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In one of his most famous stories, Borges wrote about a fictional city named Tlön, in a country called Uqbar, on a planet called Orbis Tertius. The story of Tlön is the story of a book that, by its gravity, reshapes the whole of the world
In Borges' story, the book that reshapes the world is an encyclopedia which provides an exhaustive catalog of places, names, customs, languages, and historical events, all imaginary, an earth that is not earth
The encyclopedia of Tlön is compiled by a secret society of scholars, and by imagining and describing this world, they hyperstitionally create it. The counterfactual vision of the world slowly subverts the real one
How would you really know if the history of the world were different to the one you have learned? If one by one, historical records and books were crowded out by alternate ones, stories of fake kings and fake countries and fake wars?
If the collective memory of the world, which is its written, archival memory, were to undergo such a metamorphosis, are you so sure you would notice? And are you sure it hasn't happened already?
In a sense the Tlönian revolution has happened many times in the past, as for example when the gospel of Jesus Christ transformed the Roman empire. Perhaps the Tlönian story is the story of the early Christian church.
And perhaps Tlön is a metaphor for every singularity, reaching back in time to erase the world as it existed prior to itself
In Tlön, the structure of language is different to that of the world we inhabit now. Every revolution tries to change the definitions of certain words, in order to make the past illegible
I am thinking of the texts of second wave feminism, which like the encyclopedia of Tlön replaced the history of the world with a fake one, casting men forever as villains and women as victims, as if every great book from the past were subtly altered https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1075400995683758080
As Borges wrote, "Reality yielded on more than one account. In truth, it longed to yield."
And it is ever thus with Tlönian books. In Borges' time there was no internet, but Borges did write a story about an endless book, a book which, when opened, would never reveal the same page twice, and whose first and last pages could never be reached
This book which was an eternal middle was called the Book of Sand, and in the story, Borges buys the book from a traveling salesman, and the only payment he renders is a Christian Bible. This metaphor, I think, becomes ever more apt with the passing of time
Borges said of Heraclitus: you learn the idea that you never step in the same river twice, and THIS is the beginning of terror
In the metaphysics of Tlön, which are the metaphysics of subjective idealism, the contours of reality willingly bend around the machinations of the mind. Such a world would not be a place where wishes were granted, but rather where nightmares were embodied
We can be thankful that we do not know the horror of living under subjective idealism, but when we learn of real life examples of Tlönian books, we can find for ourselves a taste of that fear
I call myself a horrorist. What does that mean? It means, quite simply, that I am conscious at all times of the longing that reality has to yield to ideas
Kant taught us that an object is monstrous if by its magnitude, it annihilates the end that its concept constitutes. This means that a thing can become so vast as to become incomprehensible, and then we can no longer discern its telos, its purpose
Borges wrote âFrom the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them."
If I may be so indulgent as to juxtapose Borges with Kant, I will speculate that the monstrosity of mirrors is that they give us a glimpse of ourselves, and that the self, like the world that contains it, is an entity whose magnitude annihilates its end https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1042166112551485440
And here at last we have had walked the circle, from books to monsters to mirrors to books, because a book, as I have said in the past, is a kind of mirror, and the internet, as we have seen, is a kind of book, and also a kind of monster https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1039509555028230147
Ever since I was a young boy it has always seemed to me that the world was a particular way, and the more I learned, I did not uncover the truth so much as I found the words that would allow me to give a voice to my perceptions
A monstrous thing may arise from its opposite; pleasure from pain, or purpose from nihilism, or idealism from absolutism https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025739449446019074
The greatest horror of all may be the realization that the world we live in, whose geography is that of mind, and is therefore idealistic in the Berkeleyan sense, is yet situated in a world where there are truths outside the mind that are IN NO WAY contingent
This is not a fashionable admission, and I am not precisely an honest seeker of truth. On the contrary, my desire is to leverage idealism to write a book like the encyclopedia of Tlön, a mirror in which you can behold MY horror
