May 16, 2025

Last night, I awoke to realize that I had been dreaming of writing this newsletter. If I were a character in a story by Jorge Luis Borges, the great writer whose work I have been reading lately, I would have dreamed that my dream-self had himself awakened from a dream in which he had been writing a newsletter, and the dream-self of that dream-self would also have awakened from a dream of himself, and so on in an infinite regress.

Borges is by common consent one of the great writers of the 20^th century. It is regarded as more or less scandalous that he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. But to appreciate him, you have to have what Theodore Sturgeon called “a touch of strange,” because he has more than a touch of it himself. In one way, the stories of Borges are intellectual riddles. In another way, they are the opposite of riddles. A typical riddle sets up a weird and seemingly incomprehensible, even paradoxical situation or image, but the answer to the riddle dispels the mystery and reduces the riddle to something simple, comprehensible, even banal. What’s black and white and red all over? Not some exotic mythical creature but a simple newspaper, courtesy of a pun on “red.” Some Borges stories are set up as detective stories, most famously “Death and the Compass,” which is a murder mystery. (In fact, Borges was given a special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America). Ordinary detective stories work like riddles: some criminal conundrum is presented to us that seems mysterious, disturbing, and impossibly complex—a labyrinth of many clues, some of them possibly bizarre, and many possible suspects. The labyrinth is indeed an image that shows up almost obsessively in Borges’ fiction. But the detective, usually in a final speech, has reduced the baffling complexity to a simple answer, revealing not only the murderer but the murderer’s motive. We move from an ambiguous night-world of threat and confusion into the light of daylight and safety.

However, the revelation at the climax of a Borges story moves the other way. We realize that what we have been taking for a reliably “real world” is in fact an illusion, protecting us from a knowledge that we cannot bear, and that may well destroy us. In other words, Borges’ stories resemble horror stories, except that the hidden threat that is revealed is not supernatural but intellectual. What is an intellectual horror? A manifestation of the limits of the human mind, and the abyss that lies beyond those limits. The mind processes experience through categories by which it understands: Kant identified 12 of them, including time, space, and causality. When those categories break down, the resulting epiphany is one, in outward terms, of chaos, and, in inward terms, of madness.

The infinite regress is a common example of the human mind running up against its limit. The human mind cannot process infinity, and when it attempts to do so crashes into a series of intractable paradoxes. Zeno’s paradox is the commonest example. An arrow can never reach its target because to do so it has to traverse half the distance; but in order to traverse half that distance, it has to traverse half of the half, and so on—a line that subdivides to infinity. The arrow has to cross an infinity of distances, and so can never reach its target. The differential calculus of Newton and Leibniz solves this problem only by fudging. My dream within a dream within a dream is another example. Most people do not regard such paradoxes as highly threatening merely because once they get the idea they get bored and stop thinking about the matter. That boredom is actually a defensive reaction, although it usually is not recognized as such. But Borges’ characters either do not have that option or they are obsessive types lured by forbidden knowledge. It’s interesting that, for all his vast erudition, Borges does not seem interested in the legend of Faust. Yet all his plots are variations on the theme of the Faustian quest—willing or unwilling, deliberate or accidental—for some kind of forbidden knowledge resulting in destruction or madness. The Faust story is itself an archetype of the horror story. The devil carries Faust off to a physical hell, but the real hell is one of a reality revealed to be absolutely Other. If his characters are not driven questers, Borges himself certainly is, and he insists on the fact that they are stand-ins for himself by offhandedly referring to some of them by his own name.

Well, so we cannot really wrap our heads around infinity, or, its temporal version, eternity—Borges has a whole essay called “A History of Eternity” laying out the attempt of philosophers and theologians throughout intellectual history to grapple with the mind’s inability to understand eternity. Who cares? Well, it depends on your identity and what your priorities are. If you are a mathematician, infinity might be a troubling notion, because it would appear to threaten the foundation of mathematics. Borges glances at this in an essay called “The Doctrine of Cycles,” in which he refers to the mathematician George Cantor and “his heroic theory of sets.” Presumably the theory is “heroic” because it is like a mathematical knight going up against an indefeasible dragon. That is not an idle metaphor, because there is a dragon in mythology that represents the paradox of eternity or infinity: the ouroboros, the serpent with its tail in its mouth, signifying the circle that has no beginning and no end. Cantor’s theory of sets runs up against the same problem of infinite divisibility. Infinity is an infinite set of numbers. But half of infinity is also an infinite set of numbers, and so is half of half of infinity. Logically, a set whose subset is identical to itself is a paradox, and a paradox is a logical breakdown. When a subset is identical to a set, mathematics falters into incoherence. Mathematics is often taken to be the last remaining truth-language. All the words of theologians and philosophers may be mumbo jumbo, but the truth of the universe is revealed in rigorous mathematical proofs that are beyond anyone’s “interpretation.” But what if mathematics is also a human construct that, like all human constructs, disintegrates when it reaches some liminal threshold, some borderline beyond which there be dragons?

Theologians might care because “eternity” to them is not just some abstraction—it is heaven. And, if we are Christians, we ought to care about it too because someday the abstract problem will become the experiential one of “How will we spend eternity?” It will take less than a century to binge-watch every Netflix series ever made, and then what? Borges’ stories are rarely over 10 pages. His longest, appropriately enough, is called “The Immortals”—long enough to convince anyone that immortality is, in effect, damnation. Borges seems to be convinced—it shows up in any number of stories—that infinity/eternity means what Nietzsche called “the eternal recurrence of the same.” The popular example is the familiar joke about the monkeys in a room full of typewriters who, given infinite time, will type out every possible permutation of letters, which means that someday, sometime, they will type the combination of letters we call Hamlet. I have never understood why people think this is plausible. Under a condition of complete chance, it seems perfectly possible to me that a certain combination might never happen to occur, even though it could. Remember that next time you are tempted to play the lottery. I can only attribute this to the human mind’s unwillingness to contemplate complete non-repetition, which means complete non-pattern. Repetition imposes a form—in fact, it copes with the problem of eternity by bending time back upon itself into an endlessly-repeating cycle. Borges appears to reject this in “The Doctrine of Cycles,” but the idea that time is cyclic, that not just the cycles of nature but those of history and individual human life repeat over and again, shows up in story after story. Metaphysically nonsense perhaps, the idea of cyclical repetition seems to me a psychological phenomenon, the projected myth of a certain traumatized state, what Freud, speaking of what we now term PTSD, called “the compulsion to repeat.”

The idea of cyclical repetition is then taken one step further, again not logically but psychologically. If the same events happen over and over, the same people also happen over and over: they too are repeating combinations. And they do not merely repeat their own roles. The human race is the cast of a play in which we are all understudies for all the parts, and eventually we play those parts. In “The Immortal,” the narrator says of the Immortals:

They knew that over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men....No one is someone; a single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am a god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world—which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not. (191)

And a bit further on:

Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, and the faithful presage of others that will repeat it in the future, ad vertiginem. There is nothing that is not as though lost between indefatigable mirrors. Nothing can occur but once, nothing is preciously in peril of being lost. (192)

In other words, the good news is that you’re immortal. The bad news is that, in the words of one of the few philosophers Borges does not quote, it is, as Yogi Berra says, déja vu all over again. Not only that, but you and the other are one, and sometimes switch identities—Borges is also drawn to the image of the double, the alter ego who is just that—your opposite, and yet someone with whom you may find you have switched identities with in what Jung, borrowing a word from Heraclitus, calls enantiodromia, the tendency of opposites to turn into each other when they have run to extremes. That happens to the main character in the aptly named story “The Circular Ruins,” who finds that he is a kind of human phoenix, creating, through dreaming him, a double who is a symbolic son. As the man dies in fire, he realizes that he too is the dream of someone else. Therefore we assume that his son, his other identity, will someday repeat the pattern and dream into being a son, and so on. Note too in the above block quotation the infinitely repeating mirror, another of Borges’ frequent images, always sinister.

