M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

The Companionship of Words
by Doug Talley

Editor’s Note: Please send your poetry to poetry@meridianmagazine.com to be considered for publishing. We’d love to hear from you.

To find comfort in the company of dead writers, how lonely is that? And yet there is a fraternity of idea and expression in such company that defends the effort. I was fortunate once to hear Jorge Luis Borges speak, who passed away some fifteen years ago now. There were no more than seventy of us cramped into a small classroom, but behind the poet’s blind eyes stretched vast desert spaces of sandstone cliffs, pinyon pine, and pale green sagebrush. A colleague whispered of him, to no one in particular, “He has no idea how great he is!” He lived simply on a daily bread no more substantial than the stuff of words.

Today I look at my bookshelf and note German, Italian, and Latin dictionaries lined up together with a Greek lexicon. I have a second Italian dictionary and a paperback French dictionary, and lament because I have no Spanish dictionary when I want to check Borges’ use of the word abarca. I pull down the Italian dictionary to see if I can find an Italian equivalent for abarca, and read with fascination the incredible variety of verbs in the Italian – abbarbagliare, to dazzle; abbarbicare, to take root; abbaruffarsi, to scuffle, to come to blows. I pursue a random reading with equal felicity in the ancient Greek –to bray, like an ass, (the word apparently onomatopoetic, the Greek “onkaomai” resonating like the English “Hee Haw”); to heap up, as a mound, more figuratively to exalt, extol; to feel a biting, stinging pain, as in all other languages seeking expression for that most common of all mortal conditions, I hurt.

With time the words of one language mingle with another, like two streams joining their waters, and with further time these waters flow into others still, until the number of words and their languages suggests a vast ocean, the engaging concept of infinitude. And what if our earthen languages join with those of another planet, a different world entirely? Or still yet another? What is infinity multiplied by itself? The legacy of Babel. A tower of language presuming to scrape the heavens and tumbling instead to the earth in shards. Lost in the depths of that fall is the name of God.

And so the words to name God suggest their own infinity – the Lamb, the Shepherd, the Rock, the Lion, the Tree, the Door, the Key, the Day Star, Alpha, Omega, the Creator, the Finisher, the Author, the King, the Bread, the Life, the Judge, the Advocate, the Son, the Father, the Light, the Truth, the Word, la Parola,, the Christ. The words to blaspheme God are probably equally infinite.

However, by adopting a singular word, the name of Christ, it seems we adopt all that attends it. We take the name of Christ upon us and we necessarily take all his other names as well, until with time we become also, in Him, the Lamb, the Rock, the Door, the Key, the Day Star. . . . until we become also fully infinite in the Word, in the way only an infinity of words will allow. This is a great mystery, to cleanse ourselves in that vast water daily and forever. Those words that make us one will eventually prove the only way to narrow the great distance between stars and to narrow and eliminate all loneliness. In the solitude of my study, indifferent to time or care or need, I read Borges and Christ both, and both remind me in the Word we shall be one. Or as Borges himself had noted, Felices los que guardan en la memoria palabras de Virgilio o de Cristo, porque éstas darán luz a sus días – Happy are those who safeguard in memory the words of Virgil or of Christ, for these will give light to their days.

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Argentina in 1899 and raised in Buenos Aires. Though a native speaker of Spanish, he learned English in his early childhood. He grew up absorbing much of his vast literary knowledge through English books. He was Director of the National Library of Buenos Aires and was awarded honorary doctorates from Columbia and Oxford. Quietly self-deprecating and modest, he nevertheless received prestigious literary awards during his career, including the International Publishers’ Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. Borges held a deep regard for the four Gospels, and considered them a divine epic far surpassing Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, one that “cannot be told better. It has been told many times over,” he said, “yet I think the few verses where we read, for example, of Christ being tempted by Satan are stronger than all four books of Paradise Regained (by the great English poet John Milton).”

The following poems of Borges, including a prose poem, are translations from the Spanish originals. In them you will note a spiritual sensitivity and imagination, which are quite compelling. We hope you enjoy.

UNFAMILIAR STREET

Twilight of the Dove
is what Hebrews named the nightfall
when shadows impede no footsteps,
and the onset of night proclaims itself
like an inspired and ancient music,
like a gratifying descent.
In this hour when the light
possesses the fineness of sand,
I came to an unfamiliar street,
plain in the noble breadth of its terraces,
whose cornices and walls manifested
the mild colors of that selfsame sky
touching the depths.
Everything – the mediocre houses,
the meager balustrades and doorknocks,
perhaps the hope of a girl on the balcony –
all these entered my hollow heart
with the clarity of tears.
Maybe the silver of this evening hour
lent its tenderness to the street
to make it as real as a verse
forgotten and retrieved.
Only as an afterthought did I reflect
that the street of that evening was another’s,
that every house is a candelabra
where the lives of men burn
like individual candles,
that our every ill-considered footstep
tramples over Golgotha.

PARADISO, XXXI, 108

Diodoros Siculus relates the story of a god cut into pieces and scattered. Who, in walking toward the evening or in recalling a day of the past, never felt at some point to have lost something infinite?

Humanity has lost a face, an irrecoverable face, and everyone seeks to be that pilgrim (as Dante envisioned in the Empyrean beneath the Rose) who sees the shroud of Veronica in Rome and murmurs with faith: Christ Jesus, my God, my true God, so this, then, was your face?

In a road there is a face of stone with an inscription that reads: True Simulacrum of the Holy Face of the God of Jaén. If only we succeeded in grasping that face, we would own the key to the parables, and we would know whether the son of the carpenter was also the Son of God.

Paul saw it as a light that leveled him; John, as the sun shining in its strength. Teresa of Ávila saw it many times bathed in a tranquil light, but was never able to discern the color of the eyes.

We have lost these features, the way a magic number becomes lost in ordinary ciphers, or the way the pattern of a kaleidoscope disappears forever. We can look at them and still not know them. The profile of a Jew in the subway, perhaps, is that of Christ. Perhaps the hands that pass coins at the ticket window resemble those that a few soldiers nailed one day to the cross.

Perhaps a feature of the crucified face peers at us from every mirror. Perhaps the face died, or faded, so that God could be everyone.

Who knows, tonight we could see it in the labyrinths of sleep and in the morning remember nothing.

THE SOUTH

To have considered from your patios
the ancient stars,
to have considered from the seat of darkness
those scattered lights
that my ignorance has not learned how to name
or arrange into constellations,
to have noticed the cycle of water
in the hidden cistern,
the odor of jasmine and honeysuckle,
the silence of the sleeping bird,
the arch of the entrance, the moisture,
- these things, perhaps, are the poem.

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