What important works of art Google Doodle is cranking out on a daily basis is big news today, with their commemoration of what would be Jorge Luis Borges' 112th birthday. Everyone from the LA Times to the Telegraph to Time magazine is reporting on the genius who wrote short stories in the style of epic literature, twisting a reader's ideas of perception. Even Death + Taxes is using this as an excuse to try their hand at intellectualism (ha ha).
Magical realism! Infinity! Synchronicity! Labyrinths of the mind! Invisible webs! Holy shit!What Google Doodles did not commemorate was the passing of Joey Vento, owner of Geno's Steaks and contemporary Tea Party legend. Coincidence? Borges would think so.
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These folks are treating with kid gloves the life of a man whose first love was metaphor and second a good trick. Borges wrote about eternal puzzles, impossible architecture, immortality, vast libraries and oceans of knowledge, epochs and eras and small moments, and religious and literary and entirely made up near-mythological characters as if he were reporting on them. Like, it is a fact that these things all exist and coalesce.So I picked up my copy of Borges' The Aleph and Other Stories to settle in for a nice afternoon of avoiding work (aka "I'm doing research for the post I'm writing on Borges, so I'm sorry boss but you won't be able to reach me for a while"). The first story, "The Immortal," is a "found" manuscript of an eternal soul, mostly as he begins to discover he's immortal via wandering through a horrific, lonely labyrinth. Suddenly he realizes a mute creature with dubious perceptive capabilities is following him.At this point, I had a very clear thought: My dog, in a past life, used to be my horse.I turned the page and read this passage: