Borges - Labyrinths (1641)

[mvuent]

George berkely? I think this is the first time youve ever flexed your degree on here. Tell us more

wasn't really a developed thought. but references to him do bookend labyrinths.

berkley's famous for arguing (very convincingly, imo) that objects don't exist outside of their being perceived. when no one's perceiving the table, it doesn't exist. iirc he goes to rescue object permanence by saying that god is always perceiving the table, but literally no one has ever cared about that part. so it's the initial unmoored godless vision of the universe that's really important.

anyways, tlön is essentially "what would happen if an entire civilization of people actually believed this shit?" and berkeley gets an in-story shout out when he's described as a member of the secret society that imagined tlön. in "a new refutation of time" borges explicitly takes berkeley's argument even further, quoting him at length. (and mocking schopenhauer for either fundamentally misunderstanding or else very imprecisely summarizing his views.)

guess it just struck me how a lot of these stories are berkeleyan dreams. stories of dissolving the dam between inner and outer. and of course you can also connect that to where we might imagine borges was in the period of his life when he wrote most of this stuff: physically surrounded by other people's thoughts working in a library, his own outer senses failing, etc.

 

[Corpsey]

Entirely coincidentally I was reading a DK book about the solar system today and had a brief moment of existential something or other as I contemplated how all these things would exist whether or not there were any consciousness to perceive them but without that consciousness there would be (at least from my consciousness-centric pov) no point whatsoever.

The beautiful dunes of mars or whatever. Pointless. Thank God for Man.

 

[IdleRich]

i think it's fair to say that a lot of pop music aspires to be what borges calls a zahir. something you can't get out of your head, until it gradually consumes your entire consciousness. a good example of this would be Miley Cyrus - Prisoner (Official Video) ft. Dua Lipa.



ironically, or as a chilling touch of mockery by reptilians who designed it, the lyrics themselves are also about a zahir...

The Zahir is one of the ones that made the strongest impressions on me. In what way are the lyrics about a Zahir?

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Entirely coincidentally I was reading a DK book about the solar system today and had a brief moment of existential something or other as I contemplated how all these things would exist whether or not there were any consciousness to perceive them but without that consciousness there would be (at least from my consciousness-centric pov) no point whatsoever.

The beautiful dunes of mars or whatever. Pointless. Thank God for Man.

 

[mvuent]

The Zahir is one of the ones that made the strongest impressions on me. In what way are the lyrics about a Zahir?

“Prisoner, prisoner
Locked up, can't get you off my mind, off my mind
Lord knows I tried a million times, million times
Oh-whoa, why can't you
Why can't you just let me go?”

“Strung out on a feeling, my hands are tied
Your face on my ceiling, I fantasize
Oh, I can't control it, I can't control it
(I can't control it)
I try to replace it with city lights
I'll never escape it, I need the high
Oh, I can't control it, I can't control it
(Oh)”

seems to me like hannah montana’s talking about a zahir—since a person can function as one.

 

[IdleRich]

Ah I get whet you're saying, nicely spotted.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Good thread this, never seen it before.

 

[version]

It's not an idea anyone can really lay claim to. Which is why it's so important to invent a name for it and trademark that name. Hyperstition.

"I think hyperstition is one of those things that has completely escaped from the box and is now a wild, feral animal on the loose. My relation to this alien thing is like everyone else’s who’s interested in it. I am approaching it from a position of zero authority, trying to make sense of how it is living and changing and affecting the world. It, the thing, not it, the concept. But having said that, my sense of a hyperstition is that a hyperstition is an experiment. It makes itself real, if it works. And whether or not it works, is something that can’t be, again, decided by a process of an internal debate, you can’t as a result of some kind of internal dialectics decide that, hey, this is a good hyperstition, it has a great future. It’s gonna work because of its intrinsic relation to the Outside, which is something that cannot be managed. Perhaps it can be cautiously, tentatively predicted in a way that a scientist or an artist would—through learning their craft—get a sense of what is gonna work and what isn’t gonna work. But that’s not the same as having a criterion, still less a law."

