Jorge Luis Borges
Borges often uses the circle and the wheel as symbols of the infinite, for they represent the whole and encompass everything. In 'The God's Script', the narrator, a Mayan magician, sees an enormous wheel "made of water, but also of fire," an enormous wheel "made of water, but also of fire," which allows him to understand the patterns in the jaguar's fur. We might say that the circle at this point implies yin and yang, or the opposites of the two primordial elements that constitute all of nature.
In The Circular Ruins, the ruins of the title are arranged in the shape of a physical circle, but the process of moving from one set of ruins to another is also 'circular' in a more abstract causal sense.
The Zahir[1], the 'Unforgettable', haunts the Borges in the form of a circular silver coin until he forgets all other external realities, dreams and destinies.
[1] Zahir is a person or an object that has the power to create an obsession in everyone who sees it, so that the affected person perceives less and less of reality and more and more of the Zahir, at first only while asleep, then at all times.
Ecstasy does not use the same symbol twice; one man has seen God in a blinding light, another has perceived Him in a sword or in the circles of a rose. I saw a Wheel of enormous height, which was not before my eyes, or behind them, or to the sides, but everywhere at once. This Wheel was made of water, but also of fire, and although I could see its boundaries, it was infinite.
The God’s Script
Black bagel
In the film Everything Everywhere All At Once, Jobu puts all her hopes, dreams and everything she cares about on a bagel that collapses like a black hole. She represents the sum total of her life - the nothingness - in a round, hollow bagel. The place that makes her feel most at peace is in a universe where life never had the chance to form - she and her mother are two stones, talking silently.
Vanitas
Homo bulla (man is a bubble) was a concept dear to the baroque era.In 17th century Dutch Vanitas paintings, the soap bubble is used as a visual metaphor. As a perfect sphere, it beautifully reflects and refracts its surroundings, representing the fallibility of life and the abruptness of death.
Voodoo in My Blood
This video is suffused with a shamanic, psychedelic and terrifying air. Underpasses are always a source of unexplainable anxiety and foreboding. Then a sphere symbolising everything, the big Other, appears. What makes this video a profound metaphor for dancing with a ball against our will. We all dance like a ball against our will.
Massive Attack: Voodoo in My Blood (Music Video 2016)
“The Fiction of Jorge Luis Borges: Symbolism.” Interesting Literature, March 13, 2022. https://interestingliterature.com/2022/04/jorge-luis-borges-stories-symbolism/.
Borges, Jorge. “The God’s Script.’” Essay. In The Aleph and Other Stories. EE.UU.: Penguin Books, 2000.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Zahir.” Essay. In The Aleph and Other Stories. EE.UU.: Penguin Books, 2000.
“The Soap Bubble Trope - Jstor Daily.” Accessed November 13, 2022. https://daily.jstor.org/the-soap-bubble-trope/.