The Man of Many Mirrors

DREAMTIGERS by Jorge Luis Borges. 95 pages. Texas. $4.

For eight years, Argentina's greatest writer, Jorge Luis Borges, has been blind. Yet Borges' latest book of poems and parables shows that blindness has not blurred his poetic vision. In his parable of blind Homer, Borges describes himself as well: "He descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and up from the vertigo he succeeded in bringing forth a forgotten recollection that shone like a coin under the rain."

Relief in an Image. No other writer of this era has so movingly championed what a man sees against what he knows. All the delights of this world, Borges implies, are to be found in the concrete; all the disasters, in crude abstractions that crush men's senses and make them cruel. Such a theme wound its way through Borges' earlier, labyrinthine short stories. His present pieces are simpler and gloomier. They are filled with a sense of death, of inexorably passing time. But there is always relief in an image, as in a visit to an old coach house where everything is in decay:

I know every single object of this old

Building: the flakes of mica

On the gray stone that doubles itself

Endlessly in the smudgy mirror

And the lion's head that bites

A ring and the stained-glass windows

That reveal to a child wonders

Of a crimson world and another greener world.

To Borges, human life is pathetically ephemeral and yet immortal, because each individual bears witness to a precise set of perceptions that cannot be duplicated. When the last unknown Saxon died, writes Borges, there died with him the "face of Woden, the old dread and exultation, the rude wooden idol weighed down with Roman coins and heavy vestments, the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners."

A Touch of the Dog. "What will die with me when I die, what pitiful or perishable form will the world lose?" Borges wonders, recalling childhood friends and memories. "The voice of Macedonio Fernandez? The image of a roan horse on the vacant lot at Serrano and Charcas? A bar of sulphur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?"

Borges delights in the multiplicity of things; he is fascinated with mirrors because they multiply. A poet cannot pin a thing down for eternity in a single phrase, nor a philosopher force it into a rigid system. Variety must be respected: "Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird."

Shakespeare, in the opinion of Borges, was the greatest artificer of all time, the man with most numbers of mirrors. He had less character than other men, writes Borges. He felt that he was a "nobody" and, in desperation, took to acting out many different roles on the stage. But that did not satisfy: "When the last line was applauded and the last corpse removed from the stage, the hated sense of unreality came over him again."

So he began composing his own plays, each one brimful of parts. "Twenty years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he was overcome by the surfeit and the horror of being so many kings who die by the sword and so many unhappy lovers who converge, diverge, and melodiously agonize. The story goes that, before or after he died, he found himself before God and he said: 'I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself.' The voice of God replied: 'Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons--and none.' "

Borges may baffle readers by being so many different persons in his stories and parables--an Irish revolutionary, a paralyzed Gaucho, a Nazi fanatic, the Minotaur. But all these characters relay a similar message: honor the moment, however fleeting; honor the human being, however humble.

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