Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths and Libraries - Worlds of Speculative Fiction (lecture 23)

[Music] so welcome to session 23 of the worlds of speculative fiction series as our third year here at the Brookfield Public Library we missed two sessions due to illness at various times and that's why we're at 23 rather than 25 but I managed to get one of them done and Bohr Hayes who were doing today got put off from December he got bumped from December to January today we're looking at Jorge leave Jorge's who one of my favorite authors hands down like across fiction genres not just in terms of speculative fiction somebody who I've been reading and rereading since I was a college student will describe why cuz I have not read them and I'm sure I'm here partly because I want to decide if he's worth reading yeah absolutely yeah I mean this is this is the book that I had this is the second copy of it because the first one got got so worn out from my paging through it and all that so yeah I'll give you plenty of background and stuff like that I'm sure we'll have a lot of great discussion about him so as usual I want to talk a bit about the narrative world that he creates and this is kind of complicated to talk about because there isn't a coherent it's not like a series you know some of the authors that we have suddenly got to kind of piece it together and then we'll talk about his biography he lived quite a long time and there is five main or five or six main philosophical themes that I wanted to hit on and we can talk about others as well so one of them is chance determination and free choice another one that's really key and his thought is identity and self you know who is who is a person what do they know about themselves another one that I thought would be kind of interesting to explore is misunderstandings in human inquiry and the productive things that this this generates [Music] and then language the world and interpretation I think that's absolutely central for more haze work I wanted an attack also about infinity and different different notions of infinity that are in his work and then I think that kind of dumped tales with his views on space and time is rather metaphysical right but but I he manages to bring it home in very human ways so Before we jump into it I you know I did mention I started reading for Hayes as a college student and I think I probably encountered it the way a lot of other people did which was in a comparative literature class he's he's not usually taught in philosophy classes as a matter of fact when I tried to bring him into my my philosophy classes as a graduate student I got a lot of resistance from my professors not all that into that idea but you know one of them let me actually write a short paper on board a sin anesthetics class I found you know I read the story of the Garden of forking paths and then that got me interested in that I bought the copy of this which is you know pretty good it's got a selection of some of his most important stories I think it's probably the easiest one to get hold of this is a nice volume to collected fictions it's got a lot of that stuff spanning his his career and you know what I really liked about Jorge's was when he is telling a story and they're very short stories for the most part I think the longest one is under fifty pages there's always a lot of philosophical ideas woven into it sometimes quite deliberately and he plays around with them sometimes they almost assume central space in in in what the story is about sometimes they're kind of tangential and he's telling a good detective story or something along those lines and and I think there's a lot he was incredibly influential a lot of other writers who were interested in especially more in the present he caught on you know by the late sixties so he managed to influence people who are closer to us in time than say you know classic sci-fi authors right or fantasy authors but he's had a major impact he also had a major impact in in you know his native language in Spanish some people think of him as being sort of the father of magical realism as a genre which which fits into speculative fiction and so you know they look at other people in that genre as having been influenced by him I really can't say that much about it because I don't read too much magical realism stuff but you have so you know you guys can fill in we're missing things so let's talk about his his life he's Argentinean but he's you know an action where he reflects on this in a couple essays to be Argentinian was not like being from other parts of South America in his view because because there was so much back and forth are the you know the origin times were looking to Europe and he and his family actually ended up spending a good bit of time in Europe and you know Argentinian like like many other countries is a country of immigrants so there's people coming in and coming out he's born in in a suburb of wano saris and his father is essentially a lawyer you know he does a couple other things who breaks a novel at one point and his father's an aside and his mother say there's a lot of mixed ancestry and there's you know he talks about learning English as a child within the household so that they you know he learned to read English before he learned to read Spanish interestingly enough although you know they would they'd also speak Spanish but it would you know we know Sirius is a very cosmopolitan city I mean we might think of it as sort of the the Buenos Aires that he describes I think it's sort of like the Chicago of my you know parents generation where it was a lot of little neighborhoods some of which were associated with particular ethnicities a lot of movement back in and out I know some people might say it's more like New York or something cuz they they they like that but anyway he's born there and he's educated at home he doesn't go to school for a long time and and he's kind of left to his own devices and in many respects he writes his first short story when he's when he's a seven and he translates Oscar Wilde's the Happy Prince into Spanish he's published in the local newspaper and everyone thinks that his dad actually did the translation but it was actually it was actually little Jorge and so the you know he's got kind of nice childhood going on there somebody asked about his childhood and he said just paraphrasing because I don't remember the exact quotation one of the most important events in his childhood was his family's library so instead of talking about you know like the time I fell down the stairs at the time I realized this or that he talks about the library itself as being an event so he's a very bookish kind of guy his father ends up having some eye problems and then he's going to become afflicted with blindness later on in life too so they moved to Switzerland and his father undergoes some medical treatment there and I mean this this is a very nice environment to be and he goes to this you know Colette edition have learns to read and speak French there he's sort of adding to his repertoire starting to read more people he receives his baccalaureate from there and then his family moves to Spain and you notice this is you know in between the time of the the first world war and then you know the the wind down after that and he joins as a young man there's this ultra-smooth that among Spanish literature and we'll talk about that in just a moment he returns to Buenos Aires in 1921 although he's going to go back and forth between there and Europe quite frequently and he starts to contribute poems to a literary journal Martin Fierro Martin fearo's is a hero of Argentinean sort of national epic sort of sort of like what the I guess you could say sort of like what the Aeneid is for you know old Romans or the loosely dhatus is for Portuguese that's that's sort of what Martin Fierro is the way he describes it and he begins spending time with his father's friend Macedonia Fernandez and this guy was a philosopher didn't write much down very influential on a young bore haze as a matter of fact a lot of the the key themes that are gonna emerge is important in his work later on Mossi Macedonia Fernandez is dealing with he he'd come up with very funny sayings like he goes to a lecture and there's very few people there and he says if anybody else had failed to show up I don't think we would have found the room for them so he'd like to play with these paradoxical sort of notions right sort of like that poem about the guy who's you know the the