I
have already discussed one of Borges' works, Funes the Memorious, in
a previous post. Funes has perfect memory, a gift on the one hand but
a curse on the other, because in reflexively recalling every detail
of his current and past surroundings, activities, thoughts and
conversations, he cannot reason abstractly. Sartre has pointed out
that the process of thought, the pathway from knowledge to meaning,
requires negation, i.e., willfully ignoring some aspects and focusing
on others, and this Funes cannot do. I related Funes to the end
result of the virtual age, where most all of our activities – and
certainly our activities within the virtual world – will be
indelibly committed to the cloud.
Here
I will discuss other of Borges' works of fiction with the same
objective of illuminating aspects of the virtual age, two in
particular:
- We are creating and inhabiting our own virtual world. It most immediately appears in computer games and avatars, but it also appears with a bit more subtlety through our on-line image. Our Facebook selves are not our real selves, and our Facebook friends are not really our friends. Like the sultry-voiced grandmother as a phone sex worker, as we extend further out past a small circle of real friends we are to a greater and greater extent who we wish to be or who we think others want us to be in a virtual world. (My eight year-old daughter is a twelve year-old French girl in Poptropica).
- We are moving toward a world where there is perfect memory and unlimited knowledge. Knowledge of the world and our history through Wikipedia, of where we are and what we are doing through social networks. If something is put into the cloud, it might well be there forever. And when we inhabit our virtual selves we capture all of our history, because all that is virtual begins in the noosphere.
A
number of books have discussed the social implications of the present
state of the virtual age, none better than You Are Not a Gadget by
Jaron Lanier, who, not just incidentally, popularized the term
“virtual reality”. But a discussion of society in the virtual age
requires more than a look at the world today. The term “age”
suggests a longer-term process, and if it is indeed an age, we are
just climbing over the cusp. The feudal age lasted from about 800AD
to 1400 AD, the industrial age that started with the Industrial
Revolution in the 1700s – actually glimmers of the industrial age
extend back to the 1400's – has been with us for the better part of
three centuries. If the virtual age really is an age of similar
import, we can take the trends we see today and push them forward to
an all but unimaginable extent. So rather than thinking of the
virtual reality of today, think of something along the lines of
Nozick's experience machine. Or, Borges' world of Tlon. And rather
than thinking of the facts-at-your-fingertips of today's wikipedia,
think of Borges' Aleph.
The
reason to look at Borges' work in the context of the emerging
virtual age is not to plot a path for the future in terms of science
fiction. It is to see the implications on ourselves and society.
For Borges, the intrusion
of the fantastic world into the real leads to alienation; the gift
of perfect memory and complete knowledge leads to stifling of our
innate, human capacity for creativity.
A
side benefit of using Borges' work as the substrate for this
discussion is that it is a quick read. Many of the stories I will
reference are ten pages or less.
Creating Our
Virtual World
I will start with two short stories where Borges creates virtual worlds, where man inhabits a world of dreams and disquieting fantasy.
I will start with two short stories where Borges creates virtual worlds, where man inhabits a world of dreams and disquieting fantasy.
The Circular Ruin
The
grey man kissed the mud, climbed up the bank with pushing aside
(probably, without feeling) the blades which were lacerating his
flesh, and crawled, nauseated and bloodstained, up to the circular
enclosure crowned with a stone tiger or horse, which sometimes was
the color of flame and now was that of ashes. This circle was a
temple which had been devoured by ancient fires, profaned by the
miasmal jungle, and whose god no longer received the homage of men.
The stranger stretched himself out beneath the pedestal.
In
The Circular Ruins an old man enters the ruins of an ancient temple,
his goal to dream a man, to “dream
him in minute entirety and insert him into reality.” That
is, to create his real offspring by virtual means, part by part
through a painstaking process of dreams. In order to do so he himself
moves further and further into this virtual world of dreams, to the
point that he finally is only awake to the real world a few hours of
the day. He dreams his son
“entrail by entrail, feature by feature, in a thousand and one
secret nights” until, finally, the dreamed one awakes.
