The two of me

"Borges and I"
by Jorge Luis Borges
(as published in "Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings" in 1964)

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.  I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary.  I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor.  It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me.  It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even him, but rather to the language and to tradition.  Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him.  Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger.  I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar.  Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things.  Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Crave

...an excerpt from...
Crave
by Sarah Kane
(1998)

C  She is currently having some kind of nervous breakdown and wishes she'd been born black, male and more attractive.

B  I give myself.

C  Or just more attractive.

B  I give my heart.

C  Or just different.

M  But that's not really giving.

C  Just someone fucking else.

A  Fragile and choking.

C  She ceases to continue with the day to day farce of getting through the next few hours in an attempt to ward off the fact that she doesn't know how to get through the next forty years.

A  I love you still,

B  Against my will.

C  She's talking about herself in the third person because the idea of being who she is, of acknowledging that she is herself, is more than her pride can take.

B  With a fucking vengeance.

C  She's sick to the fucking gills of herself and wishes wishes wishes that something would happen to make life begin.

A  I'm a much nicer person since I had an affair.

C  You can only kill yourself if you're not already dead.

M  Guilt does that.

A  Because now I know that betrayal means nothing.