Things
My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,
The obedient lock, the belated notes
The few days left to me will not find time
To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop,
A book, and crushed in its pages the withered
Violet, monument to an afternoon
Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten,
The mirror in the west where a red sunrise
Blazes its illusion. How many things,
Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,
Serve us like slaves who never say a word,
Blind and so mysteriously reserved.
They will endure beyond our vanishing;
And they will never know that we have gone.
Jorge Luis Borges, Elogio de la sombra, 1969 (trans. Stephen Kessler)
Symbol
The poem opens with a cane. What do we infer?
Sight loss and old age. The degenerating body.
Motion and stasis. Solidity and infirmity. Weariness. Journey’s end.
What else?
Do we infer that this stick is, by its pole position, the most important, the most significant ‘thing’ in the poem?
Coming or going?
The cane, the loose change, the keys, the docile lock. These are the objects we encounter as we return home or to a familiar place.
Or they are the objects gathered and checked for (pockets patted, bags opened) before we close the front door and begin a journey. Do I have everything I need? Cane, wallet, keys. Now to the door.
In the hand
These are touched things – felt for, held, manipulated. They have a distinctive shape and tactility in the hand: the polished wood of the cane handle, the greasy coins and the sharp angles of the keys. A particular, recognisable sound: jangle, scrape and tap.
Useless
Those 'belated notes'. Were they found by the feet on the doormat as we entered the house? Were they encountered by a hand on the side table near the door? Bits of paper, envelopes. Physical things which in the hands of the speaker (if we imagine that the speaker of the poem is Borges) cannot fulfil their intended role as conveyers of information.
Why are they 'belated'? Because what holds the speaker back from reading the notes is time, rather than blindness. Had these notes arrived in 1950, then the speaker would have been able to read them (Borges lost his 'reading sight' in 1955). They would not be late then.
I enjoy this inversion, that it is time rather than blindness that has rendered the notes useless: it is not the individual's fault they cannot access the text, but time's.
Without sight, the playing cards are also useless. The book has something tactile in it, but it is an old, faded thing - perhaps it disintegrates in the hand. An inaccessible momento to a lost memory.
Many things
The turning point in this sonnet is signalled by an exclamation, or a sigh:
How many things,
Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,
Why these things here, and why in this order? Perhaps they are things found by a hand as it passes along a sideboard, things found by feet scanning the floor of an apartment. Old things, forgotten things, favourite things. Random things. A chaos of things.
In a later collection, Borges writes of this 'chaos of things', what he calls 'chaotic enumeration':
it should seem like a chaos, a disorder, and it should also be, intimately, a cosmos, an order.
Borges, La Cifra (1981)
The cosmos, in which our subjective realities reside (along with all things) can be figured as both chaotic or orderly, depending on our perspective. Could this chaos of things enumerated in the sonnet - this blind chaos of things - also be figured as a kind of order, a system with its own logic and meaning?
Blind things
blind and so mysteriously reserved
The things in this poem are blind things. They are blind things in the blithe way this adjective might be used to mean ignorant, insensate, inanimate. But they are also blind things in that they are things encountered and enumerated by a blind person.