Film

Murphy’s Section Six et passim is the key to the final image, the steps thereto (“the bitter steps”) are divided by the overture into the wall and the tower (and back to the wall).

“Like a shot off a shovel” the hero appears, evading the issue, skirting the wall past barricade, over obstacle and into a couple (flowered hat, clergyman’s collar) and so on while Baudelaire’s benediction plays out on the faces of the two, as again on the old woman with her basket of flowers coming down the stairs.

He gains his room, briefcase in hand. Draw the tattered shade and thin curtains (“the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new”), take the blanket off the bed to cover the mirror with, put out the big cat and little dog, tear up the picture of God staring, cover the parrot’s cage and the goldfish bowl, tear up the photographs from birth to present, taken from the briefcase, sit in the rocking chair and doze.

The camera gets around him at last and stands before him where the picture had been nailed. He covers his eyes, the one patched like Ford or Lang, at the sight of himself with dazzling eye, looks again, covers his eyes and ceases to rock.

“Borges and I”, Borges on Whitman, Baudelaire’s albatross—with a “try” from Schopenhauer, as they say in chess problems.