Category Archives: Week 2: Books as Media- Borges and Marino

Is it Useless?

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The Library of Babel

Spanning the entirety of Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” each word seems to fit as though a dozen eyes meticulously swept through the text, line by line. Though during and after my reading, the inclusion of one peculiar word has piqued a curiosity never before known to me. As a result, the revelation is made through Borges’s short story that anything conceivable may be deemed useless due to its reliance on conception. 

Now that sounds like a lot of lengthy bullshit words jammed next to each other, but I believe (and that’s what’s important) that in Borges’ subtleties, this claim could withstand. 

The peculiar word “useless” is used five times throughout Borges’s story. Four stand in the text, with one as a footnote, though not all usages stood out to me at first. The difference relies on the understanding of what use implies, and specifically to whom. 

Due to ignorance and possibly human nature, I assumed the word implied specifically to humans. Looking up the definition of useful and seeing “able to be used for a practical purpose or in several ways.” I was surprised, though not all too convinced. Sure, a bee is deemed useful for a flower, and vice versa, but is this not told through the lens of a human? I pose the question to the class, as I’m genuinely curious, is anything objectively useful to something other than us, not because it betters our human circumstances or experience in this world, but because it just is. 

Though that is ultimately the point. Everything we know is seen through our lens. And in four of Borges’s usages of the word, they are used in relation to humans, besides one. When speaking of humanity’s eventual collapse, Borges says, “the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.” Though infinite, incorruptible, and precious, it serves nothing without someone able to conceive it. Without active engagement, is there any meaning behind any of these words–even a book of “ultimate truth” or one with “Godly wisdom?” Do humans really live that shallow of life, stuck in our own thoughts and ways, unable to tap into any other desire but our own? And really, what it’s asking is: what exactly is useful in the world external to our realities? Frankly, I don’t think we’ll ever know, or we can, but then again… why’s that useful to me?

A Bigger Beast

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Marino’s text is more than just a continuation on The Library of Babel, but instead enhances upon the idea. Specifically when Marino adds, “It began when I read that story .” It is not so much the words in the sentence itself, but instead the hyperlink embedded in the sentence. Instead of looking physically (by physically I mean having to walk from one hexagon to another and manually picking out a book with one’s hands etc) for the next book or annotation one can immediately head to the next with just a click. By doing so Marino is showing that the interwebs is a place where choice is immediate, and it is much easier to fall down the rabbit hole of searching—everything is at your fingertips in almost an immediate fashion. This is a bigger beast than the library in Borges’s story because of that immediate access for people who can connect to the world wide web. And the choices can be even more overwhelming than within the library in the story due to the fact that most of the hyperlinks pressed often lead to a multitude of other possible hyperlinks. On top of that this speed makes the possibility of information even more fragmented, because one can switch so fast from one idea to another. This makes me question the choices the rest of you made. Did you click on the hyperlink in that sentence? Did you click a different one? Did you stop at just one? What were the choices you made, and how did time limit those choices?

Labyrinth and Links of the Internet

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It has taken me quite awhile to digest the work of Borges and to develop my own thought process on the elaborate idea of the total library. Something that has helped me gather what to make of Borges’s legendary short story is Mark Marino’s metafiction “Marginalia in the Library of Babel” which has eased the connection into the 21st century.

I am stretched to incredible lengths to capture what is most meaningful between the two readings this week and I concede that the most impactful line, to me, is Borges stating “The Library exists ab aeterno“. This Library that Borges introduces in 1941 has stood the examination of of the last century, while the story itself feels like it has existed since the inception of the tool known as the book. In that sense, the story feels imperative to reread over and over again, especially in this modernized and expanded age of the library in the form of the internet. In retrospect, the vastness of the universe and the Library as Borges beautifully writes, has exponentially grown beyond imagination. And yet, the story’s most salient truths about the search and journey of knowledge reach deeper than ever.

What I took away from Marino’s short form metafiction is the perception of the internet. We brushed over this in class but the internet, like the Library, has slowly crept into the everyday lifestyle of nearly every country. What Marino’s blog, or marginalia, represents is the digitized hand users scribe daily, without a second thought about their footprint. He types, “Write in the margins, suggested my machine. Social annotation. It means that I exist or have existed.” Marino’s small contribution to the Library of Babel, the Library of the Internet, is from 2007. It feels like forever ago, and it feels a part of the Library that exists ab aerterno because it is. The marginalia he leaves with hyperlinks, highlights, and digital sticky notes are as powerful and meaningful as those previously left in the archived library of the universe. These digital notes also leave behind that someone was here, there, and everywhere. For myself and others, I think we tend to forget that integral part of the digital footprint marking the Library of Babel.

