Jorge Louis Borges and I Stroll Through Gaza

“......we have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time; but we have left in its architecture tenuous and eternal interstices of unreason, so that we know it is false.”- Borges

"So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, "Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, its bitter....but 'in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey."
- Revelations

Borges and I walked through the still life of a gossamer fabric undone, a psychic tear within an indelible and pervasive wound folding up like a cheap umbrella in the chaotic hoard of asteroids unleashed from pixels burning the atmosphere in a metallic ringing sound , a concussive rent that lingers..a tearing.

We walked through the pulverized ruins of dust that floated in the dry heat through Gaza, The dust pulled water into an acidic bitterness that sucked the humidity from our lungs. Borges had managed the removal of time from within the infinity of metaphors to erase any trace of our passage and whatever we passed was if in a gallery of images we had memorized from childhood, this is that, there is over here as it’s corruption had ceased in it’s nexus to become what it is not. Corpses as criticism within a rhetoric so black it illuminated what may be.

Do not look away. There is a desperation in words that have been stilled here, look at this child interrupted...eyes skyward, dull..open. How many of the living are ghosts ? he asked.
Gaza at the well of a spring pouring back onto itself, receding into a blurring of any distinctions we could triangulate as arising from ourselves.
The sun dispensed a grey or was it a sepia tone to this retrocausal scrapbook of primary images devouring themselves into a sour smelling series of pools congealing at the head of this child, evaporating as it was pulled into the dust as a mortar, a clay of eternal return waiting for a spark, a flash of lightning that would organize these images back from whence they came ..premature, stillborn, thrashing yet as lifeless as a plastic cup...one that rolled down a hill beyond our sight.

This world is a book that I have imagined I have read, Borges said. He spoke as he pulled a length of iron bar from a shattered block. All this has a cursed innocence about it he mumbled drawing a circle around where he stood. It is impossible to know what is between the movement from A to B. A gallery of images from childhood,,this is that,,there is over here. But..it is not and so we mourn by rote and passage from a book we cannot read. He pointed to a man frozen in the air..one arm had been dislodged from it’s socket..his face an image of ecstatic and primal apoplexy undone, deconstructed becoming what is not versus the detonation of an explosive whose trajectory and source led back to a beam of light shone onto the brackish waters of some primeval swamp and in it’s cylinder skeletons metamorphosed to fit what was between and betwixt the intention and what was not..as a suspension with a medium of an amnesiacs attempt to recall a name that had yet to be invented.

This is Gaza, he said. This indicates what is between A and B.
Borges pointed to a soldier also frozen into statuary in our invisible passage through this conflagration of becoming what is not. Can you decipher this?, he asked. No, I mumbled trying to avoid what I saw. Borges sighed. He is enthralled with a terrible beauty he is drawing from compulsion to be a character not quite here or there, immune from becoming but what has he become? A something between A and B , an unknown metaphor for a book he imagined he has read. A bridge too far? I asked.

Everything is a bridge, a diatom. Perhaps a rare flower that is blooming atop a precipice that this adventure seeks in order to fathom itself. He signs again. It could never make up it’s mind..always comparing, always undoing to do what is unfamiliar to seek an image of itself and we serve as a reflecting principle of what is not to become something unimaginable..I suppose that could be an aim..but then we play with a bad deck of cards in time. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle to become more than being. Gaza is an endgame for cooperation in keeping the rituals at the threshold of liminality intact as it’s like a web a spider has lain across the path of ghosts.A purgatorial snare whose gates invite what we imagine could be as much as what brought us here has imagined deconstruction as a path for remorse that holds no glory, no sanctification that we seek as it slips away.

Or should I say as we slip way undone to be yet again rethought as between another A and B, another universe stacked atop one another in a frenzy of calculated randomness, as it were a lottery of recombinant potential in search of a plausible story line. This is the danger of giving up your comfortable chair. This is Gaza.I must return to a beginning Borges said, back to the library back into page seven. I leave you to return to becoming whatever it is you have imagined has become and we will both search to be recognized by what is incommensurable.