“Legend” by Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Andrew Hurley
Cain and Abel came upon each other after Abel’s death. They were walking through the desert, and they recognized each other from afar, since both men were very tall. The two brothers sat on the ground, made a fire, and ate. They sat silently, as weary people do when dusk begins to fall. In the sky, a star glimmered, though it had not yet been given a name. In the light of the fire, Cain saw that Abel’s forehead bore the mark of the stone, and he dropped the bread he was about to carry to his mouth and asked his brother to forgive him.
“Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you?” Abel answered. “I don’t remember anymore; here we are, together, like before.”
“Now I know that you have truly forgiven me,” Cain said, “because forgetting is forgiving. I, too, will try to forget.”
“Yes,” said Abel slowly. “So long as remorse lasts, guilt lasts.”
There is enough in a Borges flash work to sustain generations. I’d like to start with the exposition, “after Abel’s death.” What exactly does that entail? An immediate resurrection? A few days, or weeks? Has Cain passed away or does he still live? I’d like to proceed with this interpretation that Cain is still very much alive; that he’s not set in an Apocalyptic time wherein the dead have been resurrected.
Perhaps God has allowed Abel alone to live again for the chance of reconciliation. There is good reason to believe this earlier date; Borges writes that a star passes “though it had not yet been given a name.”
Suggesting, of course, a fresh beginning, paralleling Adam’s act of naming animals he encounters for the first time.
This new event for the brothers: a chance to overcome the death imposed upon their relationship. Around them is an unknown sky, and their only concern is for interaction. (What we love most pulls us away from the world and the act of defining the world.)
The brothers sit down to commune with each other, focused on their communion, and soon after, Cain asks for forgiveness, to which Abel replies that he cannot remember who killed who.
I finished the last word and I sat with it. This idea that forgiveness maximally expressed involves shared obliviousness as to who is the guilty party. Then I thought about the story’s other implication: the myth was changed, thereby creating a new myth and ushering in reconciliation. Instead of there being one guilty party, there is, in its place, a fluctuating ambiguity as to who committed the fault against who. What we have is a surmounted myth:
Cain is no longer the sole perpetrator of the crime against Abel. Abel, righteous under the original law, stands before Cain, and, wholly justified in condemning, refuses to impose the guilt onto Cain. Abel, greater than Cain, forsakes the hierarchy that justifies him. There is a new myth in which both parties assume guilt and innocence simultaneously. Both partake in the wretchedness and the sublimity brought forth by the event. (With concern for Cain and Abel, the sublime is the righteous death of Abel whose blood cries out to God, and the mercy of God who places a protective seal upon a blood-stained Cain. They share the righteousness, the seal of mercy, and the sin.)
In the Biblical narrative, we see a similar principle. The Old Testament* provides clear guidance for defining the guilty. Humanity is guilty of breaking the law of God, and God is the righteous judge presiding over it. He wipes them out with fire and water; he sends armies to pillage their land and abduct them; plagues, of course, and prophets. There is no doubt that humanity has sinned.
*(Even with the sacrifice of animals, we still find the clear guilty party: humanity.)
But what we find in the New Testament is a new myth that supersedes the old: where once the guilty party was easily determined, we now have a God manifest in the flesh upon a cross, who to onlookers appears to be the damned (as Isaiah suggests in chapter 53; “yet we considered him punished by God”). In truth, it is humanity that warrants the wrath of God by the standards of the old myth. And here is the Christ, wrapped in this very humanity.
As an ultimate act of forgiveness, Christ allows himself humanity’s shame and misery as a means to create the new myth, wherein those who were guilty and those who were innocent partake in the punishment and the reward. (Christ dies and is resurrected. We will die and be resurrected. Both will dwell with God.) In the sight of God, there is an influx of criminals and saints, indeterminate identities: you and Christ eat and drink of the same condemnation and suffering and inherit redemption. The mercies of this God, who blinds himself by virtue of his grace. If he should exist.
And after all this ruminating, I wondered about the deaths I’ve entered and those I’ve killed. A moment arrived when I thought remorsefully of all that I’ve lost and forced others to lose. But maybe it was wrong to feel that way. I think some of it is still rationalized in my mind as the best choice for this short life. Because unlike the Christians and their god, I don’t have an eternity waiting for me after this life. I have one life. There is no supernatural moment that breaks the shackles of this short life. There is no resurrection, not a time to have another chance to live and to redeem sundry parties.
And I have decided that to live is to feel rational but blindly and capriciously choose what you will allow to drain your life and what you can do without. Life is defined by its isolation; I, alien and distant from a self ever-fluctuating, am not permitted to know myself intimately. (There is the illusion of familiarity, reinforced by pattern recognition.) My isolation, my solitude, I must figure out (if I am striving for awareness as a means of grounding my isolation-existence in this forgetful world) what characterizes my isolation. What I admire, what I hate, my apathy. My preferred solitude (preferred, as a consequence of my scrutinization, my desire to root my life in these waters of life).
This swallowing force of death, erasing what had been forsaken, what I forgot to strike down into earth.
And to die is to compromise one’s preferred solitude. Love, also, is the compromise of one’s preferred solitude. What I can allow to be dead and distant from me, without compromising who I am in my isolation. What I cannot afford to lose lest I compromise who I am and the memory of who I’d be. Always trying to hold on, and always losing every day. Every day forgetting, every day becoming. As if I Adam faced with the a nameless beginning, yet, I absolve the history, I forsake defining the moment around us: my one concern is you and I and how we shall proceed. I must choose whose sin I will share, whose beauty I wish to glean.
And you, Life, and you, God of Everything, in Everything, I reconcile myself to you; I resurrect you by means of the approach: I formulate a new myth. We partake of each other’s rancid bodies; suffering well, we derive the sublime from our mutual, patient suffering. I take you for myself and transform you as I will: I hold your sins in my body with the hope of sublimation.
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