Who cares about this kind of postmodern head-trip, eh? A fair number of people, it would appear. “The Circular Ruins” was reportedly an influence on Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 bears such a close resemblance to one of Borges’ most extraordinary stories, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” about a conspiracy theory so powerful that it begins to replace reality, that it’s hard to imagine the resemblance is accidental—although of course when you’re speaking of paranoia that’s exactly the kind of statement that makes you feel uneasy. In thinking of writers who resemble Borges, Kafka obviously comes to mind, as Borges acknowledged. But the figure of Tiresias in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, who enfolds within his identity all the characters and narrative of an ironically cyclical poem, very much evokes the Borges protagonists who are antiheroes with a thousand faces. I find it curious that Borges dismissed Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a boring failure, since it too is a cyclical satire in which all the characters are one character, and by a blind author no less. I suspect a temperamental antipathy. Joyce was sensual, earthy, and affirmative in temperament, while Borges was reportedly puritanical about sex, and gently ironic.

Let me employ the remainder of this newsletter in the attempt to show how what may seem the rarefied preoccupations of an intellectual elite are nevertheless a key to the nightmare we are living through at present, as well as suggesting how, unlikely as it appears, there are ways of living our lives that can help ground us, ways that are not an alternative to high theory or social activism—I’m all in favor of both, make no mistake—but a way of rooting both theory and activism in something that we can hang on to when the storm winds rise.

I said in The Productions of Time that the first task of the imagination is to construct what Northrop Frye called a “myth of concern,” and that a myth of concern takes the form of two identified opposites: a vision of order and a vision of love. For most of the last 2000 years, the myth of concern in the West was Christianity. The Christian vision of order derived from it was embodied in a theology developed over centuries, one that was in fact flexible and sophisticated enough to incorporate within itself a countermovement of thought that recognized the limits of the human mind’s powers of conceptualization in a way very akin to Borges, as Borges recognized. Part of this countermovement was what was called “negative theology,” a way of breaking through the limitations of the categories of thought, which are also the categories of language, by speaking of God only in terms of what he is not, since anything positive predicated of him will be false because God exceeds all categories. Thus, negative theology was a kind of mental training in paradoxical thinking, with possible Eastern counterparts in Zen Buddhism and Taoism. But even orthodox doctrine was open to the paradoxes that are inevitable when the mind tries to free itself, however imperfectly, from its limitations. The central paradox was that of the Trinity, touched upon in a not-so-distant newsletter. Most Christians take the Trinity for granted—the usual defense mechanism. To shake us out of that complacency, in “A History of Eternity” Borges employs a satiric voice that is one of the chief delights of reading him: dry, precise, elegant, preposterously erudite, deadpan serious—and outrageously witty:

Today, Catholic laymen consider the Trinity a kind of professional organization, infinitely correct and infinitely boring; liberals, meanwhile, view it as a useless theological Cerberus, a superstition that the Republic’s great advances have already taken upon themselves to abolish. The Trinity clearly exceeds these formulae. Imagined all at once, the concept of a father, a son, and a ghost articulated in a single organism seems like a case of intellectual teratology, a distortion only the horror of a nightmare could engender. Hell is mere physical violence, but the three inextricable Persons add up to an intellectual horror, stifled and specious like the infinity of facing mirrors. (130)

“Teratology” is the study of congenital abnormalities. The Trinity, the central object of Christian veneration, is to the reason a triple violation of the law of non-contradiction, linked with the Borgesian image of multiplying mirrors. St. Patrick’s 3-leafed clover might satisfy the uneducated, and Tertullian the obstreperous might say, “I believe because it is absurd,” yet that is nothing but a kind of rhetorical shrug, a way of preserving one’s sanity. For there is a danger to sanity. Nietzsche said, in an often-quoted aphorism, “when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you” (Beyond Good and Evil, Part 4, aphorism 146). There is the convention in horror of the book that drives mad whoever reads it, most famously H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon but also The King in Yellow, a madness-inducing play in Robert W. Chambers’ collection of stories, also called The King in Yellow (1895), an exquisitely unhinged book that Borges might have appreciated.

