Suffering from Unreality:

The Passion of Herbert Ashe

“… once dead, he is not even the ghost he was then”

[The conversation begins in medias res]

Borges: Now a labyrinth may seem predictable for someone like myself. It is a form of entrapment that is both beguiling, enticing and yet at the same time overwhelming.

DT: And dreadful.

Borges: Indeed. The Cretan labyrinth, as you know, contains the terror of the Minotaur residing within its depths.

DT: What chimera haunts you wherever it is you are, of which I know nothing and can’t even begin to imagine.

Borges: Ah, this question takes us, so to speak, to the heart of the matter.

DT: How so Señor?

Borges: It is simple is it not?

DT: Not at the moment. Please elaborate.

Borges: It is well known that the passion, as you describe it, Herbert Ashe endured was indeed unreality. If you wish to seriously discuss this theme you would do well to turn your attention away from Ashe towards another fiction. We can discuss a work in which the metaphysics of its protagonists also constitute states of unreality, though they do not suffer from them.

DT: To which work are you referring?

Borges: The Book of Imaginary Beings.

This choice of text surprised me. Partly because of the speed with which Borges proffered it as a suggested title, but also because it is a lesser work than “Tlõn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”. In it Borges assembles a miscellany of fabulous creatures from various cultures and provides short annotations to accompany them. This is the extent of his writing in the book.

DT: You had no hesitation in suggesting this title. What prompted you?

Borges: Imaginary Beings is posterior to Labyrinths by forty-three years. If you remember prior to the formal commencement of this dialogue we were speaking generally about the matter of reality, unreality and the delicate, gossamer-like strands that both link and partition their sovereign states. It was in this discussion that the little known and somewhat elusive figure of Herbert Ashe came into our presence.

DT: And his absence.

*

So here’s the rub. I am a living writer (allegedly) co-ordinating this dialogue with Borges, a dead writer (possibly) and the creator of the fictional Herbert Ashe (potentially). Conundrums and metaphysical knots have become irresolutely entwined. It is perhaps time to get to the heart of the matter.

DT: Now it is well known and indeed revered that the character of which we have been speaking is, in the strictest sense, imaginary. But more importantly he is not real but, as you describe him, “irreal”. What exactly do you mean by this?

Borges: Ashe was something of a savant and an eccentric. He was deeply interested in mathematics and wanted to change the duodecimal system to the sexagesimal system, whereby 60 would be notated as 10. The irreal is a real without an embodied, physical existence. It is a state of ambiguity and ambivalence that can never be resolved, in which the impossible and the possible can share a co-existence, if only fleeting. Ashe quite simply is and isn’t. In 1937 he died, as I’m sure you are aware, of a ruptured aneurysm.

DT: Indeed. So I ask you a question, el Professor, that I have asked of the other wraiths in this series: where exactly are you? And indeed if the concept makes any sense, when are you?

Borges: This is a difficult response to put into words, for as you know I cannot see.

DT: So you are still in darkness?

Borges: Yes. Blind below as well as above dust.

DT: Ever allusive. If we knew where the shade of William Faulkner was, he would no doubt be pleased with the allusion. I ask a different question then. Since you can hear me, as I presume you can as we are having this conversation, what, if anything, do you hear in your compartment of the void?

Borges: I hear a gentle, very low humming sound that is not displeasing to the ear… [pauses for thought] and a kind of rustling. And there is no sense of time passing but instead a continuous present.

DT: Now this is interesting. I have no doubt you will remember that in Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett has a brief exchange in which Vladimir and Estragon talk about “all the dead voices” they hear, describing them as a rustling of leaves, as well as being stuck in the here and now, in which there is “no lack of void”. And they weren’t even dead.

Borges: I had the great honour of sharing the 1961 Prix Formentor with Señor Beckett.

DT: I’m sure it was an honour. And for Sam.

*

DT: Can you precisely describe the “unreality” of Herbert Ashe?

Borges: Con respeto my friend, this has already been detailed in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”. Señor Ashe regrettably passed away not long after receiving a mysterious package from Brazil, a book which I found some time afterwards.

DT: Yes, a book which contained in detailed form the history of an unknown planet. One of my favourite descriptions is “its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish”. And even more suggestively marvellous, its “algebra and its fire”.

Borges: You are too kind.

DT: Jorge, if I may address you as such at this stage in the discussion.

Borges: Please.

DT: To conclude I thought it might be fitting to briefly address the theme of unreality in relation to another of your texts, though I wouldn’t necessarily call them fictions.

Borges: I’m intrigued.

DT: The Book of Imaginary Beings.

Borges: Por supuesto.

DT: In the Foreword you very simply describe the difference between zoology, or the “zoo of reality” and what is generally referred to as crypto-zoology, or the “zoo of mythology”.

Borges: Si.

DT: This “second zoo”, you write, “whose fauna is comprised not of lions but of sphinxes and gryphons and centaurs”, is ostensibly made up of “elements taken from real creatures” and that such combinations provide possibilities that “border on the infinite”. This is very elegantly put but also, dare I say it, a very simple concept, especially coming from you.

Borges: This is because like the very small and very large of the Aleph, they co-exist in all time and space.

DT: In the “Library of Babel” you write “I have just written the word ‘infinite’”. This for me is one of the most wonderful and disarming moments in your writing. I don’t suppose you would care to explain what you meant?

At this moment something very strange and completely unexpected occurs. The shade of Borges starts to smoulder slowly into a pale shadow and when he speaks there is no sound. It is clearly his time to depart. As we were about to engage in a discussion of The Book of Imaginary Beings I am struck that Borges is himself such a creature with whom, all the long, I have been conversing in this time and place, a void that is at the same time out of time and place.

As I look at him in silence, he slowly fades to grey.

*

In his Preface to the 1954 First Edition of The Book of Imaginary beings Borges writes we “do not know what the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe”. There is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to the very notion of uttering the word “infinite”. And perhaps there is also something in the imaginary being that many years ago first attracted me to Borges’ enigmatic otherness. On having finished this fiction I came to realise that he too is imaginary, living in an exotic unreality like the Basilisk, the Ichthyocentaur, the Squonk, the Cheshire Cat and Herbert Ashe.