The Dreamer is tormented by the
fear that his son will discover he is nothing more than “a mere
simulacrum,” and so it is with some relief, but also humiliation
and terror that he discovers, some time later, that he also is an
illusion, that someone else was dreaming him. As suggested by the
title, there is a possibly endless recurrence of one virtual world
being dreamed up within another one, each depending on the previous
one for the shadow of its life. With the subjugation of the real into
the virtual, The Circular Ruins depicts a gray world where there is
an absence of time and of history.
Tlon,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
The contact and
the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its
rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess
masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the
(conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the
teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has
wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a
fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past
of which we know nothing with certainty - not even that it is false.
For
the imaginary inhabitants of Tlon life is no more than a subjective
projection of the mind with no material existence. Indeed, there
are no nouns in Tlön's language, only impersonal verbs and
adjectives. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word
"moon,", but there is a verb which in English would be "to
moon" or "to moonate." What we might say as "The
moon rose above the river" is for them "upward behind the
onstreaming it mooned." They
do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of
a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and
then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is
considered an example of association of ideas. Because reality
is strictly mental, the
sciences on Tlön are all subordinated to one discipline: psychology.
As
in The Circular Ruin, Tlon invades the real world with one of
fantasy. But rather than taking a dream and
making it a reality, on Tlon the reality pursues and is embraced by
the dream. Rather than the real being created by the virtual as
occurs in the Circular Ruin, in Tlon the virtual envelopes the real.
In The Circular Ruin the dreamer created a son that at least
apparently was real, in Tlon there is no material at all. Their
world permeates the real world, the real world is yielding,
disintegrating under its influence, its fictitious past replacing
real history.
Much
as you could do in virtual space where you can build whatever world,
on Tlon there are numerous competing schools of metaphysics: one that
negates time, another that thinks all existence a dream. That is, for
all of its complexity and seeming randomness, Tlon is built by man,
using man's rationality and with man as its deity. Because
of this, once the world became aware of Tlon – through the work of
a journalist (from Tennessee!) who exhumes all forty volumes of the
lost Encyclopedia of Tlon – “Manuals, anthologies, summaries,
literal versions, authorized re- editions and pirated editions of the
Greatest Work of Man flooded and still flood the earth.” Almost
immediately, reality yields on more than one account. The truth is
that it longed to yield. How could one do other than submit to Tlön,
to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly plant? It is useless to
answer that reality is also orderly. Reality is based on divine laws
which we never quite grasp. Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a
labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by
men.
All
things of Tlon sweep the world because "any symmetry with a
semblance or order" – order which is possible in a fantasy
world designed by man, but not in the unfathomable world – is
preferred to the unfathomable nature of the real world. People
forget their national pasts, studying Tlon history, learning Tlon
languages, giving over their very existences to Tlon. Borges predicts
that ultimately "English and French and mere Spanish will
disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlon."
The
notion of virtual and real enter from the outset of the story: One of
the heresiarchs of Uqbar, the country from which the literature of
Tlon originated, had declared that mirrors and copulation are
abominable, because they increase the number or men. The
mirror in a virtual sense; copulation in a real sense.
Related to the theme of the intersection of the real and virtual world is that of The Double: two people entwined as if they are one person,
or one person appearing as two, occurs repeatedly in Borges' fiction.
The Shape of the Sword, Theme, and The Life of Tadeo Cruz are
examples of a man represented in ambiguous terms. In The Shape of the
Sword, the same person is the betrayer and the betrayed; in Theme the
same person is a hero and a traitor; and in The Life of Tadeo Cruz
two people are as if they are one in terms of their experiences and
personal characteristics. Manifest in these stories is the interplay
of the real and the fantasy. Can the two be kept separate, is one
real and the other an illusion, if one is lost is the other lost as
well? The classic Borges' treatment of the double is his very short story, Borges and I.
Borges and I
I
shall endure in Borges, not in myself (if, indeed, I am anybody at
all), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others',
or in the tedious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free
myself from him, and I moved on from the mythologies of the slums and
outskirts of the city to games with time and infinity, but those
games belong to Borges now, and I shall have to think up other
things. So my life is a point- counterpoint, 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.
I
am not sure which of us it is that's writing this page.
