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Jun. 21st, 2009 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionLugones has written that in Cordoba, before magazines came in, he had many times seen a playing card used as a picture and nailed to the wall in gauchos' shacks. The four of copas, with its small lion and two towers, was particularly coveted. (from Borges' "Autobiographical Essay" of 1970)
***
Been looking at old Argentine and other decks: looks like the four of cups was traditionally where the deck manufacturer identified itself, since there's so much space in the middle. Some just give their names, others have a picture logo. Haven't been able to locate this small lion & two towers one with my limited googledy skills. In McCarthy the card makes two appearances but the picture is never mentioned.
Borges was the literary find for McCarthy's generation, and the only known mixer of gauchismo and gnosticism pre-McC. Been reading them in tandem these last weeks (along with Calvino, who makes me think of Kafka, Borges and Abe constantly but never McCarthy) and the one makes me think of the other quite often. Today it was the second of two poems in In Praise of Darkness on Durer's Ritter, Tod und Teufel etching, where the Knight is praised as able to withstand both Devil and Death and ride forever on, unlike mere Borges, painfully lacking the luxury of being imaginary - like in City of the Plains' "Epilogue" and the relationship between the two protagonists in that book. Figured the connection was fanciful but then read the above and redescended into cartomania.
***
Been looking at old Argentine and other decks: looks like the four of cups was traditionally where the deck manufacturer identified itself, since there's so much space in the middle. Some just give their names, others have a picture logo. Haven't been able to locate this small lion & two towers one with my limited googledy skills. In McCarthy the card makes two appearances but the picture is never mentioned.
Borges was the literary find for McCarthy's generation, and the only known mixer of gauchismo and gnosticism pre-McC. Been reading them in tandem these last weeks (along with Calvino, who makes me think of Kafka, Borges and Abe constantly but never McCarthy) and the one makes me think of the other quite often. Today it was the second of two poems in In Praise of Darkness on Durer's Ritter, Tod und Teufel etching, where the Knight is praised as able to withstand both Devil and Death and ride forever on, unlike mere Borges, painfully lacking the luxury of being imaginary - like in City of the Plains' "Epilogue" and the relationship between the two protagonists in that book. Figured the connection was fanciful but then read the above and redescended into cartomania.
