. Spinning .

This one hit home, though perhaps it’s not something to relate to willingly.  On a personal level, I see the value to a randomness over which there could be no reasonable control.  Why?  Because organization in many ways to many people other than those at the top means no more control than chance; worse, it may mean a set fate that hope cannot penetrate.

On a relevant to current world workings level, I see the good idea gone bad because of the pressure of the mob mentality.  In The Babylon Lottery, a small sector of merchants start up a lottery with a single winner, all other losers out just the money they’ve put in.  Of course, if the winnings go to the winner alone, it loses some of its appeal, so a few more winners are added along with the twist of "winning" as a loser; losers who must pay huge fines.  These too are randomly selected.  This also makes the lottery more acccessible to the poor, and eventually the line between rich and poor is disguised under the mantle of luck.  Most often, losers cannot or choose not to pay so that the law enters in to imprison those who have cheated what has now grown into a secret society called the "Company." 

Then money of course becomes a problem so that instead, position, punishment, rewards of material things or status replace the prizes as well as the pay-ins.  Everything turns into a game of chance, nothing is achieved by self effort–or at least can be officially claimed as such. Eventually, it becomes unlawful to not participate and no ticket is purchased, but rather all have been entered. Soon, the unpredictable becomes the way of life for all who live under this odd method in Babylon.

Strange that the idea of random could become more organized than that which has been planned out.  The lure would of course be the possibility of good fortune where perhaps for many there was none.  The roller-coaster ride versus the rut is something that tweaks the human spirit.   Blame for the bad, remember, need not be taken on as a burden.  Every day holds the possibility of elation or despair.  Disorder becomes order.  Yet there still is no control–but then, when did man truly ever as a society have it?

The growth and progression of the system of the lottery reminds me of a labyrinth where a simple entryway turns into paths that can bring one out successfully, leave one traveling through its corridors endlessly, or drive one into the brink and beyond of human sanity.

It is what people want when they really don’t know what they want so they choose different and unknown.   

I’ve read a few paragraphs of the next story in Borges’ anthology and yet come back around to this story.

Patterns, looking for patterns.  I come up with circles: birth and death and rebirth, sleep and wakefulness in an endless repetition.  Then there is reality and the dreaming of it, the question of the statue whether it is tiger or horse.  Back to circles: the ruins themselves encircled in stone, the dreamer himself being dreamed. Why the first attempt failed; starting with a circle of candidates to select only one and the finding that the man must start from the beginning with a heart encircled by nerves, bone and skin.

Is there a question of life’s circles in time, or is it a question of life at all?

I’ve read this short story twice and still feel that I’m missing something and just don’t have it quite right.

The story is about a man who travels to a site of what was once a sacred spot dedicated to the gods, now ruined by fire and neglect.  The man’s purpose is to create a man by dreaming him complete.  First he tries to select someone from a crowd via questioning those in the arena, and this bit of wisdom comes out:

He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.  After nine or ten nights he understood with a certain bitterness that he could expect nothing from those pupils who accepted his doctrine passiveley, but that he could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him.  The former group, although worthy of love and affection, could not ascend to the level of individuals; the latter pre-existed to a slightly greater degree. (p. 58)

When in his dreams he eliminates all but one student, he continues for but a short time before the dreams stop and he is left with nothing.  He takes a new tactic, that of building the individual organ by organ, bone by bone.  With the help of the god at whose temple he sleeps and dreams, he by this means is able to complete his project, promising the "son" to the god with the god’s promise that this young man never know that he is not real. 

The man is sad for the inevitable loss of his created man, yet happy with the satisfaction of having created him.  Eventually he hears of the youth’s travels and dedication at the temple of fire where he was destined to go, and the man walks willingly into a fire that destroys the circular ruin where he has remained.

The obvious theme is the cycle of life, the circular temples, certain phrases Borges uses to lead us inn this direction:

At times he was disturbed by the impression that all this had already happened… (p. 61)

The purpose of his life had been fulfilled. (p. 62)

For what happened many centuries before was repeating itself. (p. 63)

In many ways too, it goes into other paths of thought.  There is the desire of mankind to reproduce to insure eternal life.  There is also the question asked by the final sentence:

With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him. (p. 63)

Borges here, in the midst of his magical realism, leaves us with the doubt of our own existence.  With that comes our perspective, our purpose, our trust in knowledge and history.  A very thought-provoking little story that can be taken many ways and though we may come up with loads of answers–and likely even more questions–there is still the very real possibility that we will never grasp the patterns of Borges’ own thoughts in this story.