Borges
and I is the culmination of the melding of the real and the virtual,
where the real selves and the virtual selves can no longer be
distinguished or set apart. The narrator, the “I”, is private, and in the lexicon of the virtual age, is the real. The “I”
in this story enjoys the little things – the real things – of
life: coffee, maps, the charm of old typefaces. “Borges” is the
public version of the self, the version that is transmittable electronically and can be molded to meet the expectations of the broad virtual audience (and "friends"), that has no connection
to the substance of life, but rather exists for the view projected to
others.
The
private man is the man who experiences, the public man is the one who
projects an image. Ultimately, it is not just, as the final sentence
of the story expounds, that the “I” and the “Borges” cannot
tell who is doing the writing, but that neither can lay claim to be
the real person. That is taken over by the collective
conscientiousness of all the readers. When the “I” dies, little
memory of him will remain; it is the public “Borges” that will be
recalled.
All Information does not equal All Knowledge
The Library of Babel
When
it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first
reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of
an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no
world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist―somewhere in
some hexagon.
That
unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough, by a similarly
disproportionate depression. The certainty that some bookshelf in
some hexagon contained precious books, yet that those precious books
were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable.
The Library of Babel contains an
all but countless number of books stacked within its hexagonal rooms.
Each book contains
four hundred ten pages, each page contains forty lines, and each line
can contain eighty characters. So each book has a total of 410 · 40
· 80 = 1,312,000 characters. There
are 25 characters that can be used to fill the slots, twenty-two
letters along with a blank space, a period and comma. (There are no
numbers nor are there capital letters). The library contains a book
with every possible combination of those characters. So any history
(including a detailed history of the future), description of a place
or person, philosophical discourse or religious tome will exist
somewhere in the library. That is, subject to the constraints on the
length of the books, the library contains all knowledge. More than
that, it contains all possible knowledge. There is no action, no
flight of imagination that has not already been inscribed in one of
the books. To have command of the library is to have the attribute of
God, knowing all that has occurred and will occur, knowing what is in
the hearts of all mankind.
The
problem is that this knowledge is not indexed, and the vastness of
the library assures that the knowledge it contains will never be
accessed. For every book that has content the librarian must traverse
multitudes of books, one might have the letters mcv repeated from
start to finish, or another with the exact same sequence, but ending
in mvv. But even a book with seemingly random letters, there will be
another book that can be taken as a dictionary which, in its random
language, gives meaning to those letters in such a way that the
former book leaps forth with meaning. And because there are many such
dictionaries, the same text, meaningless to us, can have multitudes
of meanings, some of terrible significance.
But
even if you find a book that made sense, and even if it seems on
point, you can never know if it is fact or fiction. For each book
that is in some sense true and correct, there will be innumerable
others that vary ever so slightly from that correctness, or are
patently false:
“the
faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false
catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof
of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides,
the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on
that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every
book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all
books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the
mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.”
It
is the juxtaposition of limitless knowledge with the fruitlessness of
accessing that knowledge which is the core theme of this story. Just
how large this library is is all but unfathomable. Indeed, a book has
been written on the mathematical features of the library. Given that
each of the 1,312,000
slots can be filled in any of 25 different ways, there are
25^1,312,000, or about 10^1,834,100, distinct books in the Library.
(Actually, it is even more than that, because each book has a title
on its spine, and perhaps for every book, it must appear with all
possible titles. But we will leave this out of the calculation,
because even without it, the number of books is about as large a
number as we can contextually conceive). Our
known universe could not contain even a minuscule portion of the
books in this library. The known universe is about 10^27 meters
across. If we take the universe to be a cube 10^27 on each side, and
assume we can fit a thousand books in each cubic meter, then our
universe could hold 10^81 · 10^3 = 10^84 books. If we were to do
that, it is 10^84 books down, another 10^1,834,016 books to go. Even
if we shrink the books down to the size of a proton, 10^-15 meters
across, so we could pack 10^45 books in each cubic meter, the known
universe would only hold 10^126 of these books.
The frustration that there is unbounded
knowledge that is out of reach breeds superstitions,
even gods and religions. There is a belief in what is called the Book
Man. On some shelf in some hexagon, it was argued, there must exist a
book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books,
and some librarian must have examined that book; this librarian is
analogous to a god. “Many have gone in search of Him. For a hundred
years, men beat every possible path― and every path in vain. How
was one to locate the idolized secret hexagon that sheltered Him?