But for nearly 2000 years Christianity was able to contain the urge to push against the frontiers of the conceivable by containing it within a vision of love. However, by the late 18^th century the Christian vision of order seemed no longer compelling to an increasing number of people, and a need was felt for a human construct to replace the Christian vision of order that had been supposedly given by divine revelation. Two centuries later, the humanities are in the grip of a skepticism about the possibility of any kind of knowledge or truth, a skepticism that finds Borges a congenial spirit. The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges contains a chapter called “Borges and Theory” by Michael Wood, pointing to the fact that the three foremost practitioners of radical theory in the period from the 1960’s through the 1990’s, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, all quoted Borges or affixed epigraphs from him on some of their works. These thinkers are not nihilists, but they do believe in staring unflinchingly at the abyss to see who blinks first.

But again I feel compelled to return to the teacher’s question, “Who cares what the hypertrophied intellects of a bunch of academics concludes about whether we can know anything or not? Isn’t this just the shop talk of those who have the luxury of armchair theorizing?” I would reply the following. If we stand back and look at the present state of the world, what we see is, yes, a paralyzed intelligentsia whose bold inquiries are good at rigorously dismantling the comfortable illusions in which we like to hide, but who feel that any step beyond negation is giving in to a temptation to become prophets of some new religion that could only be an inflated travesty.

But meanwhile, we are undergoing an authoritarian coup. Why? Because there are tens of millions of people who cannot deal with a world that is this complex, with a world that is indeed more complex than any before it. Articles abound about the authoritarian personality type. Such people have a compelling need for a system of order that reduces reality to either-or, black or white, good or bad, a binary world. Such people feel threatened, unsafe in the presence of complexity—a situation or a person that cannot be understood in simple black and white terms triggers feelings of panic that easily turn into hate and aggression. They are by no means stupid, and they may even be highly educated like JD Vance, but they lack the ability or the will to cope emotionally with a world that cannot be reduced to something simple. So they are attracted to authoritarian leaders who promise to reduce it for them, by fiat or by force.

It is important to understand the nature of what is going on right now. True, some of it is greed and grifting: there are any number of jackals who have breached the protective walls of government and are pillaging and plundering it as if it were another Troy. But there is also a hysterical drive to reduce what to some of them appears an out-of-control, ramifying complexity. There is, to be sure, a grifting side to Elon Musk: he is making sure his businesses are positioned to profit from government contracts awarded by cronyism. But there is something else, the chainsaw-massacre side. Musk doesn’t truly care about waste in government. He is furiously hacking away at what is indeed a proliferating complexity the way someone hacks kudzu to prevent it from taking over the property. It genuinely appalls him, and the fact that it may be necessary because millions of good people depend on it is less important than his need to cut it down before it somehow takes over the world. What is true of Musk domestically is true of Trump’s international policies. Trump’s commitment to tariffs is not, as some say, a symptom of dementia. It is a way of reducing an economic system that has grown so complex and interdependent that only experts can understand it back to the comparatively simple give-and-take that worked for William McKinley in 1900, or so he thinks. It is not that he is too stupid or too senile to grasp the webwork of a global economy, in which terms like “supply chains” point to what amounts to an economic ecosystem. He gets it—and rejects it. He is going to rip down the global network that has grown up over decades and return to the simple scenario of isolated, independent nation-states.

