[......]

Writing this while tapping on these keys of
no return, their infinite regress becoming a
certainty I seek. Questing after words that
most compel the reader's attention while
always sure that what I write is for the void.
Into his and into yours. While this is Borges'
question, it is also spilling into mine. Knowing
that his proposition has already spent its
muscular sensations, their past tactility lightly
layered onto this day's outside sway of silhouetted
branches filling up my window frame. Scratching
all that constitutes my current 'I' onto glass.
His "nothingness of personality" also mine.
His no-whole-self-in-travel soaks its seamless
situation mirrored overtop of mine. How
mirrors-of-the-past project upon the present
walk-of-any-distance like a midnight sky,
while also knowing one can't count the stars
on any given night, even if to braid them into
crowns. Knowing this, that memory is a noun.
Its consciousness recurring imprecisely, as if to
say (with allatonceness): 'I know, I do not know'.
How any present moment always totters on the brink
of its goodbye. And suddenly discerning how no
given one can justify my own. That each subsequent
unfolding-into-more is irrevocably provisional.
This, too, is Borges' notion. That we are nothing
if not the circumstantial flow of now. Like
Schopenhauer asking what he was before his birth
and Borges transcribing his answer into this;
"I was always I; that is, all who during that time
said I, were in fact I." Understanding how the
twilight of this statement lies lurking in the
shadowy origins of language.

There is no whole self. Any of life's
present situations is seamless and sufficient.
Are you, as you ponder these disquietudes, anything
more than an indifference gliding over the argument
I make, or an appraisal of the opinions I expound?"
(Jorges Louis Borges, 1922)

His claim that I am not my visual nor my auditory
reality because if so, darkness and silence would
erase me. Nor am I any desire for consciousness
because without its projection, without the
expression of its ever-shifting shades, I could
not exist. No, I am nothing but this now, is what
he claims.

Which makes me ponder compulsions, wondering at the
unending verbiage of poets past. Their unfaltering
desire to become a palette of colours mixed into
sonic rhythms that transcribe the daily blackandwhite.
Languidly lettered locutions siphoned into print and
all for what? Just to note that there are 100,000
english words contained within its dictionaries,
while there are only 31,000 spanish words and 29,000
french ones? So who can say which poets conjure more
ideas or express them with greater grace? As Borges
concludes, "We touch a sphere, see a small heap of
dawn-coloured light, our mouths enjoy a tingling
sensation, and we lie to ourselves that those three
disparate things are only one thing called an orange."

To deluge and to converge lies within his answer. Since
his question traces poetry's persuasion, it seeps within
that stretch of words that touch the future with his
hope.

"A deliberately poetic vocabulary, a record of
ideas incompatible with common speech, would be a
different matter, however. The world of appearances
is complicated, and language has only verbalized a
miniscule part of its potential, indefatigable
combinations. Why not create a word, only one, for
the converging perception of the cow bells announcing
day's end and the sunset in the distance? Why not
invent another for the dilapidated and threatening
face of the streets at dawn? And another for the
well-meaning though pitifully ineffectual, first
streetlamp to go on at dusk while it is still light
out? And another for our lack of trust in ourselves
after we have done wrong?" (JLB, 1926)

There is no rush of time in all of this.
No near or far. But only contraposto.
The counterbalance of poetic diagonals.
A path towards the upanddown of love and loss.
The graphite line of joy and devastation
captured by its endless reading-through.