Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges
Movement: Postmodernism
Published: 1940
In life, we are forever trying to split nature at its cruxes; in death, we preserve not even a fraction of the precision with which our life reduced itself to tautology. Somewhere in between (fiction? unreality? 17 hours of DSBM?), we succeeded in articulating a will so authentically horrible: the idea that explaining a world could, ex pede Herculem, explain its reason to be. Something our world lacked. Thus disappeared our willingness to merely admire our reality, its obsolete and illusory truth, as a series of coincidences convinced us, like gods of the past, of a fraudulent promise for truth; Tlön.
In pronouncing our mortal laws, in learning to be God to another world, our fear of divinity disappeared; the most sacred relics of our past (language. topology) became the essence of our future, inducing infinite power. The infinitude of possibility became incommensurable with mere hope, now more of an ambition, not for perfection — no, it was precisely the curse of seeking perfection that inspired the creation of Tlön — but for a meticulous execution of completeness, of exactly that which is necessary and sufficient. A congenital rigour constitutes the fomer, the latter generates its reality; Uqbar.
Naturally, the scope of ambition would expand, increasingly elaborate realities would be conjured, and this would continue, well, forever. Borges’s ‘Collected’ ‘Fictions’ — really only collected to the degree that the rotations and reflections of the regular n-gon are (such a definition neglects their most wonderful structural features), and only fictional to the extent that any entire weltanschauung is — are permutations of a unique, most complete story of how every human, or bipedal-terrified-conscious, is itself a permutation in time, hence ultimately tautological; Orbis Tertius.
Despite its reality seemingly contradicting our own, the horrifying and banal truth is that the wonderful Tlön is no less reprehensible, no more sublime. If one deliberates enough thought, one might convince themselves that any difference between the two emerges from their divergent structures of time: how we fail to be free of the present mortal moment, and how we know Tlönian time as a compact and connected continuum. But if ever we were to care enough, maybe we’d believe it ourselves…
slow comes the hour…
its passing speed how great!
waiting to seize it —
sed esto vigil!
++
