In 1955, Jorge Luis Borges, aged 56 and completely blind, became Director of the National Library of Argentina. “No one should read self-pity into this statement of the majesty of God,” he wrote, “who with such splendid irony granted me books and blindness at one touch.”
Books and blindness – Idle Motion’s starting point for this compelling rhapsody on language, vision and imagination. A handful of strands intertwine: an aspiring librarian with a passion for Borges; a reading group; Sophie, a woman who loves books, is falling in love with Nick, and is losing her sight; Borges himself. It’s a structuralist’s field day; a reading of The Tiger Who Came To Tea in the light of Borges’ short fiction, itself in part a response to Kipling; Idle Motion are vividly aware of the inter-connectedness, the self-referentiality of them all. And that, as any structuralist disciple would tell you, has everything to do with language. Language constitutes the world, meaning is attributed; the tiger can be a child’s teatime guest, an old man’s friend, a jungle predator; nothing about its essence as a tiger determines any of that – it’s all a question of attribution. For years the tiger stalked through Borges’ work, the king of the jungle, the looming beast he’d dread to meet; until as an old man, at a party in his honour, he was seated on a bench and felt a warm, meaty breath on his cheek, a friendly, unfrightening furry paw on his shoulder.
Idle Motion’s optimism takes the possibilities of language beyond physical constraint; its potential is transcendent. As Borges and Sophie go blind, they turn to the books of their childhood; the images are refreshed, the words reinvigorated. It’s like the huge, black canvas that once hung at Stoke Art College, quoting Wittgenstein in Braille; the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. The piece’s maze of meaning and language is impeccably structured; every moment is carefully chosen and placed; there’s a logic to the creativity, as well-ordered as Borges’ 800,000 tomes in the National Library or Nick’s alphabetized bookshelves. Transitions are smooth and seamless; we glide from job interview to biographical account of Borges via farcical reading group; motifs of sight, reading and tigers unite them all.
The title belongs to Borges, from an essay on narrative; Borges reads and interprets Borges but recognizes himself less and less in the writing. “Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger,” he writes; but life is a flight, “everything is lost to oblivion.” And therein lies the beauty of Idle Motion’s thesis; the liberating conclusion that if all is lost to time then the possibilities of language must be infinite; the reader will outlive the writer. Borges concludes his essay with the same all-embracing spirit with which Idle Motion take us into his world before bringing it into our own; “I do not know which one of us has written this page.”