Another Spiral in the Borges Labyrinth
There is a peculiar comedy in realizing that one has become exactly the thing one has been studying.
I just published my latest Wizard of Madeira meta-fiction novel Pessoa’s Dreams, which is a book about the life of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa written through the lens of Borgesian short stories (chronicles).
I have been studying both Borges and Pessoa for the past 20 years because it seems to me they share a kinship, certainly through my literary lens, I see that both Pessoa and Borges were enigmas of literature who were able to construct metaphysical labyrinths that mirrored the essence of consciousness itself.
For years I have approached Jorge Luis Borges as an English writer fascinated by labyrinths, dreams, mirrors, doubles, false histories, libraries, secret books, and the metaphysical mischief of literature. I thought I was studying him from the outside, with the safe distance of the admirer, the essayist, the literary tourist. I thought Borges was an influence, a reference point, a constellation of techniques and obsessions from which I could borrow light.
Then I read Mauricio Runno’s article about the Borges Labyrinth in San Rafael, Mendoza, and felt the trapdoor open beneath my feet.
Of course. This is how it happens.
One begins by admiring Borges. Then one begins writing about Borges. Then one discovers other people who have built actual labyrinths for Borges, planted in boxwood, mapped in earth, measured like runways, dreamed by an English designer who was also, apparently, some kind of literary James Bond. Then one realizes that the story is no longer about Borges at all. It is about the endless procession of people who have been caught by Borges, the readers, translators, architects, gardeners, critics, mystics, filmmakers, widows, obsessives, impostors, scholars, and pilgrims who all thought they were paying tribute to him, when in fact they were simply becoming further passages in the labyrinth.
Runno’s article is funny because it pretends to be exasperated. “Borges has me fed up,” he keeps saying, as if Borges were an irritating house guest who will not leave, or an old professor still correcting one’s metaphors from beyond the grave. But the irritation is really a form of devotion. Anyone who has spent enough time with Borges understands this fatigue. It is the fatigue of being unable to escape a mind that has already anticipated your escape route. Every exit leads back to the same small room, and in that room there is a mirror, a tiger, a knife, a blind librarian, and a sentence you are sure you have read before in another life.
The article tells the story of the Borges Labyrinth at Los Álamos, an estate in San Rafael. The idea sounds almost charmingly straightforward: create a living tribute to Borges by planting a labyrinth inspired by his work. Yet the project immediately becomes Borgesian. The labyrinth is designed by Randoll Coate, a British master of symbolic labyrinths who supposedly dreamed the design. Coate had known Susana Bombal, who introduced him to Borges. He later becomes part of that beautiful blur between diplomacy, espionage, literature, and myth. The labyrinth appears not as a mere garden design, but as a living book, an “open book to the universe,” made of plants, paths, letters, symbols, and memory.
This is the part that fascinates me most: the labyrinth is not decorative. It is not a theme park homage or a clever literary attraction. It is an enacted metaphor. It is Borges translated into earth. His sentences become hedges. His metaphysics become irrigation. His obsessions become pathways that people physically enter, wander, misunderstand, and eventually surrender to.
There is something wonderfully absurd about that. Borges, who wrote so often about infinite books, imaginary authors, circular ruins, and men trapped inside systems they only half understand, now becomes the subject of an actual system built by people who only gradually understand what they are doing. Runno and his collaborators think they are making one labyrinth. Then comes the first lesson: a labyrinth is all labyrinths. This is pure Borges. The single object opens into the universal object. The garden in Mendoza contains the garden in Venice, which contains The Aleph, which contains the world, which contains the reader, who now contains Borges.
This is where I begin laughing at myself.
Because what have I been doing with my own writing, if not planting another Borges Labyrinth in a different soil?
My soil is Madeira. Instead of San Rafael, I have forests, levadas, volcanic caves, mirrors, ghosts, saints, pirates, poets, heteronyms, red-robed guardians, and old trees that seem to remember more than human beings can bear. I have been building a literary world of recurring names, hidden correspondences, dream logic, nested histories, and metaphysical echoes. I have been writing chronicles in which Pessoa, Borges, Crowley, and other haunted minds become part of a larger pattern. I have been telling myself that this is my own mythos, my own island labyrinth.
