A scar upon the left profile of man can also be upon the right profile. Jorge Luis Borges
The epigraph that I borrowed from Borges is not taken from his compositions. He said those words in a dream. In my dream. Said it to me. I don’t remember details. The dream was in 2002, I made a note in my diary. For years I have been trying to make up my mind and write about it on paper. I don’t any more know whether I will write about it or not. All the more so that it is September 13, 2010, the Day of the Dead, one day after the Festival of the Holy Cross. Now, since I have started, I must bring the story to the end.
I am writing without thinking a lot. Let it be going as it is going. I am aware (at that time, too) that I saw the dream under the impression from reading the story by Borges “Colerage’s Dream” (having been aware of it even at the time of the dream).
The sleep was aggravated by my eyelids. Pieces of sounds, colors, smells, tastes and images started to whirl in my brain. My consciousness half-participated in all that, it was interesting to follow the progress of chaos, but also rather difficult.
In front of me was the Great Blind, the Great Seer. His half-closed eyelids looking at my closed eyes. The head only, lips hardly stirring. At that moment the blind one seemed to be myself. He spoke. Hardly stirring his lips he spoke. And the word sounded in my head, in my brain, so that the one who spoke was me. He spoke Spanish, of course, but the sound was Armenian in my head: “A scar upon the left profile of man can also be upon the right profile”…
…He said? Or did I? We still looked at each other, when I woke up (was I asleep?). The final words still sounding in my head, my eyes already open, his face afloat, ruffling and wavering, thus faded. Touching the cheek on my right, I smiled: no scar was there.
…The rest was what I remember in greater detail. I got up from my bed: thirsty. Got myself a glass of water. Stopped at a mirror in the passage. I turned the switch with an unexplainable fear of what I could see there. The light went on, and the mirror showed me my face. My brain suddenly prompted me that in the mirror the left profile goes right and vice versa. I knew that Borges had a particular attitude to dreams, mirrors, labyrinths and the like.
…What I think now is this: a scar on the left profile of man in a mirror can be seen on his right profile, but is it indeed only in the mirror? I also think on whether it is my thought or that of Borges. And whether he thought so or wrote so? I have searched through his works a lot, but haven’t yet found it so formulated. But why isn’t it possible to assume that it is just his word and his thought? Isn’t the entire Universe a Book? Why not assume that As he could remember the ambiguity by Zhuan Li-Ji, the reality can be a dream and a dream can be the reality.
My intellectual friends often advised me to write down my dreams. Indeed, I did write down some of them. With this one however I hesitated whether to put it down to paper. I had an apprehension that I would inadvertently invent things that haven’t happened. “Try not to invent. But if you do, it will be OK. What about the dreams, you invent them yourself, intentionally or not, don’t you?”- a friend once said, hinting that I may see a dream intentionally. And then I tried. There is no difference whether you invent it while asleep or while awake. A dream is production of our mind. After having said that much, I will open you a secret: Last night I had a dream urging me to write down a dream of eight years ago. But who urged, I do not remember…
September 13, 2010 Kh. G.- My search has so far produced no results. However, yesterday I read again an idea once expressed by Borges, and I cannot remain silent:
Kh. G. 18.09.2010
P.S.- A prose-writing friend of mine advised to drop the final lines. “They will say: invented, you have invented that part, where in your dream someone ordered you to write”. To tell you the truth, while writing I had the same kind of thinking. I remember, when staging a play by Konan Doyle, the real snake looks unnatural to the spectators and the critics, while a dummy snake is taken for a real one. Nonetheless, I removed nothing: everything stayed as it was. Besides, I did not remove because I was afraid: it was clear that I was compelled to write, so, why not write about it? Thus, in this case it was the dream that prompted the writing.
Kh.G. 20.09.2010
POSTSCRIPT: That is the final result of my explorations yet. Yesterday I found “The Book of Dreams” by Borges in the Internet, in Russian. And there under the title “The Vanity of Dreams” I read a reference to Sirach: “The dreams are absolutely the same things, while the expression of the face is face to face”. And today I read in the Bible: “It is so vain, the reflection of the face, the same is seeing dreams” (Sirach 31£3)£ No, I have not been shaken, I accepted it quietly (there have been many things like that). I just think: if dreams are vain, it means that that was what Borges wanted to tell me, and if it was that what he said, are the dreams indeed vain?
Translated by Hachatoor
