As soon as I awakened I noticed the spider’s web. And entered the woods. Through the web. Neither the web nor the woods had been there before I fell asleep. I’m sure of it. Perhaps I’m still dreaming. The web glistens across the upper window pane. Is it inside or out? The glistening suggests it’s outside and has collected dew. From the woods, looking back, it’s gone. So is the window. Typical of a dream. The web, the window, the woods. All those W’s! And, of course, the wind. Which weaves in this remembrance of Borges:
To gaze at the river of time and water
And recall that time itself is another river
To know we cease to be, just like the river,
And that our faces pass away, just like the water.
To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.
To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of mankind’s days and of his years,
To transform the outrage of the years
Into a music, a rumor and a symbol,
To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold, of such is Poetry
Immortal and a pauper. For Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.
At times in the afternoon a face
Looks at us from the depths of a mirror;
Art must be like that mirror
That reveals to us this face of ours.
They tell how Ulysses, glutted with wonders,
Wept with love to descry his Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of wonders.
It is also like the endless river
That passes and remains, a mirror for one same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And another, like an endless river.
(Jorge Luis Borges, in Ars Poetica)