Quantum poetics

[Celerity]

How Borges and Heisenberg converged on the notion that language both enables and interferes with our grasp of reality

https://aeon.co/essays/borges-and-heisenberg-converged-on-the-slipperiness-of-language


Jorge Luis Borges in Palermo, Sicily in 1984. Photo by Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum



As history’s bloodiest war metastasised from Europe outward, two men – a world apart from each other, and coming from profoundly different disciplines – converged on one fundamentally similar idea. One of the men was a poet and short-fiction writer with middling success in his own country but virtually unknown outside its borders. The other man had already won the Nobel Prize for work he had done around 15 years earlier and would soon top the Allies’ most-wanted list for the work they suspected he had done in Germany’s unsuccessful atomic weapons programme. But while Jorge Luis Borges knew nothing of the advances of quantum mechanics, and while Werner Heisenberg wouldn’t have encountered the work of a man among whose books was one that sold a mere 37 copies on the other side of the world in Argentina, around the year 1942 they were each obsessed with the same question: how does language both enable and interfere with our grasp of reality?

After the resounding failure of History of Eternity (1936), the book that sold only 37 copies in a year and garnered almost no critical attention, Borges slipped into a bog of depression. That book’s philosophical themes, however, continued to percolate and eventually emerged in an entirely different form in a series of stories called Artifices (1944). In that collection’s opening story, Borges describes a man who loses his ability to forget.

The man goes by the names Ireneo Funes. When the narrator of the story meets him, he is still a young man and known in his village for his quirky ability to tell the time whenever he is asked, although he never wears a watch. Two years later, upon his return to the town, the narrator learns that Funes has suffered an accident and is entirely paralysed, confined to his house on the edge of town. The narrator goes to visit him and finds him alone, smoking a cigarette on a cot in the dark. Astonished and saddened by Funes’s change of fortunes, the narrator is even more surprised to learn that the young man doesn’t perceive his condition as a disability, but as a gift. Funes believes the accident has endowed him with perfect memory.

The young man, who has never studied Latin, borrows a Latin dictionary and a copy of Pliny’s Naturalis historia from the narrator. He then greets him on his return by reciting, verbatim, the first paragraph of the 24th chapter of the tome’s seventh book: a passage about memory. However, though his ability to recall is astounding, Funes’s gift extends beyond mere memory. His immersion in the present is so profound, so perfect, that nothing to which his senses are exposed escapes his attention. In a poetic passage, Borges describes Funes’s abilities:

– from Collected Fictions (1998) by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley

snip

[intrepidity]

1. Celerity, may I say?

You *always* bring such interesting things to us here, and I, for one, notice and greatly appreciate it.

Now I want to get a copy of that Borges story.... but first, off to the link to read the rest of this article.

Thank you!

[Celerity]

2. yw!

and thank you for the kind words

[dweller]

3. I just spent a futile 1/2 hour

Searching for anything on Borges History of Eternity … a little available at wiki but
nothing else … 37 copies surely puts it out of reach , and didn’t see anything of a translation of it

Oh well
✌🏻

[Celerity]

4. here

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL14452026M/Historia_de_la_eternidad.

and here (Spanish editions)

https://www.amazon.com/Historia-eternidad-Jorge-Luis-Borges/dp/8499089534/ref=sr_1_1?crid=O3RNCKWFCIXH&keywords=historia+de+la+eternidad&qid=1694715099&s=books&sprefix=Historia+de+la+eternidad%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C254&sr=1-1

[dweller]

5. Thanks

✌🏻

[Prairie_Seagull]

6. Putting the irony aside, the story was a good read.

Signed up for Aeon and loved that pic.