tempest of ideas and the guardianship of pessimism and cynicism we have around every hopeless aspect of the whole bloody affair. Hopelessness stands to reason, and reason stands to sense. We cannot even write that "Hope stands to life" because this somehow is still writing, but at the same time a view to the very limit of writing itself...

Borges is a conductor. But he is a conductor of what? I think of him as a very fine metal lightning rod, able to channel the fierce torrents of eletro-static vertiginous energy through itself without the slightest moment of "impedence." The Borges conductor is very pure.

Fat belongs to the bourgeoise, a result of too much leisure and avarice. The lean belongs to the working class as well. The lean days are here: get out your Borges and read, and maybe you will be wide awake when this thing gets through