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Circular Ruins is releasing a new tape in a couple of weeks on Portals Editions (+ Australian release by Altered States Tapes). Organizing a little party for the occasion for it on Thursday, 23rd of Feb. Other acts: Moon Wheel (live) + DJ Molly Water

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Letters from the Depths of Solitude. 221. On Circular Ruins

Borges's short story The Circular Ruins is but several sheets.

The dreamer's intent to dream a man and to bring him to reality. He selects ruins of a burnt temple for his endeavor. He spends his time sleeping avidly. In the recurrent dream he starts delivering lectures to a circle of his pupils, sitting in the amphitheater, teaching them "anatomy, cosmography, and magic." Soon he realizes that those of his students who accepted his teachings passively, could not be brought to reality, unlike recalcitrant students who dared to oppose him. One afternoon he dismisses the whole "illusory student body" and keeps one student, whose features resembled his. After a while an "intolerable lucidity of insomnia" falls upon him. After a struggle to regain sleep, he finally succeeds in dreaming about various organs of his student: heart, all principal organs--one might imagine, esophagus, lungs, stomach, intestines, phallus; "within a year he had come to the skeleton and the eyelids." He dreamed the entire young man, "the innumerable hair was perhaps the most difficult task."

Gradually, the wizard dreamed his son into reality. One night he kissed his son good bye, erased his memory of years of apprenticeship, and sent him away, to the remote remnants of another temple, consecrated to the deity which was "a bull, a rose, and a storm," and which earthly name was Fire. Being a simulacrum, his son was incapable of being burned by fire, and soon obtained the fame of the priest, but he did not retain the memory of being his father's dream. What kind of disappointment might there be if he learns the truth! The wizard found it disturbing that apart from him, the deity knew about the origin of his son: "Any father is interested in the sons he has procreated (or permitted) out of the mere confusion of happiness; it was natural that the wizard should fear for the future of that son whom he had thought out entrail by entrail, feature by feature, in a thousand and one secret nights."

One day fire came, and, narrowing the circle, was going to destroy what scarce traces there were left of circular ruins--the wizard, first thinking about taking a refuge in the water, embraced the blaze--but the fire did not harm him: "With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him."

Whose dream was he? Borges's, first and foremost. But also, perhaps, the reader's (considering that Borges is no more an alive man). The wizard was his own dream, and the dream of all the people who encountered him and taught him anew the language--since his memory was also obliterated by his creator. The wizard was the dream of deity of fire. The wizard was the dream of his son--perhaps it is his son's impatient and passionate desire to be born that brought to life his father. What role do the circular ruins play? They break the temporality: they create the similarity of the place replicated across different territories. How many they were, the priests / wizards / strangers with no memory, serving to the god of fire in the ruins of circular temples that once stood? Were not those circles enclosed into one grand circle of endless repetition? Why were those temples ruined? Were they created as ruins, as ruins are created as ruins in computer games, to evoke a certain feel of being-there, or the temples in fact existed? The circular ruins is a space metaphor for the circular structure of the event: the wizard dreams a wizard dreaming a wizard who dreams a wizard, dreaming a wizard dreaming a wizard in his turn, who, in his turn, dreams a wizard, and so forth.

(Written on the laptop of a friend.)

#letters #Borges #ruins #circular ruins