150
PARTISAN REVIEW
me about it: "Poor Julie! She got awfully
queer,
and they had to
shut her up in the Bosch. She's just going to be the
death
of the
nurses who have to
spoon-feed
her! Why, she keeps on talking about
a
coin,
just like Morena Sackmann's
chauffeur.
... "
Time, which generally attenuates memories, only aggravates that
of the Zahir. There was a time when I could visualize the obverse,
and then the reverse. Now I see them simultaneously. This is not as
though the Zahir were crystal, because it is not a matter of one face
being superimposed upon another; rather, it is as though my eye–
sight were spherical, with the Zahir in the center. Whatever is not the
Zahir comes to me fragmentarily, as if from a great distance: the
arrogant image of Clementina; physical pain.
Tennyson once said that
if
we could understand a single flower,
we should know what we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant
that there is no fact, however insignificant, that does not involve
universal history and the infinite concatenation of cause and effect.
Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit in every pheno–
menon, just as the will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit in
every subject. The Cabalists pretend that man is a microcosm, a
symbolic mirror of the universe: he would, according to Tennyson,
be everything. Everything, even the intolerable Zahir.
Before 1948 Julia's destiny will have caught up with me. They
will have to feed me and dress me; I shall not know whether it is
afternoon or morning; I shall not know who Borges was. To call
this prospect terrible is a fallacy, for none of its circumstances will
exist for me. One might as well say that an anaesthetized man feels
terrible pain when they open his cranium. I shall no longer perceive
the universe: I shall perceive the Zahir. According to the teaching
of the Idealists, the words "live" and "dream" are rigorously synony–
mous. From thousands of images I shall pass to one; from a highly
complex dream to a dream of utter simplicity. Others will dream
that I am mad; I shall dream of the Zahir.
In
the empty night hours I can still walk through the streets.
Dawn may surprise me on a bench in Garay Park, thinking (trying
to think) of the passage in the
Asrar Nama
where it says that the
Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the Rending of the Veil. I associ-
