Page 10 - GALIET EMPATHY and Byron´s Hero IV

selfing and othering, identities that extend as far as 20th century Borges and his other I: “My life is a kind of fugue, and a falling away and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.”5 It is the error of poets, reiterates Aristotle, to think that Herakles is indeed one man, one I.6 For the Hero of Byron, ‘wanderer over eternity’7 3⁄4 what modern, thousand-fold Icaruses or Prometheuses 3⁄4 the centuries quake and heaven’s mirror shatters: its pieces are forever scattered into that abysmal infinite, a no here, a no there, a nowhere, where he has relentlessly fallen, whirling and whirling, towards nothingness.
Endless and terrifying fall towards modernity’s black hole where Byron’s Hero never reaches his tragic dénouement or his dulcet Paradise or Ithaca of his heart. Endless fall where all he perceives is his wistfulness and weariness: his cursed catastrophe 3⁄4 a tormenting and poisonous clash of being. Thus, he seeks refuge in maternal nature or physis; thus, he shuns and rebels against every social convention or nomos;8 thus, he will not tolerate being that which he is not: ‘a falcon
5 Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. “Borges and I.” NY, USA: The Penguin Group. Viking. 1998. 324.
6 Aristotle. Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. 8.
7 Byron. Childe Harold. Canto III, Stanza 70. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
8 Byron. Childe Harold. Canto III, Stanzas 13, 52 and 72. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
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