met Amanda wasn't there yeah yeah and so there's paradise well how can you be present an absence at the same time these are philosophical questions right so very kind of like comedic sense that while men language - yeah well I mean you could say in shop or case is also very into shot he he read a lot of English authors he also really enjoyed Stevenson Chesterton so it you know you can you can say kind of an interesting question that question of influence you can say Jorge's is influenced in the sense that he draws inspiration or ideas from it off there you can't say he's influenced in the sense like he's following in the path of a particular author right so there's two different ways we can talk about the influence I mean somebody who read who again influential in a certain sense but not in others was Arthur Schopenhauer - who not only was an interesting philosopher but also very witty you know rather biting sardonic you know now he gets involved in this this this movement this ultra movement and this is a literary movement that begins in Spain and like a lot of things in South America you know sort of washes over into that context as well and their idea was to oppose modernism ya know and modernism in a literary sense not to oppose the modern in general they thought that the the moderns were in some sense not modern enough so it's it's got connections or similarities with like Italian futurism that might be a reference point dadaism the Surrealists so in a sense they're saying the modernists that's great that they're pushing modernity but they're not going far enough with that so yeah I mean you might if we we use our contemporary terms it might say there since they were there post modernist supposed you know as opposed to modernist but post-modernism is always a movement out of modernism and they you know they stressed new technology trying to bring together graphic treatments and you know words so some of their journals would actually be like broad sheets that they would staple to like a wall or something I'd have people like read it there a lot of experimental stuff and Bohr Hayes in 1922 he published a manifesto in nosotros magazine and he summarized their goals in this way reduction of the lyric element to its primordial element metaphor so metaphors are incredibly important getting rid of middle sentences linking participles and adjectives so economy of language avoiding ornamental artifacts preaching far-fetched and nebulosity I mean that's sort of a self referential thing because that's kind of nebulous itself and then synthesizing two or more images into one widening it suggestiveness that's kind of an interesting idea that's trying to I would say actually like what do we call those these days you know mashups right so he's he's kind of talking about bringing things together like that and so that's that's where he is for a long time and he writes poetry for the most part I need rights you know manifestos and think about he's in his 20s he's caught up with this new movement and that goes on for quite a while and and you know eventually he's going to start leaving that behind he pronounces the death of Argentine halt Reyes well that's already kind of dramatic thank you when you're saying a movement is dead you know it's probably not dead but but you're making yourself really central and eventually he starts writing the stuff that we're you know we know him for the almost dreamlike short stories where he's meditating oftentimes on philosophical themes the the real impetus for that comes in the year that his father dies which is 1938 there's a very important year for him his father dies and Bor hey starts working at this library the the Canaan municipal library there's there's actually an interesting story about that that I came across there was in a working-class area and there weren't a lot of books so cataloging you know was a major thing for the librarians he was told not to catalogue more than 100 books a day because if he did he was a rate breaker I know you're familiar with this term from Labor Studies but you are too so a rate breaker is somebody who exceeds the rate of work that's been set within the shop somehow so and it's usually done informally right so everybody in the library don't you know nobody should do more than this about because you're otherwise you're making us look bad and so that's what they told them so he was like what the hell am I supposed to do all day and eventually he hid here I've done an mo where he would spend the rest of his day in the basement of the library writing and translating stuff and puttering around so seven-eighths was his work day was you know maybe maybe 4/5 of it or 2/3 of it was spent doing stuff that wasn't in his job description because they wouldn't let him do his job and he did that for a long time he only loses that that position when Peron comes to power oh yeah I don't remember I think he fell and hit his head if I remember right and the big problem is is he gets he gets blood poisoning in the hospital and he almost dies he loses his inability to speak for a short time and I guess this is an experience that really you know put things into perspective for him and so he starts experimenting with with this new style of writing that we we now know him for he at the same time his eyesight starts to worry so eventually it's gonna get to the point where he actually becomes blind and he will write about that he has a few interesting love affairs most most of which don't really go that well this this Estrela canto he meets her he actually proposes to her and she tells them that you know I can't really marry you because then we we have to be lovers and we're not actually lovers because you're a bad kisser you know she's talked about it was being rather rather clumsy and and ungraceful and it sends if he didn't you know have have any sort of relations but but I guess he wasn't particularly a ladies man you could say well yeah his marriages tend to be you know other values sort of matters of convenience the last marriage she's going to become his literary executor and she's a secretary for a long time you know another thing that I suppose we could jumping out of this this biography a little bit you know the year-to-year stuff as he loses his eyesight he is placed into a very difficult position not just in terms of being a librarian but in terms of being a writer because how do you write if you're if you lost your eyesight so his mother actually helps him out for for a long time he has his secretaries who do some of that work somebody else who I actually worked on for a long time and wrote my dissertation on loose Bloedel it would be a really in some respects well you wouldn't be a contemporary because he's much older but he went through a similar issue where he lost his eyesight and he had he couldn't really effectively work until he found a secretary who would read things to him verbatim and then once he did that he managed to compose volume after volume after volume of work so when you have the right person working with you I guess and you have enough you know mental facility I don't think I could do it you can really do a lot and so more haze you know some of the other things that happen so Peron is going to come to power in Argentina and Boreas was opposed to piranha so you know not long after the the peronist government takes over he loses his job in the library and he you know he he winds up going on a lecture circuit some of his friends help him out by this time he's already starting to get a little bit of recognition outside of the spanish-speaking area because notice like the garden of forking paths' appears in Ellery Queen which was a really important pulp magazine at the time once Peron gets out of power Jorge's is back in you know the limelight you could say he's appointed to the directorship of the National Library he's made a professor if I remember right I think it's English and Spanish literature at the University of Buenos Aires and now he starts to like become well-known internationally in part because he's receiving prizes which which bring him to people's attention his work start to be much more translated he starts to work with Norman Thomas de Giovanni he's nominated for but does not receive a Nobel Prize in Literature that's I forget who got a thing here but he Graham Greene and this other guy were the finalists and the other guy who I don't remember which shows maybe he's not quite as good as Graham Greene Herbert case he gets the prize instead and and you know you