With the Eyes of the Spirit Borges Imagines Xul Solar

Abstract

San Signos identifies a set of 64 visions experienced by Xul Solar from his work with the hexagrams of the I Ching. Jorge Luis Borges refers to the visions of Xul from the 1960s. Why the need to tell a story of Xul Solar, to create a “convincing” symbol capable of identifying it? Borges knew how difficult to assimilate his friend was for many. Believing in his story meant taking him out of the risk of oblivion and silence he was exposed to. This anecdote did not separate him from what he considered essential in him, “a reformer of the universe”. For Borges to refer to him only as a painter was incomplete; Xul had been a visionary, a mystic and as such, a poet. However, from 1977 the public image of Xul Solar was affirmed in the figure of the multifaceted artist, painter and creator (an image that found support in the rereading of the artistic avant-gardes in Latin America at the end of that decade and in which Xul entered in his own right). In a reverse process, his visions became hidden or protected from the profane gaze. In an Argentina in the midst of a military dictatorship, it was difficult to think about that visionary Xul and, even less, to build his memory on what had been essential for Borges: the figure of a painter, mystic and visionary, in short, a poet.