Eye of The Other Tiger: Borges and the Dreamer Within

Triptych for Borges' poem "El Otro Tigre" by Elza Norma Gonzalez

“The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.” 

Jorge Luis Borges, from “The Circular Ruins” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (a source)

All may read the entire English translation of Borges' text, "The Circular Ruins." This piece of intensely magical literature breathes a truth rarely spoken. Life is not simply a dream, but a dream within a dream. As one may chance on an ancient temple, or its ruins, there is a parallel labyrinth quality of sacred architecture and geometry in life and consciousness. As we dig deeper into the internal realities of our lives, we find that to dream is more resonant with the truths of our ephemeral existence. More and more, as I live a life of conscious dreaming, I confront the ultimate truth that I am impermanent, and was not made to last. To dream within the dream of life is the beginning of truth-seeking in the creative arts, and in the drama of everyday voice and action. The dream within the dream is the resonant core of our foundation; the heart of our mind. And finally, we are led into the holy of holies, the central chamber of the temple ruins, where we see through the eyes of a Dreamer who is not us, and yet who dreams our lives. Or, as Borges writes in El Otro Tigre (translated by Alastair Reid), "Let us look for a third tiger. This one will be a form in my dream like all the others..."

See my related posts: Borges On Volcanic Riddles of the Unconscious & Borges and The Ancestral Mirror of World Literacy

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 She shares with me her dream by being, and I become hers.

Enter Her Image by RK

She Above the Soft Night by RK

Full Moon Pines by RK

Inner City Arboreal Heart Transplant by RK

Face of the Dreamer by RK

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...napping between contiguous web-threshed freedoms to a forgotten deafening…and thickening the low-coasted noon of the heat wave forecast…my mind becomes sullen with blank remorse and a violent emptiness fills me…bearing down on memory like a catastrophic angel of the white light…pitch black featureless dusk of interpersonal reason in the long endless fight to be good and seek happiness in the joyful cries of others…

Bingeing on the unnecessary billions…whose lives anger at the human mold in a resounding attempt to save a bit of that home…that once was stolen from the earth’s own sun-dried hands…still cool with the dank earth and her womb of littered seeds

And the rains pour angelic wisdom over the arisen anguish…to craze for the source and defy the powers that be in an unanswered mind of free rationality...

Dreaming of berries in season and wild-crafting the maze of Her swollen lust…turning on the locomotion of boom bang music over the café loudspeaker…three hours into space in the beyond of our lost anxious sound...

“Each to their own” writes back the lazy teacher…beginning with Zen and ending with architecture…bending for no one except the jungle fire steaming behind the glassed promenade…glowering sickly in the mud of visionary astonishment…shaken in a thud…the mortified martyrs’ brought cinematic drip dry skin…to toast their muscular direction to the lunar fist...

excerpts from "Random Parkade of Fences"

Speechless Movement of Noetic Sound

"...to use art not as self-expression, but as self-alteration; to become more open." 

"In Zen, they say, if something is boring after 2 minutes, try it for 4, if still boring, try it for 8, 16, 32, and so on. Eventually, one discovers that it's not boring at all, but very interesting."

John Cage

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At my father’s house, the neighbors are belligerent. They drink in squalor and rev engines in domestic rage, puffing their chests with the heave of self-created poverty, a traumatic school of bundled nerves, fraying and pressed against the hot ice of American dreams. On the road between my father’s and their house, I stare, empathizing with their tragic isolation. As I spin my head around to my father’s lawn, the grass is inundated with naked souls, barefooted and striving with dead honor to lust and feed off each other’s energy. Multi-colored bodies writhe and shake as a spawn of ghosts shrieking wildly in the post-greed high of the stubborn suburb.

Recoiling mad into my private bathroom at my mother’s I freak wryly, drowning my habit in a sore crack addiction. Black pills behind the mirror scream deftly into my ear at all hours. Howls brew, slaking my darkest corner with a dreamless food. Dispassionate and apologetic, I am exposed by my mother, who slowly weans me off the fatal addiction. Re-entering the street, I pass between the spiritual purgatory of population and the isolated wallowing of violent speed.

A time after, I walk carefully through a glowing green brush in the rural vein of the Northeast country. Carrying our instruments, my Love and I meander toward the new home of my father, way out in the bush of Maine. On their property, I play with a friendly cat, shaking a healthy, felled branch over its crooked head, radiant with happy fervor. We are received. I eat a stomach-full of red steak. I haven’t eaten meat in 7 years! The flesh is warm and satisfying. I ask, “Is the steak from Argentina?” The label says, “Made in America” just like any other consumer product. Sitting out by an outdoor hearth in the midday sun, my Love and I begin to play music for the flies. The wind is bright with security and home.

I imagine our next phase, on a bridge in San Francisco, street performing with a lively troupe and befriending a nut seller on our way to public grace.

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Country

"To dream of being in a beautiful and fertile country, where abound rich fields of grain and running streams of pure water, denotes the very acme of good times at hand. Wealth will pile in upon you, and you will be able to reign in state in any country." (iDream)

Meat

"To see raw meat in your dream symbolizes that there will be many obstacles in achieving your goals. If you dream of cooked meat, this symbolizes that you will see others obtain the object that you have been striving for." (iDream)

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separation into the unfair glory of a broken now,
embittered jealousy and temptation from the host of a brewing psychic sickness,
guarding the predawn monumental distance among the enchained
battered souls of a deeply entrenched loss
complexified and exponential falsification of death's human mask
still breathing the attuned words of spiritual greed in the crescent boon of a perfect desert sleep,
and involved within an enclosed world all their own,
the forgotten beauty of an intoxicating truth still relieves the air above with its tempting,
yet out of reach and petrified, animalistic burden
feeding on the glow of the moon
and the laughter of pagan lights streaking past the beyond
in pairs of three and nine,
we forever move. 

 

- excerpt from "4 Dreams"