The Library as a Beehive

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After reading Borges’ famous short story “The Library of Babel” (1941) for the first time, I was overwhelmed by its scope of theme. A story trying to make sense of the nonsensical is sure to be dense. The more I read, the more expansive this infinitely yet finite library became. Making sense of the story and its purpose was difficult, to say the least. Despite this, I kept coming back to one word in particular, “hexagon,” a word that immediately reminded me of something, but a thought not developed enough that I decided to brush it off. It wasn’t until my second re-reading that I was able to focus on Borges immediate description of the library’s infrastructure and architecture and the word itself.

“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite,
perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery
is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can
see the floors above and below-one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each
side, line four of the hexagon’s six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor
to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. One of the
hexagon’s free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn
opens onto another gallery, identical to the first-identical in fact to all.” (Borges 1)

The immediacy of the description suggests that Borges is not only highlighting the books and the knowledge that are on the shelves, but the architecture of the library itself.

A structure that similarly mirrors the labyrinth of the Library is a beehive. Beehives do not naturally form into hexagonal shapes. The process takes place when a worker bee molds the wax into circles, only for their body heat to melt the comb into its familiar hexagonal shape. “Roman scholar and writer, Marcus Terentius Varro, proposed that it was a mathematical hunch known as “The Honeybee Conjecture.” He said that a structure that was built from hexagons is slightly more compact than a structure built from tiny squares or triangles. The more compact the structure is, the less wax the bees need to complete the honeycomb. (Allon par. 3) Honey is important to bees, it is not only used as a food source but as a climate control for the hive itself, communication, preservation, honey is essential to bees and every aspect of their being. Bees spend their whole lives on the quest for honey, nectar, pollen. They die only for another worker bee to takes its place to continue the never ending goal of finding, creating, and storing honey.

The idea of librarians living and dying within the library, cataloging knowledge, is reminiscent of the lives of bees, and the library itself is akin to a beehive. There is a natural process in which the library and its librarians function. The process that the narrator describes within the first few paragraphs mirrors this. Natural labor is deconstructed into an animalistic, primal level, where, through instinct, bees’ lives revolve around honey, so too do the lives of these librarians revolve around the books and their potentially infinite knowledge, “Now that my
eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die,
a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born.” (Borges 1)

At its core, the library is a hub of cells filled with knowledge; it must be protected. And its inhabitants participate in eternizing it. “-The bee serves as example when one must reinforce the definition of the human as rational animal. (The first to question this complicity was Derrida in The Animal that Therefore I am.) But Borges’ brief story deconstructs each of these binaries: language/sound, rational/irrational, and human/animal. The random creation of the library’s texts shows that even the most complex achievements of human “reason” are equally possible without any animating consciousness or any intention-to-signify at all. The life of us bibliotecarios is no more justified and no more good than that of the bees. And who’s to say a bee doesn’t believe his vindication awaits in the very next hexagon?” (Basile). Of course, the distinction in my comparison is that humans have a conscience and animals, namely bees in this instance, do not. Yet the comparative nature of the library itself invites the reader to deconstruct this notion and compare a natural order to that of a chaotically infinite one and the purpose of not only the library but the librarians as well.

The Library or The Universe?

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While reading Borges, the first element that stood out to me was his discussion of the universe in relation to libraries, aka that they are the same thing. I had not heard this comparison before if I am being honest, but now that I think about it, it makes sense. The library is a collection of stories, histories, and archives of information: much like the Universe. The discussion of how the library was made into the shape of a hexagon- “the library is a sphere who exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible”- shows the complexity of them both. This made me think about how the universe is inaccessible to us fully and it will never be able to be fully explored. Borges discusses the library and the universe in the same way, a mystery. It seems it’s almost impossible to have a full understanding of either, both being described as theory and symbolic to a bigger picture.

The ‘book’ during this time is described as impenetrable and mysterious, because only certain people could read/translate them. This reminded me of the video we watched in class the other day that showed how foreign the book was versus the scroll, and how people had to be taught how to use it. This is much like technology now for older generations, and even me when new technology is out I have to be taught as well. Borges description is a reminder that the book and the library was not accessible to everyone, and not everyone knew how to understand/read it. This is relevant to current times too, as not everyone has the same access to the same resources, its all a privilege, which is what Borges discussion of the library reminded me of. Not only of our progress of information and understanding, but that these things are a privilege not everyone has the same level of access to.