Someone proposed searching by regression: To locate book A, first
consult book B, which tells where book A can be found; to locate book
B, first consult book C, and so on, to infinity...(In fact it can be
shown that such a compendium cannot exists; the library itself is the
only compendium).
Funes the Memorious
He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30,1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were those memories simple—every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so on.
No one has ever felt the heat and pressure of a reality as inexhaustible as that which battered Ireneo, day and night, in his poor South American hinterland. It was hard for him to sleep. To sleep is to take one's mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot, in the dimness of his room, could picture every crack in the wall, every molding of the precise houses that surrounded him.
Those on Tlon do not reason about reality because they do not live in the real world. In contrast, Ireneo Funes cannot reason because he is too bound up in reality; he is in incapable of breaking away from the onslaught of facts in order to think abstractly. Funes says to his interviewer, "My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap." His story is about the need to be able to forget, the paralyzing effect of perfect memory.
Funes the Memorious
He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30,1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were those memories simple—every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so on.
No one has ever felt the heat and pressure of a reality as inexhaustible as that which battered Ireneo, day and night, in his poor South American hinterland. It was hard for him to sleep. To sleep is to take one's mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot, in the dimness of his room, could picture every crack in the wall, every molding of the precise houses that surrounded him.
Those on Tlon do not reason about reality because they do not live in the real world. In contrast, Ireneo Funes cannot reason because he is too bound up in reality; he is in incapable of breaking away from the onslaught of facts in order to think abstractly. Funes says to his interviewer, "My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap." His story is about the need to be able to forget, the paralyzing effect of perfect memory.
Except
for his gift of perfect memory, Funes is frail in every dimension.
Paralyzed and bedridden by the same accident that led to his
indelible memory, he cannot do anything based on this gift; it
remains tethered to his mental and hence virtual world. He knows
everything that he has experienced, but cannot digest this knowledge.
Unlike those in the Library of Babel,
he is not frustrated and depressed by this disconnect between having
everything at hand but in a useless form. Rather, he is the proto-web
surfer, happy to frolic in the sterile virtual world, collecting and
recalling facts without any further purpose. Still, he chooses to
stay in a darkened room to contain the press of data on his mind. At
the age of nineteen, Funes dies of pulmonary congestion, a physical
mirror of his mental congestion. As far as stories about the perils
of too much information go, this on ranks at the top.
The
Aleph
Under
the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost
unbearable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I
realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying
spectacles inside it. The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters
in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no
diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us
say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every
point in the cosmos.
The
infinite Aleph contains within its small sphere a simultaneous vision
of millions of delightful and horrible acts, all occupying the same
point. Looking at it is to have a god-like vision that the narrator
can only compare to the descriptions of Persian mystics, Ezekiel's
flight to prophesy, and Alain de Lille's description of a sphere
whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. Yet
the other-worldly Aleph is located in an improbably real-world
setting, the basement – the nineteenth step up from the bottom of
the basement, to be exact – of a condemned house in a run-down
neighborhood. To gain this ineffable vision, the narrator must lie
down on a tile floor in a narrow space more like a
cistern than a basement, on a humble couch, in the company of a crate
of empty bottles and a pile of burlap sacks. Taking one of the burlap
bags as a pillow, the he stretches out, precisely situated on the
couch in "something of a pit."
There
are a number of points of irony in The Aleph in addition to that
of finding the fantastic Aleph in such a comically real-world
setting. One is that in spite of having free access to the Aleph,
Carlos Argentino, the proprietor of the Aleph, still is a bad poet.
(Though he does manage to be a prize winning poet). A second is that
in the real world, absent the Aleph, the narrator holds to a sublime
memory of dignity and beauty of his dearly departed Beatrice, but in
the light of the Aleph he sees her less flattering post-mortal state of nothing but bones. The
Aleph captures everything without filtering, and therefore shares the
same limitations as Funes exhibits with his perfect memory. Again we
come back to Sartre's notion of negation. There is no device in the
Aleph for negation, and so Beatriz, who was remembered by a limited and generous memory now is also seen in the stark, present reality.
Note: I have taken from
The
Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel
for the numerical calculation of the vastness of the Library of
Babel, and from Borges
and His Fiction for literary interpretation of Borges's work.