When in Babel...

I think we do Borges, Magic Realism, perhaps Latin America a disservice by trying to "figure it out." If we look at the work of Jose Saramago or Garcia Marquez we find a poetry. Saramago writes of the passage he goes in and out of everyday on his way to work in All the Names. He refers to it by it's name, The Door of Communication, in a passive way, never aluding to its possible meanings. This affords him wonderful opportunites for little poetic one liners, "he turned off the lights and closed the Door of Communication for the night." Likewise it affords us the opportunity to plunge, descend and then slowly ascend until we surface again into the writing. We play an active role in Magic Realism. It is our duty to read the text and believe it as a truth.

The Magic Realists do these things because they can. When I first read the staple, One Hundred Years of Solitude, I thought to myself, Yeah, why not? Why can't a character be surrounded by butterflies when she is in love and delivered in that matter of fact way that Borges delivers The Library of Babel? Why not? Too often we force ourselves to figure it out, to define it, to limit it. I'm not arguing against an interrogation. I think it is neccessary. I just say save me the references to a premonition of the internet, or religious texts that Borges piece is a metaphor for. Borges himself spells it out for us. If we're looking for the story to be vindication of the internet or the Bible or some "treacherous variation thereof", we will not find it. Instead we are to contemplate the variations of the 23 letters. Their possibilities. The possibility or the impossibility of writing, of communication, of history, of now. For example,

You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?"

Of course not. I can not be sure of the translations accuracy whether from Spanish to English or thought's conception to hand, or hand to pencil or especially pencil to paper. I can't be sure that he even wrote this. And if I can't be sure why am I reading it in the first place? A book that comes from nowhere. Can we be certain where we found this copy of Library of Babel from? What if I revealed the secret here, that this is actually something I wrote. I sent the link to Kotsko. Did you check the accuracy of my link? Perhaps what you've read was my reaction to the actual Library of Babel.

I kept reading the text, looking under it's rugs for unswept details. I did not read it one hundred times. I even fell victim to my own warnings looking up things that were invented in 1741, which would have been 300 years before the text was written in 1941.

This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfacorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered:

The Franklin stove was invented and the first magazine was published, but I found that a little suspicious, because Poor Richard's Almanac had been circulating for a number of years prior. I even read Poor Richard's Alamanac from 1741 for some piece of advice that would have made it possible to formulate a general theory of the Library. This might be what borges was refering to when he said tautology...or the internet or the Bible:

Best is the Tongue that feels the rein; --
He that talks much, must talk in vain;

Thats just not the way to read this. We should read these texts the way we listened to our parents, and our grandparents speak. The disorder in which they speak to us as children who are unable to grasp their inflections and intonations is an order. The order.

My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.