notice that he's got a lot of works here and they're being published and I didn't put all of his works in there mostly the ones that have been translated and I put the year the the Spanish version of it not the year that the English translation came out but he's got quite a few collections of stories he writes essays he write he continues to write poetry and he's a guy the last thing I said it's not in this biography somebody who's continually learning even after he's going blind he started learning anglo-saxon yeah because he wanted to understand something of not only his you know English ancestry which he had some of that but also to you know be able to hear what Beowulf sounded like you know and be able to understand it and he continues producing through throughout his life he travels a lot he actually has you know like a couple lectureships here and there University of Texas at Austin is one place that brings him in that by the way is a place of that's kind of well-known in in the semiotic area for like producing you know books book series that are important and then I think mores kind of figures into that so there were people who were into his his kind of stuff at the time and he he dies of liver cancer in 1986 having lived you know quite a long life more than the 70 years made some solid contributions got to see unlike many of the figures that would be for the death got to see people really getting into his work Laden could see him because he was blind got to got to hear people he didn't get into his work you know so I credibly the credit good life overall and a lot of literature produced as a result of it you know his early stuff also this is the last thing I'll say about his early stuff he he didn't disavow it entirely but he said that he was taking the wrong direction and that it wasn't you know it wasn't very good he also worried that that some of the earlier stuff and I think you can say this about Italian futurism too would get adapted by conservatives or fascists as something that could justify their their points of view and I should say this about his politics so what is blessing or who's described himself as a classical liberal in the meaning that he's somebody who he's not you know the free-market liberal who thinks that everything should be turned into market-based solutions instead he thinks that that individual liberty is very important the state should be weak and we should try to make individuals strong so he was opposed equally to fascism and nazism on the one side as he was to communism he took a lot of heat and lost a lot of friendships over opposition to communism he was also opposed to the Peron government because the Peron government it's difficult to say exactly how it should be classified some people in fascist Studies think that he we could call it a fascist government others you know stress the you know other sides to it but he thought that it was yes that way but it wasn't just a dictatorship this is this is kind of a good point so it in a regular military dictatorship it says it's sort of hierarchical relation right and you don't modify the whole society Peron was similar to fascism and communism in that he wanted to mobilize the masses and to transform Argentinian society from within so you definitely was a populist right and he did he did exercise dictatorial powers more Hayes also you know he was first he was four and then he was against the military junta in Argentina so you know generally he's going to be taking a position against any sort of powerful government but that I mean that's about as far as it went he wasn't very politically committed but I thought that kind of an important point so let's talk about the narrative world I chose as a title for for this this lecture libraries and labyrinths and I did that because those are kind of focal points for of Jorge's stories and there isn't a narrative world in the sense of an overarching you know universe we're all the same similar characters you know encounter each other have their arcs grow there there's not one single you might say set of rules or principles underlying all of all of his stories but we can't say that the figure the labyrinth shows up over and over and over again and I wanted to bring up a few examples so in his very first work the universal history of iniquity he talks about the the Mississippi Delta as being there as having labyrinths of clay dead fish and swamp reeds already he's using that that sense you know in another story he's actually got a guy writing a book called the God of the labyrinth this guy Herbert Wayne the house of mysterion which is about the Minotaur that's one of the stories that made it into here that is is about a labyrinth of course and the house of the Styrian is the labyrinth that's it's a house with this tyrion says fourteen doors and fourteen means infinite the Garden of forking paths that we'll talk about a little bit more that's a that's one where there's a labyrinth but the labyrinth is actually a book and the labyrinth is a metaphor for a greater labyrinth which is time itself which is a whole set of forking paths in the labyrinth in the house no beautiful it's so thick oh I wouldn't doubt it I was with it in directions you know so let's go into a little digression here and I'll tell you something a bit confessional so when I when I read this as an undergraduate I wanted to write a book and I actually did start writing a book never finished it and I'm sure whatever whatever files I created their long sense lost on one drive or another and it was going to be called 14 infinite coming from the house of mysterion's story and a part of it was be you know because I thought in a way that was so central to what Borghese is doing here that that the whole thing could be understood as a labyrinth or at the whole book all of his stories together and 14 I could pick that number talked about 14 stories and that was that would substitute for talking about all the stories 14 could be infinite and in this it's a very short one the house of mysterion and trying to try to find it it's very sympathetic to the Minotaur as a matter of fact the Minotaur ends up getting killed at the end and it's almost tragic in a way so I'll just read a little bit from yeah it's like read four heads and just sort of updated yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't with time okay well bourget's definitely sees time itself as a labyrinth and and time can be understood not just in terms of like an individual's trajectory through time or time as like you know the metaphysical thing that we're all moving in but but also history right so and you'll appreciate this as a journalist you know you think about a story that gets told all right it can be looked at from a number of different perspectives and anything interesting is almost always controversial right so there isn't that coherent everyone agrees that this is the story and there's usually if you dig into it well enough there's going to be some things where the official story turns out not to be not to be the truth right so all of those are aspects of the time so he you know in this the the Minotaur is telling his story says I know they accused me of arrogance perhaps a misanthrope misanthrope II perhaps of madness it's true I never leave my house but it's also true that it's doors whose number are infinite or open day and night to men into animals as well anyone may enter and he goes on and he talks about you know how he spends the day running through places he imagines anotherís Tyrion I pretend he comes to visit me and I show him my house with great abhi ciients that say to him now we shall return to the first intersection or now we shall come out into another courtyard where I knew you would like to drain or now you will see a pool that was filled with sand sometimes they make a mistake and then the two of us laugh heartily and then he goes on and he says is where we get to the like telling the story about the what's happening in the labyrinth every nine years nine men enter the house so that I may deliver them from all evil I hear their steps were their voices in the depth of the stone galleries and I run joyfully to find them the ceremony lasts a few minutes they fall one after another without my having to bloody my hands they remain where they fell on their bodies help distinguish one gallery from another I don't know who they are but I do know that one of them prophesied at the moment of his death someday my Redeemer would come so he's associating the killing of other people