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Encrypted in Borges' fiction, “Funes the Memorius,” written in 1941, is a poem discoverable only by accident. My own happening upon the poem took the form of my noticing that an essence of an essence could be discerned when I pieced together sequentially the fragments of sentences that I had circled in the course of several dozen readings of this story over a period of fifteen years. “Funes the Memorius” is the story of a boy of sixteen who, after having been thrown from a horse, finds that he is paralyzed, but also blessed and cursed with infinite memory. His memory is so vast and so precise that no detail, however subtle or however distant, of any experience or perception, past or present, is lost to him. However, in his world so overbrimming with detail he is unable to generalize, unable to filter and sort his perceptions and memories, and consequently is almost entirely unable to think or sleep. At nineteen he died of “congestion of the lungs.” The following is the encrypted poem that I uncovered in the Spring of 1999:
I remember himhe is deada passion flower in his handI remember himI remember him (I think)I remembera yellow screenVagueI clearly remember