All
This Without Mention of Jungles
My Ficciones
book opens on its own. I will walk into my living
room from some distant place and there it will be,
flopped open to the page whose crease has broken the
spine. The pages have somehow become a little
crinkled, as if a child had been reading along with
me, one who was learning how to turn the page.
Underlines, squiggles, arrows, parenthesis, questions,
questions, questions and of course circles fill the
page. Circles that circle the word "circle",
a circle that is the central focus of the title, The
Circular Ruins, circles dance in the seven pages
in form of literal description and in metaphor.
Circles run around and around in Jorge Borges’
stories, circles started spinning in my head, my life
became the circles in the story. My Ficciones book
opens on its own and I keep coming back to it, a
repeating cycle, a circle. Who knew that this small
story could pack so much punch?
When Jorge Luis Borges
wrote The Circular Ruins the world had been at
war for five years. For five years the world was on
fire, fighting fire with fire. For five years, people
had been dying; people had been killing one another,
all for ideas. From Germany came Hitler and the Third
Reich. Out of Italy marches Mussolini. In Russia,
Stalin starts his farm. Through allied forces and
political ties, the world is at war. Like a
playground game, or pinky promises one countries head
is tied to the tail of the next, and the globe
becomes the Axis and the Allies. Argentina, where
Borges’ lived, was one of the only countries
that claimed neutrality throughout the majority of
the war. In a way, Borges could sit in his giant
library across the globe from the guns, tanks and
fire of the war and look at World War II from an
outsider’s perspective. (As outside as one can
be in a war that encompassed the globe.) So in 1944
Jorge Luis Borges wrote The Circular Ruins as
a way to comment on the tragedy of the human
condition, of the inescapable and self-perpetuated
cycle of creation and destruction that has been the
history of all humanity, and is destined to be our
future as well.
In order to talk about
such a heated time as 1944, Borges turned to a time
in the past where the world was on fire in a way that
mirrors that of World War II. In the beginning of The
Circular Ruins Borges makes brief mention of the
stranger coming from the mountain lands of the South,
"where Zend language has not been contaminated
by Greek." (Borges 57) This tiny reference alone
leads to research on the Zend language, which was a
religious text used in Persia before the raids of
Alexander the Great swept across the Middle East,
leaving burning ruins in his wake. A few lines later
in text, our hero from the South drags himself into
an ancient circular ruin. "This circle was a
temple which had been devoured by ancient fires,
profaned by the miasmal jungle, and whose god no
longer received the homage of men." (Borges 57)
This suggests that the story is set in a time beyond
the raids of Alexander the Great, but not so far past
that the Zend language had been lost from the hills.
The circular temples were used in the practice of the
Zoroastrian religion, for which the ancient texts
were written in Zend. It does not appear that the
exact date of occurrence is very important in
comparison to the implied message that is being
conveyed by using this specific time of controversy.
When Borges uses this
one man from the South as his main character, he
picks one of the "others." The man who
crawls into the ruined temple is that of a dying
breed. His language is no longer recognized and the
people around him fear his connection to the fire god
because he is no longer understood. When the Wizard
arrives in the circular ruins, he finds what is
referred to as a "sepulchral niche," or a
tomblike niche in order to curl up and to dream. In a
ruined temple, this old man sleeps in a tomb in order
to dream up a man. This tomb and this ruined temple
are symbolic of the man’s quickly fading culture.
As the Western world spread influence in the Middle
East, there was a clashing of cultures that had to be
accounted for. Directly after Alexander’s
crusades the Middle East (or the "World"
then) went through the Hellenistic Period. During
this time Eastern tradition met up with Western
philosophy and tried to hold hands. As one culture (generally
the one with the most arms) dominates the other
culture diminishes until what emerges is a new
culture based on old ideas.
During and before
World War II the world certainly saw its fair share
of cultural creation and demise. With the rise of
Communism, Fascism, and the Nazi party all occurring
during the beginning of the 20th century,
the world was in a state of radical change. Strong
and charismatic leaders like Mussolini, Hitler and
Stalin led movements forcing change that were backed
by military power. All of these movements in Europe
set out do dramatically change the world’s
current state of existence. Much like Alexander
crusading through Persia with his Aristotle inspired
ideas, military regimes such as the Third Reich were
interested in furthering their own ethos, and
destroying other cultures in their wake. When Borges
was writing The Circular Ruins, World War II
was raging in all of its ugly brutality. There was
really no denying that the Nazi party was anti-semantic,
no way to casually brush off the Ghetto’s or the
black smoke of the concentration camps. Life as the
world had once known it was literally going up in
smoke; entire ethos are being destroyed by flames.