What is true of the economy and social institutions is also true in the context of the culture wars. In religion, the fundamentalist Protestants are determined to wipe out the labyrinth of “interpretation” that has progressively grown up over two centuries around the Bible and Christian beliefs, interpretation that leaves common people without much to hold onto, even the existence of a historical Jesus. Belief is not complicated, and the Bible has one, simple, obvious meaning. In the area of gender and sexual identity, behind all the sound and fury about departures from the simple heterosexual binary is a visceral, nauseated rejection of differences that strike them as alien, not really human—a woman with a penis, a person who is “they” and therefore seems to have no sex at all. Racism and xenophobia, needless to say, follow the same pattern. Nothing is simple—exactly the point—and there is also an element of economic competition in the world of Social Darwinist capitalism that plays into the picture, but there is at the same time the horror of those who are not only different physically but culturally—their language, their customs, who can understand them? Yet they proliferate in the communities that once used to be almost totally, simply, white and English speaking. There is an urge to tear down the whole brave new world, to raze it back to the simplicity of the 1950’s. Someone like Musk is even more extreme. When Musk says that he thinks modern society will destroy itself, so that he needs to establish colonies on Mars, I do not think he regards that destruction as regrettable. I would caution that he seems to be laying plans via a dominating network like Starlink that could enable him to initiate some global conflict that would be terminal, that that would be to him a consummation devoutly to be wished. All this destruction for the sake of a return to simplicity is a hunger for a strong, powerful, comprehensible myth of order.

Even as we fight back against this tooth and nail, I think we must recognize that we share the same feelings, differing rather in the response to them. The far right are by no means entirely wrong about a contemporary world it is no longer possible even to understand, let alone control. This is not new, nor is nauseated disgust with it confined to reactionaries. The United States always promoted the image of itself as a champion of democracy and freedom. But after the Second World War, it began to engage in the dirty politics of the Cold War. What that meant was that behind the scenes were Machiavellian agreements kept shrouded in secrecy because they would not bear the light of day. Because of “necessity,” the CIA worked with foreign groups to topple elected governments, as in Iran; it installed and kept in power puppet governments that served U.S. purposes, both political and economic. Moreover, it was no longer possible to distinguish the government from corporations that were now multinational. Did we go to war in Iraq to ensure the profits of Halliburton Oil? The point is that it is impossible to tell. There really is such a thing as a deep state, even if nutball descriptions of it are misconceived. “Systems theory” grew up to explain to us that the world was now a system made of systems. It constructs our lives, even our identities, and a revolution cannot topple it because it is pervasive and impossible to locate. What happened in 2008? A financial system that even those involved in it did not understand spun out of control and caused a worldwide crash. The system is so complicated that its software cannot even be updated. Those in the know were terrified that DOGE’s meddling with the Social Security system might break an electronic network that still runs on COBOL, for heaven’s sake, because it has been too hard to replace it. The same, as we hear these last few weeks, is true of the electronics of air traffic control. The system is so lunatic that within the same news cycle we read of systems running on antiquated software and simultaneously how sophisticated AI is going to eliminate everyone’s jobs. Why are people jumping on the overhyped promise of AI? Because it is the symbol of something capable of dealing with all that complexity as we no longer can, of processing information and making decisions that are beyond human capacity. Borges’ fiction does not deal with politics, but the novels of Thomas Pynchon are all about being lost in the labyrinth—which is why they are labyrinths themselves, as long and involved as Borges’ stories are short.

So, as a progressive I sympathize with the hard right’s alienated resentment at living within a system that regards us all as disposable. As a scholar of sorts, I sympathize with the yearning for some new myth of order that is not simply a reductionistic form of hysterical denial. Since the Enlightenment and the concurrent Romantic revolution, however, the awareness has grown that any new myth of order cannot be like the old one, given by supernatural powers from on high. Instead, we have to construct it for ourselves. Out of the attempt to do so grew the mystique of the library and the encyclopedia. These can be seen as the macrocosmic and microcosmic versions of the same thing: a total collection and preservation of all knowledge organized according to a pattern that makes it a single vision. Borges was, like many of us, a lover of books and therefore a lover of libraries. In fact, he was made the head of the Library of Argentina. In an essay called “Blindness,” he speaks movingly of his love, since childhood, of libraries: “I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library” (475). But elsewhere he speaks of the library as symbol of one more kind of labyrinth. If we could only gather all the knowledge together and organize it under the proper categories, seeing how all the parts related to one another by relating to some central principle, we would possess the total form of the Truth. It is a beautiful hope, but forlorn. Like many of us, Borges also loved encyclopedias, which are, when you think of it, microcosmic libraries, the contents of a library condensed to their essentials. Like many others of his time, he was especially fond of the most famous encyclopedia of modern times, the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The “Blindness” essay is poignant when Borges speaks of being put in charge of a library of 900,000 volumes at exactly the time he went totally blind and could not read them.

