Earlier this week 'world renowned' (how does one measure renown, Maestro?) 'Peruvian' (now only by origin for he is Spanish by citizenship) novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was in town to deliver the Richard A. Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, in a dual purpose church down the street. Obviously, I went to hear what the Man had to say on the topics of 'Cervantes and Don Quixote' and Borges on two consecutive nights. I missed the third lecture on Ortega y Gasset because I was at a worksite, and also perhaps because I had never heard of him before.

I have in front of me a set of notes I took from the two lectures, and they are simply unreadable. The axiom 'thou shall not be able to pay attention to what is being said (or read in this case) and take legible notes at once' seemed to have held up. But for the sake of my kind readers (and 'peeps'), I engaged in heroic jujitsu, or more appropriately 'tilted at the windmills', to revel and reconstruct the following set of cryptic notes from Lecture Uno, 'Cervantes and Don Quixote'. Also don't ask where Senor Llosa ends, and where I begin in the following!

The torments of Cervantes, his dispossession, his prison spells, his long litany of debts, his inability to write verse, which in his era was the preferred mode of literary manifestation, and so ends us writing prose, which is close to the masses.

Don Quixote (DQ) as a fiction of fiction, and also as a literary criticism of then popular genre of novels of chivalry. DQ as a dream, as a way of escape from the heaviness of life, from the primitive cares, as a transformation of reality into fantasy, a breakdown of rational leading to foolish adventures into false reality and fantasy.

A short riff on the origins of novel as a transition from the perishable tradition of oral stories and ballads into a medium that is capable of creating alternative realities, as well the desire to escape from the real.

Balzac’s comment on how reading engenders ‘a private history of nations’

Initial definition of Pancho: someone whose matter suffocates the spirit

DQ is the original fanatic as he doesn’t have doubts about anything he believes to be true, and doesn’t believe he can ever make a mistake; this even when he ‘liberates’ those dangerous criminals from prison, or when he attacks goats and pilgrims as evils. [Does this mean Le Chosen One des Etats-Unis is just another DQ of our current crazy times?]

Other ominous signs in DQ: doesn’t have any sense of humor and is intolerant of criticism. In this DQ as a fore runner of the revolutionary Jacobeans of the French Republic with their elegant reason and rationality, the Aryan Nazis with their utopia devoid of all untermenschs, the Gulag commissars with their glorious revolution of the working class etc. [Should we add to this list the Glorious Heterosexual Christian Soldiers of these United States, who wait for the Rapture (Sweet Jesus! Come save us Lordy!) as they spread ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, at the end of smart missiles and cluster bombs?]

Pancho as the rough, the illiterate, the materialist, the ‘respector’ of social rules and customs who draws wisdom and sustenance against calamities caused by his master from popular and religious sayings, the ideal citizen, and as the doppelganger of DQ. And thus acting as an anchor, and preventing the novel from disintegrating and floating away into irredeemable fantasy. But this also sets the stage for a role reversal of sorts in the latter part of the novel, when Pancho and other observers of DQ encourage him to behave with his earlier outrageousness, and perhaps showing their other humanity by display the hungers for the unreal. This also as a symptom of how DQ’s contagious passion for living out fiction, which is to say to live many lives simultaneously, slowly spreads throughout the novel, to infect others, so much so that it is as if DQ has expanded to permeate all life!

DQ as a fictional character or a specter, who channels the human condition for fiction, to give up life and blood for the airy perch of a tale

Questions: Was it fiction that was the cause of DQ’s troubles, and nearly constant unhappiness? Also, politically, does the creation of DQ explain the ‘magic realism’ of Latin America? Also doesn’t behind the comedy of DQ and Pancho lay the larger personal law of freedom?

.....

