The Circular Ruins by Jorge Luis Borges - Short Story Summary, Analysis, Review

The Circular Ruins by Jorge Luis Borges, up for discussion today. Ruins. I can never say that word, I'm going to struggle the whole video. Make fun of me in the comments below, I'm sorry. Let's get to it. Alright, I'm going to start off reading this epigraph because I think this is important. And if he left off dreaming about you, from Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. We're going to have to discuss that one because, my friend, did you notice anything about the opening here? Should I have? What did I miss? Alright, so a foreigner arrives from one of infinite villages, right? There's that infinity part. He could be from anywhere, the probability, you know how Borges likes to craft and weave these into all of his stories. Right. And upon arriving at the malarial jungle, the writing, just beautiful, there's a statue of some sort in the middle, right? And I quote, the stone figure of a horse or a tiger, which had once been the color of fire, but was now the color of ashes. So my question is, you know, who's been here? What's happened? It almost feels like rebirth. I was kind of confused. And I thought, okay, is this, you know, the Phoenix rising, so to speak? Or is this the fall coming to, like, he's coming to the old runes that have been destroyed, you know, like you see in any video game or, you know, adventure movie and stuff, and they look thousands of years old. It's unclear of whether this is a rebirth or a decay, a death. Okay. But he does have those layered writings, right? And I think it's okay to kind of have this ambiguity when you're trying to understand and wrestle with the Borges stories. Because this next part, I'm kind of curious where you went with this one. I have a suspicion, but on his way to this jungle, right, he's kissing the mud, he's cut by various sharp leaves, and he sinks his bamboo boat. And he knows this temple is going to lead him to another temple of some old god of some sort. And then one night, he awakens from a bird cry and finds that the local men have been spying on him while he sleeps, and he heads to his tomb-like niche where he is covered with leaves. If we just stop the story there, okay, I imagine you're already, you've already got a singular interpretation that is 100% valid on this one. Tell me what yours was. He's JC. Uh-huh. Right. He's Christ. It's just so obvious with the leaves and the time frame and emerging and the people, you know, coming after him. It's there. But that's very surface level. I believe you're going to hit me with something a little deeper. Well, okay, I'm just going to share my view because I agree with you, right? If you take one man's life, right, Jesus Christ in this situation, and you're looking at it from the crucifixion walks where he had the thorn crown and he had the cuts, like the leaves here, there was a fig on the ground, the tomb-like niche, aka where they buried him with the resurrection, with the wooden boat, right, like that's his cross, right, that he's burying. He's burying. Yeah. So he's 100% very, you know, you could draw that conclusion. Okay. So if I come to that conclusion, what could be the next step I could take? So we start to talk about how this might have been done before. This could be one man's journey. And there are various other influences, like I'm not saying that Borges perfectly wanted to identify one specific thing, like he's a very interesting writer. But when you talk about rebirth and a cyclical experience, one of the things that you could start to explore is Buddhism. Okay. And a book that I've been reading recently is about kind of like the assimilation of Buddhism, how it's such a spirituality where it's not really about negation or denying. It's about taking on everything. It's a complete experience. And in this book, it talks about how its views on, like there's even talks about Hinduism, about how like, okay, well, that's just incomplete in their view, because there's, it doesn't cover this. It doesn't cover that. It doesn't cover this. And if you start to think about how Buddhism might wrap around Christianity, I mean, Jesus to him, to them might be a perfect Bodhisattva, a person that's just lived a perfect moral life once and almost kind of like, you know, ideally achieves enlightenment by the end of the life. But that's, but that's just Jesus's life where we're trying to be that perfect morally straight person just like him. And Buddhism was going to take that and say, okay, well, there's more to it rather than just a one and done experience. You know, if you fail and you stumble and you make mistakes, you're reborn and you do it again. And life can be cyclical like that. And that's, that's one of the tenants that we kind of need to explore with this story. So if Jesus is seen as like a Buddha-like figure, then in this story, our unnamed narrator is living these lives again and again and again in this, in this iteration of trying to live that perfect life. And so we're coming to these temples. He maybe is seeing his past lives that he's lived or his past failures perhaps as well. Deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole we go with Borges, my friend. So we learn his goal is to dream a perfect man, right? He wants to impose this dream, an image of the mind into reality, totally normal life ambition there, right? And it consumes his entire life, how he starts teaching here and he starts getting disciples and these people that come up and he's just like, oh my gosh, this is totally not going to work. These people are useless. And then he's got this one guy. He's like, oh, you're, you're going to be my guy. Right? Like, like we're going to make this work and then, and then he fails. And you kind of start to imagine, you know, when you talk about Borges, he always plays with this idea of idealism where it starts with the mind. It starts with, with pre-existence before existence. And you can even think about it from like the beginning of belief. Like how did the belief and how did Jesus Christ come along? Who is one man's, one man, God's journey through life, like pre-existence to him. Is there anything to explain that? Right? And here's this man that's going through a similar challenge of creating something from nothing. The part that catches me there though, is that he is not aware in the story yet of his own origin story. And so it's another layer that we have to go down to, to really understand where our narrator at this point is coming from. So do you know in that epigraph, the through the looking glass, do you know what that part of the story is about? No. So if you remember Alice that whole time, I mean, spoilers for a hundred year old story, right? She, she, is she dreaming? Is this reality? Is the red queen who's sleeping right now, dreaming Alice and Alice isn't real. It's kind of the matrix approach of what is real too, that we have to start questioning what is the origin of existence and belief and where does, where does it begin and stop? Because if Alice isn't real and she's just a dream to the red queen, does it matter? Does she know? Is it