But Borges’ skeptical imagination will not allow him to entertain the idea of total knowledge. In the first place, what we call knowledge is a reduction, a set of general principles distilled from the real knowledge of the world, which would be completely overwhelming. Two famous stories dramatize the mental overload that would happen if the mind were really exposed to total knowledge. In one, “Funes the Memorious” or “Funes, His Memory,” a young man develops a total memory after sustaining a head injury. But this total memory far exceeds what we mean by a “photographic memory.” Funes remembers every single detail of every single perception he has ever had—and that means he cannot think at all. He cannot understand “rose” because “rose” is an abstract category under which we file all particular roses. Yet those roses all have hundreds of minute differences. Funes cannot forget the differences and think simply of a “rose” in general. In “The Aleph,” the protagonist is shown the Aleph, which is down in someone’s cellar. It is “one of the points in space that contain all points” (280); “the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist” (281). There follows an astounding tour de force, a catalogue that goes on for an entire page of what the narrator sees in the Aleph. I can only quote a small part of it:

Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spiderweb at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors of the planet (and none of them reflecting me), saw in a rear courtyard of Calle Soler the same tiles I’d seen twenty years before in the entryway of a house in Fray Bentos, saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapor, saw convex equatorial deserts and their every grain of sand, saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget, saw her violent hair, her haughty body, saw a cancer in her breast, saw a country house in Androgué... (283)

That is about half of it. This is a vision of what Dante calls the Empyrean, which is the cosmos not as human beings see it but as God sees it, and it is no accident that the narrator (called “Borges”!) is in love with a woman named Beatriz. But it is also God himself. It is called the Aleph because “In the Kabbala, that letter signifies the En Soph, the pure and unlimited godhead” (285). It is also likened to Ezekiel’s vision of wheels within wheels and an angel with four faces, and to an old definition of God as a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere (282). I might add that Aleph or “A” may also stand for “apocalypse,” a word meaning total revelation.

A human effort to approximate such a vision verbally would be what Borges called “The Total Library” in an essay of that title. The essay opens with his usual dry wit: “The fancy or the imagination of the utopia of the Total Library has certain characteristics that are easily confused with virtues” (214). Once again we get an epic catalogue to dramatize what such totality would be:

Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus’ The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true name of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat’s theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley inventing concerning time but didn’t publish, Urizen’s books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. (216)

The reference to “Urizen’s books of iron” is one sly joke among many. By the usual and by now expectable synchronicity, I have begun talking about William Blake’s mythology in the Expanding Eyes podcast, and will arrive at a description of the mythical character Urizen, whose name puns on “reason” and “horizon.” Urizen is Blake’s figure of false order. He is the would-be tyrant on the throne, and he attempts to accomplish what would get him the votes of the hard right, the reduction of all life to first principles:

Laws of peace, of love, of unity:

Of pity, compassion, forgiveness.
Let each chuse one habitation:
His ancient infinite mansion:
One command, one joy, one desire,
One curse, one weight, one measure
One King, one God, one Law.
(The Book of Urizen, chapter 2, section 8)

This is monotheism as monomania, the reduction of all life to a nice, big, simple unity, easy to understand and totally obedient. Not. Urizen later despairs: “for he saw/ That no flesh nor spirit could keep / His iron laws one moment” (chapter 7, section 4). That wouldn’t stop him from winning the election here in Republican Ohio.