in the labyrinth with somehow freeing them up it's almost like a like a Greek mystery you know freeing them from this life so then he says since then my loneliness does not pain me because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise above the dust and then he asked what will my redeemer be like will he be a bull or a man will he be perhaps a bull with a face of a man or will he be like me and then the under that is the Morning Sun reverberating from the bronze sword there was no longer even a vestige of blood would you believe it Ariadne said Theseus than the Minotaur scarcely defended himself why didn't he defend himself because it you know he he was ready to be slaughtered because for him in his frame of reference that was being liberated and you know we I mean it's sort of like that that that story I forget who wrote the book some of you one of you will know it the sort of revision of the story of Grendel and Beowulf who was the guy who wrote that where he tells his Grendel's science story yeah and that's what Boris I thinks is doing with with this you know but but the labyrinth so what is the labyrinth about it you know sometimes it's constructed to keep somebody in the one that Daedalus created that you know the Minotaur is supposed to be in this is supposed to keep him from getting out to the rest of the world and of course you know - puts Daedalus and Icarus in there - you know it's kind of kind of smart if you don't want anyone to know how to get there they're their way out but it might also be to keep others out and that's the way a lot of labyrinths are in Bohr his stories the things that we have to penetrate into if you think about it means you know why why do you set up a maze it's to protect in the area to keep it to keep so sure like with cybersecurity we we don't set up mazes as such we set up all sorts of things that make it difficult to figure out where the real vulnerabilities lie and so anything could become a maze right i you know think about a story in politics or even a better example than our own time conspiracy theories right why why some conspiracy theories so that nobody will ever figure out the real conspiracy right so that could be a labyrinth and so that runs throughout olive bore Hayes works this this notion of that the other thing is library and I mean we're in a library right now and libraries are kind of changing their function these days too which is an interesting thing to talk about but they are still associated primarily with books right what makes something a library is it just having books or does there have to be there's there have to be more than that and in order for it to be a library I think there's something really interesting about the trust hood community that a library requires because yeah you know for zero fees essentially you provide some documentation that you're part of that community then you get a card and it entitles you to maybe a limit books but I think even here it's like you can have a hundred books the idea that I could go and take out 125 of these books and then perhaps never returned you know that's a better way of saying there's a trust in the community that I'm going to take care of it carefully bring it back and make sure that I return it to its rightful place yeah but I also get such incredible value because I can do that as many times as I want and if I were to even even like at a half-price bookstore or a bargain book then reaches a quarter even the millions of dollars you could spend over your lifetime the books that you could just as easily get for free at the library and the library has a commitment to not only carrying I think it sends a certain element of like like a canonical some sort of canonical record right like you expect them to have certain books within sci-fi or fantasy or literature fiction and or you know nonfiction but they also continue to purchase and add to their collection yeah and really serve the commune you know what about private libraries that you know we have a private we have a library at home given given all of our books you know yeah talks about his family library but also his most famous library there's no way you can check the book libraries Babel you can never so let's talk about that one so this is this is the library has a universe and here I think they're going to be useful to read a few guys from it this I think has given rise to a lot of ideas within you know sci-fi and fantasy but what might be like this so he says the universe which others call the library is composed of an infinite indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries with vast air shafts between surrounded by very low railings from any of the hexagons one can see interminably the upper and lower floors the distribution of the galleries is invariable twenty shelves five long shelves per side cover all the sides except to their height scarcely exceeds that at the notice we since a normal book case there's a frame of reference there's something outside of it one of the three sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto the gallery he goes on and on each of these these shelves there applause and unlike the books in our library which mostly makes sense in this library they they they presume every single possible combination of letters is generated within these these books so he says there are five shelves for you to the hexagons walls each shelf contains thirty five books of uniform format each is four hundred and ten pages each page of forty lines each line of some 80 letters which are black in color there are also letters on the spine the letters don't indicate or prefigure what the pages will say and each of the the books could just be one letter repeated over and over and over again or it could be Shakespeare or it could be whatever and so in a way it's kind of its kind of chaos right within a very organized system and there's a lot of theorization about you know whether books could say refer to themselves or you know whether each book is irreplaceable I mean that he doesn't say at one point that there were like schisms and and Wars people killing each other many books were destroyed but the good thing is for any book that gets destroyed there's gonna be one that's just one letter off from it so you're not gonna lose it all together and you don't know which one was the the best one anyway so that's that's one well so that's a good question I mean it is one coherent universe although - yeah so this is this isn't a very important partisan library notion for poor Hays each book because of it being a book could be describing the entire world alright so on the one hand we've got like the the book as sort of the key for understanding the world it's a very very old concept you know this is a common idea in an ancient and medieval thought on the other hand maybe the entire world can be understood as a book that's something that we read if we if we know the right way to unpack it you might say if we know how to figure out what's being said so those are those are key ideas and then yeah is it a multiverse well I mean you could have multiple books right and each of them there's just a little bit off from the other one one book that contains the complete justification of their life yes say that are equally convincing but false yes every possible iteration of a book exists in the library yeah so this justification idea for each person there would be a book which would describe everything you've ever did and why why it's it's okay you know so it would even justify you and wouldn't it be nice to have something like that but you're right all it would take would be inserting a not wrong there's actually a website with the library of Babel online which so one nano actually I wrote my first page and then I searched for it in the library of the Bell and it's really eerie because you'll find the paragraph you just wrote because it's you know it is funny though because there's no way in that particular story to make it work without there being some sort of external frame of reference it's supposed to be it can totally contain universe right please you can't you can't pull it off and I think Boreas knows that but when you're first reading it through you're like yeah this this this actually maybe I could be in this thing maybe that could be a metaphor for the world there's there's other worlds or mind sets you could say with their own worlds that he describes that are very different from our own the library of Babel being one of them but there's another story