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Feel like you get more insight, or aperçus, as Xgau used to call them, from a negative Lem writeup than from someone else's praise.
'nh' typo in thread title makes me think it is some kind of Portuguese word.
three months pass...
eight years pass...
one year passes...
Lovely pic of the man above, That Borges eh, he's so crazee, what is he like etc
The link for Lem on Borges above is broken, so here's a sampler and short analysis of it:
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/borges35_lem05.html
Some quick, dirty thoughts on Lem's critique: Yes, you don't go to Borges for a revelation of the future, he is a chronicler of the deep past of culture, by which I mean its more esoteric elements, even if recent in time. ...” Borges is fundamentally a librarian. But this point of departure is obsolete: “Borges is located near the end of a descending curve which had its culmination centuries ago.” He extrapolates on the cultural heritage of the past, but he has nothing to say about the future.
Yes, but, it occurs to me that climate change is likely to make Borges more relevant in future. I think cults, superstitions, nature-worship, broken knowledge, cultural paradoxes and bizarreries are likely to proliferate, and the
technology that Borges reveres, the book, with its anecdotal/encyclopedic properties is likely to be necessary as a means of recording and communicating in a world where powering modern tech becomes more fraught. Parts of the world may become unexplored and unreachable again. There will be sightings of more creatures fit to inhabit the Manual de zoología fantástica as environment pressures evolutionary change.
Basically the future is going to look more like the past than Lem thought, though he says "For we are building newer, richer, and more terrible paradises and hells; but in his books Borges knows nothing about them." No Borges knows that there is nothing new under the sun, we have just forgotten the past. Maybe technology is Borges' blind spot, but I would argue technology is a replication of systems or sights already existing in nature (and even to some extent in ancient technology, whether we mean oral storytelling or hieroglyphics) and that's something Borges grasps. He understands that the infinite comprehends everything and so we can just as well look at the past in its spiraling infinities and that helps us to understand the present and the future, which are not really distinct.
That's how I see it anyway.
I expect to get ripped for this, but just some Saturday thoughts. Fuckit post
― glumdalclitch, Saturday, 17 August 2024 14:12 (one month ago) link