any less valuable? Or is her existence and the fact that it's in the mind enough? Where does the concept of reality and dream begin and end, I guess, and does in our case of this is, is the red queen dreaming of Alice or is Alice dreaming of the red queen? And I don't think you can answer that question in this story either, because as the story implies, it is cyclical. There is no beginning and end to a circle. Did you think anything about the students, about how they were like giving them the knowledge of like, okay, here's how to live a better life or how to pray or how to create these temples like what, whatever he was trying to achieve, right? Short story. The fact that they kept failing, right? Like the, the, we see that in our lives too, where you can be given the answer of this is what you need to do and it could be problem solving. It could just be morally like, this is the right thing to do. This is what makes you a good person. But we constantly stumble. We constantly fail, right? It's these evils that, you know, that we succumb to from either like a Buddhist or Christianity perspective that causes us to stumble in a sense. Like if you ever thought about like why these disciples like find it so hard, but in reality, those are the same struggles that we go through. Agreed. I also think that everything in kind of in the story is put in pairs, right? If you think about, we're talking about life and death. We're talking about children and adults, and as you said, we're talking about teachers and students. Well, in order for there to be a teacher and a student, there has to be success and failure on both parts and life and death are literally the opposites of each other. And you have to have one with the other light and dark, all of it, everything is paired together in the story. And I think that's why you see the students keep failing and failing and failing over is because you need them to have a teacher to keep teaching and teaching and teaching them so that they can grow and become better people. Okay. Yeah, that is interesting because it's true how even these temples are one of thousands of temples as man's from one of infinite villages, right? How they're all connected. And if you have the belief and you create in your mind and you can suddenly see and pray to these gods that have existed for hundreds of years, been burned and rebuilt before, it's all part of that. What I would call a shared existence even, right? You could say linked. You could say shared, but it's something about how when one person lives through this, right? You don't even have to have knowledge of that other person. Another person can just live that exact same life and you can see the people doing these exact same things over and over again. And it's very strange to see the way that humanity progresses, but also falls at the same time too. And it's so cool that this story takes the idea of almost consciousness and puts it into that dream state. We've seen this done. Well, at this time the story came out, we hadn't seen it done many times, but you've seen different iterations of this in movies and comics and games and whatnot. But I love how the use of fire and rebirth and dreams and this idea of a shared consciousness, you don't know what is reality and what is not reality. Have we dreamed each other up? I mean, you and I, for example, am I dreaming of you? Do you exist without me? Or do I not exist without you? Or do we not exist without each other? Do we have to have one another in order to exist? And I just, I love that concept because, I mean, it does hurt your brain, but I think in a good way that you can start to identify yourself as yourself. And I think that's one thing that Borges, for me, has helped me kind of understand is my own humanness, humanity, or my own soul, for a lack of a better word. Right. And it gets deep in the rabbit hole of philosophy, too, from an idealism standpoint. It's not a podium that I can stand on and explain perfectly, but the way that, you know, he has the creation of the sun and he wants to see that somebody's disconnected, you can even kind of see that from like a religious standpoint, too, the way that maybe a lot of people feel disconnected from God if they believe God was created, the way people feel disconnected from their past lives if they are in a Buddhist state and being reborn over and over again. There's this longing for connection and creation and the fact that you can't recreate it in the mind and you can't see it in person. You feel this distance, right? And I think that's something that, you know, that the story tackles, interestingly, the way that the temples are connected and he knows that his son can be untouched by fire and knows what's happening in that temple. And then to go through that same experience where when he burns, he realizes that he's a phantom, too. That shared experience is something that is just very remarkable that I think Borges knows how to lace into an incredibly short story. Do we actually exist? And does the fire prove that he exists or he doesn't exist? That's the conundrum. That's where I always keep coming back to of kind of that philosophical idea is how do I approve I exist? How do I prove that? Is that possible? I mean, there is that, I think, therefore I am, but are you just thinking me up? Well, and that's the struggle with idealism, right? Because you have to then question, right, that statement, you are predicating existence as proof and rational evidence, but that's the total opposite of an idealist. The fact that it is in the mind is where it matters and that simulacrum of it existing in the mind versus, you know, in reality, like that connection and understanding the true forms, like that's where it can just get so confusing. But that's why I love this story, right? Because now you're wondering, like, if the sorcerer, which, well, okay, so he's a sorcerer because he created something from the mind, the sun, right? Do we look down on him if he is a phantom? If he's not real, do we think lesser of him? When everything else about the experience of living with him, of going through his struggles of trying to create and have a life ambition and struggling with these disciples, is it suddenly less valuable if we think he didn't exist when the experience that we shared with him was real? And that's why Borges is a genius. I think from a story perspective, some readers may feel almost cheated, the idea of, oh, it was all a dream that is kind of played out in modern media. So maybe from that perspective, but for a talking point, for us having a discussion, a dialogue, I think that it is absolutely brilliant and I love it. Right. So Alice, were you dreaming the whole thing up? Or are you not real? And this is all in the Red Queen's mind, who knows? But I'll tell you what, if you love Borges, we got a playlist down below of plenty of other talks on him. Join us. What other Borges stories would you love to see us cover next? Because it's going to happen. I don't know which one's next, but I'm looking forward to it because it's going to be amazing. My name has been Una. Thank you for spending time with us today. Peace.