Through The Circular Ruins Borges seems to see
this destruction and creation of entire cultures not
as an unusual experience, but one that is a
repetitious cycle.
In The Circular
Ruins there are several different textual clues
that suggest this idea of life as a repetition cycle.
The most obvious is the reference of fire to ash to
fire again. The burning effigy of a forgotten god
suggests of civilizations long ruined and buried
under the cyclical destruction of time. When the
stranger first crawls to the temple, the effigy is
the color of ash. Just as the "sepulchral niche"
(Borges 58) suggested death of a forgotten culture,
so does the ashen complexion of the effigy suggest a
recent period of destruction. When the stranger
begins to dream a man, the god becomes less ash and
more fire, as if a new idea is being born inside this
strangers mind. Perhaps the man that this stranger
dreamed was Jesus Christ, perhaps Muhammad, perhaps
Darwin, or perhaps Hitler they are all one in the
same. Every man is just a different answer to the
same question of existence. These ideas are spread
through arms, through religion, through scientific
reason. However it is spread, the cycle cannot be
broken. Fire burning will eventually turn to ash.
Even the greatest ideas will soon be challenged by
another idea. When Alexander the Great clashed with
the Zoroastrian religion of Persia, it was the gods
of the ancients versus the philosophy of the newly
established Western thinkers, and in the fire of a
new idea, the old burns to ashes. The land became
"contaminated by Greek." (Borges 57) A
blending and mixing and adaptation of cultures
commenced, and an entirely new and different idea
emerged.
When the forgotten god
is at the height of his dreamt power, Borges
describes the ambiguous god in a nearly nameless way,
"…it was not an atrocious bastard of a
tiger and a colt, but at the same time these two
fiery creatures and also a bull, a rose, and a storm.
This multiple god revealed to him (the stranger) that
his earthly name was Fire." (Borges 61)
Throughout the entire story, the god never takes a
definite form. Always changing, never exact, this god
can come in many different forms, but the only
element that is consistent is that it is sometimes
fire and sometimes ash; it is cyclical. At one point,
Borges uses the term "effigy" to describe
the god of the circular ruins. (Borges 60) An effigy
is "a dummy, often roughly made and
intentionally amusing or insulting, representing
somebody or something disliked or despised." (Encarta
World English Dictionary) The use of the word effigy
suggests that the god, constantly in a state of
destruction, represents all those foolish ideas of
the past, and those great ideas of the future that
will eventually become foolish ideas of the past as
time continues on. During the time that Borges wrote
this story, Nazi Germany was considered by some to be
the next great idea. Fascists believed in Fascism.
Communists believed in Communism, and the Nazi’s
believed that the Jewish were a problem. History soon
found it fit to burn this Nazi effigy. At some point,
perhaps Democracy will take its turn or top of the
circular ruins, perhaps it will be another Rome.
Even the title, The
Circular Ruins, suggests this unavoidable dilemma
of existence. I am reminded of a song I used to sing
when I was a brownie,
"Make new
friends, but keep the old
One is Silver
and the other gold.
A circle is
round, it has no end,
That’s
how long I want to be your friend." (My
Mind, II)
A circle is round, it
has no end: quite an ominous message. The ruins below
this perpetually cycling god of Fire are round. They
have no end. We will continue to exist, and we will
always be in ruins.
Beyond the temple and
the God, the very existence of the dreamer and the
dream is cyclical. At the beginning of the story, as
a foreshadowing of things to come, the stranger is
introduced as a man so solely consumed with his
"immediate obligation to dream" that "if
some one had asked him his name or to relate some
event of his former life, he would not have been able
to give an answer." (Borges 57 & 58)
Although when the story is read the first time, this
is an inconsequential bit of information, once the
story is read entirely through we see that this is an
ominous clue that the dreamer is also nothing more
than a mere dream. When the dreamer is finally ready
to send his son to the "temple whose remains
were turning white downstream," (Borges 61) the
dreamer "destroyed in him all memory of his
years of apprenticeship." (Borges 62) Then the
dream is sent out into the real world. None of the
characters in this story are anything but the
substance of a dream. In the end of the story the
dreamer is engulfed by flames, "For what had
happened many centuries before was repeating itself."
