Borges & the ugly duckling theorem

For Buber, the I exists only in the I & Thou. Otherwise, even for itself, the I is merely an it. 

The I that is an it is the Freudian id. The ego may seek transcendence. What happens if the super-ego is weak or missing?

I imagine thoughts like this would have crossed readers minds when the following was first published

'Borges & I 

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.

Things are done to things or to people. But only people feel those things.  

I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary.

Borges is like an institutional building which has some poignant association or personal significance for us. We stop at the entrance, perhaps out of habit, and notice an unimportant detail- e.g. the fretwork on the ornamental archway. But, it is our ability to notice such things which exiles us from what is across the threshold. Why is that?

At one time, mirrors were a gateway. The denizens of the mirror world would often launch attacks upon us. The Yellow Emperor, by his magic, reduced them to the virtuality of slavish imitation. But, for a man from what Prebisch called the periphery not the core, one who knew the terms of trade must always move against his people and that Cold Looking Glass Wars would inevitably become hot or dirty on his soil, the sullen insolence of the man in the mirror revealed the malicious inscrutability of every sort of double or mask. Ramanunja may have celebrated the Holy Trinity of image, pre-image and mirror, but the mirror was of stone and the image a fossilized emblem of petrified rage- an insatiable bellicosity in suspended animation. The Mussar may have spoken of the spiritual needs of ipseity as being the material needs of alterity. But where slavery is all that triumphs over war, there can be no caritas or koinonia. The Hegelian struggle for recognition has been frozen by a Gorgon's glance. No mirror is not a brick in a Chinese Wall which will inevitably come tumbling down. No specular image, no double, no shadow, but chafes at its bondage to what it seeks to annihilate and displace. No clepsydra but counts down to that final conflagration. Which, I suppose, is the reason

I like hourglasses,

Also Mums used to have egg-timers back then. Kids found them fascinating. Hourglasses are ornamental. Perhaps their sands are more precious than such passing moments as slip from our hands. Unlike our golden afternoons, we can always turn the hourglass over and start again.  Who doesn't like them?

maps,

Treasure maps? 

eighteenth-century typography,

on a treasure map?

the taste of coffee

I want to drink coffee. It's what grownups drink. Some day soon, I'll give up Ovaltine.  

and the prose of Stevenson;

the guy who wrote not just Treasure Island and Jekyll & Hyde  but also the Wrong Box. His was a narrative wine which needed no stylistic bush. 

he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor.

Many of us deploy personae such that different aspects of our personality are deliberately exaggerated. Thus, at work you might play up behavioral tics associated with obsessive diligence, whereas, amongst your friends, you wish to appear a head-banger indifferent to all save hard liquor and heavy metal. 

Is there are a real person under the plethora of masks we have fashioned for ourselves or which were fastened upon us in the womb? Perhaps. But only if there is some other real person we could be in a real relation to. Without such an anchor, or Archimedian point, independent of, for outside, our own simulacra, we would remain solitary prisoners of our own dream of a world. 

There is a problem here. If you don't think you are yourself authentic, you are like the ugly duckling in Hans Christian Andersen's fable. Wherever you go, whoever you meet, no relationship of yours can relate you to the real you- for all anybody can see is an ugly or pitiable creature. Then, rushing at a group of swans in the hope that those beautiful birds might end your misery by a stroke of their powerful wings, you find you have been returned to your own. You too are a swan. You stretch your wings and fly off with your kin. But, even now, you have only found your own real self- that of a swan- because you are part of their flight. 

The 'ugly duckling theorem' of Satasi Watanabe states that if there are finitely many properties combinable by logical connectives, and there are finitely many objects; then any two different objects share the same number of (extensional) properties. Essentially this means that no classification is possible without some sort of bias. Otherwise, an ugly duckling shares as many properties with a tiger as a swan. 

Obviously, if 'birds of a feather flock together', then 'cluster analysis' can distinguish between naturally occurring groups without any initial bias or preconceived notions. Indeed, given enough data, an 'unsupervised learning' algorithm could calculate the 'Mahalanobis distance' between ducks and swans and tigers and so forth. However, it might also show that, poetically, I cluster with flatulent swine, whereas in financial terms, I more am more closely related to constipated church-mice. In other words,  even strong A.I would be of little use to the ugly duckling. This is because whatever it is which creates 'natural groupings' is itself wholly arbitrary. 

A quite different point is that, if 'naturality' is not a bias what actually is it? That which optimizes utility or efficiency or something of that sort? Alternatively, we may search for 'uncorrelated asymmetries' which enable us to tell the original from the fake. But is 'authenticity' a 'bourgeois strategy'? Is it the sort of thing lawyers could agree about or which Banks could use as collateral? Borges's generation probably thought they could have sort of privileged relationship to 'Being' or 'Becoming' or the Racial Oversoul or some such shit but, by the time 'Borges & I' was published, a more pessimistic, and nihilistically permissive, existentialism was in the air. 

What is our proper relationship to one of our own personae? Provided we have finite properties and aren't biased in some way, the mask is as much the man as the man is real to himself. But if a man can be in a relationship to the real person he is, why should that real person not be in a relation to a third man who is as real as the real man but has some additional property lacked by either the man or the real man? But if there is a third, why not a fourth, a fifth etc.? There is an infinite regress here. The I that thinks about the I is its own mise en abyme. Beyond a boundary condition for reflection, this is a divergent series. Alternatively, any given I may be a parasite or a symbiote. But where is the host? 

It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship;

it is an exaggeration no one would be guilty of. The relationship is too tenuous. We are not speaking of a double or a doppelganger- to meet whom is to meet death. There may be supervenience, that too of a spectral kind. What there isn't is emanation or emergence. 

I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me.

Surely, another's work only justifies that other? Perhaps Borges means that the writer justifies his own non-writerly existence by quarrying it for material.  

It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me,

Borges, like Joyce's Shakespeare, isn't saved by the wisdom he has written, the laws he has revealed

perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition.

It seems, Borges rejects the Stoic notion of Oikeiosis- 'natural appropriation' or belonging- at least with respect to what is merely virtual, fictional or a simulation. 

Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him.

He too is destined to perish. Everything will.  

Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger.

But the conatus of a person with a vocation- a calling- is a type of kenosis or self-emptying so as to be a more perfect vessel or instrument.  

I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar.

I'm no connoisseur of high-brow literature but even I find Borges almost everywhere save in his books. But this is because, in bits, they are good. They have 'apoorvata'. Each time you return to them, you find something new.  

Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs

I suppose this would have involved taking a side in the political controversies of the time 

to the games with time and infinity,

Borges had chosen a side- but it was a coin with only one face 

but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things.

That well-bred man of letters shielded us from those terrors probably because we were they.  

Thus my life is a flight

The collective noun for what, taking wing, the ugly duckling became is a flight. 

and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

Everything is going to destruction save Allah's face. 

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Of Henry James it was said, there was James the First, James the Second and then there was the Old Pretender. Was this what happened to Borges? It would be convenient for us to think so. We don't know, we don't want to know, which of us, at which times, is a page torn from Borges's Universal History of the heart's darkness. I'm not saying I am content to be an ugly duckling. It's just that I get air-sick.