called toin book bar or mist here ts in which you could say fiction intrudes into the and I think we have a lot of examples of something like this happening today you know in various forms so in this this story fund they they find an encyclopedia and it's got an extra entry in it and it turns out that there were there were human beings in in the real world who decided to like make up an imaginary place and they would they would work in different ways because everybody there would be in effect a Berkeley and idealist so Berkeley Berkeley actually was supposed to be pronounced was a British philosopher who was in between Locke and him and he argued that there really was no such thing as a manner that everything is just ideas in the mind or as he put it the ideas for spirits God being a spirit all of us being spirits and we could never you know there is nothing there's no substance out there life this is not a substance this is just a bunch of perceptions that we have and they're consistent just like they're showing up on you know on that camera as a bunch of data right it's that closer to Plato's well Plato thought that there were real archetypes and then they were copied in material substances and the material substances aren't as good as the archetype the archetype is you know more beautiful or real but that's that's something that's that's real in the mind is you could say a third thing apart from that so you got the material object mind and then archetype you know various other thinkers trying to put the archetypes into the mind right Berkeley is saying something a bit more radical namely that well I'll just read you some of the examples that that jorge's gives you in this about what would it would be like for for them so he says there we go the classical culture of flan compromises only one discipline psychology all others are subordinated to it the men of this planet conceive the universe is a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successfully in time they don't conceive that the spatial exists in time the perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the birding field and they then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered merely an example of the association of ideas and he says that in the languages that they have even the languages represent this the world for them is not a concourse of objects in space it's a heterogeneous series of independent acts there are no nouns in Tuan's conjectural Irish rock of its original language there are impersonal verbs modified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes with an adverbial value so he says for example there is no word corresponding to moon there is a verb which in english would be to moon or to moon 8 so you know it's a very different frame of reference and now what does boria's doing he's he's imagining a way of life like this and it comes into our world through through books through encyclopedias and then it catches on and then eventually like infects our world and nobody can nobody can get good free of it and eventually plon artifacts from plants are showing up in the world and now we're in real trouble because we're gonna be you know living in that thing eventually the library Babel another another example he's got another one called fused the memoria another translation I think it's fused his memory and it's been a guy who is again mindset very different from ours who sees each thing as an individual thing and you know you might say why I see individuals as individuals right there's four people in the room but we see largely through through something like archetypes you know the patterns that we share with each other fewn sees each thing as a separate thing and remembers things and and tries to make sense out of the world through this and and Bohr he says he doesn't really have a world the way that we do instead of seeing a shoe like as an archetype Joe is recalling every shoe she's seen as a titrate leg the way that her mind was working yeah and she was talking a little bit about that about you know part of her struggle being an opportunity to create connections and to sort of like be able to catalog these differently so that the individual thing that's being seen has a different context yeah yeah that's her greatest gift is being able to see all of these you know to look at for example a pen of cattle being held and to see each individual as a couple as a cow experiencing something in that moment that was like you know they're new in many ways that's the gift of her autism yeah is the way in which she's able to not only reintegrate through careful practice but also see all of those individual things yeah no but it was overwhelming I think it's part of what the desensitization that she needed to create for herself was meant to combat is that overwhelm of walking into a room and not seeing you know set up a little bit yeah I mean every almost do not have a concept of cow as in category well she did but what you're saying is it was a way of learning to think differently because of her autism effects at her hurt the way that her brain initially saw things was her collections were different than her much closer to they like the individual things but she was able to recognize patterns instantaneously because you can see how each individual thing fit into part of the pattern yeah so here's from a few as the memorials says lock in the 17th century postulated and it rejected an impossible language in which each individual thing each stone each bird each branch would have its own name fuse once projected a analogous language but discarded it because it seemed to general to him too ambiguous in fact fuse remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood but every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it he decided to reduce each of his past days to some seventy thousand memories which would be defined by some means of ciphers he was dissuaded from this by two considerations his awareness that the task was interminable and his awareness that it was useful useless he thought that by the hour of his death he would not even have finished classifying all the memories of his childhood and if you think about what you know what goes on in our perception right we are way way more at any moment then we can possibly conceptualize and and you know the reason we're all functional is because we leave out almost 99% of what we're we're perceiving this guy is doing something different and Boreas places himself as best as he can into that frame of reference through the medium of imaginative literature and then says what would that be like and we were getting quite quite far away from library so let me mention one other thing about the theme of libraries more haze makes up books and this is one of the things that I think a lot of people have tried to imitate him in he actually creates books that exist he's not unique in that the HP Lovecraft of course did that too of the Necronomicon and other people do that too but it's difficult to pull off right it's difficult to get people to think that there's something in a book that that you don't you don't have and that he's citing from and sometimes footnoted yeah exactly yeah yeah okay that's a great example - yeah yeah I mean in a sense it's Boreas is almost you can think about journalism again someone's doing the opposite of journalism right he's making up his sources you're not supposed to do that you're supposed to actually get to the get to the heart of the story Matt and that make up the story as he go along describes their structure yeah it was because he loves doing structuring it I won't say a cheat for him but a way to he doesn't have to write the whole book to do the part that truly interests him which is given a different yeah it's a good trick yeah you you or you you can also he not only does that with like making up books he also makes up books that are like making an argument against that original book you know I guess you know in a way to Frank Herbert did that too with like the orange Catholic Bible or some of the other books that so it's not a unique thing but it's an interesting device and and he does have a one story die you know pierre menard author of the quixote right here he imagines this guy who's not not real pure Bernard and he writes a whole series of what the guy wrote he's so like his catalog and then he says that he rewrote the Quixote by writing the the same Quixote but it has very different meaning now you know when you're writing it as a 20th century Frenchman