Reviews OWE & Fringe Published 22 June 2012

Borges and I

New Diorama Theatre ⋄ 19th - 23rd June 2012

Books and blindness.

Ben Monks

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.”

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Ben Monks is a contributor to Exeunt Magazine

Borges and I Show Info


Produced by Idle Motion

Link http://http://www.newdiorama.com/

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