Behind the Zahir
To memorize a text, I have to read it over and over again and though of course this can become tedious, I have found that the tedium does not continue to increase in proportion to the number of times the text is read. In other words, when I am memorizing a certain paragraph (today it is the second paragraph of Funes the Memorious by Jorge Luis Borges) it starts to becomes tedious after the sixth or seventh reading but it will no longer be so by the eleventh or twelfth. I explain this in the following way.
Nabokov said, "One cannot read a book; one can only reread it." This has been my experience. The first time I read a book, I feel like a foreigner wandering through a strange country: I am interested in everything, but I understanding almost nothing. It is only during the second and third reading that my understanding, like a photographic print which has soaked for the appointed time in a basin of developer, becomes complete and my mental focus is freed up to enjoy the finished picture, see all the now lucid details, feel the rhythm of the prose, fluidly follow and anticipate the now familiar concatenation of meaning. This remains enjoyable through the fifth and perhaps even the sixth reading. Then tedium creeps in. My interest lags. But still I doggedly continue to read and reread, my eyes running over the words without taking in their sense. It is at this point that I may experience what the French call jamais vu: The rows of little symbols, the words, sentences and, obscurely, meaning itself, suddenly appear to me as something strange, alien and incomprehensible. I feel as though I am seeing it all for the first time. Gradually, the feeling fades and the text becomes familiar again, but it is a different kind of familiarity now; not a restoration of my familiarity with the written word, but a close familiarity with those particular words in that particular order, which seem somehow to be trying to pull together into a single symbol. What I mean can be more easily explained with an example. When you see the word thunder you do not see seven individual symbols but a single symbol, one that you can fully and intuitively grasp at a single glance, in a single cognitive flash. What the letters are to the word in this example, the words are to a sentence that has been read a sufficient number of times. I perceive the text differently. I see the texture of its meaning, its pattern of tensions or the liquid flow of its prose. I feel the meshing gears of logical syntax or the switching circuits of cause and effect. In some strange way, the text has taken on a presence and a personality. I utter the first word. Some magnetic force draws me on towards the end. It is as if the text wants to be recited. As I conceptualize it, a new text has a certain lustre like that of a wet stone. This dries up the first time the text is read. At some later point, boredom sets in. But it is almost as if this boredom were a tarnish on the text that can be rubbed off by repeated readings. Eventually the text is memorized, takes on a dazzling sheen, and my interest in it intensifies far beyond my initial interest. And something else again no doubt lies beyond this level of perception... I take a lesson from all this that I believe can be applied to the world at large. Perhaps there is nothing in the universe that is intrinsically tedious or boring, and such words merely describe an obstruction of perception or of comprehension. Even a plastic light switch in a bank or a faded insurance form may, like Tennyson's Flower in the Crannied Wall, contain the germ of sacred awe and astonishment. In War and Peace, Tolstoy has one of his characters say, "There is no subject so trivial that it will not grow to infinite proportions if concentrated attention is devoted to it." Nabokov wrote, "You can get nearer and nearer to reality but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable." At the end of The Zahir, the short story by Borges in which a man comes into possession of a cursed coin that has, "the terrible power to be unforgettable and whose image eventually drives people mad," the doomed narrator speaks some words which, though it may be a stretch, I find myself connecting in my mind with the foregoing ideas. He says, "Perhaps I will succeed in wearing away the Zahir by thinking and re-thinking about it; perhaps behind the coin is God." |