Post by Madame Red on Jun 9, 2011 21:23:38 GMT -8
Jorge Luis Borges was born on the 24th of August 1899 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was a writer, poet, critic, and librarian. As a writer he was, in a word, brilliant. In many of his stories and poems he takes already outlandish topics like eternity and infinity, and plays with them.
Space, time, eternity, infinity, memory, and identity are absolutes. They just are. The vastness of infinity and eternity are incomprehensible to us, as they are as outside of reality as you can get. We will never see eternity come to pass, and, like infinity, it is just an idea thought up by man. The two do not truly exist.
Memory, to me at least, is a series of pictures in our minds from times past. There is no such thing as a perfect memory, we simply remember things the way we want them, not the way they are, for better or for worse. Some people have photographic memory. They see everything that they have ever seen, at least in a certain period, perfectly, but they do not have a perfect understanding of it. They can perceive the multitude of images however they want to.
Time exists, though it is also a thing created by man. Every second that goes by and every second to come is the vastness that is time, but we are the ones who gave it its name and are trying to understand it.
Identity is who we are and what we are. We can change anything about ourselves, but our identity stays the same all the while. We cannot change who we are, at least not by any natural means.
Now, back to Borges. He wrote many poems and short stories, but for now, I am going to focus on a specific six of his stories. Each of them plays with one of the six absolutes. Borges takes things not of reality and puts them in, twisting and turning your views of the world around you, and meddling with your mind.
The first of the six is The Aleph. The main character, as it is in many of his stories, is Borges himself. It begins with him simply talking of a woman he loved who has died. Soon he meets a man that eventually comes to show him the Aleph.
In The Aleph, the Aleph is a glowing orb that shows you everything. When you look into it, you see everything in the world from every possible angle. The way I imagine it in my attempt to understand how he plays with space, is to image a room of mirrors. When you are in a room of mirrors, you see yourself, and anything in said room, from all angles.
However, in the case of the Aleph, the entire world is in this room, and you are looking in. The analogy of my room is imperfect. In a room of mirrors, the reflections can be obscured, but the Aleph is perfect and shows you all of these images separate, yet together, at the same time with nothing interfering with them. Each is clear.
The next is The Zahir, in which memory is the absolute he toys with. He also plays with time, thought the focus is more on memory. You could call this the opposite of The Aleph. As the Aleph showed Borges (who is also the main in The Zahir) the world entire, from all aspects, the Zahir is all he can see. The Zahir in this is a twenty-centavo coin. Borges first comes across it after being given it among change in a bar.
The Zahir is unforgettable. The image is engraved in Borges mind and even time cannot wear away the image. As he says, “Time…softens recollections…” The Zahir is just the opposite. As time goes on the memory is all the better. The longer it has been since you first saw it, the more of it you can see.
It is a bit like reading a book. The longer you read it, the farther you get and the more you know of the characters. You can also look at it like writing a book. As you write, you reveal more. Sometimes you find out more about your own make believe person than you thought you would as you see their personality and actions from all aspects.
Funes the Memorius also plays with memory. In it, Ireneo Funes has “perfect” memory. In reality, there are those with photographic memory, as I have said before. However, Funes has absolute and total understanding and perception of each memory.
Say you could remember one thing perfectly. Perhaps a leaf or something simple like that. If you were Funes, you would remember every detail of the leaf, and then remember each time you remembered this leaf, and so on and so forth. Like looking at yourself looking into a mirror image of you looking into a mirror at yourself. In addition, there would be an infinite number of these mirrors, all reflecting you looking the same and you would see every single detail of yourself.
Borges brings the concept of the perfect memory and brings it into reality, giving it to Funes and writing of how he explained this perfection. If perfect memory such as this were real, anyone who had it would inevitably go mad.
Yet another of Borges’ stories plays with memory, though it also toys with identity. Shakespeare’s Memory. Memory is what makes a person and gives him his identity. Our experiences shape our identities to make them our own. Shakespeare’s Memory messes with identity a bit more than memory.
In Shakespeare’s Memory a man is offered, and accepts, the “blessing” of bearing the memory of Shakespeare himself. Soon after he accepts, he begins to receive the memories of Shakespeare.
As he receives more and more of the memories, he feels that he actually is Shakespeare. The receiving of these memories begins to change his very identity. He holds the weight of the memories of two separate lives and is not himself while he carries this burden.