And it is. But it is also another spiral in the Borges labyrinth.
That is the amusing humiliation of influence. You set out to create something original, and if you are honest enough, you eventually recognize the ancestry of your own obsessions. Borges did not invent labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, doubles, books, heresies, or metaphysical speculation. He simply condensed them with such terrifying elegance that it has become almost impossible to approach those subjects without passing through him. He is a customs officer at the border between literature and infinity. He stamps the passport whether you like it or not.
Runno’s article understands this with tremendous comic intelligence. It knows that Borges is both a blessing and a nuisance. He gives writers permission to think of literature as a cosmic device, but he also makes them feel slightly ridiculous for trying. He wrote so little in terms of page count, yet he occupied so much metaphysical territory. He could suggest a universe in ten pages. He could make an encyclopedia entry feel like a conspiracy. He could make a footnote seem like a portal. The rest of us arrive with our notebooks, our projects, our mythologies, our elaborate architectures, and Borges is already there, smiling faintly, as if he had been expecting us.
What I admire in the San Rafael labyrinth is that it accepts this absurdity. It does not try to defeat Borges by explaining him. It honors him by playing with him. It plants him. It walks him. It lets schoolchildren, visitors, believers, skeptics, and accidental pilgrims enter the pattern. The project seems to say: here, Borges is not a monument. He is an experience. He is something you get lost in.
That seems exactly right.
The article also captures something essential about literary devotion: the community of the afflicted. Every great writer produces a strange family of readers. Borges’s family is especially peculiar because his readers tend to become conspirators. They do not merely admire him. They start arranging reality in Borgesian ways. They create fake documents, alternative histories, symbolic gardens, labyrinthine essays, dream chronicles, metaphysical detective stories, and private jokes about infinity. They start seeing doubles everywhere. They begin to suspect that coincidence is a literary device being used by the universe.
This is why the article feels so personally dangerous. I recognize the symptoms.
I recognize the pleasure of being trapped. I recognize the desire to turn landscape into text. I recognize the instinct to treat a place as if it were secretly a manuscript. I recognize the suspicion that certain forests, islands, mirrors, and old houses are not locations but machines for producing revelations. I recognize the urge to gather history, myth, memory, and invention into a pattern that feels discovered rather than designed.
That may be Borges’s most seductive trick. He makes invention feel like archaeology. You write something, and it feels as though you have uncovered it. You create a symbol, and it behaves as if it existed before you. You place a labyrinth in Mendoza or Madeira, and suddenly the labyrinth looks less like an artwork than a message that had been waiting for someone foolish enough to receive it.
Runno’s exasperation becomes, for me, a kind of warning and a consolation. Borges wears people out because he gives them too much. He gives them precision, mischief, metaphysics, austerity, playfulness, and dread. He gives them the possibility that literature can be both a game and a sacred instrument. He gives them the nightmare that all stories are versions of older stories. He gives them the relief that this does not make the work meaningless. It makes the work participatory.
To be another spiral in the labyrinth is not a failure of originality. It is the condition of literature itself.
The labyrinth has no true center because every reader becomes a temporary center. Every writer enters through a different gate. Runno enters through San Rafael, Los Álamos, Camilo Aldao, Susana Bombal, Randoll Coate, and the comic exhaustion of building an actual garden for a dead genius. I enter through Borges by way of Pessoa, Madeira, forests, dreams, occult letters, invented chronicles, and the strange possibility that islands may be libraries written in stone, mist, and laurel.
Somewhere, Borges is laughing. Or perhaps that is too sentimental. Perhaps he is simply reading, which is worse. Reading us with that calm, blind, amused attention that makes one feel both honored and exposed.
And so I admit it: I am caught.
I thought I was writing about labyrinths. I was walking one. I thought Borges was one of my influences. He was one of the architects. I thought I was building my own symbolic garden in Madeira. Perhaps I am. But the path curves, the hedges tighten, the mirror appears, and there, scratched discreetly into the stone, is the old signature again.
Borges.
Fed up with him, naturally.
Completely enthralled.
Read Pessoa’s Dreams on Kindle Unlimited here.
