Borges, by Mordzinski (top) and by Arbus (bottom)

An old Man with a steady Look sublime —/ That stops his earthly Task to watch the skies — / But he is blind — a statue hath such Eyes — / Yet having moon-ward turn’d his face by chance/ Gazes the orb with moon-like Countenance…/ He gazes still, his eyeless Face all Eye —/ As ’twere an Organ full of silent Sight,/ His whole Face seemeth to rejoice in Light/ Lip touching Lip, all moveless, Bust and Limb,/ He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on Him!

— S.T. Coleridge, “Limbo” (1811)

This photograph of Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires, made by Daniel Mordzinski in 1978, fills me with what I must call love. Full of awe and fantasy, it is an emotion I would allow myself to feel for a great and elderly writer who also embodies, in my eyes, an unfathomable grace. Recently, while watching a film on the 98-year-old artist, Louise Bourgeois, I felt something similar. It was a love built on the idea of selfless service. I felt I could do anything for her, from the most menial to the most exalted, and the self-effacement seemed idyllic. Such a feeling is at once perverse, fantastical and real. It is premised on impossibility, but it is also the welling up of a genuine response to greatness.

I have felt it for Tagore, and for Chaucer, Shakespeare and Henry James. Unlike Chaucer and Shakespeare, who died in their fifties, James and Tagore lived until 73 and 80 respectively; Borges was 79 when this picture was taken, and died eight years later. So, old age — what the late Edward Said called lateness — was essential to the terminal image of their genius. Tagore and Borges (but not James) were also blessed in their last years with a band of men and women whose vocation seemed to have become the care of these great, old men. Borges inspired in both Norman Thomas di Giovanni (his American biographer, translator and frequent co-traveller) and María Kodama (assistant, companion and, in the last year of his life, his wife) a devotion that was as proprietorial after his death as it was absolute while he lived.

I find myself imagining such devotion in minute detail — its mortal, bodily demands, its intellectual rigour. But what gives to Borges’s old age a mythic, and almost allegorical, dimension — lacking in, say, Tagore’s — is the blindness. To have read to him (as Alberto Manguel had done as a boy) or to have been his amanuensis, must have felt like an election. And this is what Mordzinski’s photograph brings out to startling effect. It makes us see Borges at the end of a line of blind poets that goes back, through Milton, to Homer, in whose figure history merges with mythology. Seated in darkness, yet surrounded by the tools of vision (a studio light on a stand, a hand holding what looks like a camera lens) and a strong light falling on his face and hands, Borges seems to be caught at a crossroads. A mysterious hand points in one direction, while another giant finger-like shape points in the opposite direction, the two marking the two edges of the picture. They seem to belong to the “enigmatic god” who conducts a “game” that the blind man “doesn’t understand”. This was how Borges had written about the “blind man in a hollow house” in “A Saturday”, a poem that is part of his History of the Night (1977). In this photograph, the “hollow house” could also be Borges’s own garden of forking paths, or the castle of crossed destinies that Italo Calvino could not have been able to imagine without him. Having just read Calvino’s Cosmicomics, I see Mordzinski’s Borges as Calvino’s narrator, Qfwfq, a historian of the universe who is as old as the universe itself. In my imagination, Qfwfq sits like Borges, somewhere between outer darkness and inner mystery, his hands clasped over a walking stick firmly planted on earth, his eyes seeing everything and nothing.

Almost a decade before this photograph was taken, Diane Arbus made a frontal portrait of Borges in New York City for Harper’s Bazaar. With the bare trees of Central Park behind him and their forked shadows on the ground, Borges holds his walking stick in exactly the same way as he does in Mordzinski’s photograph. But his gaze is both divided and frighteningly direct, each eye turned in a different direction. The forking paths seem to be coming out of Borges himself, out of his sightless eyes towards, and away from, the viewer. To love Arbus’s Borges is to be pulled both apart and within by those crossed, inwardly turned eyes.

Yet, Mordzinski’s photograph seems truer to what Borges had called “my own modest blindness” in a lecture delivered in the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires in 1977. His blindness was modest because it was total in one eye, but only partial in the other. This put him, not in total darkness (that, strangely, would have been more comforting), but in a world of a few dimly, yet perpetually glimmering colours that did not desert him even in sleep — yellow or “the gold of the tigers”, blue, green, white and grey. But his destinies crossed more dramatically when the “slow nightfall” over decades finally became blindness in 1955, the same year that he was made director of the Argentine National Library, which, by another incredible turn of the screw, got its third blind director with the appointment of Borges. That enigmatic god, he wrote in his “Poem of the Gifts”, “with such splendid irony/ granted me books and blindness at one touch”.

For Borges, blindness was both “a literary destiny” and a gift, with that mix of liberation and confinement that true gifts always bring. The freedom it brought was not only a freedom from “the inconsequential skin of things”, but a curious freeing of space itself, both within and without. Mordzinski captures this by placing Borges at the heart of an expansiveness that seems to be eternally gesturing beyond itself. “In this dark world and wide”: Milton’s phrase from the sonnet on his own blindness precisely described to Borges “the world of the blind when they are alone, walking with hands outstretched, searching for props”. This was also the vertiginously opened up space that Shakespeare’s blinded Earl of Gloucester learnt to feel his way through in King Lear.

The theatre of the blind is at once baroque and absurd. Yet, its tragic groping turns into something else at the end of Borges’s 1977 lecture. As they abandon their search, what the outstretched hands learn to claim for themselves as a newfound gift is the emptiness itself, in which “everything near becomes far”. Blindness becomes a metaphor once again, the way towards understanding the “supreme solitude” that is truer for Borges than his own blindness. Faced with this last solitude, the language of blindness, of the slipping away of the visible world, must give way to something simpler and more absolute: “All things go off, leaving us.”