The amazing audacity of it: the concept of rewriting Cervantes’ Don Quixote exactly word for word without referencing, and yet come up with different meaning.  This is the premise of Borges’ story.

For me the glory is not in the reading of the story as much as in the very idea of it, and in so doing, one cannot help but come back to the author, Borges himself.  But isn’t the very nature of the story to spoof the author, the critic, the reader? 

In one part, Borges compares the work of Menard, whose intent is to write Don Quixote just as Cervantes did, to its original.  In both Spanish and its English translation, the two examples are exact and yet Borges (or his narrator) attempts to convince that there is a difference:

The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say; but ambiguity is a richness). (p. 52)

Or is this a tribute to the reader who does indeed find his own path within the words that may be contrary to those of others?

Astounding story because of the idea, not of the story itself which was the only way the idea could be told.

This one’s a definite re-read; knowing that every reader changes with every word that is read.  What will I find, what will I add the next time around?

Hmmm.  Have you ever read something and realized that you missed the whole point of it?

This story was easier to follow than the previous, and yet I know I’m just not getting it.   The story line seems simple enough, but somehow there are just so many names of people, books, places, etc. that I found myself getting bogged down in these details and trying to make myself keep track of them in case they were real important.  Knowing Borges’ labyrinthistic tendencies, I felt the names were like walls to weave between, leading me into dead ends whence I would turn around and circle back to pick my way through again.

Will have to come back to this one.

This one will definitely be re-read, likely when I finish the rest of the stories in this book. 

Borges would be someone I would definitely love to sit and spend a few hours with.  That is, if he spoke English because my Spanish has been all but forgotten (another one of those things to do–brush up on it).  And too, if he were still alive.  But maybe he is; or never was.

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a very strange little story and one that is ripe with metaphor–if you wish.  Borges leaves much up to the reader, incites him to take the text and run away with imagination. The denouement is not that at all, but instead poses a bigger question: has our history been written by men who tell truth or lies? The narrator himself is in the process of rewriting.  He hints that things that exist now will not, but rather be transformed into a Tlon-like planet with language and science so changed as to be unrecognizable.  But then, who would care, since readers in the future would read and believe what is written and that becomes the new truth.

I think I’m in love again with Borges.  If when I cease to exist here or in fact never did, I will hope there is another plane, another time and space where he is accessible, maybe lives down the street, two houses away, and would join me in an aperitif and some talk.

I don’t think you can read Borges without the man himself being within the story.  In this particular short story, he places himself there.

A writer to a fellow writer:

The whole affair happened some five years ago.  Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and talked to us at length about a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person, using a narrator who 0mitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various contradictions, so that only a handful of readers, a very small handful, would be able to decipher the horrible or banal reality behind the novel.  (p. 17)

So what Borges is doing here is adding the real to the unreality of fiction.  First person pov, himself.  He’s also hinting at what is to come–a jest, perhaps, or a true lie.  And this is what the story itself becomes, a lie about a lie that has been taken as truth.  The discovery of this strange planet of Tlon, and in particular, the place known as Uqbar, has a history that is somewhat proven by references in text, previously unknown or perhaps just hidden.  He goes into some detail about language, making this knowledge, together with the credibility of the narrator, become something it is not, that is, real.

What he’s telling us too, I think, is that what is written cannot be trusted.  For in the history of Uqbar, there is the firm belief that what exists cannot be trusted.  Some things exist only temporarily, some just for the few who need to see them.  Just before the final closing of the story, is the closing of the research story:

Things duplicate themselves in Tlon.  They tend at the same time to efface themselves, to lose their detail when people forget them.  The classic example is that of a stone threshold which lasted as long as it was visited by a beggar, and which faded from sight on his death.  Occasionally, a few birds, a horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater. (p. 30)

I don’t pretend to quite grasp the full (or perhaps multifaceted) meaning of this short story, but I think that Borges is having fun.  Having fun with his free-association way of thinking, and having fun with turning it over to the reader to do some of his own.

Just halfway through this first story in the Borges collection, but I can say it is quite intriguing.  Borges is concept-driven I suspect, and as he twists his own mind in wonderment, he enjoys doing the same to the readers.

The concept on this is the narrator being drawn into a mystery of lands that may or may not exist, as written in text of books that while printed and marked as the same, differ in what they include.

The land and the people? Language without nouns, depending on adjectives.  Words that are transitory in nature, exist only once perhaps and describing things and places that may or may not exist at all.

Like I said, intriguing.

Two at once this time, just because if I’m not going to be writing, then it’s the time to enjoy diversity and Borges fits that bill.