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Portland, O r e g o k

Scriptor Press

Circular Ruins

by Jorge Luis Borges

edited by Raymond Soulard, Jr.
& Kassandra Kramer

Number Forty-one

Circular Ruins
by Jorge Luis Borges

This volume is for those

who keep wondering:

what is real?
Burning Man Books is

an imprint of

Scriptor Press

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Seattle, Washington 98107

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This volume was composed
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"And if he left off dreaming about you . . ."
— Through the Looking Glass, VI.

No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one
saw the bamboo canoe sink into the sacred mud, but in a few days
there was no one who did not know that that taciturn man came
from the South and that his home had been one of those numberless
villages upstream in the deeply cleft side of the mountain, where the
Zend language has not been contaminated by Greek and where leprosy
is infrequent. What is certain is that the gray man kissed the mud,
climbed up the bank without pushing aside (probably, without feeling)
the blades which were lacerating his flesh, and crawled, nauseated
and bloodstained, up to the circular enclosure crowned with a stone
tiger or horse, which sometimes was the color of flame and now was
that of ashes. This circle was a temple which had been devoured by
ancient fires, profaned by miasmal jungle, and whose lowercase god
no longer received the homage of men. The stranger stretched himself
out beneath the pedestal. He was awakened by the sun high overhead.
He was not astonished to find that his wounds had healed; he closed
his pallid eyes and slept, not through weakness of flesh but through
determination of will. He knew that this temple was the place required
for his invincible intent; he knew that the incessant trees had not
succeeded in strangling the ruins of another propitious temple
downstream which had once belonged to gods now burned and dead;
he knew that his immediate obligation was to dream. Toward midnight
he was awakened by the inconsolable shriek of a bird. Tracks of bare
feet, some figs and a jug warned him that the men of the region had
been spying respectfully on his sleep, soliciting his protection or afraid
of his magic. He felt a chill, and sought out a sepulchral niche in the
dilapidated wall where he concealed himself among unfamiliar leaves.

The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though
supernatural. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him
in minute entirety and impose him on reality. This magic project had
exhausted the entire expanse of his mind; if someone had asked him
his name or to relate some event of his former life, he would not have
been able to have give an answer. This uninhabited, ruined temple

Circular Ruins

suited him, for it contained a minimum of visible world; the proximity
of the workmen also suited him, for they took it upon themselves to
provide for his frugal needs. The rice and fruit they brought him
were nourishment enough for his body, which was consecrated to
the sole task of sleeping and dreaming.

At first, his dreams were chaotic; then in a short while they
become dialectic in nature. The stranger dreamed that he was in the
center of a circular ampitheater which was more or less the burnt
temple; clouds of taciturn students filled the tiers of seats; the faces of
the farthest ones hung at a distance of many centuries and as high as
the stars, but their features were completely precise. The man lectured
his pupils on anatomy, cosmography, and magic: the faces listened
anxiously and tried to answer understan dinghy, as if they guessed the
importance of that examination which would redeem one of them
from his condition of empty illusion and interpolate him into the
real world. Asleep or awake, the man thought over the answers of his
phantoms, did not allow himself to be deceived by imposters, and in
certain perplexities he sensed a growing intelligence. He was seeking
a soul worthy of participating in the universe.

After nine or ten nights he understood with a certain bitterness
that he could expect nothing from those pupils who accepted his
doctrine passively, but he could expect something from those who
occasionally dared to oppose him. The former group, although worthy
of love and affection, could not ascend to the level of individuals; the
latter pre-existed to a slightly greater degree. One afternoon (now
afternoons were also given over to sleep, now he was only awake for a
couple of hours at daybreak) he dismissed the vast illusory student
body for good and kept only one pupil. He was a taciturn, sallow
boy, at times intractable, and whose sharp features resembled those
of his dreamer. The brusque elimination of his fellow students did
not disconcert him for long; after a few private lessons, his progress
was enough to astound the teacher. Nevertheless, a catastrophe took
place. One day, the man emerged from his sleep as if from a viscous
desert, looked at the useless afternoon light which he immediately
confused with the dawn, and understood that he had not dreamed.
All that night and all day long, the intolerable lucidity of insomnia

Jorge Luis Borges

fell upon him. He tried exploring the forest, to lose his strength;
among the hemlock he barely succeeded in experiencing several short
snatchs of sleep, veined with fleeting, rudimentary visions that were
useless. He tried to assemble the student body but scarcely had he
articulated a few brief words of exhortation when it became deformed
and was then erased. In his almost perpetual vigil, tears of anger burned
his old eyes.

He understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous
matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task
that a man could undertake, even though he should penetrate all the
enigmas of a superior and inferior order; much more difficult than
weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind. He swore he
would forget the enormous hallucination which had thrown him off
at first, and he sought another method of work. Before putting it
into execution, he spent a month recovering his strength, which had
been squandered by his delirium. He abandoned all premeditation
of dreaming and almost immediately succeeded in sleeping a
reasonable part of each day. The few times that he had dreams during
this period, he paid no attention to them. Before resuming his task,
he waited until the moon's disk was perfect. Then, in the afternoon,
he purified himself in the waters of the river, worshipped the planetary
gods, pronounced the prescribed syllables of a mighty name, and
went to sleep. He dreamed almost immediately, with his heart
throbbing.

