TLÖN DREAMS

-1-
"Chapter three has a similar orientation, relatively free of a palimpsestic layering of images, though it introduces one of the book's many leitmotifs, Jorge Luis Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," for reasons that readers of that story will find obvious."
—from "A Short Walk Through The Rings of Saturn" by Rick Moody, page 9 of The Believer, May 2007

-2-
"In Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," the narrator navigates a standard Borgesian labyrinth of encyclopedia entries and letters in an attempt to learn about the region of Uqbar, a place with uncertain borders thought to be located somewhere between Iraq and Asia Minor."
—from "The Codex Seraphinianus" by Justin Taylor, page 21 of The Believer, May 2007

-3-
"A contrite and self-deluding believer in a Many Worlds type of ontology narrates Borges's 1941 short story "The Garden of Forking Paths."
—from "Death Comes (and Comes and Comes) to the Quantum Physicist" by Rivka Ricky Galchen, pages 40-41 of The Believer, May 2007

The three "main" articles of the May 2007 issue of The Believer each contain references to short stories of Jorge Luis Borges found in his collection The Garden of Forking Paths. One reference is to the eponymous story, and two are to Borges's strange tale of layered mythical lands "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." I suppose the fact that these texts are referenced in each of these essays in The Believer could have been due to editorial assignment, although I find that highly unlikely. Perhaps, it is simply a case of Jungian synchronicity. Or, more likely, Tlön is simply resonating at a frequency received by all three authors; the Ursprache of Tlön is seeping out from its imaginary realm and making itself felt, manifest.

I read each of the three essays back to back in the wee hours of the morning last Thursday. Borges referenced once usually perks up my ears. But, Borges referenced three times unsettled me. I had to go pull my copy of his Collected Fictions off of my bookcase and read "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," in order to refresh the tale in my memory. So, what do W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, and Hugh Everett III's "The Theory of Universal Wave Function" have in common? In this case, "juxtaposed" with one another in three essays on different subjects—dense, poetic, associative prose fiction; "impenetrable," yet available "text" and art; and, quantum mechanics—they have the "association of ideas" that is one of the cores of Tlön:

The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then the countryside on fire and then the half extinguished cigarette that produced the scorched earth is considered an example of the association of ideas.
—from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," by Jorge Luis Borges, page 74 of Collected Fictions

I am unsure that it is any more than that: ideas associating with one another for their own sake, or, perhaps, for my/our sake.

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But, where does the association of ideas end?

Tonight the child and I were wandering around when we passed a cage of Blue Rhino propane tanks. The child told me that she saw a "hippopotamus with fire coming out his nose." Sure enough, before me is a blue rhinoceros logo with a flame where its largest horn should be. Then we passed a woman who was smoking and the child told me that "her has fire coming out her nose." I informed the child that the woman was smoking, and the child concurred that "she is smoking her candles." And, there in the hand at her side rested a cigarette.

From "cloud of smoke on the horizon" to "countryside on fire" to "cigarette that caused the scorched earth" to "smoking her candles" to "hippopotamus with fire coming out his nose" to what? How? Why? Where does the imaginary realm of Tlön begin? Where does it end? When is an electron's x-spin both up> and down>? (Not when we measure them, as I learned in the article on Everett. When measured and observed, an electron's spin is one or the other, although quantum mechanics claims otherwise.)

There is so much we are uncertain of, and yet, the imaginary, the mythical, the unexplainable connections can resonate at levels of depth we can barely fathom. We just need to be aware of our limitations, especially on a linguistic level. Once those limitations are acknowledged, then we can skirt them, and see things anew, like a woman smoking candles that makes fire come out her nose.