(Borges 63), the cycle of existence continues. The
dreamer is astonished when the flames pass over him
without burning him. It is in this very last line of
the story that the dreamer realizes that "he
also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming
him." (Borges 63) This pinnacle moment in the
story may be Borges’ comment on the idea of the
individual. Borges seems to be suggesting that no
person is in fact composed entirely of his or her
self, but is a myriad of other people and thoughts
that have been constructed our of the past. The
dreamer feels that he is in control throughout the
entirety of the story until this very last line. At
one point, the narrator suggests that when the
stranger falls asleep he thinks, "The son I have
engendered is waiting for me and will not exist if I
do not go to him." (Borges 61) He has no idea
that he, in turn, does not exist without the dream of
another man.
This idea of existence
being based on the dreams of other men is present
from the very beginning of the story, if you know
where to look for it. The Circular Ruins
starts with a quote from Through the Looking Glass
by Lewis Carroll. The quote, "And if he left off
dreaming about you…" (Borges 57, Carroll VI)
is taken from a section of text that is ends up being
quite revealing in comparative context. Alice,
Tweedledee and Tweedledum are watching the Red King
sleep:
"He's
dreaming now," said Tweedledee: "and
what do you think he's dreaming about?
Alice said
"Nobody can guess that."
"Why,
about you!" Tweedledee exclaimed,
clapping his hands triumphantly. "And if
he left off dreaming about you, where do you
suppose you'd be?"
"Where I
am now, of course," said Alice.
"Not you!"
Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. "You'd
be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing
in his dream!"
"If that
there King was to wake," added
Tweedledum, "you'd go out -- bang! --
just like a candle!"
"I
shouldn't!" Alice exclaimed indignantly.
"Besides, if I'm only a sort of thing in
his dream, what are you, I should like to
know?"
"Ditto,"
said Tweedledum.
"Ditto,
ditto!" cried Tweedledee.
He shouted
this so loud that Alice couldn't help saying,
"Hush! You'll be waking him, I'm afraid,
if you make so much noise."
"Well, it's
no use your talking about waking him,"
said Tweedledum, "when you're only one
of the things in his dream. You know very
well you're not real."
"I am
real!" said Alice, and began to cry.
-Through
the Looking Glass, Ch IV
(http://www.kellscraft.com/throughthelookingglassch4.html)
Because this is the
first quote of the story, it acts as a sort of
premise for things to follow. Looking at this quote
in context, one sees that The Circular Ruins
is a story that is based on this same idea that is
found in Through the Looking Glass. It is not
just that history repeats itself and will continue to
do so because life is cyclical, but it is the ideas
and dreams of the past that define the future. Every
person living now is a menagerie of all things past.
Hitler is not the mastermind of a completely evil
idea. He was born and influenced by Nietzsche, Marx
and Freud. He was part failed painter, and only
failed because the other hodge-podge artist critics
and buyers were influenced by the dreams and
expectations of others. Hitler was made partially by
the poverty stricken state of Germany, which was
partially caused by World War One, which was
partially started by an assassination of Franz
Ferdinand. The cycle goes on for as long as human
existence does. We learn and are influenced by those
who go before us, who in turn are taught and
influenced by those before them. When the dreamer
realizes in the end of the story that he is not in
control, Borges is suggesting that it is this cycle
that perpetuates existence. It is not the individual;
it is not the dream that exists. It is the past that
dictates the current and predicts the future. It may
appear that we are individuals; it may appear that we
have control of the now, but what are we but elements
and ideas of the past?
The dreamer in the
story comes to this realization "with relief,
with humiliation, with terror." (Borges 63)
Alice refuses to recognize her existence as the Red
Kings dream, crying because she believes herself to
be real. In The Circular Ruins when the
dreamer dreamt the young man, he had created a "clumsy,
crude and elemental…Adam of dreams." (Borges
60) But what was the dreamer but a clumsy, crude and
elemental Adam of dreams as well? What are we all but
carbon copies one hundred times over from the first
man who decided to ask the eternal question of
existence? And so history looks for answers, and
combines different ideas, and takes different puzzle
pieces and puts them all together and that is now.
But now is just a clumsy, crude and elemental dream
of a dream of a dream. We do not have the answer; we
are not even close. We are just the dust that ideas
are made of, and somehow the clumsy that is now will
create a formula for a future that is determined by
our current existence in this clumsy and groping
moment. The choice of now determines the future, and
our choices are determined by every dreamer of the
past. Is there really any control? And the ideas just
keep getting thrown to the fire. The world is not
flat. The earth is not the center of the Universe.
Time does not exist. Newtonian physics isn’t
really applicable. Philosophy. Religion. Science.
Kingdoms. Communism. Democracy. Jesus. Ghandi. Hitler.
Osama Bin Laden. All of these are answers to the
question of existence. It seems that this is our fate.