A DIALOGUE WITH BORGES

The sound of the second snowfall in as many days was as soft as cotton balls landing on a heaped cotton. Slightly reclining on my sofa by the fireplace, I sat across from Jorge Luis Borges—two imaginary beings having a real conversation about one of his stories.

“Maestro, what will you have?”

“A cup of yerba mate is always my goto, but a beer would also do nicely.”

I fetched him a Scottish heavy from the fridge—no yerba mate, but possessing a caramel flavor and rich aroma I know he would appreciate.

He sipped the beer with satisfaction and began retelling a story, Las Ruinas Circulares, which he wrote in 1940. His voice was raspy, excited with a certain poetic cadence. He paused between each, carefully locating each word in space as if constructing a verbal edifice.

In the story, the wizard protagonist, has the singular ambition to conjure a man—not a woman, and certainly not with a woman— into existence, in flesh and blood, by dreaming about him with precision and in complete

(700 BC), to John Sladek’s 1983 Tik-Tok and the 2017 film Blade Runner 2049.

She traces the curious relationship between gods, humans, and robots. Mayor points to the framework of ‘born versus made’ as a distinguishing factor between humans and robots. But, what of the gods? In mythology across the world, gods were neither born nor made (with notable exceptions). Where gods were made, they were immaculately conceived or magically conjured—not born. That is the case with Jesus Christ and with Pandavas in Mahabharata. Kunti, in Mahabharata, conceived six children including the five Pandavas through immaculate conception with the aid of the various gods.”

Borges nodded and signaled me to continue.

“Your story connects gods, humans, and robots in much the same way as we have seen throughout human history but delivered with a characteristic twist.