than it did when Quinn Cervantes wrote it but in some some respects it's a richer composition see if I can find that yeah here we got 36 so so he's the he's got a whole list of all the works that this guy wrote this is completely fictional he's he's actually introduced like some some other controversies in there so one of this guy's patrons is a lien woman yeah the countess Magna Reggio he writes a definition of her which is supposed to rectify the inevitable inevitable falsifications of journalism to present to the world and to Italy an authentic image of her person so often exposed by the very reason of her beauty and her activities to erroneous or hasty interpretation and she turns out to be somebody who has supported him it has worked all completely fictional so you know that's that's the so quite external the good thing is they're all short so they're very easy but no what are you getting up so that's a good question what I get is more haze leads me to sort of like play around with ideas in ways that I might not ordinarily do by using the narrative form he gets me who's somebody who you know thinks about things sort of for a living to think about them from a different angle I would say to think about them you know for example metaphysical things like time or whether we're really free or not or what you know what what it is what's the difference between reality and fiction so think about those now if there's in a different way but I think I guess you could say he provides things to fix our attention you know examples that we can use sort of like what goes on in good philosophical thought experiments you know what do you you know you've read this right but these are thought experiments he gives you new they're a lot more vivid though than the stuff that a philosophical literature yeah it's like you read an entire novel and a year later you remember one or two images and bore Hayes's made up entirely of those one or two images who remembers yeah so one of the themes that I'd really wanted to hit on was was chance determination and free choice and I actually went through and made a handout just on what is for me my favorite Jorge story which is called both the lottery and Babylon and there's a number of different phases in this he starts out and typical 40s kind of stuff nobody really knows you know if these stories are true and I'm you know there's been a lottery in Babylon I'm gonna tell you what what I've heard and then he goes in and just as if he hadn't said any of that tells the story and then gets to the end and kind of calls it into question so in the the lottery in Babylon what starts out is you've just got a lottery you know sort of like the lottery that we have here with the Powerball all right everybody puts in some money and somebody's gonna win and most people are going to lose and it's you know the common people who play it it's not very good for them to do and the lottery company starts losing money because people are like this this doesn't really hold our attraction and he says these so-called lotteries were a failure they had no moral force forever they appealed not to all a man's faculties but only to one of them to hope for this right which is think of when people buy lottery tickets today that's what's going on so they introduced something one out of four for everyone forever for every 30 good tickets there's one bad ticket that gives you a find so imagine if we change the lottery like the Powerball and like you know the Powerball is not a good example because there's so few winners so think about the scratch-off tickets yeah so and it's very rare you know one out of one compared to thirty thirty winners to one loser but that loser has to pay a fine now you would say from a rational perspective that becomes a bad lottery why plant you know but it actually gets people playing it more and I think there is something to this that it appeals to to two emotions now hope and fear and society starts to change people who don't play the lottery start to be called cowards why aren't you taking a chance and then a new thing happens because people start refusing to pay the fines they also start to you know in in that society start say well if you pay the fun you're a sucker you know you're a coward you shouldn't you shouldn't do that so all these people get good you know behind in the fines the companies like what are we gonna do we're gonna run out of money pretty soon and so they take them to court and the judge decrees that the loser should put either pay the fine and court costs or go to jail so the loser is decided to go to jail to try to defraud the company it doesn't work but it introduces another new wrinkle into the game because now what you're comparing is no longer money against money right you're comparing money against jail time money loss and gain and so now the lottery extends the time in the company after a while says well what what will do is the losing tickets just have to have a jail time you know they go to prison for a certain amount and this is such a successful thing that they're forced by the ordinary people to increase the number of lucky numbers don't you again seems rather irrational doesn't it but we're talking about the play of the passions here so where he says this is the first introduction of non-pecuniary elements in the lottery then there's people complaining as there always are there's two complaints that come in one is from the people he calls the more or less so these are like the you know the essayist and philosophers and they say look the winning prizes are about money but you can't really be guaranteed that money is going to buy you happiness so maybe it should be more direct like you know maybe you should you know win a nice meal or you know a beautiful spouse comes to your room or whatever right and then the the ordinary people are like hey the rich they can buy a lot more tickets than that than we can so this is unfair the rich get to experience the highs and lows of life more than we do this needs to change which is the Equality of participation so then there's a crisis and it's a terrible crisis but you know it's it's one that introduces a paradigm so slave steals a ticket and that ticket in the drawing turns out to merit having his tongue burn down which is also the penalty for stealing a ticket so now the question that there's no question he's gonna have his tongue burned out the only question is what is the justification for it if he gets his tongue burned out because it's the penalty then the lottery really isn't being rigorously applied is it but if they're generous with them and they allow him to his tongue burned out because that's what the ticket said then he's evading punishment so you know justice and injustice get mixed together in a very strange way and the company this provokes a big crisis and the company takes over it takes over the culture of Babylon it says the company was forced to assume all public power the lottery that was made secret free of charge and open all by being a Babylonian citizen of a certain age you automatically part of the lottery so it requires a comprehensive coordination of everything that's taking place within Babylon by the company and it says sometimes a single of that would be a inspired outcome of 30 or 40 drawings because remember the tickets now are about all sorts of things that could happen to you in life and it's not just about your life and what happens to you because what happens to you also might affect me and what's going on with me might might affect the next person over so the company somehow in some very complicated way is coordinating all these different chance drawings and the company becomes all-powerful some people start complaining that that you know could be favoritism or corruption and so the company responds with an argument and it happens in if I remember right a mask Factory it's written on a little thing because the company is never just responds directly to the people the company says the lottery is an interpolation of chanson to the order of the universe to accept errors as to strengthen chance not not to contribute it so if there is corruption if there is favoritism if there are errors that just introduces more chance and the company is the one who is taking a otherwise orderly universe an introducing chance into it and so this starts a lot of debates among among the citizens and these lead to new reforms which are going to raise the level of chance in the drawings so where they end up is that drawings lead to further