I found this reading to be very interesting. I had never heard of the library being built or compared to a hexagon. ‘The chief of an upper hexagon’ – as in their were so many different levels and librarians or deciphers that worked in different section?? Much like now but I found it intriguing how hexagons made up different levels of space and understanding. “There was no personal or world
problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope.” (pg. 4) The idea that the library held all the answers is interesting as its compared to the universe that is so vast, but it makes sense as we typically like to think that we have all the answers- some things never change too much. Overall this reading was very interesting and I felt like I got valuable information about the history of the library.

(sorry late! computer issues yesterday)

Borges Knocks on the Door of Reality

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Frankly, I read this work twice over the course of 2 days but I feel like I need to read it many more. What I took from this work is a critique of the pursuit of objectivity. What is the library? The library is their universe which is analogous to our universe. The books are analogous to our information about the natural world. The passage regarding travelers feverishly searching for their “vindication” makes me think of those in (what Borges’ argues is an effectively futile) pursuit of who they “really are” or what the meaning of their life is.

“All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure… At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future… The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man’s finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero” (5)

Borges also seems to explore religion from an Absurdist perspective. The criticism of the deep longing for a sense of belonging from a faith-based perspective reminds me a lot of Camus and his criticism of those who believe that the universe has an ultimate meaning:

“Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified. The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception” (7).

The revelation that the library exists “ab aeterno” (from an infinitely remote point of time in the past, according to Merriam-Webster) reminds me of Descartes’ revelation that the there is the mind (res cogitans) and the world outside the mind (res extensa). Both posit the universe as somewhere unattainably far away from the mind. This alienation of the human experience from reality/truth is dangerous because it rids the individual of agency, which is what I think Borges’ is trying to say when he writes “The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms” (7).

I see Borges final affirmation that the library is cyclical as a way to demonstrate how something can have infinite meanings despite surrounding one material thing. In other words, there can only be a certain amount of variations due to the 25 total characters available for use in the books, 410 pages, 40 lines per page, etc. This doesn’t mean that there can’t be an infinite number of possibilities, however, because those variations can loop around. Similarly, even if there is a definite (yet near-infinity) amount of ways one can convey they perception of reality, once near-infinity runs out it may just loop back around again.

Reflections of Today and Borges’ “Library of Babel”

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Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” is a fantastical thought exercise that essentially reflects various human reactions to abstract questions in a thoughtful and sometimes humorous way. Borges sets up the story to take place inside a library which equates to the whole world for the people living inside it. The Library contains an infinite amount of books which have a perpetually endless combinations of letters and punctuation. With this knowledge many librarians have formulated their own schools of thought and way of life to accommodate conceptualizing and dealing with their world. 

When reading the short story, I enjoyed the diversity of thought within each librarian and how that manifested in their living, or rather, coping. In the uncertainty of the Library, librarians created things like religion and a norm culture to help regulate their way of life. A group that stood out to me the most was the Purifiers, who would invade “the hexagons, showed credentials which were not always false, leafed through a volume with displeasure and condemned whole shelves” (Borges, 6). I think their response to the chaos of their world makes sense, but it almost feels rash in their need for control. The Purifiers’ line of thought mirrors plenty of people’s beliefs today, as many grapple with our chaotic world by simply trying to carve it into what their perfect world would look like. I think an example of this, relevant to today, is book banning. The act of banning books often reads as a response from adults who cannot grapple with the notion that the world is more than what they can conceptualize, so in turn, they try to control what they can to make more people similar to themselves. Borges does this reflection of our world in the Library repeatedly with different philosophies and religions, which made me love and ponder on this piece for a long time.

“The Library of Babel” Borges

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Jorge Luis Borges’, “The Library of Babel”, took me a couple reads to grasp. In the “indefinite and perhaps infinite” Library, what stood out to me was the importance, and vastness, of language. The Librarians struggle with the “formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books… for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences” (Borges, 2). When all possible combinations exist, the incoherent outnumbers the coherent. Borges’ Librarians specifically struggle with deciphering books that may use recognizable words, but form illogical sentences with seemingly no meaning. While some Librarian’s believe the majority of the books to be nonsense, the narrator argues that there is not a “single example of absolute nonsense”, instead, “in some of them, the symbol library allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and last system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value” (Borges, 8). In an indefinite library, and here on Earth, language and etymologies are constantly evolving, and just because you can read the words, does not equal comprehension: “You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?” (Borges, 8). While some Librarians write off books they deem as nonsense, Borges recognizes that language is not static, but constantly evolving. 

