A Safari into the Mind of a Legend
Throughout his lonely childhood, his dull Swiss teachers insisted on pronouncing Jorge Borges as though both rhymed with “forge.” Never did they suspect that it might be pronounced “HOR-hay BHOR-hays.” Not once did they look at this shy Argentinean and see in him an audacious writer who would soon startle the world. But his weary instructors did know that he was fond of the Zoo and that he spent countless hours there gazing at the tigers:
“In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger – not the jaguar, that spotted “tiger” that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Parana and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can only be found by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant. I used to linger endlessly before one of the cages at the zoo; I judged vast encyclopedias and books of natural history by the splendor of their tigers… Childhood passed away, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but still they are in my dreams. In that underground sea of chaos they still endure. As I sleep, I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it’s a dream. In those moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger. Oh, incompetence! My dreams never seem to engender the creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it’s flimsy-looking, or it has vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it’s altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger…”
As he grew older, Borges’ eyesight did cruelly abandon him, but never his faithful tigers. “And now that I am blind, one single color remains for me, and it is precisely the color of the tiger, the color yellow.”
Tigers, leaping out from the pages of books once read. Tigers, creeping from the mists of forgotten zoo-trip memories. Tigers, filling the mind of Borges:
“My father enjoyed encyclopedias; I judged them, I am certain, by the images of tigers they offered me… One will wonder quite reasonably why tigers and not leopards or jaguars? I can only respond that spots displease me and not stripes. If I were to write leopard in place of tiger the reader would immediately intuit that I was lying. To these tigers of sight and word I have joined another… this last tiger is of flesh and blood. With evident and terrified happiness I neared this tiger, whose tongue licked my face, whose indifferent or affectionate mitt lingered on my head, and which, unlike its precursors, possessed smell and weight. I will not say this tiger that amazed me is more real than the others, since an oak is not more real than the shapes of a dream, but I would like to thank here our friend, this tiger of flesh and blood…”
Jorge Luis Borges, consumed by tigers, is gone now. And of his days of walking among them he had only this to say: “Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”
Roy H Williams
It strikes me now as evening fills my soul that the tiger addressed in my poem is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols and scraps picked up at random out of books, a string of labored tropes that have no life, and not the fated tiger, the deadly jewel that under sun or stars or changing moon goes on in Bengal or Sumatra fulfilling its rounds of love and indolence and death.
To the tiger of symbols I hold opposed the one that’s real, the one whose blood runs hot as it cuts down a herd of buffaloes, and that today, this August third, nineteen fifty-nine, throws its shadow on the grass; but by the act of giving it a name, by trying to fix the limits of its world, it becomes a fiction not a living beast, not a tiger out roaming the wilds of earth.
– From The Other Tiger, by Jorge Luis Borges