Moving on to Lecture Dos, on Borges, before I was about to transcribe my chicken scrawl, I decided to look at what Senor Llosa had previously said/wrote about Borges in his book A Writer's Reality (a book which I had avidly read two years ago, with a pen in hand). And to my complete surprise, I discovered that the remarks Senor L had delivered on Borges two nights ago were identical to a I with the sentences (which were initially delivered as lectures at Syracuse University in 1989) I found in front of me on the printed pages of this book, complete with my crazy night time marginalia!

Anyway kind readers, this saved me the trouble of transcribing my jerky chicken scrawl for your edification. So if you want to know what Senor Llosa had to say (and say again a few nights ago, this time after excising those stray references to Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda, for Senor Llosa is a recovered Leftie, who had seen the light, as formulated by that darling of gringo right wing supplysiders’, Milton Friedman!), please read Chapter 1 of ‘A Writer’s Reality’.

And finally this is what Borges cooked up on Quixote in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote". Also the Spanish original for those kind readers who can lea y entienda a Español! Gracias.

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[1] The pages on which I write this are damp, for I had previously placed beech leaves, nearly transparent, bleached of all color, which I had fished out from the creek bed between them as bookmarkers. The ink of my pen bleeds a little, blue spidering out in many directions all at once, especially in the grooves of the patterns that the leaves have left. A pattern of leafiness. Isn’t this what we leave too, when we go wherever we go in that long autumn?

[2] A March Sunday morning like no other – echoing that well worn proverb, you don’t step into the same river twice. The constant sun falls on this little rock beach when the wind sifts the cloud screens. The rocks, suddenly, take distinctive colors in that new light. The hand reaches to pluck from them a small pebble shaped like a pendant, which was shining. Such is also the nature of remembering. Such is also the sudden epiphany of grace.

[3] Two mallards – with the coming of spring every bird, however solitary it may have been before, is now seen with its double – are floating down the creek. They don’t have to paddle their duck legs for the current propels them downstream like two boats loaded to the top with green jade. Soon they are beyond the bend, and are gone from sight. In the viscid mind the images, too, sinks from sight. This transitoary line, when read by me, perhaps in another life, will be the only record of this sighting.

[4] In that country, penitents stand on one leg, face the ochre sun of the tropics, and pray. In this country, he is standing on both his legs, facing the sun, under which a couple of Canada geese are standing similarly, on one leg, almost without any effort, taking an afternoon nap.

[5] A walker strides under the March sun, his eyes screened from the light by sunglasses, his ears filled with a bass noise, which spills and trails behind his back. One person less then, with whom I will have to share this banquet of blooms, birdsong, and yellow butterflies with backs still wet from their long sleep.

[6] On days like today, when the rushes on the banks bend, Lullwater sashays at the bottom of the hill, cloaked in silver glitter, impenetrable to the human eye, shadows of wings, or the gaze of traveling clouds. This till the wind dies down and carries its dress away.

[7] To my right, in one corner of the lake, young males of the Canada Geese family, huff, puff, and honk loudly at one another, beating the water with their wings, as they reenact old rituals of dominance. On the other hand, figuratively and literally speaking, this solitary bird (very much after my own heart) slowly and meditatively glides the waves. [8] A red ant clambers up the leaf of grass, which is resting against my face, and soon it is striding across the stubbly sahara of my jaw, invisible to my down turned vision, calm and purposeful in its scouting mission that seamlessly spans the flesh of both grass and skin.

[9] When the wind dies down, suddenly voices intrude that corner of space that you now occupy. You hear the hoot of a rail engine, the rattle of motorcycles, indecipherable human speech of a boy and a girl lying in the grass further down on their stomachs – all this till wind picks up again and wipes the slate clean.

[10] After lying on this log that juts into the creek at this junction of mingling waters – a small stream from the surrounding wooden hillsides joins the broader silver gold belt of the creek – you get up on you knees, lean forward to place your hand in the chill water to feel the flow of all the things of this world that are liquid: blood, breeze, rustling grass, even gratefulness for this brilliant day and affection for that she, who now happens to be, temporarily, far away.

scribbled at Lullwater, 03/12/2006