drawings which specify modify and perhaps even nullify the first drawing and so where he says in reality the number of drawings is infinite no decision is final all branch into others the ignorance assume that infinite drawings require infinite time actually all that's needed is that time be infinitely sub divisible which means that these lottery people the company was running it they have superhuman powers if they're actually doing this there's also impersonal drive now there's not just the coordination of all these different drawings happening there's also impersonal drawings so he gives us examples like somebody introduces a snake into a jar of wine or every every so often it was a great example in here where is that here we go one proposes the sapphire of table top rope on ax B throw it into the waters of the Euphrates another that a bird be released from the roof of a tower another that each century there be withdrawn or added a grain of sand from the innumerable ones on the beach the consequences are at times terrible and so the grand effectiveness is that everybody in Babylon feels like their lives are just some fuse with randomness with chance with possibility now here's the interesting there's there's one other interesting question that we'll come back to but here's the interesting question in terms of like freedom are people living in a domain like that free in the sense of having freedom of choice or free will they're escaping determinism but they've got all these weird random things being thrown in there which seem to affect what their life is like and maybe even things that they think are themselves making free choices are some in some way guided by this mysterious company so are they are they free or not do they have some measure of freedom of choice it seems like they can you know act within the scope of what they're given can they can they refuse to be involved in the lottery no I mean if you're in Babylon you are stuck in the environment that so that's not free okay that's not free in that sense but I mean I mean the ultimate choice is always life or death right so you could kill yourself you possess yes so you can't leave them and we can't take the choice of doubt that's really not one what if that's something that's just the outcome of a bunch of different drawings that the company has done you know that's right yes and so he he ends it by saying the company with divine modesty avoids all publicity its agents as is natural or secret and so he says who can brag about being a mere imposter the drunkard improvises an absurd order the dream of a wake suddenly and strangles the woman who sleeps that aside do they not execute perhaps the secret decision of the company that silent functioning comparable to gods gives rise to all sorts of conjectures so here's the conjectures one of these insinuates the company has not existed for centuries and the sacred disorder of our lives is pure purely hereditary and traditional so that the company is just kind of part of our mythology and it hasn't existed for a long time sort of like you know we talk about like that you know the free market and the invisible hand that's all pathology when we come down to it maybe it's something that they used to guide their lives he says another judges that it is eternal and teaches it will last until the last night when the last God annihilates the world another declares the company is an impotent but it only has influence in tiny things in a bird's call the shadings of rust and of dust and the half dreams of dawn here's the interesting another is that it has never existed and will not exist so could you tell whether any of those I mean imagine we were in a situation like that would we be able to decide between these different possibilities [Music] given the the prophecies it seems hard to figure out how we would all right because it's a yeah to get out of bad luck yeah well I think it's one of those things too the word if you're from Babylon you going off to a foreign place that would also be you know the company somehow the company is behind it you know or they or they put in your head the idea that you shouldn't put up with this sort of thing or you know yeah once you start going down that line of thinking it's sort of like with conspiracy theories right people who have conspiracy theories typically get one and then they tweak it you know and then if you say well look the evidence shows that this is not the case that's not the case oh they got to you you know there's always ways to to say that it can't be falsified which is yeah I mean I think that's the way it works some of the time there's there's an experiential aspect I mean people talk about things changing their life or you know you've got a feud if you're if you want to see whether whether meditation works you can you meditate and see whether it makes any difference or sometimes yeah I think you're right that there's there's always gonna be some aspects that you're never going to have possible experiences that that everybody would be convinced by for right so there has to be some element of taking it on faith you get in a certain sense you could say conspiracy theories Lisbon Chesterton actually says at one point in orthodoxy are kind of like impoverished religions in a way religions are richer in terms of the story that's being told although some conspiracy theories are pretty elaborate aren't they well rich I mean you know I mean if you think about like any of the great world religions you could spend the rest of your life just studying the literature of them because there's there's so much you know so there's a rich story because it might be a false story but it's still a rich story you know we could say something similar about like gaming worlds you know like some some game worlds are kind of small and impoverished and others are so vast that the players don't even know what they're supposed to do and then there was there was a game recently that was so vast and so dope that that players quit playing and I can't remember was I remember reading about that somewhere because they're like we don't know what the hell we're supposed to be doing yeah that limits help us so that's a good segue into another key idea so you know the world being open to language and thereby being open to interpretation this is a key idea in more haste that you know he's got one which is actually called one translation the god script and other the God we're like the whole universe is really a set of correspondences if you could sort of crack the code you would you would understand it all the lottery in Babylon trying to figure out what the company is actually doing is kind of along that that line there's a number of different ones where we're I think he's he's got this this it's a world that's like I said mysterious but also meaningful and and the key it's a cracking it is to find how to read it correctly how to interpret it correctly you know and you can you can totally get it run too so he's got a great story where two actually two stories where there were this theme comes up one is three versions of Judas and the other one is deutsches Requiem deutsches wreck when it was about this this Nazi who is sort of justifying what what he and the other Nazis are doing and he gets to the end and he realizes because sort of the proof of the pudding for the Nazis was that they were gonna win you know they beat everybody else then there their doctrine must have been true and he comes to the point where he he says that the point of the the whole Nazi you know German exercise was to create something new and it's not true it's not new Germany he says many things will have to be destroyed in order to construct the new order now we know that Germany was one of those things we've given more than our lives who sacrificed the destiny of our beloved fatherland let others curse and weep I rejoice in the fact our destiny completes a circle and is perfect and then I mean this is where it's kind of prescient story he says and an external epic is spreading over the world we forged it we who are already its victim what matters if England is the hammer and we the anvil so long as violence reigns and not servile Christian today Victorine and justice and happiness or not for germany let them be for other nations that heaven exists even though our dwelling place is hell and so there's there's a sense that that there is a meaning to life that just turns out that you happen to be on the wrong side of history but though you think we're on the right side