I was assigned Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges in college - one of the great things from the true purpose of education that William & Mary ever did for me - and loved it. A few of the stories stuck in my mind, including Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius, and random others. In true Borges fashion, one of the most memorable paragraphs was in fact a footnote about the Simurgh, the "Thirty Birds" of Persian mythology. In his universe a footnote may contain more than an encyclopedia.
Borges was my preparation for W.P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe ("Field of Dreams") and the even better The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, yet I find as time goes on that there are Very Few of his stories that keep getting referenced by others, usually The Library of Babel and The Garden of Forking Paths. There may be selection bias at play, as I started as a math major, loved Martin Gardner, Lewis Carroll, and the highly mathematical (but terrible at maths) CS Lewis, and still seem to gravitate to writers who have similar odd fascinations - mystic software engineers, near-fanatic liturgical applied mathematicians, tech writers embedded in magical realism, spiritualist chemists, Jewish cognitive scientists whose grandfathers were Hasids. I can't decide whether they are unusual and I just find lots of them or this is the typical state of the ultra-logical, that they cannot help but be mystics.
That was a lot of references but knowing this group, many of you just shrugged "Well, of course" during the description and the others said "What ho! That's one I hadn't heard of that I need to seek out." I should throw in Tom Stoppard for you in case you missed that Carroll/GKC/Godel/Borges/Gardner/Kinsella/Stoppard cluster. The reader may choose to add to that zoo in the comments. Plenty of sci-fi writers also, really.
I think all this just to notice the oddity that so many Borges pieces resolve to a very few in the imagination - which is surely an illuminating revelation about imagination itself. It is contradictory, in that such things should lead to expansion, but such is the need for tidiness and efficient storage in the mind that they narrow instead. Many works of Borges are beloved by his fans, but are other stories still creeping into the conversation, or is it just Babel and Forking Paths now?
2 comments:
..this is the typical state of the ultra-logical, that they cannot help but be mystics.
The way Leonard Nimoy played Spock.
“…the typical state of the ultra-logical, that they cannot help but be mystics.”
I would say that this is correct. Plato’s Parmenides is a thoroughgoing walk through concepts necessary to logic — unity and difference — that both have to be true and cannot be true. Mysticism is the only thing that makes sense. By the time of Plotinus and his followers, it is fully integrated into the Platonic method.
Post a Comment