Gaucho Marx- Borges as gagster.

If the pages of Roberto Bolano's posthumously unwritten 'Gaucho Marx' are haunted by a specter, it is the imminence of an immanance that never comes to pass, or rather the Permanence of a World Wide Insurrection against the soul-deadening szygy of Trade- which is synoecist precisely because it is expansionary- and Settlement- which is perennially schizophrenic by reason of being so impredicatively imprecise as to constitute the hieratic locution of its own locust like horde.

Borges, in his burlesque incarnation as the libidinous, too-necessary-to-exist, Liebnizian  gagster, Gaucho Marx, unites 'Jerusalem to Benares': id est, on the one hand, the Ivrim & the Arya- Sinai's Jerusalem and what it will always already have become for vast Northern steppe lands- and, on the other, the infloldingly infinite labyrinth of jaguar haunted jungles which lure both Semite & Steppe nomad, than desultory Death, yet farther South.

Not that Bolano's 'Gaucho Marx' actually bothers with any such notions, concentrating instead on taking cheap shots at best selling Indian authors- like Rabindranath Tagore ('I never forget a beard, but since you are Victoria Ocampo's beard, I'll make an exception'- what? it's funny in Spanish especially if you jiggle your eyebrows and gesture suggestively with a cigar) and Jawaharlal Nehru ('Like the covers of his books, Nehru Jackets enclose shite.'- which is funny in any language provided you've met an Indian diplomat or a relict of Swinging Sixties Carnaby Street- or Natkat Singh who is both) and Sri Aurobindo ('fuck off you great big bearded Bengali retard. Seriously. Just fuck the fuck off you utterly worthless cunt.' Not particularly funny, but an immortal truth that transcends language and thus an esprit de escalier worthy of the Superman toiling up Urania's spiral Staircase towards the Omega point of Tielhard's salon.)

Okay, you can give over with the retching, granted this is my worst post ever, still, I think I've given you an idea of why people like Borges's Gaucho Marx are just too metaphysically necessary, therefore real, to ever actually exist. Why? Because conatus now entails being comic in a manner more meaningless than Existence itself. So, and ever sadder than we can know,  all that can be or be thought about-  Parmenides's pining as the Quantum Zeno of every Divorced Dad's, Singles' Complex, House of Night- is re-runs of a Seventies sitcom by, not Ruth Barcan, which would be bad enough, but Barcan-Kripke, which is like totally fucked.
For which, needless to say, I personally blame David Cameron.
That boy aint right.
Mind it kindly.
Aiyayo.

Borges's Lottery in Babylon vs Rawls's Veil of ignorance

"Imagine that you have set for yourself the task of developing a totally new social contract for today's society. How could you do so fairly? Although you could never actually eliminate all of your personal biases and prejudices, you would need to take steps at least to minimize them. Rawls suggests that you imagine yourself in an original position behind a veil of ignorance . Behind this veil, you know nothing of yourself and your natural abilities, or your position in society. You know nothing of your sex, race, nationality, or individual tastes. Behind such a veil of ignorance all individuals are simply specified as rational, free, and morally equal beings. You do know that in the "real world", however, there will be a wide variety in the natural distribution of natural assets and abilities, and that there will be differences of sex, race, and culture that will distinguish groups of people from each other."^[6]

Since we  only prefer clear cut Contracts to 'fuzzy' Relationships or opportunistic Transactions where there is a need to hedge against some specific type of Uncertainty- the 'Social Contract' has to be about the specific sorts of Uncertainty arising out of strategic behavior in the Socio-Political realm.
A quite separate issue has to do with the provision of Public Goods, policing of Repugnancy markets, enforcing of Contracts and so on.
These clearly don't require a Social Contract because Absolute Monarchies, Dictatorships and so on can provide them just as well. Indeed, iff the folk theorem of repeated games is Muth Rational and Evolution has provided our Species with a mimetics that is thus epigenetically canalised, then we can show that a unilateral & universal Social Contract isn't in the Core assuming non-zero information and/ or compliance costs.
Nevertheless, just as Monarchies and Dictatorships still have a 'Niti' type Ethical Discourse such that subject-hood exceeds compliance, so too do Liberal Democracies acknowledge that free-riders remain part of the Social Contract. More generally, it isn't the case that acceptance of a given Nation's Social Contract means you agree to every specific article regarding who or what is protected, or how that protection is provided, by National Defence or Health or Economic Policy.

Indeed, a Social Contract is only needed because every type of Public Justification or Substantive Due Process or Just Entitlement thesis can and will be gamed with the result that we all have an incentive to hedge against the uncertainties arising out of the manner of that gaming. Thus, the Social Contract- unless itself the constitution of a Regime specifically stated to have unlimited powers- to count as falling within Liberal discourse, must conform to a limiting ejusdem generis type canon of construction & therefore have no specific & indefeasible Economic or even Legal content, but concern itself wholly with hedging against Mechanism Design or  Race Hazard or Concurrency deadlock or Moral or Agent Principal type hazards.

By contrast, Rawls believed, epigenetically canalised risk aversion would militate for everybody agreeing that the minimum provision of 'basic goods'- which includes Aristotelian 'Goods' like Self-Esteem and Liberty- be maximised subject to Natural as well as Economic/ Social Science type constraints. Rawls, believed that the Social and Biological Sciences were univocal, so to speak- i.e. no 'reswitching' or multiple equilibria obtain- and thus there would always be an 'overlapping consensus' re. the Social Choice Menu and this by itself would militate for metaphysical differences having nil impact on the 'reflective equilibrium' because the latter only concerned itself with unambiguous, unanimously received, 'material' outcomes.

Borges, however, writing a few years earlier than Harsanyi (whose work Rawls drew on) had looked at the opposite situation- viz. what happens in an established, indeed ancient, Society- the paradigmatic Babylon- when a Lottery (i.e. a new source of Social mobility) is introduced. He shows that, under psychologically plausible assumptions re. 'Preference Profiles' in the General Population- people would wish for more and more random, more and more bizarre outcomes (e.g. Gender reassignment and Social invisibility) to occur with dizzying frequency.
Indeed, if your metaphysics commits you to metempsychosis- then the 'tuirgen' knights-tour of all possible lives is by itself soteriologically liberative and so everybody should choose Borges's nightmare Lottery in Babylon over Rawls's Bleeding Heart Nanny State. This does not mean there can't be an 'overlapping consensus' to stick with widespread compulsory Social Insurance- it's just that some sensible people vote for it because they believe the Bureaucratic nightmare that results will simulate Borges's Babylon, not Rawls's Brahminical Boston.

Meredith Townsend, whose spank mag (the Spectator) permanently perverted the young Jawaharlal, argued that Orientals aint motivated by rational self-interest but Arabian Nights 'interestingness'- like the increasingly bizarre outcomes of Borges's lottery- but, of course, it is only Rawlsian rubbish and Sen-tentious shite which can construct the Kafkaesque Bureaucratic Punishment Machine which instantly breaks down to but butcher its one fervent proponent whose crime is to 'Be Just'!

Abu Nawas, I think it was, who first remarked that, at our Symposium, the Saqi's muslin veil protects her from the wine fumes & Plato from mirth.
Alas! Modi's culling of the Planning Commission is to all us old L.S.E-wallahs, Folly's famine & dearth.
For which I personally blame David Cameron.
That boy aint right.
Mind it kindly
Aiyayo.

Borges's Orbis Tertius vs. Dummett's Frege's

'...for Frege, several people may grasp the sense of one word or of one thought, and that just as the sense of a name denotes an object, the sense of a thought denotes a truth-value'- 

In other words,  Sense (Sinn or Acceptation) is the name Frege gives to the solution of a co-ordination problem which itself is described by the 'Reference' of the word or phrase or 'thought'- i.e. its context. If there is a canonical solution- then Sense corresponds to a 'truth value'. In other words, if you can be sure of finding the Schelling focal point without discussing it with anyone (i.e. gaming it) because there is an obvious, unique,  quick to halt algorithm you can run- then you have a proposition in a first order language of a certain type.

'What is involved in grasping a sense?'

The answer, obviously, is a zero knowledge mimetics or cheap-talk Preference Falsification. But that's not Frege’s response  which is- 'that senses are neither part of the world of spatio-temporal objects, nor do they exist inside the minds of individuals. They belong to a “third realm”, a timeless world, to which all of us have access.'

Access how? Well, d'uh, collaboratively like Borges's 'Orbis Tertius' project.  The Tlon thus collectively created is, of course, a Psychologism- which from the Evolutionary p.o.v it's useful for us to cultivate, even in hyper-mentalist, hypo-mechanist, form. In this sense, so long as one is autistic enough to reject Psychologism as Teleology, there is no ontological scandal- anymore than there is a Christological scandal in Tertullian- in Frege's, surely Game theoretic, not hyper-mentalist at all, 'third realm'.
However Dummett, Frege's greatest English language commentator,' is far from endorsing the suggestion that thoughts occupy a third realm beyond time and space. He describes this doctrine as a piece of “ontological mythology”, the term “mythology” here being used in a purely pejorative sense (Dummett, 1993a, 25). Dummett thinks that these two loose ends should be tied together. Rather than being content to describe the act of understanding as involving a mysterious connection between our minds and timeless entities known as senses, we should focus on the practice of using sentences in a language. This, in turn requires us to think about the purpose of classifying sentences as true or false, and that requires that we think about the purposes for which we use a language (Dummett, 1981a, 413). The result of this process might be to vindicate Frege’s semantics, or it might vindicate the intuitionist position. Dummett’s most influential contribution to philosophy can be understood as an attempt to resolve this unfinished business.'

In other words, here again is that paranoid and programmatic- as opposed to sane for self-sublatingly schizophrenic- 'linguistic turn' which coincided with the de-Industrialization of Higher Education and the Great Credentialist Moderation now nakedly revealed as a Ponzi scheme rendering us all asymptotically Third World.
Why? Coz everybody needing a PhD in order to understand that, like, Language speaks them- is only par for the course for discoordination game Elitism or Chauvinism but fucked for the true purpose of Higher Education-as-Paideia which is Universal and Transcendental and consists entirely of telling kids not to masturbate so much otherwise they'll go blind as opposed to just getting  more and more myopic. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.

Envoi-               Prince! Since by hic sunt leones  the State's burgeoning is naturaliter permitted
                                Ex ungue leonem,  our I & Thou, is now  to a Third Estate demitted.

The Reflection principle & Borges's Aleph

Leibniz wrote, in section 56 of the Monadology: “Each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and is in consequence a perpetual living mirror of the universe”.

Borges's Aleph is a small spot only viewable from a certain angle when lying on the floor of a rodent infested Buenos Aires cellar. In it, everything in the Universe is simultaneously viewable. Yet, Borges comes to the conclusion that it is a false Aleph. Why?

Well, for the purposes of the higher criticism- i.e. writing tendentious shite about modish Modernist texts we haven't re-read since we were ourselves equally psilosophical College Sophomores- one approach is to argue that, by any Reflection Principle, which itself has enough structural features; or a, Tarski type, suitably dense Relation Algebra (the two not being homologous for any Semantic or Sen-tentious end!)  to fully specify the pre-image/pratibimba or Universal Set (V) for any given empirically observed Aleph, it must be the case that there is no way of distinguishing if that Aleph is merely partial or actually complete. Indeed, the probability is overwhelming that it must simply be false.

Since you and me aint edumicated, however, this road is closed to us and so we have to go back and read Borges's text coz, truth be told, tho we woz too Sophomores sho nuff, it was High School Sophomores and not in a good School District either. Indeed, far from it.

But, wait. 

Hang on a fookin hanging fart. Aint u & me red blooded Sarah Palin types? Surely, our Christian Faith- or Swahili Witch-doctor- will save us from having to actually read wot some fookin W.O.P wrote?

I mean, what would J.C do?

The answer, of course, as so often happens on this blog, turns out to involve making a distinction between cataphatic and apophatic theology. Whitman's method was cataphatic- i.e. listing sonorous shite. Borges, notoriously, was a heteroclite Whitman- his lists undermine themselves. He gives us a credible Aleph by means of a vetiginously veridical cataphasis- 'On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland’s — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.'

Rabindranath Tagore said- 'Kadombini moriya proman korilo she more nai' (Kadambari dies only to prove she was still alive) and though he was referencing the baroque Sanskrit novel, not his beloved  sister-in-law's suicide, there is a univocity to this epigram which redeems that too hirsute and prolix Sage.

By contrast, Borges's various Kadambaris- whose V precludes Victoria Ocampo, for whom Rabi had a lech- whether called Beatrice Viterbo or Teodolino Villar, did not die merely to prove they were alive but, like the risen Christ at the end of the Gospel of John, in order to become the protagonist of such Epic Agons as, were each written down in a book, not the World- nay, not the Library of Babel!- could contain them all. 

Which is why their Alephs are false and Zahirs forgettable. 

If only because 'Borges & I' represents a Red Queen's race.

In this respect, Borges ever trembles on that threshold boldly crossed by both true Mannerists (e.g Riti kavya a la Jagganath Pundit) & proto-Marxists (as in the subaltern Shlok of Nund Reshi) videlicet; Love is a Second Creation. Its God Grief.

What of Cantor's Aleph & the too Christian Godel?

'Hao Wang records  Godel’s argument in item 8.7.14 of his Logical Journey
 Consider a property P(V, x), which involves V. If, as we believe, V is extremely large, then x must appear in an early segment of V and cannot have any relation to much later segments of V. Hence, within P(V, x), V can be replaced by some set in every context. In short, if P does not involve V, there is no problem; if it does, then closeness to each x helps to eliminate V, provided chaos does not prevail.”

This sounds a bit like the Secretary problem also known as the 1/e stopping rule. If so, we have a proof of (almost) the Trinity

“There is also a theological approach, according to which V corresponds to the whole physical world, and the closeness aspect to what lies within the monad and in between the monads. According
to the principles of rationality, sufficient reason, and preestablished harmony, the property P(V, x) of a monad x is equivalent to some intrinsic property of x, in which the world does not occur. In other
words, when we move from monads to sets, there is some set y to which x bears intrinsically the same relation as it does to V. Hence, there is a property Q(x), not involving V, which is equivalent to P(V, x). According to medieval ideas, properties containing V or the world would not be in the essence of any set or monad”.

  But those properties  would be in the Holy Ghost against whom alone sins are unpardonable.

But, what is Sin (Evil being Empty) other than its own corpus delecti?

Thus all Sin is formally identifiable as a failure to properly dispose off Sacrifice's surplus.
What is unpardonable is to ascribe e's excess over 'two-ity' to anything but V

                            Wherever two are gathered, there is the lover & the rival.

When they disperse there remains only the Zahir of their Aleph.
And that is always the smallest coin in circulation amongst us.
So, drink up, & spend that penny already.

Barzakh, Bibliothetic Order & Borges's Library in Babel

Note- this has been edited on the basis of a negative comment.

The books in Borges's Library of Babel are a random distribution of unique character strings of equal length. One way to generate the Library would be to start with the book that consists entirely of the letter a, then the one which is entirely a except that its last letter is b and so forth. This would generate the lexical ordering of the Library in a time factorial to that of producing one book. The actual order of books is random and we don't know where the Library starts and finishes. Still, we can just arbitrarily choose an anchor book and say, this is in the right place and every other book must be moved to correspond to the lexical ordering. More generally, for any bibliothetic ordering, two variables arise for any given book- first, its vector distance from the anchor book, and second its vector distance from its assigned place- both of which have polynomial form.
Thus catalogs of the Library have existential Second Order Complexity which,by Fagin's theorem, is non deterministically computable. But, since we know the books have a lexical ordering such that there is a least fixed point, it follows that algorithmic orderings are deterministically computable in exponential time. Moreover, if the catalog of the Library must also be a book in the Library then, since we know that there is no 'sparse language' in the one case which is not in the other we have no grounds for hoping that some non deterministic computation would be shorter than exponential time.

This is one approach, a pessimistic one, to answering the question-

'Could there be a specified bibliothetic order for Borges's library that you or I could create and describe in, say, a 100-page document? Not a complete cataloguing, obviously, but an algorithm that sensibly placed the books in an order explainable to a bright and interested human? I don't think so—at least I wasn't able to dream anything up!—but nor did I see any path to a proof that no such ordering could be possible. And maybe I'm being redundant, but it wouldn't need to specify hexagon and shelf for each possible book, but rather a compelling way that set the books so that were you to find yourself in a particular hexagon, you'd have a good sense of what might be in nearby hexagons. I got nuthin'.'

What happens if we abandon the idea of a universal descriptive language and replace it by something arising out of the theory of co-evolution? Do we thereby escape the tyranny of Time hierarchy theorems?

One reason to hope so is that co-evolution is stochastic, not deterministic, and generates 'advice strings'.- i.e. an extra input becomes available- in a particularly useful manner. The Red Queen, in Lewis Caroll's 'Through the looking glass', manages to run just as fast as the scenery- which is in 'state space explosion'- thus staying in the same place. 

How might this work in practice?

Suppose 'interesting books' in the Library of Babel are traded and used as a store of value and suppose preferences are epigenetically canalized to not-too-much, not-too-little diversity (Graciella Chichilnisky- an Argentine Mathematical Economist- did path-breaking work on this in the Seventies) then over infinite time we are likely to see all sorts of bibliothetic orderings corresponding to all possible Wealth distributions which would exhaust polynomial complexity. Now, if a steady state obtains at any point, then we know from a result by Axtell, that this is also a Walrasian equilibrium- which is an exponential time algorithm for fixed points. Under certain conditions- e.g. if we assume that the race of Librarians have homothetic preferences and thus the same satiation point- this corresponds to the notion that a bibliothetic ordering has been implemented.

My feeling, however, is that there is more to this. Essentially, the Economic evolution of biblothetic ordering itself adds meaning and, what's more, the fitness landscape (assume guys more successful in the book trade live longer or have more progeny) for hermeneutics now has a sort of built in 'Red Queen' predator-prey type driver for complexity. I think this means that though any given bilateral trade is still only of complexity class P, the co-evolved complexity of the system is much greater. Indeed, Borges-the-writer-who-was-also-a-librarian's own sequential bibliothetic orderings of the books that simultaneously created his precursors - which corresponds to a non computable real- could have a representation. (This is because a few typos don't make much difference, so there can be a lot of book sequences corresponding to how specific works stood in relation to each other on Borges's mental book-case at different points of time)

Elsewhere in the library, variorum editions of Schelling focal 'interesting books' might themselves end up with higher prices because of baked in hysteresis effects. Parallel to this is that 'important' book dealers have epigenetic canalisation- i.e. they behave like each other even though they have different origins and preferences. I think this means that a lot of the time we are going to see fractal patterns with provincial 'collections' mimicking (mutatis mutandis) those of the 'metropolitan' Merchant Princes. My guess, or particular brand of Economic Romanticism, is that this still wouldn't give us a substantive 'catalog' except as a degenerate state.

Still the co-evolved descriptive complexity I am attributing to the librarians could, of course, be a property of a discrete math simulation. We just need to tinker with the rules of the game till we get a sufficiently rich steady state fractal. But would the result be something we would find humanly cognizable or intuitive? 

The problem is that, whereas librarians can have a canalised tropism to value 'interesting' books- a guy running a simulation doesn't have that ability to pick out 'interesting books' in the same way. I suppose one could breed genetic algorithms to do something which looks like Librarian Economics but the only way of knowing if what they produce is something interesting is to look inside the thing. But that's clearly illegitimate. I mean why not just put in a predator which goes through the lexical order and either quarantines or eats anything that looks meaningless when compared to the Google Books database? 

Another approach, of whose legitimacy I'm not sure, is to appeal to Intutitionistic mathematics.

Suppose there is an ideal ordering such that the Expected value of the sum of randomly teleported visitor bewilderment is minimized (i.e. some visitors, by reason of their lucky location, can quickly work out the ideal order while some, who are stuck in low structure stacks, take a very long but finite time to do so). Suppose further that the visitors are of a specific mathematical race such that Total bewilderment is a function of the spread of choice sequences they construct in comparing adjacent books. Muth rationality is the notion that one's choices or expectations conform to the prediction of the correct theory. Since the best thing for the visitor race as a whole is that the library be ordered to minimize total bewilderment, it makes sense if their choice functions reflect this (i.e. they choose to be bewildered by any empirical deviation from the ideal order). So we know there is an ideal ordering (albeit only for ideal visitors). 

We also know there are better than random orderings- e.g. the lexical.

I am tempted to say that by the Brouwer's continuity principle (an illegitimate use in this context?) this means there is a canonical bibliothetic ordering for all visitors who are the product of natural selection. In other words, there is some way to extract phenomenological information about us- on the assumption that we have evolved in a Darwinian manner- and make it available to Mathematics in the same way that the Anthropic principle might yield information for Physics.

I also think, because of the nature of choice sequences, one can keep changing the genotype of the visitors so that there is a trade-off between Total bewilderment minimization and other things we value- e.g. the chance for a lucky few to quickly get to a 'good' book-stack. 

But, can Brouwer's principle be used in this way?

Neither books nor information about ordering poses a difficulty. Everything is well defined and therefore continuous. But is it legitimate to stipulate that choice sequences be constructively Muth rational?- doesn't that make them impredicative?
On one horn of the dilemma- the Kantian horn- we can have a priori Muth rationality but no intuitive idea of how the choice sequence is constructed, on the other horn- the Darwinian horn- we know that choices are epigenetically canalised and thus something like ex poste Muth rationality obtains only we can never be sure it is optimal, and therefore really 'rational', in any sense.
One way to resolve the dilemma is to embrace a peculiar sort of monadology in which whatever is interstital is constantly populated by virtual particles which themselves spontaneously create choice sequence bridges. This, I suppose, is the Ibn Arabi's concept of the barzakh- the incompossible, phantasmal Limbo which unites what it separates- the world of the 'command', i.e. what is possible, and the world of 'creation'- i.e. what exists- which is also the pure virtuality represented by the 'superficies of the Mirror' in the Library of Babel of which Khwaja Mir Dard was surely speaking when he wrote-

Borges, Babel and Translation's broken mirror.

 If not of books, then bricks, Babel had once a Tower, bridging Image and pre-image- Heaven and its Earthly double. But, even in that blissful Arcadia, by baleful Translators untroubled, there arose from Eros' playful confabulations the invidious Eris of distinguishing the literary from the literal. Thenceforth, howsoever fancifully the spume of Language had spun, it but fed as it fled the turbid supervenience of Translation's two way mirror-  a portal of mutual invasion, enslavement and annihilation- such that, through all Time though its tower topple, bricks yet embower books and no bookshelf, however humble or aleatorily arranged, is not the incendiary speculum of Hermetic Alexandria's bibliothetic holocaust; because, though Allah only ordained Alexander's invention of the mirror so it unfold to him, as upon Christ's Lenten lectern, the one kingdom he could never conquer, yet that Book of Sand, bitterly yearning to be read, has ever been before hand in turning books to bricks such that in each is bricked up the enkindled kiln of all its kin's auto da fe. 
For which, of course, blame should be properly affixed on Narendra Modi- vide this letter of mine to the editor of an Indian literary E-zine.
Dear Editor

Receiving an email notification of the latest issue of Phalanx, I eagerly clicked on the link described thus-

 Literary and Literal Translation: The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges: Two different translations, one idiomatic and one literal, of the same story by the great Argentinian author show facets of the story that every critic and translator dealing with Borges appears to have missed.

Alas! I read the essay.

It began promisingly enough-

The everywhere present mirrors of the Library of Babel faithfully duplicate appearances: from which circumstance its clerkly men are wont to infer that the Library is not infinite. The narrating librarian seems to demur. Yo prefiero soñar, he records, que las superficies bruñidas figuran y prometen el infinito: literally: I myself prefer to dream that their burnished surfaces figure and promise the infinite

but lapsed thereafter into outright imbecility, commencing with this pearl of wisdom-
A man will prefer one or other between feasible choices; usually at least; and one cannot choose what to dream. 

WTF?. No man has a preference between the vast majority of feasible choices because no man has a complete information set. On the other hand, every man chooses everything he cares to day-dream about. As for what one dreams in the night, an aficionado of Borges will know of several esoteric oneirological practices and theories which suggest that not only can one choose what to dream (a notion confirmed by Scientific research) but that those dreams can shape reality or actually create it ex nihilo.
Indeed, 'the contamination of Reality by the dream' is a central trope for Borges.

The author, blissfully unaware of any such fact, merrily continues-

But a persevering man may, nonetheless, continue to prefer what he cannot proceed to choose: he may keep wanting what he cannot have. 

From protozoa to Pope, all beings want what they can't have. It is the condition of life. Nothing to do with 'persevering'.

To prefer does not presuppose being able to actually choose then; not strictly considered; and we may rescue 'prefer to dream‟ from mere solecism thus. 

How stupid is the author? What is his major malfunction? Has anybody ever suggested that every living being's preference to enjoy health rather than suffer disease or death PRESUPPOSES the ability to actually choose not to die and instead enjoy felicity? Not even an extreme Existentialism or relationist Occasionalism would qualify its notion of conatus in this way. Why is the author using pompous, learned sounding, language to say something so foolish and utterly without foundation in the philosophical or hermeneutic traditions relevant to Borges's essay?

The author concludes this truly asinine or Unamuno type sample of Saloon bar casuistry with a rhetorical flourish worthy of H.Bustos Domecq- But the effort seems wasted, for the locution remains strange even so: to dream that mirrors figure and promise the infinite would not be to dream mirrors whose surfaces do so figure and promise. So the promiscuously literary version which accompanies the literal transcription here renders the sentence thus: I wish always to dream their burnished faces: which prefigure and promise infinity.

This is rubbish. Cats don't turn into Kapil Sabil. But I can will myself to dream they do. Also a dream cat can turn into Kapil Sabil- indeed, that's exactly what happened the other day when I'd dozed off with NDTV on and the neighbor's cat jumped through the window and came and made itself comfy on my tummy.

Borges's librarian has said something simple- 'there are mirrors in the library. Mirrors make a place look bigger than it is. That's why some people say 'the library must be smaller than it appears'. If the library is infinite, why put in mirrors?'  I don't accept this. I like to day-dream that the superficies (Borges has chosen a word with a highly suggestive mathematical associations) of these mirrors have a certain sort of relationship to infinity. What sort? Well, the librarian's 'burnished superficies' suggests something like Cohen 'forcing'- i.e. expanding the Universe so as to do things that would otherwise violate the countinuum hypothesis.
Of course, that is just one possible reading.  Depending on one's depth of Mathematical knowledge or direction of professional specialization, the same poetic phrase or sphota can have different 'models' - i.e. demonstrate the coherence of different axiom systems.

Borges knew Cantor's work on degrees of Infinity. He had some hazy idea (he wasn't a Math maven anymore than I am) about developments in the 30's- Constructivists, Logical Positivists and so on. Further, as Floyd Merrel pointed out in his path-breaking book some twenty years ago, Borges knew Kastner & Newman's classic 'Mathematics and the Imagination'. In any case, Borges was au fait with the Husserl vs Heidegger contretemps- and had the sense to despise Heidegger.

This being the case, In interpreting or translating or commenting on Borges why not extend to him the benefit of the doubt? He may not have been a Godel or Heytig or Kripke. But students of Godel and Brouwer and Cohen and Kripke find much to chew over in Borges. Why heartlessly abandon him to Gallic gobshites, J.N.U jhollawallahs, or Foucault spouting M.F.A types?

Okay, full disclosure, I'm a rank philistine- an Economist by training but not a real smart one- I have to get my own miserable scribbling checked for mistakes by Math guys. Still, purely subjectively, the word 'superficies' with its legal, mathematical, and philosophical associations seems to me to be a rich one and worth highlighting.
My guess is that a mathematically literal, though utterly un-literary, translation which remains faithful to the word Borges has so felicitously used, might read  'the surface of the mirror promises us something like the projective plane of the Reimann sphere whose parallel lines intersect at the vanishing point of the visual cortex- and whose further quality of being burnished suggests that something can occur- like 'forcing'- such that it itself prefigures -or. constructively performs- a sort of Cantor diagonalization.' 

Precisely because Borges writes poetically, both naive reception and metanoiac correction have the quality of immediacy and get me to some concrete open question in Math- i.e. though Borges isn't a Math guy, he has chosen his words so carefully, or has been guided by such native Genius, that a line from him gets us to an open problem whereas many Maths guys from fifty years ago, in their prose, seldom hit on open questions instead of arguing the toss on questions already know to be closed.
It may be that everything that exists is computationally equivalent to an open question, but most things which pop into our heads under the spell of a poetic phrase aren't yet questions at all- they are Indra's winged mountains not yet captured as convenient salinecies by underlying co-ordination problems. For instance, since I'm interested in the influence of Ibn Arabi's concept of barzakh, mediated by Asin Palacios and his commentators, on Borges, the word 'burnished superficies' suggests to me some still hazy notion of 'negative complexity' as linking to apophatic theology such that Blake's leaping tiger tears through its own reflection to fulminate all but the frame of its own immortal symmetry.

Robert Frost's dictum- 'Poetry is what is lost in Translation', though massively confirmed by the cunt-queefery of the last fifty years of American Academic output- yet must be false because poems are but the brick-dust of Babel and so, provided Translation is a Knight's tour through all Language, it's terminus must be apocatastatic. Clearly, I'm assuming something like Liebniz's 'law of continuity' - 'in any supposed continuous transition, ending in any terminus, it is permissible to institute a general reasoning, in which the final terminus may also be included whereby what is true of the finite is true of the infinite'- which begs the question rather. After all, precisely because a poem, or at least every poetic phrase in a poem, is an infinitesimal increment for a given Language's 'poetic', it follows that the Translator first needs to empty out the target language of its native 'poetic' to make space for the Source language's 'poetic'. Following the American Academic path, or just being a cloth eared dolt, is certainly highly efficacious for stripping out what is poetic in your own language. What that can't do is repeat the process for the Source language to recover the infinitesimal increment represented by what is to be translated. Indeed, put this way, the project sounds impossible. Even if you can dissolve everything apart from some tiny atom in one thing; even if you can seize that tiny atom and translate it to exactly the right point in the midst of something else; how can you accomplish this when you have already dissolved the latter in your own mind?
More importantly, even supposing all this could be done, what would be the point? Infinitesimals scarcely exist. Translation can't change anything. Liebniz was wrong. Univocity can at best be National or Racial. Not poetry, what it is possible to have is the slogan; that great unanimous shout, Canetti tells us, of the conjoined horde of the living and the dead.
Yet we know that a Language's literary 'poetic' is almost entirely translation driven and that fact changes much, if not almost entirely all, of what the literary poetic can change.
The truth is, the two way stripping I've described, which sounds a bit like the way you construct a Cantor ternary set, is something we all do all the time. There's a huge amount of Cantor dust floating about. The good news is that it always adds up to the same thing we started with. Univocity of this sort- and Borges was more troubled by this then anybody else- can be both many and the same. The infinitesimals of standard analysis, which always sum to nothing, are resurrected as the hyper-reals of non-standard analysis and can do all the cool things real numbers do. Borges's librarian is vindicated by Mathematics which permits the enrichment of reality such that Infinity's existence pushes none to oblivion.
Indeed, a straightforward reading of Borges's new refutation of Time cashes out as - if one guy perceives the same thing twice- like stumbling twice on the same clearing while trying to hack your way out of the woods- or if two people perceive the same thing at different times- like if you share a cab with a fellow tourist in a strange city and you go 'whoa dude! I just saw Vivek Iyer drunkenly sodomizing the equestrian statue of the Great Liberator!' ' and the other guy goes 'What? I saw that twenty minutes ago. This fucking cab driver must be taking us round in circles to bump up the fare!'- what is empirically refuted is both Newtonian Time and Kantian Time because, clearly, Time has lost its sovereign succession and legitimacy as Psychopomp.
But that's good news because it proves that with respect to any given School trip, if we are non uniquely perceived as sodomizing equestrian statues rather than having, quite pardonably and that too in a moment of inebriation, mistaken a humongous and marble horse's ass for yo momma's face, then not only is Time refuted but the category of causality has no necessary order. Thus our personal univocity with the Infinite is re-established since, not us, only Time gets wasted and thus what we witness as its walking in circles is to Eternity its linear but equally unavailing approach.

But, it seems, I too have strayed off topic.
Getting back to my Email to that editor, this is how I conclude-

The author of this essay appears to have zero knowledge about the Philosophy of Infinity- surely a prerequisite for the task. What great point is he making? If the translator is stupid, ignorant and out of his depth, then there is no difference between a literal and a literary translation because both are shit.

The author writes-

The literary version will seem wantonly false to the original; and only in the sudden if modest assertion of his last and valedictory sentence does the plausible commentator there show himself kin, at all, to his fictive model. 

Why wantonly false? After which Strange God has the literary version gone whoring? Why this baroque self-regarding punctilio in the context of an exhibition of naked illiteracy?

But just so must I seek excuse: I must hope that the pronounced difference here, between locution literally transcribed and its egregiously literary glossing, will somehow disclose, between them, the strange presence that the speaking voice becomes in the original.

Stupidity is its own excuse and not one far to seek. There is no pronounced difference between the stupid illiterate shite spouted by this author under either rubric. He can't write decent English. How is he going to write literary English? He doesn't understand the first thing about the subject matter- how is he going to give us a faithful literal translation?
As for 'the strange presence that the speaking voice becomes' in the echoing chamber of the gap between the literary and the literal- how strange can that presence be? We are talking about an elderly librarian not fucking Pierre Riviere.
What is uncanny, for Borges, is not what is monstrous or grotesque, nor what is predestined or preternatural, rather it is the baffling fact- which, like Death, no one does not know or care to know- that the secret sealed, by the secret symmetry of all things, is a secret so banal that if, by Banach-Tarski, Unviocity's double is real, it is also double, and thus mimetic rivalry constitutes Satrean seriality not Girardian sacrifice. The Rabbi isn't fulminated by his uncanny Golem, nor the uncanny Golem by the all too common Goyim, though, in a Divine sense, they are all but doppelgangers.

Okay, no doubt, the Golem is a 'P-zombie'- but so what? Only wankers still get worked up about P-Zombies. On the other hand, questions like P=NP are of abiding interest in this context because the Golem and the Rabbi are complexity-wise highly distinguishable to us but not so to God who isn't computationally constrained.
But, surely, for Borges's librarian, all that matters is that his autobiography (which is what he gives us) though, no doubt, already contained in the Library as a 'Vindication' equally applicable to an infinity of men, yet be constructively unique to him as auteur? So what if for le Rêveur- Grothedieck's dream giving God- all operation is unary? It is at least binary for us and as that arity goes to infinity- by reason of our indiscernible, save by spatio-temporal location, difference from others equally subject to that operation- our self-wrought haecceity, or Kolmogorov complexity equally increases precisely because only mortals live in Space-time and that's where we've got God beat.
One consequence of having this justified true belief in our own irreducible complexity is that it permits us to have a rational preference without a corresponding feasible choice such that the Universe- that is the intersubjective information set- is shown to be incomplete. This is the only sort of ontological dysphoria which doesn't cash out as merely an adolescent or romantic sehnsucht which, by the contagion of the World's slow stain, inevitably turns into a corrupt aldermanic, or crackpot revolutionary, schwarmerei

I think Co-evolution- which even Babel can't wholly forbid its books and but breeders- even for Borges or bibliolatry, is always ontologically dysphoric in the good sense- after all, librarians do scribble their dessins d' enfants on the margins of the books they curate, thus practicing a Grothendieck Yoga, and, so long as they don't lift their pencil from the doodle, at every moment they overturn arithmetical invariants as they continue to sketch: thus- for it is an open question as to whether dessins can be distinguished by combinatorial or topological invariants- restoring haecceity to that samadhi which sublates Pascal's atrocious sphere and defeats the atomistic determinism of the Polis by raising up the barricades of that barzakh  which Zeno did not know-  which is interesting because, now for a purely Secular, albeit specular reason (because it is the mirror in our library which is doing all the heavy lifting) we are released from the Humanist duty to be at home in this twilight world maintained by our do-good-nik Golems or spectral Social Welfare Functionaries.
So yah booh, sucks to you Roberto Unger!.
I can always re-read Borges to spark valuable literary insights, like the one presented in that last and lapidary line, and, sure, looking at Borges's Spanish text can help me see something new. In this case 'superficies brunidas' served that purpose. But only because I've taken the trouble, over the last 30 years, to read a little of the philosophy of Math which contributed to shaping and inspiring Borges.

The guy who wrote this has not taken any similar pains.

That's why this essay is a waste of time.

Why, dear Editor, did you publish this?
Who wrote it?

Was it you?

If so, I apologize for any hurt feelings this post may cause you.

Still, do commit suicide to protest something or the other. Blame will properly be affixed on Narendra Modi

Mind it kindly.

Aiyayo
Vivek

Note- in an earlier version of this post I inadvertently suggested that Borges's native country suffered from high levels of machismo fueled domestic violence.
I apologize.
Argentina is in no way related to Tina Turner.
Who knew?

Naipaul misbehaving again

‘Madam, what to do? Naipaul misbehaving again.”

Mrs. Sulochana Pundit, Deputy Director, Virtual Reality Division, Ministry of Cultural Reconstruction, pushed her glasses up her nose.

She saw Kishen- one of the peons- except they didn’t like being called peons- Administrative Assistant (Grade III) was the title they insisted on- standing sheepishly in the shadows.

“Don’t tell me! The time-lines have got muddled and Sir V.S. Naipaul is getting up Victoria Ocampo’s nose …”
“Madam, not nose only. It is too horrible. Back-side, front-side, don’t ask what all and where all that little shaitan is not getting up.”

Mrs. Pundit sighed. If only she had crammed a bit more, to get higher marks in the Government’s competitive exams, she would now be a glamorous Police officer, saving the country from jihadi terrorists, rather than having supinely to sit, pushing a pen, in this godforsaken hole of a department.

“All right, Kishen” she said tiredly, “shut it down and re-boot.”

“Madam, it is not shutting down. “

“What? How can that be?”

“Madam, I am thinking, Time coil is responsible. What I can tell you? Greedy Contractors thinking profit only. Safety- not caring. That is why, just to save on disk-space, they went and put in a self-organizing heuristic to compress database. Madam, we were complaining it is unsafe. Such type of heuristic should only be used where data is random in nature. Historical information isn’t random. But protests of our Cadre Association went unheard. Contractor has too much pull. Ministry is saying- ‘because of George Soros principle of reflexivity, History has inbuilt noise generator”. Madam, who is this billionaire George Soros to be talking? Is he doing dangerous work like us? Also we were consulting independent experts- including great scientists like Vandana Shiva and theorists like Pappu Yadav- I can repeat to you, word for word, what their report said- ‘though the principle of reflexivity, in its generalized form, ensures that no humanly cognizable algorithm can make historical information almost infinitely compressible, the same can not be assumed for a machine intelligence... Historical processes may be decomposable in manners it would be destructive of human consciousness to contemplate… But, if so, there is nothing to stop the complexity of the Time Coil’s heuristic from growing faster than any computable function… What if, as a result, the whole system’s entropic arrow of Time goes into reverse? In that case, the Virtual Reality Operator might start running independently as the heat sink of the Time Coil. Which raises the further question, what if the combined complexity of the two systems grows exponentially faster than that of which all Physical Reality is the heat sink? Might not, by Landauer's principle, the one usurp the other?’”

Sulochana was a kind hearted woman. She let the hysterical peon babble on for a bit. ‘What to do?’ she thought to herself, ‘these peons- sorry! Admin Assistants (Grade III)- are so superstitious and
backward. They think the machines they tend are alive or animated by some God. Poor fellows! it is not their fault. They are given just enough education to be able to read an operating manual- or Political Party manifesto- and then are pushed out into the job-market. It is the failure of the Government that they are not properly indoctrinated into our Secular, Socialist, Gandhi-Nehru-Yadav, National ideology. Though, of course, in one sense, it’s just as well. It keeps the riff raff element out of the higher cadres of the Bureaucracy.’

“Uff ooh, Kishen!” she said- once the little peon had run out of steam - “what nonsense you are talking! Too much Sci Fi on T.V nowadays, I say! And as for those pulp magazines- don’t even ask! I tell you, it has become major problem.”

Kishen looked set to burst into tears. “But, Madam…” he spluttered.

Sulochana cut him short. One must be cruel to be kind. “Don’t be misled by the professional agitators. They are just heating your mind for no reason. Your cadre was worried jobs would be lost if the information was compressed. Okay, that was a legitimate concern. But, see, Minister Sahib has given undertaking- no retrenchment. Your jobs are safe. That was all your people wanted. Just forget all the nonsense the Info-Environmentalists spouted about Database Ecology and the terrible things that would happen if whole species of algorithms, whole genera of heuristic paradigms, were allowed to go extinct.

 It was all just alarmist propaganda- nothing more. Even a child could not be fooled. After all, Govt. of India has an inbuilt Reservation policy to ensure against such things. But, the Info-Environmentalists didn’t stop there. Remember their scare-mongering about … what was it?.. oh yes, some nonsense about the fifth dimension- the diagonal direction of Time- being destroyed if the Time Coil overheats? Sheer sensationalism! As if the malfunction of some little machine could destroy the imagination of the entire Universe! Look, just be clear on one point. Here, in Govt. of India, Information is Information. Energy is Energy. They are two separate things. Here is Ministry of Information on this side of Rajpath and there is Ministry of Energy over on that side. Those with information lack energy and those with energy lack information. Granted, in the Private Sector, Power and Knowledge may be interchangeable, but what has that to do with us? We have our own traditions to maintain. So, you may just very kindly go and pull the plug, that’s all, and the Virtual Reality Operator will switch off by itself.”

“Madam, I already pulled the plug. Still it is running. Must be, it is getting power from the Time Coil just like the Info -Environmentalists warned. That only I was explaining.”

“So, okay, some software glitch, or spatchcocked rewiring, is causing it to take electricity from the Time Coil. Tell Tech Support to come and fix. Meanwhile, why not switch off the Time coil?”

“Madam, we can switch off, but how we can recover all emergent properties of the system on re-booting? That is why it is a Director level decision. And you know Director Sahib has gone for Hajj. So, what to do?”

“Is Naipaul really misbehaving so very badly? Or if he is, why not just turn your eyes away? ”

“Madam, you may be remembering, previous administration, due to its Hindutva obsession, insisted the Virtual Reality Operator satisfy Ved Vyasa’s stipulation that karma and dharma be conserved. Thus each eigenstate of the system is constrained to display 2 additional symmetries. However, since both karma and dharma are observer dependent, the Zeno time of the system is macroscopic. But, Madamji, it is well known- by George Sudarshan Sir’s theorem- that observations at intervals greater than the Zeno time would have the effect of accelerating its run away evolution. Thus, for Soteriological Health and Safety reasons, we have to schedule observations at lesser intervals to retard the process.”

“Kishenji, all that may be very well and good, but, just consider, was it very correct for you to come to me with a problem like this just now? Due to upcoming Pooja holidays, my mother-in-law has come to stay which means all the herbs and vegetables have to be bought fresh and the spices ground by hand. Couldn’t you have waited till after the week-end?”

Kishen fidgeted and hung his head. “Madamji, I am sorry. I made mistake. Please forgive me.”

‘No,” said Sulochana feeling guilty for having tried to shirk her responsibility, “You were right to tell me. The whole purpose of our Ministry is to reconstruct our Culture on a proper basis. Indeed, this current project is not just of National importance but also International significance. You see, when, Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore went to Buenos Aires, ninety years ago, a great historical opportunity was missed because Tagore’s secretary- a wealthy English squire- quite gratuitously went and put his hand up Victoria Ocampo’s skirt. This vulgar action incensed that great Argentine Muse and Maecenas. It put her on her guard. It colored her subsequent dealings with the venerable Indian sage. It prevented the proper unfolding of what could have been a wonderful Cultural cross-pollination and Spiritual efflorescence whose impact- on the young Jorge Luis Borges, to mention just one instance- was bound to have had world shaking implications.”

“Yes, Madam. But, please, one thing I am not understanding. Why this Naipaul fellow getting involved? Due to why he is doing such unspeakable things to Ocampo Memsahib? What doomsday is this?”

“History,” said Sulochana, “has its own System Repair utility. It mends its own broken threads after its own fashion. Thus, Norman Thomas di Giovanni- blind Borges’s amanuensis- became also the facilitator of an affair between Naipaul- previously unlettered in sexual intimacy’s Braille- and a cultured lady of the Argentine upper class. This had a re-invigorating effect on Naipaul’s own work- his stigmatic sphota or inward Gorgon glance- and he went on to win the Nobel prize- but that wasn’t what History had intended. On the contrary, the purely spiritual marriage- like the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and, Tagore’s niece, Sarla Devi- which History had arranged for Tagore and Ocampo – but which Tagore’s lustful secretary frustrated- was meant to benefit Borges- not Naipaul, who read in Borges’s bibliolatric Universalism nothing but a sterile and corrosive fantasy of cosmopolitanism spun out by a schizophrenically self-mythologizing mind whose manic protestation against its own Provincialism but sealed it to that doom. 

"But such a reading had the effect of creating something new in Universal Culture- the notion of the ressentiment of the margin towards the centre- the beginning of an imputed insurrection- or, let us say, an epistemic fracture already apparent in such abortions of the Weltgeist as the notion of a malign and objectifying ‘Orientalism’, an unreasoning and implacable ‘Alterity’, a more sinister for speechless ‘Subaltern’, and a now galloping Globalization underpinned by the escalating export of indiscriminate Terror and all pervasive Fraud.

“This is a mistake we must correct. We too- humble pen-pushers though we be, in the Ministry of Cultural Reconstruction- are front-line soldiers in the battle to save Universalism. You too, Kishenji, if you could but see it, are playing an important role. The connection between Indian and Argentine modernism must be re-established on a high Spiritual level free from the taint of lechery or illicit sex. History must be remade on a proper basis so as to permit the, Democratically mandated, Cultural reconstruction of the country- in line with the Nehru-Gandhi-Pappu Yadav ideology of Secular Scientific Spiritualized Socialism sans Sexy Shenanigans. That is why Naipaul’s naughtiness with Victoria Ocampo must not be allowed to stand. Action must be taken. Tell you what- can’t Borges do something? Couldn’t you get the young Borges into that time-line to…you know, throw cold water on Naipaul?”

“Madam, I am not very expert on Borges. But, perhaps, if we consulted Vivek Iyer- not only he is General Secretary of the Admin Assistants (Grade III) Borges Appreciation Association but also- due to a couple of typos on the ballot paper’s small print- ex officio, Sexretary Genital of the Admin Assistants (Grade III) Benevolent Association. Surely, he is the proper man…”

“Kishenji, I appreciate your suggestion but… the fact is… Mr. Iyer may not be the best person to involve. To be blunt… how should I say this?… you see, the sight of Naipaul’s lusty actions can have a titillating effect on certain sorts of depraved people. In any case, Iyer is infamous, throughout the Secretariat, for his fanatical campaign to prove that Naipaul only sustained himself financially, during his lean years in the late 60’s and 70’s, by appearances as the masked wrestler, El Bandido Anal, on Venezuelan Television- not to mention cunnilingual cameos in Malyalee porn. Indeed, Mr. Iyer is running a roaring business supplying videos that purport to substantiate his claims. Frankly, I think it is better if we keep Mr. Iyer out of the picture.”

“Madam, I was not knowing. Please forgive me. What you suggest is best. However, still one doubt is in my mind. Don’t mind it if I speak frankly. I am only Eighth Standard Pass. Sorry, to ask such a basic question. But, Madam, what of the Parmenides Principle? It was the basis of Lalluji’s defense in the fodder scam case back in the Nineties. And now he is Minister of Railway Timetables, Ontology is under his portfolio. As Rabriji mentioned in her letter of support to our Action Committee- ‘ in a block universe- whatever can be thought of or spoken about must be- and that includes Virtual Reality representations.’ Madamji, reason I’m mentioning is because of a great danger. An eventuality unthinkable we may think, for unspeakable it surely is- Madamji, what if Naipaul prefers Borges to Ocampo? “

“So? Why only women should suffer? Anyway, what else we can do- tell me that?”

“But…but, Madamji! Question is- is this all only a simulation? Can we be sure there will be no real-world effects? I mean, sorry to be blunt, but you know sometimes even Departments of the Government India end up actually achieving something they were set up to do…Can we be sure the Past won’t be changed?”

“Ah!” said Sulochana- wishing she’d kept awake at Tech Support briefings- “Well… we know that, as Sir Karl Popper said, the Past is affected by experiments made in the Future... Indeed, the whole purpose of our Department is to change the Past. But, whether it is just Government of India’s version of the Past or the actual universally inter-subjective Past… I confess, these are difficult questions to resolve on a Friday afternoon.”

“Madam, are you saying we should wait a little…?”

“What? No! Virtual Reality or not, Naipaul is breaking Indian law. He must be stopped. Actually, Borges might be the right man to stop him, because his was the strongest voice warning Mankind of the dangers of Reality being contaminated by the Dream or usurped by the Simulation. Come to think of it, that’s also Naipaul’s point- but arrived at from the perspective of restless travel journalism rather than a tuirgen of restive hermeneutics… Perhaps, the two will complement each other. Even find a workaround for the… urm... Parmenides Principle and fulminate this whole distasteful episode of the riotously rutting Naipaul from the Universe’s memory…But, Kishenji, it’s almost five o’clock. Without waste of further words you may kindly return to your terminal and write a neat little macro which interposes Borges between Naipaul’s chthonic lust and its long suffering, yet still Olympian, object. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?”

And that’s how I, Vivek Iyer, formerly a lowly Grade III peon, gained international acclaim as the author of ‘The approach to Al-Mutasim”- the most authentic, the most original, Indian novel ever envisaged by a native of this great land. Or, at least, that’s what would have happened  if Commissioning Editors hadn’t turned up their noses at the myriad song and dance sequences-I not, I confess, strategically but syntagmatically- interpolated to give Borges’s story a bit of oomph.

At any rate, this is the story Kishen keeps telling me. His boss, Mrs. Pundit, is the wife of a top literary agent- which is the only reason I cultivated the Backward Caste little bugger in the first place- but not even that high and mighty agent can get the publishers to see sense.

You see, as Kishenji has just now tearfully texted me, Naipaul misbehaving again & so something truly catastrophic has happened. Its arrow reversed, the Time Coil is now busy uncoiling Imagination’s compacted dimensions, precipitating us all into this irremediably, for of Empathy, orphaned world where books befriend no books and turning their leaves but fans an arid simoom.

What was it Ghalib said?

Not your blanking me when we pass on the street

But that beggars too, now, alike me treat…

Great Wealth, thus, has our manners refined

Strangers, alone, to the Poor are kind!

Borges, Ibn Arabi and Charles H Hinton's 'alterable Past'

In 'the Secret Miracle', Borges writes of the first volume of a fictional poet's Vindication of Eternity as being'...a history of the diverse eternities devised by Man; from the immutable Being of Parmenides to the alterable Past of Hinton...'
Alterable past? Charles H Hinton had a concept of an alterable Past?
Borges continues, that the poet's second volume, 'denies (with Francis Bradley) that all the events in the universe make up a temporal series. He argues that the number of experiences possible to man is not infinite, and that a single ';repetition' suffices to demonstrate that time is a fallacy..."
The Ibn Arabi scholar, W. Chittick, writes
“There is no repetition in [God's] self-disclosure” (lâ takrâr fi’l-tajallî) 'By acknowledging the unity of the Real, Tawhid, we recognize that it is one and unique in its every act, which means that each created thing and each moment of each thing is one and unique; nothing can ever be repeated precisely because of each thing's uniqueness and the divine infinity.' (W.Chittick)

I must admit I still don't understand the phrase 'alterable past'- is it the notion that one can choose any past compossible with the present?
Dunno.
Help?