of history and that meaning is going to go on but but notice the kind of meaning is everything should be violence everything should be you know the struggle of the strong against the weak there's other alternatives for you know how one would read the world as well but I think that's one of the things that his characters are typically doing is trying to figure out how do I make sense out of the world how do i how do I read it properly like a book and so studying language which is something else that many of his characters do they're linguists or they're they're theoreticians of language would be one way to do that being a literary author would be another way to do it another key idea is identity in the self you know what you know what are we he has one one great story called the circular ruins where there's a magician I guess we could call him and he wants to create a living meeting he wants to create a person and so he does you know he prays to this this this this God in a temple and he engages in this visualization process that eventually brings a new being new person into being who is the only the only difference between him and other people is that fire can't Harmon because he fire was used to create him and or the fire God was used to create him and so fire won't harm him and so he tries to make sure that this guy never like actually winds up in situations where he's doing should get burned but doesn't get burned so that he doesn't realize that there's something up because he doesn't want this this creation of his to think of himself as a creation he wants them to think of him as a real living human being and he takes care of this person who he thinks of as his son and then eventually in his own place there's a fire and he realizes his own status when he starts you know the fire is closing in on him and he doesn't get burned and now he realizes that he himself is a simulacrum in a way or a creation of somebody else so the notion that somehow you know the things that we take for granted is being certainties like I mean if you think about when we talk about being you know making ourselves well you know we've been watching some black mirrors to where that plays a role or well yeah yeah and I mean there'll be a real kick in the pants wouldn't it to find out that your bet but in a way it's in a way it'd be also relief I think to especially if you realize that you yourself were able to create something so detailed so conscious that it itself could think that it's real yeah you know I'll mention one last theme because because we should probably end priests and so I said I would talk about human inquiry and misunderstandings so he's got a couple stories where people are getting things wrong in ways that are very interesting and it's usually with with intellectual life and interpretation so he's got one couple of theologians and it's about heresies and trials and stuff like that and these these two theologians that are writing things back and forth and one is going after the other one which was something that didn't happen in in you know in the West in Christianity is you'd have these these people you consider their works you see if you follow out this line of reasoning that leads to this end and that's heresy so they must recant good example that would be Peter Abelard burn one of his books and in the end they wind up in heaven and realized that they're actually much more closely connected and that they were getting things wrong another great one is about the the Islamic philosophy of eros and it is let's see it's called avro search yeah even even rushed as Arabic name and it's this wonderful story about oven roast who's trying he's a translator and commentator at Aristotle as a matter of fact he was one of the people through whom the medievals got to know Aristotle again and he's trying to figure out what Aristotle means in talking about tragedy and comedy and he doesn't again he's lacking a frame of reference because he's not seeing anything like this in the culture that he's living in there's no drama as such there's poetry which peopled acclaim and there is storytelling and then he's the he has a traveler who he's added like a dinner party with and this travelers or County haven't seen something really funny out in China because you know the Islamic world stretches across the continent this traveler saw playing tries to describe it in such a way that the audience will be able to make sense of it and in the end they basically come to the conclusion boy these these foreigners really do crazy stuff you know and Averroes isn't able to make the connection even though he's got it staring him right in the face about what Aristotle might mean by a tragedy and comedy and so in the end he writes a few lines where is says Aristotle gives the name of tragedy to panegyrics that of comedy to satires and Anathem odds admirable tragedies and comedies about and abound in the pages of the Quran and the moja lacas of the sanctuary and so here's here's the end of what what Bourdais says in the foregoing story I tried to narrate the process of a defeat I thought first of that Archbishop of Canterbury who took it upon himself to prove that there is a God then in the alchemists who sought the Philosopher's Stone then of the vain try sectors of the angle and squares of the circle later I reflected it would be more poetic to tell the case of a man who sets himself a goal which is not forbidden to others but which is to him I remember a Burroughs who closed her than the warp of Islam could never know the meaning of the terms tragedy and comedy and so he goes on and I mean this could be our case as well that within the frame of reference that we inhabit there's there's things that we should be able to understand that we just can't we can't formulate adequately we lack the cultural reference or we lack the vocabulary how would we know again how would we figure that out yeah yeah I mean there you get somebody who is outside of their cultures frame of reference right Rossum is very successful within his culture precisely because he and successful as somebody who's adapting previous culture to these taking Aristotle and commenting on them so I guess the more successful you are within your own culture maybe the less adapt to our context problem most insight yeah well let me ask you also does it sort of bring this to a close because you've got this extensive background in journalism when it comes to like sources like that to actually get up what's going on in the story how do you how do you figure out who who are the who are the outliers who you would talk to to get the fuller picture I think for me when I was doing stories I always had believed everybody yeah I really had this desire everybody was telling the truth and I was always kind of astounded when I hear about people who were just lying flat oh yeah it's just very strange for me because my contest so so I wasn't always looking for outliers I was just looking for you know anybody who knew any information about something but then when I started putting information together and I saw things that conflicted yeah that was that would be the red flag and then I would have to go and sometimes I would write stories and then realize I'd have to completely rewrite them because I have got something wait something so something that would individually that that one thing would change how to look at the other offense they saw completely and then you are always under a time limit so yeah that's that's a different time I I kill somebody off I should kill them off in my story then I made this last-minute phone call and actually got him on the line and get the thing change to the story before it was too late yeah I imagine now that there's there's even more pressure to try to get stories out as quickly as possible or they are and they're there for just huge numbers of errors constantly yeah that's one thing with Boreas is he really had the luxury to what he wrote and the things that he wrote a very short for the most part to labor over them as as he wanted you know there wasn't any pressure to publish yeah you know that's a very yeah all right well let's let's draw this one to to a close some great discussion and we've got a lot of cool authors ahead [Music]

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

Views: 3,474

Rating: 4.9689922 out of 5

Keywords: Lecture, Lesson, Talk, Education, Sadler, Philosophy, Learning, Reason

Id: jG8PAAedRic

Length: 85min 37sec (5137 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 14 2018