The catalogue of the Total Library is delightful but ironic, for what it contains is a random jumble of knowledge, which means it is not order but chaos. Books are arranged in libraries according to categories, as in the Dewey and Library of Congress systems, but those categories are very general and only help a user to find certain volumes. They do not point to a synthesis that unifies all the information into a total meaning according to a central principle. That kind organization is what the medieval theologians called a summa, and there were various attempts at writing one, deducing all knowledge from the fact of God.

The summa is one variety of what Northrop Frye calls encyclopedic forms. The original encyclopedic form was the epic, not the heroic kind of Homer but the mythological epic, such as Hesiod’s Theogony, which, like the Bible, starts with Creation and moves forward in time to become, in the title of a chapter of Frye’s book on Milton, “the story of all things.” Prose works with similarly all-encompassing ambitions were given a generic name by Frye, the anatomy. Frye wrote four major anatomies, including Anatomy of Criticism. All his life he contemplated a magnum opus that, in his private notebooks, he called the Ogdoad, an 8-volume work intended to encompass the entire order of words. He never wrote that work, and reading Borges helps us understand why it was not possible, but every work he did write was intended either as a version of it or an offshoot of it.

Why write such a work? I am called upon to answer since I have, heaven help me, inherited the encyclopedic vocation, and The Productions of Time is intended to be, at least in spirit, a version of the work that Frye contemplated in his notebooks but never wrote. Inspired by Blake and Blake’s way of reading the Bible, Frye felt that what was needed was a new vision of order, but one that avoided the fatal error of trying to coerce all knowledge into some reductive Unity. We are done, or need to be done, with that type of “totalizing” order. Out of Blake’s notion of Contraries comes a different vision of order, one that includes difference and change, an identity-in-difference. This too is a paradox, but one that liberates the mind rather than numbing it into mindless Oneness or blowing it to smithereens. That vision of order is, among other things, not a retreat from social activism but a model for the better society we are trying to build. Everything I have written has been inspired by it.

But, contradictory creatures that we are, though we need a vision of order, we have an equal-but-opposite need for release from that order. If you say, well, you can’t have both, I would reply that, yes, we can: there is a positive use to be made of paradox. In narrative terms, this release is wandering. The primary mythological narrative is said to be the quest, which is governed by an order principle symbolized by its goal. But one of countless reasons that the Odyssey is one of my favorite works of literature is that it shows how the quest and wandering are unified Contraries, an identity-in-difference. Odysseus is driven by the quest to regain home, family, and kingdom. He is also driven to delay those goals and wander in order to have new experiences. The fact that he succeeds in having his cake and eating it too means that his is one of the great examples of the well-lived life. Sometimes it’s good not to have a goal or plan, to wander around just to see what happens. Just to see. In one of my touchstone poems, “Corson’s Inlet,” A.R. Ammons makes this point by describing a simple walk in nature. The walk saves him from the Urizen within him obsessed with order as a will to power:

the walk liberating, I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
      straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
               of sight

At the end of the poem he clarifies: he has not abandoned the vision of order, but supplemented it with its Contrary, as Frye says that a myth of concern has to have a “myth of freedom” in creative tension with it:

I will try
       to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

For bibliophiles, the pleasure of wandering is the pleasure of browsing. Like Borges, I have loved encyclopedias. Before my parents bought me an adult set, the Americana, I had The Golden Book Encyclopedia for children (1959), of which I have retained volume 9, Labor Day to Matches. I tried to read through it from start to finish when I was about 10. I am not sure how far I got. But that was an order-obsessed compulsion. Since they scarcely exist anymore, let me, as an old man who remembers the good of the past, celebrate one pleasure that physical encyclopedias can give that their online versions cannot. It is quite possible to pot around happily on Wikipedia, one article inspiring you to look at another, and then another. But a physical volume provides the possibility of a true randomness. In the lecture on his blindness, Borges remembers as a boy accompanying his father to the library:

I, too timid to ask for a book, would look through some volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica or the German encyclopedias of Brockhaus or of Meyer. I would take a volume at random from the shelf and read. I remember one night when I was particularly rewarded, for I read three articles: on the Druids, the Druses, and Dryden—a gift of the letters DR. (475)

One can also wander in a library. I am sad that my university’s library has perhaps a tenth of the books it had when I was an undergraduate, though I understand. There is no use keeping them, for undergraduates do not look at books. But I remember the day, when I was there as a student, coming across this huge shelf of 12 old, musty, thick, and strange volumes called The Golden Bough, of which I had never heard. Opening a volume, I began reading stories of the strangest mythic practices, recounted in quaint but spellbinding Victorian prose. I remember that afternoon a half century later. The library provides pleasures of serendipity, but so does the wild abandon of the “library discard sale,” books on tables and crammed in boxes under the tables, having lost their respectable place on a library shelf, like homeless immigrants looking for a place to be. I have found unexpected treasures at discard sales, but also rescued curious books of no literary or scholarly value whatsoever, some with inscriptions in them, voices out of a long-ago past: “To Mary, Christmas 1907. This is one of my favorite books.” Used bookstores, especially what survive of the old ones, run by eccentric people who somehow manage to stay in business in spite of making sales perhaps amounting to less then ten dollars a day, are also places of adventure. Not for nothing does the genre of fantasy include a typical plot in which someone finds a book of magic in a strange old bookstore.

The vision of order is driven, as Nietzsche told us, by the will to power, for better or worse. Wandering is the relaxation of that will, going with the flow, and is informed—not driven—by the pleasure principle, not with Nietzsche’s Apollonian but with his Dionysian principle. The pleasure is not of order and meaning but of acceptance, acceptance of difference and particularity. In terms of writing, it may mean short, fragmentary forms such as the lyric rather than the architecture of the epic. Blake was an epic poet—but also wrote haunting lyrics and was one of the great aphorists of all time. In times of writing blocks, I have remembered an anecdote I read about the surrealist painter Joan Miró, whose way of starting a painting was to make a mark on a canvas and let it suggest the painting. I wrote my magnum opus, and since then I have been enjoying the opposite technique of the newsletter, in which “tomorrow a new walk is a new walk” and almost anything can and does suggest the next newsletter.

How is all this going to save the world? One answer is that occasionally types like me need to be saved from the impulse to save the world. Notwithstanding, it is true that the world needs saving, especially those panicked crowds running to authoritarians for salvation. What can liberate authoritarian personality types from the compulsion to eliminate complexity and difference—because our world is inevitably and forever complex, and the attempt to simplify it will only destroy it? I have only the same old answers, but they are not yet obsolete. One is education, which widens horizons. That is why authoritarians fear and attack it.

The other is the necessary counterpart of the vision of order: the vision of love. I have been writing lately about what could be called the mythology of everyday life because I think that high theory and social activism have to lie down, as Yeats said, where all the ladders start. Those demonically possessed by fear and hate are not going to be magically converted by peace and love—we hippies learned that back in the old days. But, you know, there was something about that “Woodstock nation” stuff that was potentially less naive and pathetic than we thought. It was an attempt to “get back to the Garden” by recognizing what Michael tells Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost. That we are the Garden. There is a paradise within us, he told them, “happier far” than that original simple place, even though we wander in the labyrinthine wilderness of this lower world. Milton, like Borges, was blind. But, as with Borges, what came to him in his darkness was language. Both men had encyclopedic minds—their libraries were within. External libraries may be labyrinths, but the young Borges “always imagined Paradise as a library.” Turned out that, with the wisdom of childhood, he was right. There is a Garden within, and there is a library within, and they are one.

References

__________. The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges. Edited by Edwin Williamson. Cambridge, 2013.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions. Edited by Eliot Weinberger. Various translators. Penguin, 1999.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Viking, 1998.