Arbus:Borges

One accepts those incompatible things which, only because they coexist, are called the world.

-- J L Borges, The Book of Sand

The world is a Noah’s Ark on the sea of eternity containing all the endless pairs of things, irreconcilable and inseparable, and heat will always long for cold and the back for the front and smiles for tears and mutt for jeff and no for yes with the most unutterable nostalgia there is.

-- Diane Arbus

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Diane Arbus took this photograph of Borges in Central Park in 1968. Three years later, she took her own life, aged 47. Borges, 69 years old when this picture was taken. He would die, a blind old man, in 1986.

Borges; the writer who invented paradoxical universes. Arbus; the photographer whose lens saw the hidden.

Borges was fascinated by Jewish mysticism and Arbus was a Jew whose eye seemed to unlock mysteries hidden in the world before us. The word of God hidden in the world of reality is the essence of Kabbalism and when Arbus says: "A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know" she writes in the tradition of her forebears. Arbus' photographs of strange worlds hidden in plain sight, her vision so complete it's as if she constructed an entire life in her own image. Borges stories of wdreams and edifices built on riddles, his writing so complete that though he could not see the world, he created vast universes of 'awful symmetry' and complete logic. The two of them seem to belong together. The photographer's image of the writer seems to speak something.

I wonder what they said that day in the park.