I compare this to being bi-polar. There seems to be two different people inside of you, and sanity is difficult to hold onto. Again, the notion of receiving someone else’s memory is impossible, though it is intriguing how Borges explains it.
The Library of Babel, the most confusing, in my opinion, of Borges stories thus far. This piece plays with infinity and eternity. The Library itself is the universe and everything of it. The Library is immense, unending, and eternal. In The Library of Babel, Borges even says, “The Library is unlimited and cynical.”
The Library of Babel inspired the image above. In his story, Borges describes the library as a series of hexagonal rooms joined among several stories and railings lining each room. Each bookshelf has five shelves, each shelf contains 35 books, and each book has 410 pages in it.
Borges also says that the books contain everything there is to know of life and the universe, at least that is what I made of it. And each book is a jumble of several languages and hardly understandable, if at all.
We all know what a library is. A collection of books in a few rooms and you can take what you wish as long as you return it by a certain date. You can find virtually anything you could want from a book in a library. The Library, being life, represents that anything is possible and anything can be found and done. You can take from life, but you must give back, just like in a library.
Finally, our last story, Blue Tigers. This story plays with space. In the beginning, it is just a man talking of how he is fascinated by tigers. He, one day, hears of the sighting of blue tigers in a village. Soon he makes his way there to see if the reports are true.
He finds no “tigers”, but on a plateau, he finds what the villagers have christened “blue tigers”. Blue stones, which happen to be the exact shade of the tiger the man dreams of.
The curious thing about these stones is that they would multiply and disappear at random occurrences. The way Borges describes it is, “…some inhuman will absorb the stones and then in time threw an occasional one back again?”
To me it seems that the stones have the powers to transport themselves through different dimensions. Or, at least, from place to place. On the other hand, they are like the single celled paramecium. They split to multiply themselves and, in time, regain that matter which they lost in the act of multiplying.
In all these stories Borges amazingly takes the most unreachable, incomprehensible theories we as the human race have, and he twists them into our reality. At the same time, he skews our perception of all we thought of these concepts.
Borges takes the grand wall that splits our reality and that void that is the unknown and breaks it down. He allows these two completely different worlds mix and he plays God with them by shaping them however he pleases. Thus, these awesome examples of literature are created.
Space, time, eternity, infinity, memory, and identity are absolutes. They just are. The vastness of infinity and eternity are incomprehensible to us, as they are as outside of reality as you can get. We will never see eternity come to pass, and, like infinity, it is just an idea thought up by man. The two do not truly exist.
Memory, to me at least, is a series of pictures in our minds from times past. There is no such thing as a perfect memory, we simply remember things the way we want them, not the way they are, for better or for worse. Some people have photographic memory. They see everything that they have ever seen, at least in a certain period, perfectly, but they do not have a perfect understanding of it. They can perceive the multitude of images however they want to.
Time exists, though it is also a thing created by man. Every second that goes by and every second to come is the vastness that is time, but we are the ones who gave it its name and are trying to understand it.
Identity is who we are and what we are. We can change anything about ourselves, but our identity stays the same all the while. We cannot change who we are, at least not by any natural means.
Now, back to Borges. He wrote many poems and short stories, but for now, I am going to focus on a specific six of his stories. Each of them plays with one of the six absolutes. Borges takes things not of reality and puts them in, twisting and turning your views of the world around you, and meddling with your mind.
The first of the six is The Aleph. The main character, as it is in many of his stories, is Borges himself. It begins with him simply talking of a woman he loved who has died. Soon he meets a man that eventually comes to show him the Aleph.
In The Aleph, the Aleph is a glowing orb that shows you everything. When you look into it, you see everything in the world from every possible angle. The way I imagine it in my attempt to understand how he plays with space, is to image a room of mirrors. When you are in a room of mirrors, you see yourself, and anything in said room, from all angles.
However, in the case of the Aleph, the entire world is in this room, and you are looking in. The analogy of my room is imperfect. In a room of mirrors, the reflections can be obscured, but the Aleph is perfect and shows you all of these images separate, yet together, at the same time with nothing interfering with them. Each is clear.
