1 Dissolving of the Veil: Barriers of Time, Barriers of the Other Suzanne Kite It is Maya, the veil of deception, which

blinds the eyes of mortals, and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say either that is or that is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine or the sane which the traveller takes from afar for water, or the stray piece of rope he mistakes for a snake. 1 How does one express the infinite nature of reality or the ephemeral texture of time, in mediums such as art and music? The work of Marco Mazzoni and Debussy capture that experience, as well as the work of Jorge Luis Borges. Borges stories in Labyrinths weaves forking pathways that leave the reader questioning which version of time have occurred. Borges is a master of creating stories tangled with the experience of timelessness where his characters experience something very real, but very inexplicable. The same veil that shields our experience of the now from the memories of past is that which shields us from experiencing ourselves and experiencing the Other. The Other is a concept separating the self from someone or something different. The concept of the Other appears in many of Borges stories and essays in Labyrinths. In Partial Magic of the Quixote, Borges addresses the peculiarity of characters reading themselves into stories. Why does it disquiet us to know that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote, and Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the answer: those inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious. 2

1 Schopenhauer, Arthur, R B. H. Haldane, and John Kemp. The World As Will and Idea. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1964. Print 2 Borges, Jorge L, Donald A. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 2000.

Print. pg. 174

2 With the lines between reality and fiction blurred, Borges can completely dissolve the veil between the character and reader. Similarly, Borges often creates a work within a work, creating the First Encyclopedia of Tlon in Tlon, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius, Quixote in Pierre Menard, the Lost Encyclopedia in Garden of Forking Paths. Furthermore, many footnotes and references are fictitious, like the writing career of Pierre Menard or the footnote reference to own fictional character, Jaromir Hladik, in Three Versions of Judas. Borges often uses the concept of the Other to address cultural and political divisions. In The Immortal, Marcus Flaminius Rufus meets a man whom he considers wretched, naming him after the old dog from the Odyssey. Soon he considers that Argos and I participated in different universes 3, until a pivotal disintegration of the veil, separating Marcus and Argos, occurs. Then, with gentle admiration, as if he were discovering something lost and forgotten a long time ago, Argos stammered these words: "Argos, Ulysses' dog." And then, also without looking at me: "This dog lying in the manure." We accept reality easily, perhaps because we intuit that nothing is real. I asked him what he knew of the Odyssey. The exercise of Greek was painful for him; I had to repeat the question. "Very little," he said. "Less than the poorest rhapsodist. It must be a thousand and one hundred years since I invented it. 4 The Immortal speaks clearly to Borges views on the separation felt by people and groups, and its effect on politics and human interaction. In his usually literary flourish, Borges
3 Borges, Jorge L, Donald A. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths. pg. 174 4 Borges, Jorge L, Donald A. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths. pg. 109

3 rips off the veil of differences, revealing that, not only is this dog the author of the seminal work of Western literature, but an immortal man. Similarly, in the Story of the Warrior and the Captive, Borges contrasts three starkly different characters, a warrior in ancient Rome, his English grandmother, and an English girl turned Indian. At the end of the short narrative on the stark differences between each character, the final lines encapsulate the lack of differences in Gods or Borges eyes, stating, Perhaps the stories I have related are one single story. The obverse and the reverse of this coin are, for God, the same. 5 In The Immortal, Borges writes, Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once. 6 Along these lines of thinking, consider that, if immortal, the soul would never cease to be, and not be, the Other infinite times over, with the infinite morphing of the political and cultural landscape. Amongst Borges motifs, like the Other, labyrinths, and dreams, time is a constant subject, but also a tool to form and blur the lines of reality. In The South, a man named Dahlmann miraculously recovers from septicemia, and travels to the South, only to meet his death in a duel. Borges writes, "He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt.
7

Dahlmann may or may not have dreamt his own romanticized death, but,

as Schopenhauer says, Life and dreams are leaves of the same book. 8 How can we assert that

5 Borges, Jorge L, Donald A. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths. pg. 124 6 Borges, Jorge L, Donald A. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths. pg. 110 7 Borges, Jorge L. Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Emece, 1996. Print. 8 Schopenhauer, Arthur, R B. H. Haldane, and John Kemp. The World As Will and Idea. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1964. Print.

