[sociate] The Net as an Aleph

In his 1945 short story El Aleph,  <http://www.internetaleph.com/> Jorge
<http://www.hum.au.dk/romansk/borges/home.htm> Luis
<http://www.themodernword.com/borges/> Borges, Argentina's celebrated writer
of metaphysical tales, describes some visits he paid to Carlos Argentino
Daneri, an irritating acquaintance of his in Buenos Aires. On one of his
last visits, Danieri tells Borges to head into the cellar, to lie on his
back and look up a the nineteenth step. Despite great misgivings, Borges
does, and he sees there an Aleph -- an opening through which he can see
everything that ever happened, is happening and is still to happen. The
following passage is Borges' description of what he saw. 


On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent
sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving;
then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying
world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an
inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a
mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it
from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and
nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the
center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I
saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw
all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard
of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the
entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco,
lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their
grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw
her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a
ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a
summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny
-- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each
page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not
get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed
to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in
a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied
it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea
at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of
a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a
pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a
greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all
the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a
writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene,
detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a
monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and
bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation
of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of
death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw
the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my
own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for
my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to
all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity. 

Not to be too much of a Romantic about it, that reminds me of the Net. 

posted by Jerry Michalski at 7:05
<http://www.sociate.com/blog/archives/2004_06_01_archive.html#10879735455583
6553> PM

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