"I am not 100 percent confident of what Reza is saying in that text. I wouldn’t want this to be treated as a commentary on his thought. But hyperstition did arise in a certain milieu that definitely rhetorically emphasized a certain type of collectivity and even more than that. What’s being referenced is not primarily universality at all, but something much closer to an anonymity or the problematization of attribution. Any hyperstitional unit—and what’s now called a meme is very close to this—that can be confidently attributed to a particular act of individual creation is originally disabled. H.P. Lovecraft seems to have understood that the whole production of the Lovecraftian mythos was very much an attempt on his part to subtract his own creative role. It’s only when that is subtracted that these things are released. Cthulhu becomes a kind of hyperstitional term to the point that it’s not simply something that has been invented by Lovecraft. The fact that he weirdly, often a bit hamfistedly, weaved his social network of friends, namely their names, into his stories, is part of that recognition. What’s more at stake in this notion of collectivity is something like a breakage of attribution, the original subversion of it. I don’t think it’s just a tactic. It’s precisely the things where you have no idea where they came from, it’s exactly those elements about whose genesis you have least confidence, that are the ones that have the greatest hyperstitional momentum."

https://syntheticzero.net/2017/06/19/the-only-thing-i-would-impose-is-fragmentation-an-interview-with-nick-land/

 

[Benny Bunter]

Got inspired to pick up Borges again by this thread and pleased to find my Spanish is good enough to read it properly this time round. Properly mindbending stuff - favourites so far are Funes the memorious, the secret miracle, the immortal and the house of asterion.

I love Emma Zunz too, which doesn't seem very typically borgesian at first, it's a lot more realistic, but by the end he's still demonstrating how a fictionalised story is in essence more true than the 'facts' (the story she gives to the police about what happened).

And I just love the man too. I hadn't seen him interviewed before, this interview is brilliant

And I've listened to the first couple of these lectures and they're superb. Makes me want to check his poetry out now, he certainly knew a lot about it.


He's also making me want to check out a load of writers that he rates highly who I've never previously been interested in - Chesterton, Kipling, Poe.

 

[luka]

His poetry isn't poetry but it's still worth a look

 

[Benny Bunter]

Yeah, you never really see his poetry talked about much or anthologised, but I'm intrigued after listening to those lectures.

 

[luka]

It's basically of a piece with the stories. Same sort of thing.

 

[mvuent]

Got inspired to pick up Borges again by this thread and pleased to find my Spanish is good enough to read it properly this time round. Properly mindbending stuff - favourites so far are Funes the memorious, the secret miracle, the immortal and the house of asterion.

I love Emma Zunz too, which doesn't seem very typically borgesian at first, it's a lot more realistic, but by the end he's still demonstrating how a fictionalised story is in essence more true than the 'facts' (the story she gives to the police about what happened).

emma zunz and the shape of the sword were the ones that felt the most like good yarns in a more conventional sense. the ones that made me suspect he was an actual person and not just a brain floating around in the Cosmic Library.

having said that, the borgesian punchline of emma zunz also reminded me a bit of so-called gettier cases in epistemology...

Actually, the story was incredible, but it impressed everyone because substantially it was true. True was Emma Zunz' tone, true was her shame, true was her hate. True also was the outrage she had suffered: only the circumstances were false, the time, and one or two proper names.

Gettier problem - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

it's not exactly the same but it's an interesting foreshadowing of a development in philosophy that happened ~15 years after the story was written. creates an interesting emotional effect where, to me, the ending feels almost happy, by borges standards, but the epistemological "gap" casts a shadow over it.

 

[woops]

emma zunz and the shape of the sword were the ones that felt the most like good yarns in a more conventional sense. the ones that made me suspect he was an actual person and not just a brain floating around in the Cosmic Library.

having said that, the borgesian punchline of emma zunz also reminded me a bit of so-called gettier cases in epistemology...

Gettier problem - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

it's not exactly the same but it's an interesting foreshadowing of a development in philosophy that happened ~15 years after the story was written. creates an interesting emotional effect where, to me, the ending feels almost happy, by borges standards, but the epistemological "gap" casts a shadow over it.

this gettier has got a very kewl first name imo

 

[Mr. Tea]

this gettier has got a very kewl first name imo

 

[version]

Even more devious than a building that has no exits, like a prison, is a building with exits that lead nowhere, like a labyrinth.

Piranesi, Borges, and the Labyrinths of Time

Jorge Luis Borges was deeply inspired by the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose prints of imaginary prisons and palaces captured the Argentinian author's imagination.

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu