#Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius

[gbfmi1]

rip jorge luis borges you would've loved tumblr collectively manifesting Goncharov into being

[atrusofmyst]

I owe the discovery of Goncharov to the conjunction of a mirror and a film guide. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Scaletta Street in Posillipo; the guide is fallaciously called The Greatest Mafia Movies Ever Made (New York, 2014) and is a literal but delinquent translation of Il Cinema di Mafia, published 2009. The event took place some five years ago. Giancarlo De Cataldo had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a movie in the first person, whose main character's point of view would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few viewers - very few viewers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From 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 hare something monstrous about them. Then Giancarlo De Cataldo recalled that one of the mafia dons in Goncharov had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men. I asked him the origin of this memorable observation and he answered that it was reproduced in The Greatest Mafia Movies Ever Made, in its article on Goncharov.

[power-chords]

Not to vaguepost on main but I am stunned by the carelessness and confidence with which people ascribe a directional, much less intentional, power to individual artistic works outside any clear and identifiable political program in prescribing normativity. (As opposed to, say, the inescapable economic systems that reproduce state control/capital and inevitably capture and commodify that art.) Even among people whose politics I more or less share or at least sympathize with, and who are otherwise cautious and skeptical thinkers, there are these really entrenched assumptions about what an author/artist must be intending to represent and what ideology the art is self-evidently reinforcing on the basis of how that art made audience n=1 feel. What I'm saying is that if you are going to make the claim that X piece of art or fiction produces Y result in Z culture at large, you better be damn well ready to explain the mechanics. You'll notice on Tumblr that no one ever actually does this. They simply state that such-and-such a thing "is normalizing" or positioning itself as normative, with zero good faith analysis into the context of that art, why it was made, for whom, and under what structural circumstances (including and perhaps especially who is publishing/profiting).

[vodevila]

rip jorge luis borges you would've loved goncharov 🙏

[gnostotron]

[cirrusin]

Dungeon Meshi - Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

[utilitycaster]

I'm curious as to your thoughts on fhsy and how that used horror as opposed to neverafter (I'm pretty you mentioned seeing it?, otherwise, disregard). I also came out of neverafter really unsatisfied with the horror, but felt like brennan was able to pull it off much better in fhsy with the nightmare king, obviously baron, and kalina. Those scenes are the ones I keep coming back to because of how unsettling certain aspects of the nightmare king/kalina worked. Do you think that was a better example of Brennan's horror?

throwing in some good tags from @criticalrolo to answer this all in one go:

#prev tags extremely real and I’d love to read your thoughts on brennans DM style#totally totally agreed that there were a lot of parts of neverafter I liked but the Dense Lore was. NOT the best for a horror season#like. horror is based around the concept of Not Seeing or Understanding the Monster#so having a LOT of Dense Lore felt. WAYYY off base and it all got explained WAY too early on in the season I think

I think the takeaway is that Brennan's style - which is all about Dense Lore, that's his whole deal, have you seen the Make Some Noise where he has a prompt to spin dense lore and he just does it immediately? - is not suited to horror, where you can't have dense lore. Horror I think benefits from having one big convergent reveal. Like...the example that's coming to mind is Get Out, which is horror-comedy and also reveals how little true horror I watch (really more a New Weird kind of girl). There's a lot of unsettling details but they all build up to the one big reveal of "this white family does brain transplants into black people so they can live in their bodies" and it all clicks into place. There's plenty of lore but it's very streamlined whereas Brennan's tends to be convoluted - much more suited to, say, high and heroic fantasy and space opera and more sweeping genres like that.

So Fantasy High Sophomore Year (which I have seen but not since its original airing) works because it's not a horror story. It's pretty wacky, and Kalina and the Nightmare King are a part of a much larger story, so you have plenty of other things to do while that's allowed to simmer throughout. I think the problem with Neverafter is that you need the early reveal of the authors to set up the motivations of the princesses and fairies, but at the same time there's kind of not much else going on so the dense lore just feels like wheel spinning and ends up amounting to very little. It's like...there's a very cool story about the concept of narrative and being inside a story, which is very much my shit* and then also we keep cutting to the inside of a spirit halloween in which someone's reading Grimm's Fairy Tales for two hours at a time. I don't actually know how I'd fix it other than "stop making it horror," is the problem. I think dropping any other trappings of horror and just being fairy tales and having to sit with the knowledge that you are an archetype or a pawn or an avatar or a moral lesson would have been the route and maybe focusing on that instead. Lean in really hard to the vibes of episode 4. This will probably make people who are into gore and whatnot mad but the thing is that like, while I'm not into that I understand the appeal, but I also think that it's never going to be given justice in a primarily auditory medium. Which is the other reason why Kalina works. It's not so much horror as a mystery that happens to be pretty scary.

*total tangent and I would need some time to put together a full list but for if this is also your shit, here's a few personal recommendations that are not just Wikipedia's list of metafictional works or works that are of the correct vibe, even though most of them are in fact on there:

Stranger than Fiction (2006 film)

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Borges short story)

There is an Ursula K. Le Guin short story in which someone is a planetary explorer on a planet that turns out to be the worldbuilding project of a teen boy. I cannot figure out which one it is. I read it in high school, I'll keep looking but anyway just read a lot of Le Guin's short stories. It's good for you.

Black Sails (maybe not metafiction? but also. it's not not metafiction.)

Arcadia by Iain Pears

it's been a hot minute since I read either if on a winters night a traveler or House of Leaves but those definitely did things to my brain in college

Piranesi and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke aren't explicitly metafiction but they also are very much about narrative. Also they're extremely good.

Sandman by Neil Gaiman

[hungwy]

reread tlon uqbar orbis tertius in hurley's translation in collected fictions. whoever did it in labyrinths (irby?) did it slightly better. still an amazing story after all this time, probably borges's best

[morlock-holmes]

Related to this:

Sometimes I imagine that I have been placed in front of a vast console or machine, covered in buttons of different colors, and switches, and such.

And beside is an Angel who says, "You have been given total freedom. You may use this machine however you wish. Some buttons bring life, some will bring you love, some will give you a small amount of money, some billions of dollars. Some will kill you; some will kill another person. Some will kill dozens or hundreds of people."

"Well..." I ask, "All these buttons are unmarked, how do I know which one does what?"

The Angel stands eternally silent.

In this case, what would it mean, what could it mean to "grow up" or "take responsibility"? When there is no earthly reason to prefer one button over another but the certainty that any choice has vast consequences?

Ethics would seem to demand either a meek retreat from any sort of action at all and/or a furious demand that some kind of predictable order be imposed on this chaos.

The specific page @zoobus linked to in this thread talks about zombie apocalypse preppers (and preppers more generally) and one very important aspect of those fantasies is that they represent a sort of restoration of cause and effect, a fantasy of actions which have meaning, not only in the sort of abstruse philosophical world in which heroism once again becomes thinkable, but in the very concrete sense of a world in which the action you take today has some predictable and measurable effect on how things go tomorrow.

This is understood as so desirable that it is in many ways wanted even at the expense of health and comfort.

In Borges' Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,

Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order-dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism-was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlon, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws - I translate: inhuman laws - which we never quite grasp. Tlon is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

Lovecraft, and I don't know his biography well at all but this is certainly visible simply in the art that he made, understood the way that the modern world was decimating our sense of cause and effect and our sense of our place in the universe. Or rather, our sense that "What is our place in the universe" is even a sensible question to ask.

Particularly, one question at work in his works is, "If I think this is ugly, and that is beautiful, what basis do I have for making that judgement? In fact, can I have any basis for making that judgement? If I fundamentally can't have any basis for making such judgements at all, what does that mean for my life?"

American racism is, among other things, a response to the erosion of cause and effect and the sense of disorder that it provokes.

It's not a good response, morally or even as a method of restoring order, and I'd like to say that's so obvious I shouldn't even have to say it but it's clear that we don't live in that world.

Lovecraft grasped certain aspects of modern problems so thoroughly I wouldn't be surprised if some part of him understood the inadequacy of his own bigotry.

Well, I only really know him through his art, rather than his biography, so who knows.

[theseventhoffrostfall]

Having picked up an anthology of Borges' works, I'm naturally drawn to compare and contrast with the last book I finished that's still rattling around in my head (Blood Meridian, in this case). Namely, in terms of how works age.

Blood Meridian was reviewed early in its lifetime with lines that adorn its modern covers: things like "shocking" and "subversive", it "demythologizes the Old West". Well, in modern day, that kind of violence in a book is rarely shocking and the Old West has been demythologized so hard it's pendulum-swung into being mythologized in the opposite direction. A modern reader, desensitized by newer media, bearing no delusions of a noble and heroic cowboy gang, and most likely forewarned by the book's reputation if nothing else, is showing up to the splash-zone with an umbrella. The gore and violence and subversive nature can be readily looked past and the book's deeper themes are laid relatively bare. It's a book that's aged incredibly well, even enhanced by age, to a reader who didn't substitute the old moral outrage of violence for a new moral outrage for its language.

By contrast, my collection of Borges opens up with "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". It was probably as mind-blowing as it's hyped to be on release, and was probably the first exposure to a lot of ideas for its early readers. To a reader who witnessed more or less in real time such philosophies as the book discusses go from being ridiculed as useless academic group-masturbation, to being rediscovered in an even shallower manner by a new generation of pretentious inheritors, to being proliferated and watered down until it's fodder for the lore of mobile gotcha games, that aspect of the story has aged somewhat poorly, to say the least. The story is also heavily based on the notion of language and its underlying philosophical precepts influencing thought to extremes, a notion popular in the mid-20th century (see also 1984) which has since left the philosopher's study, entered the labs and surveys of the psychologists and sociologists and been consistently proven, insofar as either profession is capable of proving or of consistency, to be complete bunk. It is, thus far, not a story with quite as much staying power.

I will, however, admit I didn't approach the second story with complete impartiality. The collection opened with a foreword, full of unqualified and worshipful praise of Borges, by William "draft-dodging hippie that blighted the earth with the self-propagating meme of a pathetically shallow social commentary-cum-even shallower coat of aesthetic paint for horny tryhards known as cyberpunk" Gibson, upon whose opinion I place precisely as much value as you're probably guessing.

[highladyluck]

came for the "tumblr user" post, stayed for the "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in the header.

:D Welcome! I love that Borges story because it conveys the dangerous seductiveness of narrative/world building. And on that note- it’s mostly Wheel of Time posting here, but you can always filter that tag if it’s not your jam! Sometimes I post about other things, like frogs, or art that I want to eat.

[wretched-mog]

really enjoying watching tumblr speak Goncharov into existence, ‘tlon, uqbar, orbis tertius’-style

[dovahnap]

Maybe we were once in a young earth universe but then we shifted dimensions to a scientific, billions-of-years-old universe.

Is a paradigm shift a dimensional shift? Is Google trying to dimensionally shift us to a universe where the founding fathers were a Diversity campaign? Will AI misinformation generate widespread dimensional psychosis?

I always thought the simple and banal truth at the heart of Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius was that it depicted our world, but I always thought it was metaphorical. Now I wonder whether hyperstitionality is more literal.

This was a thought that occurred to me some time ago in order to explain CL.

Still hoping for that explanation, but not expecting one. Cheers!

[babyheroeclipseweasel]

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - Borges Audiolibro