Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

On Unreality

I've been Christmas shopping, though I'm not sure I really approve of the activity, and I recently bought a copy of Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths for someone I hope does not read this blog. I feel that Borges has been an influence upon me, even though I have not re-read his work that much, and last read something by him, I believe, some years ago. Anyway, it's a very attractive Penguin edition, and I decided to dip into the work of the great man again. Actually, before I continue, perhaps I should repeat something I have said before - that the very title of this blog owes itself to a quote from a story by Borges. The tale in question is called 'The Shape of the Sword' and is the story of an Irishman called John Vincent Moon. The quote runs as follows:

"He had studied with fervour and with vanity nearly every page of Lord knows what Communist manual; he made use of dialectical materialism to put an end to any discussion whatever. The reasons one can have for hating another man, or for loving him, are infinite: Moon reduced the history of the universe to a sordid economic struggle. He affirmed that the revolution was predestined to succeed. I told him that for a gentleman only lost causes should be attractive..."

The story I dipped into, however, was not this, but one entitled, 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'. This, in fact, was the first story by Borges that I had ever read, and it had impressed me from the beginning as the work of a true original, at once strange and familiar, presenting new ideas as if they are your own, merely remembered, or perhaps the other way around. I was particularly struck this time by an incidental description:

"In his lifetime he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen; once dead he is not even the ghost he was then."

Unreality - somehow Borges has caught the esssence of the English disease. I too am a sufferer, so I feel I know the disease intimately. In fact, I am probably quite an extreme case in some ways, my situation only ameliorated somewhat by the fact I acknowledge my disease and know its symptoms. But I certainly cannot describe my ailment any more succinctly than Borges has - it is unreality. Yes, I do feel like a ghost even as I live. It is an image that returns to me again and again - a ghost trapped in the world of the living with no means of communication - and no doubt I shall write a story about it if I do not evapourate like smoke into the further unreality of death before I have the chance.

But what exactly is it that causes this ailment in the English? I do not think it is unique to England, though it is virulent here. I believe that it is a disease of modernism, and, even more so, of post-modernism, and can be seen in any country where people shop at supermarkets and watch television. Perhaps it goes back much further than the modern and post-modern ages, but I am not sure I can trace it to its very source. I can, however, make a few mental links.



I had a conversation recently about money. "Do you know what's written on the American dollar?" I believe that was the question I was asked. Of course, I did know. "In God we trust." To have such a phrase printed on one's national currency is so grotesque that I hardly think I need to point out the irony of the situation or attempt some kind of satire. But then came the question of what is on our English money. I pulled out the ten pound note in my pocket. On it there was a portrait of Charles Darwin. Suddenly this seemed as grotesque as the statement on the American dollar. Evolution. The survival of the fittest. The law of the stock market. You could almost say that the dollar and the pound showed two sides of the same coin.



Before we had Darwin on our money we had Newton. Gravity and evolution. These are some of the things that we English have brought the world in our quest for the ground beneath our feet, our dogged search for reality. Ours has been a search for something concrete, and so we have made a concrete world. But reality, living reality, is precisely what the concrete has buried, and from which we have cut ourselves off.