pg. 22

4 what we dream is not reality, or that our waking life is not a dream? Schopenhauer suggests that we can never know. The assertion that what is dreamt is less vivid and distinct than what we actually perceive is not to the point, because no one has ever been able to make a fair comparison of the two; for we can only compare the recollections of a dream with the present reality. 9 Borges does not confirm whether Dahlmann dreams or lives his death, but rather creates a cosmos where both are possible, a cosmos where past and present melt into a possible dream. In Deutsches Requiem, Borges proposes that every negligence is deliberate, every chance encounter an appointment, every humiliation a penance, every failure a mysterious victory, every death a suicide. 10 If time were predestined, and we were in control of everything before it happened, time, as we know it, would fall away and there would be no need for past, present, or future. Similarly, Jewish Midrash from the 11th century deals with the possibilities of having pre-determining knowledge. Why, Eleazar asks, does the child forget? Because if it did not forget, the course of this world would drive it to madness if it thought about it in the light of what it knew. 11 Borges studied and quoted the works of Kabbalah scholars, especially Scholems, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. While many Kabbalistic ideas on immortality and time appear in Borges works, he only hints at concepts, never professing a viewpoint on mystic speculation. The Midrash on the Creation of the Child states that after its guardian angel

9 Schopenhauer, Arthur, R B. H. Haldane, and John Kemp. The World As Will and Idea. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1964. Print.

pg. 20
10 Borges, Jorge L, Donald A. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths. p.133 11 Eleazar of Worms, Alazraki, Jaime, Borges and the Kabbalah (New York, 1988), p. 26

5 has given it a fillip upon the nose, the newborn child forgets all the infinite knowledge acquired before its birth in the celestial houses of learning. 12 Borges story The Circular Ruins, depicts a man who dreams a boy into existence, but must erase the childs memory of his own creation. As the man dreams, he was troubled by the impression that all this had happened before. 13 Such a troubled feeling of almost understanding the concepts behind time, are the definitive qualities of the veil of deception. The mans troubled feeling is mirrored throughout Labyrinths, with many characters on the verge of understanding the inexplicable qualities of time, but always just out of reach. In the essay A New Refutation of Time, Borges explains this intense, troubled feeling, as the realization that time is inconceivable and inexplicable. I felt dead. I felt as an abstract spectator of the world, an indefinite fear imbued with science, which is the best clarity of metaphysics. I did not think I had returned upstream on the supposed waters of Time; rather I suspected that I was the possessor of a reticent or absent sense of the inconceivable word eternity. Only later was I able to define that imagination...Time, if we can intuitively grasp such an identity, is a delusion; the difference and inseparability of one moment belonging to its apparent past from another belonging to its apparent present is sufficient to disintegrate it. 14

A veil is a thin, transparent barrier. With a little effort you can see through and even lift its fabric. Examining these veils of separation is Borges device to magnify the structures

12 Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1961), p. 92 13 Borges, Jorge L, Donald A. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths. p. 53 14 Borges, Jorge L, Donald A. Yates, and James E. Irby. Labyrinths. p. 199

6 built by human perceptions, whether temporal or political. As I explore these thin barriers within time and the Other, my perception of reality morphs and changes, but I have accepted that there will be no conclusion, because nothing, no knowledge, can replace the constant debate15, whether that debate is cultural, political, spiritual, or temporal.

Dark Mirror Ableton Live, Max for Live, and Film With my film and audio project, Dark Mirror, I wanted to explore the potentials and limitations of expressing timelessness. All scenes are recurring, backwards, forwards, and

altered. Each film clip is changed by specific parameters programmed into the music program, Ableton. Each scene contains doubles of the subject. She is doubled in the mirrors, in two places at once by the river, and two eyes are watching. I wanted to create an eerie sense of multiple points of view with obvious motifs. With a plug-in called midi_vidi_1.1, I attached each section of a 12 section video to 12 notes of the keyboard. Each recursion, forward play, backward play, and alteration is the result of midi notes being jumbled by the Max for Live Buffer Shuffler, which is jumbled audio voice clips at the same time as it is jumbling video clips. The video was shot in completely at the creek inside Topanga Canyon. The music is created using my looped voice which is sent through the Buffer Shuffler, my voice singing the melody, a sine wave with an LFO that I created for the bassline. The percussion was created by recording my mother cooking with pots, cutting cauliflower, and

15 Lecture, Plot, Martin.

7 shaking a pill bottle. The drum beat was sampled from Roni Sizes album, New Forms. The harmony is recorded from an out of tune baby grand piano, and a wurlitzer synthesizer in which I inputed a composed harmony.