In putting pen to paper, I have often tried to become the authors I admired. Not to emulate, which is only playacting, but to really be: mind and body. Writing, to me, is a spiritual surrender, and is as much becoming as creating. Becoming your antecedents, becoming your protagonists, becoming yourself (which is qualitatively different from being yourself), over and over again. Most often I have tried to be Borges, and so it was again today.
I tried to become Borges. I tried to become Borges trying to become Pierre Menard, or, better yet, Borges trying to become Borges trying to become Pierre Menard.
(Menard, of course,
who tried to become Cervantes,
who tried to become the Moorish translator,
who tried to become Cide Hamete Benengali,
who tried to become Alonso Quijano,
who tried to become Don Quixote,
who tried to become Amadis de Gaul,
etc.)
If that list seems ultimately exhaustive, this is only due to my ignorance. Or if it is at all tracable to a beginning, that beginning coincides with the very commence of mankind. Let us, for sake of ease, imagine as that beginning Adam and Eve, though the specifics hardly matter. Though we tend to believe nowadays in the ever-expanding universe and the ever-expanding mind science suggests, I would hypothesize the opposite. In fact I would argue that where Genesis says that Adam and Eve are being kicked out of the Garden of Eden, what is meant by that is them walling themselves in. The Garden of Eden is infinity, and - by extension - perfection. Their punishment is reducing this, thus creating the beginnings of suffering and vice in the form of imperfection. From that point on, every successive generation, in the spirit of their ancestors, builds a wall inside the previous one.
If Cervantes' working space was a luxurious mansion, mine is a nearly identical one, only slightly slimmed down. Future generations will be slowly but cumulatively reduced to discomfort. All that precedes us limits us, because it predefines us. Of course, I am not the first (nor will I be the last) to say this. As Borges aptly points out, the exact same sentence written by Cervantes has completely different connotations when reimagined by Menard. Consequently, Borges' quoting of these lines sheds yet another light on them. So, to claim my place in history, I too will conclude with those illustrious words, forever and never heard before:
Truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counsellor.