He dreamed that it was warm, secret, about the size of a
clenched fist, and of a garnet color within the penumbra of a human
body as yet without face or sex; during fourteen lucid nights he dreamt
of it with meticulous love. Every night he perceived it more clearly.
He did not touch it; he only permitted himself to witness it, to observe
it, and occasionally to rectify it with a glance. He perceived it and
lived it from all angles and distances. On the fourteenth night he
lightly touched the pulmonary artery with his index finger, then the
whole heart, outside and inside. He was satisfied with the examination.
He deliberately did not dream for a night; he then took up the heart
again, invoked the name of a planet, and undertook the vision of
another of the principle organs. Within a year he had come to the

Circular Ruins

skeleton and the eyelids. The innumerable hair was perhaps the most
difficult task. He dreamed an entire man — a young man, but who
did not sit up or talk, who was unable to open his eyes. Night after
night, the man dreamt him asleep.

In the Gnostic cosmogonies, demiurges fashion a red Adam
who cannot stand; as clumsy, crude and elemental as this Adam of
dust was the Adam of dreams forged by the wizard's nights. One
afternoon, the man almost destroyed his entire work, but then changed
his mind. (It would have been better had he destroyed it.) When he
had exhausted all supplications to the deities of the earth, he threw
himself at the feet of the effigy which was perhaps a tiger or perhaps
a colt and implored its unknown help. That evening, at twilight, he
dreamt of the statue. He dreamt it was alive, tremulous: it was not an
atrocious bastard of a tiger and a colt, but at the same time these two
fiery creatures and also a bull, a rose, and a storm. This multiple god
revealed to him that his earthly name was Fire, and that in this circular
temple (and in others like it) people had once made sacrifices to him
and worshipped him, and that he would magically animate the
dreamed phantom, in such a way that all creatures, except Fire itself
and the dreamer, would believe it to be a man of flesh and blood. He
commanded that once this man had been instructed in all the rites,
he should be sent to the other ruined temple whose pyramids were
still standing downstream, so that some voice would glorify him in
that deserted edifice. In the dream of the man that dreamed, the
dreamed one awoke.

The wizard carried out the orders he had been given. He
devoted a certain length of time (which finally proved to be two years)
to instructing him in the mysteries of the universe and the cult of
fire. Secretly, he was pained at the idea of being separated from him.
On the pretext of pedagogical necessity, each day he increased the
number of hours dedicated to dreaming. He also remade the right
shoulder, which was somewhat defective. At times, he was disturbed
by the impression that all this had already happened .... In general,
his days were happy; when he closed his eyes, he thought: Now I will
be with my son. Or, more rarely: The son I have engendered is waiting
for me and will not exist if I do not go to him.

8 • Jorge Luis Borges

Gradually, he began accustoming him to reality. Once he
ordered him to place a flag on a faraway peak. The next day the flag
was fluttering on the peak. He tried other analogous experiments,
each time more audacious. With a certain bitterness, he understood
that his son was ready to be born — and perhaps impatient. That night
he kissed him for the first time and sent him off to the other temple
whose remains were turning white downstream, across many miles
of inextricable jungle and marshes. Before doing this (and so that his
son should never know that he was a phantom, so that he should
think himself a man like any other) he destroyed in him all memory
of his years of apprenticeship.

His victory and peace became blurred with boredom. In the
twilight times of dusk and dawn, he would prostrate himself before
the stone figure, perhaps imagining his unreal son carrying out
identical rites in other circular ruins; at night he no longer dreamed,
or dreamed as any man does. His perception of the sounds and forms
of the universe became somewhat pallid: his absent son was being
nourished by these diminutions of his soul. The purpose of his life
had been fulfilled; the man remained in a kind of ecstasy. After a
certain time, which some chroniclers prefer to compute in years and
others in decades, two oarsmen awoke him at midnight; he could
not see their faces, but they spoke to him of a charmed man in a
temple of the North, capable of walking on fire without burning
himself. The wizard suddenly remembered the words of the god. He
remembered that of all the creatures that people the earth, Fire was
the only one who knew his son to be a phantom. This memory, which
at first calmed him, ended by tormenting him. He feared lest his son
should meditate on this abnormal privilege and by some means find
out he was a mere simulacrum. Not to be a man, to be a projection of
another man's dreams — what an incomparable humiliation,
procreated (or permitted) out of the mere confusion of happiness; it
was natural that the wizard should fear for the future of that son
whom he had thought out entrail by entrail, feature by feature, in a
thousand and one secret nights.

His misgivings ended abruptly, but not without certain
forewarnings. First (after a long drought) a remote cloud, as light as a

Circular Ruins

bird, appeared on a hill; then, toward the South, the sky took on the
rose color of leopard's gums; then came clouds of smoke which rusted
the metal of the nights; afterwards came the panic-stricken flight of
wild animals. For what had happened many centuries before was
repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was
destroyed by fire. In a dawn without birds, the wizard saw the
concentric fire licking the walls. For a moment, he thought of taking
refuge in the water, but then he understood that death was coming to
crown his old age and absolve him from his labors. He walked toward
the sheet of flames. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and
flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with
humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion,
that someone else was dreaming him.

— Translated by Anthony Bonner

10 • Jorge Luis Borges