Mystics in the Library

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“The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.”

This paragraph comes just before the end of “The Library of Babel” by Borges. Throughout the story, this narrator presents his experience of the Library straightforward and factually. He acknowledges the existence of other views (the mystics, the “impious”), but he dismisses them.

“The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God” (2).

“The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. They speak (I know) of the `feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity'” (6-7).

I, however, am a firm believer in the constantly-changing nonsensical library and the circular chamber (I, myself, have seen the god-book. It was torus-shaped.). Clearly, I’m a mystic. I could say I’ve been a mystic my whole life. Ironically though, I only felt comfortable calling myself a mystic since reading William James’ lectures on mystical experience. James was one of the first scholars of religion as a social phenomenon. He qualified “real” mystical experiences. After reading his qualifications, I realized I’d had real mystical experiences before.

But who was William James to decide what makes a mystical experience real or not? And who is this “man of the library” to decide what parts of the library are real or not? He’s not the “Man of the Book” (6). He’s just another wanderer. And what good has his wandering done? “In adventures such as these,” he says, “I have squandered and wasted my years” (6). Going back to that penultimate paragraph, the narrator looks back at the living world. He laments those who worship books but can’t read them. What about those who can read but cannot fully understand?

Isn’t that all of us? What human can read something and fully understand all the nuances and connections to other texts, events, people, memories? I can’t even remember all of the individual influences that come together to help me create a new piece of writing. But that’s sort of a creative dream of mine: a hypertext that manages to connect everything. Like Marino’s Marginalia, but nothing not highlighted. Highlights on highlights. Infinite footnotes. “It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe” (6). I agree that it could exist. I wish I could create it.

But what would be the point? All of the connections that I could make are not all of the connections that could be made. It would need to be something that EVERYONE took part in creating. And at that point, I’m just creating The Universe. The book that this peregrine is looking for is the entirety of the library.

“I pray to the unknown gods that a man — just one, even though it were thousands of years ago! — may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified” (6).

From one wandering mystic to another… You are that One. You’re examining and reading the book right now. And you’re also writing it. This is the book. “Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry,” are the book. “suicides, more and more frequent with the years,” are the book. The humans, about to be extinguished (in 1941. Plenty of reason to think that in 1941.) are the book. It’s the whole thing.

Week 2: Bodies and Knowledge Production in Borges’ Library

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New York Times writer Noam Cohen names Jorge Luis Borges the “Man Who Discovered the Internet” (“Borges and the Foreseeable Future” 2008). Borges (1899-1996) envisioned prescient models of hypertext and the Internet not only as technologies, but as cultural institutions which shape human relationships to reading and space. The Library of Babel, Borges’ famous 1941 short story, is framed as the late dispatch of a philosopher in the limitless, arcane Library of Babel. Borges suggests that the custom of reading is a perpetually iterated project in which we interpret our environments, and through which we construct and deconstruct knowledges.

The narrator of The Library of Babel catalogs the esoteric architecture of the Library, defining its physical properties much like an archivist recording the material data of a book object. The datific language of this archival reads the Library itself as a book object. (The fabled “book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books” would thus seem to be the Library itself, and all librarians within it thus together compose the demi-godly “Book-Man” [116].) The narrator’s descriptions increasingly focus in scale, suggesting the labor and time taken to read the Library space: while it might take quickly enough to mark that “[e]ach wall of each hexagon is furnished with five bookshelves”, for how long have the librarians studied to find that “each line” of every book contains “approximately eighty black letters” (113)? The labor of cataloging the Library’s material properties, as visible in the narrator’s report as it is in the metadata of SDSU’s library catalog, is bound up in bodily time. Borges situates archival, reading, and knowledge production as material, time-bound labors that interface with violence and mortality. Before the Internet exists, Borges reminds us that this network is a material construction through which human labor produces means of interpreting information. This seemingly prophetic image indicates Borges’ understanding of books, reading, and knowledge production as material objects and actions.

More under the cut.

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