Tag Archives: Mark Marino

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?

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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