The next is The Zahir, in which memory is the absolute he toys with. He also plays with time, thought the focus is more on memory. You could call this the opposite of The Aleph. As the Aleph showed Borges (who is also the main in The Zahir) the world entire, from all aspects, the Zahir is all he can see. The Zahir in this is a twenty-centavo coin. Borges first comes across it after being given it among change in a bar.
The Zahir is unforgettable. The image is engraved in Borges mind and even time cannot wear away the image. As he says, “Time…softens recollections…” The Zahir is just the opposite. As time goes on the memory is all the better. The longer it has been since you first saw it, the more of it you can see.
It is a bit like reading a book. The longer you read it, the farther you get and the more you know of the characters. You can also look at it like writing a book. As you write, you reveal more. Sometimes you find out more about your own make believe person than you thought you would as you see their personality and actions from all aspects.
Funes the Memorius also plays with memory. In it, Ireneo Funes has “perfect” memory. In reality, there are those with photographic memory, as I have said before. However, Funes has absolute and total understanding and perception of each memory.
Say you could remember one thing perfectly. Perhaps a leaf or something simple like that. If you were Funes, you would remember every detail of the leaf, and then remember each time you remembered this leaf, and so on and so forth. Like looking at yourself looking into a mirror image of you looking into a mirror at yourself. In addition, there would be an infinite number of these mirrors, all reflecting you looking the same and you would see every single detail of yourself.
Borges brings the concept of the perfect memory and brings it into reality, giving it to Funes and writing of how he explained this perfection. If perfect memory such as this were real, anyone who had it would inevitably go mad.
Yet another of Borges’ stories plays with memory, though it also toys with identity. Shakespeare’s Memory. Memory is what makes a person and gives him his identity. Our experiences shape our identities to make them our own. Shakespeare’s Memory messes with identity a bit more than memory.
In Shakespeare’s Memory a man is offered, and accepts, the “blessing” of bearing the memory of Shakespeare himself. Soon after he accepts, he begins to receive the memories of Shakespeare.
As he receives more and more of the memories, he feels that he actually is Shakespeare. The receiving of these memories begins to change his very identity. He holds the weight of the memories of two separate lives and is not himself while he carries this burden.
I compare this to being bi-polar. There seems to be two different people inside of you, and sanity is difficult to hold onto. Again, the notion of receiving someone else’s memory is impossible, though it is intriguing how Borges explains it.
The Library of Babel, the most confusing, in my opinion, of Borges stories thus far. This piece plays with infinity and eternity. The Library itself is the universe and everything of it. The Library is immense, unending, and eternal. In The Library of Babel, Borges even says, “The Library is unlimited and cynical.”
The Library of Babel inspired the image above. In his story, Borges describes the library as a series of hexagonal rooms joined among several stories and railings lining each room. Each bookshelf has five shelves, each shelf contains 35 books, and each book has 410 pages in it.
Borges also says that the books contain everything there is to know of life and the universe, at least that is what I made of it. And each book is a jumble of several languages and hardly understandable, if at all.
We all know what a library is. A collection of books in a few rooms and you can take what you wish as long as you return it by a certain date. You can find virtually anything you could want from a book in a library. The Library, being life, represents that anything is possible and anything can be found and done. You can take from life, but you must give back, just like in a library.
Finally, our last story, Blue Tigers. This story plays with space. In the beginning, it is just a man talking of how he is fascinated by tigers. He, one day, hears of the sighting of blue tigers in a village. Soon he makes his way there to see if the reports are true.
He finds no “tigers”, but on a plateau, he finds what the villagers have christened “blue tigers”. Blue stones, which happen to be the exact shade of the tiger the man dreams of.
The curious thing about these stones is that they would multiply and disappear at random occurrences. The way Borges describes it is, “…some inhuman will absorb the stones and then in time threw an occasional one back again?”
To me it seems that the stones have the powers to transport themselves through different dimensions. Or, at least, from place to place. On the other hand, they are like the single celled paramecium. They split to multiply themselves and, in time, regain that matter which they lost in the act of multiplying.
In all these stories Borges amazingly takes the most unreachable, incomprehensible theories we as the human race have, and he twists them into our reality. At the same time, he skews our perception of all we thought of these concepts.
Borges takes the grand wall that splits our reality and that void that is the unknown and breaks it down. He allows these two completely different worlds mix and he plays God with them by shaping them however he pleases. Thus, these awesome examples of literature are created.