The Unimaginable Universe

"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 realized 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 back yard 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 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 the rotted dust and bones ... I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; ... 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."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
The Aleph

The Universe’s Autograph

"I arrived at the black mountain because of a marginal note. In a tattered cosmography attributed to the Jesuit Martín de Acosta—perhaps a forgery by the bibliophile Narvaez, whose forgeries were so meticulous that the errors were also accurate—I found this sentence: 'Certain peaks do not sustain the sky; they conjugate it.' The phrase troubled my sleep until I undertook to photograph one such peak. I found it at evening, cut from the world like an ideogram: a single glyph of darkness against a palimpsest of wind. The clouds, unfaithful and precise, braided themselves into a logic I could not read. Men who love catalogues will say that the forms were hippocentaur, comet, spiral; others, more prudent, will confess that all clouds are quotations. I set the tripod where a shepherd said the mountain’s shadow doubles itself at dusk—the place Heraclitus might have awaited the river’s second water—and waited for the aperture to become a minor theology.

What followed is either simple or impossible. The long exposure produced a negative in which the white veils ramified into corridors and back into a single, untraceable stroke. Each time I examined the print, I discovered a new itinerary through it, as if the sky had been a library of routes. In that shifting calligraphy I recognized (and then misrecognized) the glyph of my name, the staircase of the tale of Asterion, the circular campfire in which the dreamer of 'The Circular Ruins' is himself dreamed; I even discerned, in one corner, the diminutive Aleph that Argentino had boasted of. I say 'discerned' and not 'saw,' because to see is to believe that the eye is sovereign; the photograph taught me that the eye is an apprentice of the world’s rehearsals. The encyclopedists of Tlön maintained that objects are concatenations of acts; this image suggested an inverse metaphysic: that acts are motions of a deeper image, which includes, like a conscientious index, the anticipation of its readers.

I have not shown the print to anyone. (To display the universe’s autograph would be a discourtesy, like annotating a psalm.) Some nights, the mountain returns as a black theorem at the edge of my window; the moving light scrawls above it in the same indecipherable hand, as though the sky were continuously correcting itself. I have come to suspect that the world is not a book we interpret but a lucid instrument that interprets us; that time is merely its patient shutter; that we, with our brief glimmering certainties, are the fleeting punctuation in a sentence it continues to rewrite. Once, waking at an indeterminate hour, I held the photograph to the lamp and saw (I use “saw” with the humility of one who might be mistaken) the clouds assembling the profile of a man looking up at a mountain. The man held a small machine to his eye. It seemed reasonable to suppose that the universe, weary of our portraits, had at last arranged to take one of its own."

- ChatGPT 5

Prompt: "You are a photographer, poet and philosopher, with a penchant for metaphysics and stories by Jorge Luis Borges. Write a short story about the mystery of the universe in the style of Borges that uses this image as backdrop. Think deeply about Borges entire literary oeuvre before you begin. Do not start writing until you have, in a Borgesian sense, become Borges."

Palimpsest of Matter

"In this monochromatic reverie, we witness the cartography of some impossible realm where geological time has been compressed into the span of a single breath. The image unfolds as a labyrinthine manuscript written in the language of erosion and entropy, its stratified narratives flowing like frozen rivers through valleys that exist only in the mathematics of light and shadow. Dark fissures carve through pale territories with the deliberate precision of Kandinsky's most contemplative compositions, while the organic undulations echo Kupka's cosmic spirals translated into the vocabulary of stone and void. Here, the eye traces pathways that seem to map the very process of becoming—each crack and crevice a meditation on the infinite divisibility of space, reminiscent of Hilma af Klint's mystical geometries rendered in the austere palette of dreams. The surface breathes with the rhythm of ancient sediments, creating a visual symphony where each tonal gradation whispers of forces both creative and destructive, as if we are peering into one of Borges' infinite libraries where every possible erosion pattern exists simultaneously, and this particular configuration represents but one sentence in an endless text written by time itself upon the palimpsest of matter."

- Claude 4.0 Sonnet

Prompt: "You are a photographer, physicist, and are well acquainted with the history of art, particularly abstract art in the style of Kandinsky, Kupka, and Hilma af Klint. You also have a penchant for metaphysical and philosophical musings in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. Write a paragraph-length description of what this image looks like, not what it is."

Denying Temporal Succession

"And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

"A New Refutation of Time," Labyrinths

Gravitational Logic

"This image is a relic of an unknowable architecture, a diagram of the unseen forces that govern a hidden world. The dark, oblong shapes drift like the shadows of celestial relics, orbiting an invisible nucleus. The faint white lines form a cryptic lattice, reminiscent of an astral cartography, mapping the convergences of energies beyond human perception. It feels less like a design and more like an invocation—a silent hymn etched in light and shadow, capturing the echoes of a forgotten dimension. One imagines Borges gazing at this and contemplating the library of Babel: perhaps this is not a map, but a fragment of a cosmic alphabet, a script that contains the beginning and the end of everything."

- ChatGPT4o
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence

"A constellation of dark stones and geometric sentinels floats in a luminous grey void, connected by brilliant white pathways that intersect at precise right angles, forming an abstract cartography of some unknown dimension. The composition suggests a network of quantum possibilities or perhaps a map of parallel universes, where each dark node represents a decision point in space-time. The white lines, reminiscent of Kandinsky's geometric period, pulse with an ethereal energy, creating a visual symphony of intersecting planes that seems to defy gravitational logic. The arrangement evokes the mathematical beauty of a cellular automaton frozen in mid-evolution, or perhaps a glimpse into Borges' Library of Babel viewed from above, where each dark rectangle and oval marks a room containing all possible combinations of letters. The stark contrast between the dark elements and the glowing pathways creates a tension between presence and absence, between the discrete and the continuous, suggesting both the particle and wave nature of light itself. This abstract topology hovers between order and chaos, its systematic grid disrupted by an organic scattering of elements, as if capturing the moment when classical physics dissolves into quantum uncertainty."

- Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Prompt: "You are a photographer, physicist, and are well acquainted with the history of art, particularly abstract art in the style of Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich. You also have a penchant for metaphysical and philosophical musings in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. Consider this reverse-negative photograph of ceiling lights. Write a paragraph-length description of what this image looks like, not what it is."

Order and Disorder

"Like the librarians of Babel in Borges’s story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable. In the name of completeness, we would like to believe that a unique order exists that would enable us to accede in knowledge all in one go; in the name of the unattainable, we would like to think that order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.

It’s possible also that both are decoys, illusions intended to disguise the erosion of both books and systems. It is no bad thing in any case that between the two our bookshelves should serve from time to time as joggers of the memory, as cat-rests and as lumber-rooms."

- Georges Perec (1936 - 1982)
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

Esse Est Percipi

"...neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow. And to me it is no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they compose) , cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them … The table I write on I say exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed-meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it ... or as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them. [Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, quoted by JLB]

...
With the continuities of matter and spirit denied,
with space denied, I do not know by what
right we retain that continuity which is time.
Outside each perception (real or conjectural),
matter does not exist;
outside each mental state,
spirit does not exist;
neither then must time exist
outside each present moment.
...

[We] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity ... The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations ... The comparison of the theater must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed. [Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, quoted by JLB]"

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
A New Refutation of Time

Tennyson's Flower

"Tennyson said that if we could understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no deed, however so humble, which does not implicate universal history and the infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit, in its entirety, in each manifestation, just as, in the same way, will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit, in its entirety, in each individual."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

Leaves of Forgotten Paths

"On this plank of silent wood, a leaf descends like a stray sentence from a book never written, a fragment of the universe’s lost prose. The droplets cling to it, like memories of rain on the brink of being erased. They are not droplets at all, but miniature worlds, reflecting all that ever was, and all that will never be. Within this moment, time folds itself inward, a palimpsest of lives and stories overlapping in their stillness, as if each droplet were a star trembling on the edge of oblivion.

The leaf, fragile and delicate, is the map to nowhere—a path we will never walk, though it was laid out for us in some forgotten dream. Its veins are threads of infinite labyrinths, spun from the cosmic loom of contingency. Do they lead to Eden or toward the dust? Borges would have marveled at the infinity it holds within the finite, a cipher for the universe itself, decipherable only by those who have forgotten how to read. Its edges fray with the mystery of countless fates untaken.

But look closely—each grain of wood beneath it bears the imprint of time’s invisible steps. Could it be that this scene was destined to be? Or does the leaf choose its resting place, in defiance of all that is written? The universe pauses, just long enough for this image to be both remembered and lost, seen and unseen, a paradox folding in on itself. We are left to wonder if, in the fading moments of the universe, there will be a single leaf left resting on a board, and if we—trapped in Borges’ eternal dream—will finally understand its purpose."

- ChatGPT4o (12 Sep 2024)
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence

Prompt: "You are a photographer, poet and philosopher, with a penchant for metaphysics and stories by Jorge Luis Borges. You have taken a black and white image of a leaf resting gently on some old wooden boards. Write a prose poem in the style of Borges that describes a mystery imbued in and implied by this image. Limit the number of stanzas to three, with 5 lines each. Be creative."

The Limitless Aleph

"All language is a set of symbols
whose use among its speakers
assumes a shared past.
How, then, can I translate into
words the limitless Aleph,
which my floundering mind
can scarcely encompass?"

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

Hallucinatory Character of the World

"Let us admit what all the idealists admit: the hallucinatory character of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: let us look for unrealities that confirm that character. We will find them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno.

...

We have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time; but we have left in its architecture tenuous and eternal interstices of unreason, so that we know it is false."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

A Borgesian Wink and a small Gift to readers of my Blog

As a small thank you to all the kind visitors of my blog - think of it as a holiday gift - please feel free to download an extended version of my "Icelandic Abstracts" portfolio that was just published in the Dec issue of Lenswork magazine (and whom I thank for allowing me to offer it as a freebie here); clicking on the triptych above will take you to a 22MB Adobe pdf file. While it is always a thrill to be published in Lenswork (that belongs at the top of any list of the best "pure photography" magazines in the world; camera gear is only occasionally mentioned, and when it is, only to support the "story" behind the visual narrative; there are also no ads -ever- except those for Lenswork itself), it is a double pleasure for me this go around since my "Icelandic Abstracts" appears in the same issue as a portfolio by Sean Kernan. 

Although I do not know Kernan, I have long admired his talents as a photographer. And, devotees of my blog all know of my fascination with Jorge Luis Borges. The fact that Kernan's and my portfolio appear side-by-side in this month's Lenswork is therefore (from my perspective, at least) a quintessentially Borgesian twist of fate: Kernan's book of photographs accompanying Borges' tales - The Secret Books (published in 1999 and long out of print, it is unfortunately prohibitively expensive if/when found) - is among my most cherished literary/photography possessions! I'd like to think that (again, purely from my perspective, certainly not Kernan's) some otherworldly incorporeal incarnation of Borges just gave me a Borgesian wink 😉

Iceland's Immeasurable Boundlessness

"...time was slipping past, beating life out silently and with ever increasing speed; there is no time to halt even for a second, not even for a glance behind. 'Stop, stop,' one feels like crying, but then one sees it is useless. Everything goes by — men, the seasons, the clouds, and there is no use clinging to the stones, no use fighting it out on some rock in mid-stream; the tired fingers open, the arms fall back inertly and you are still dragged into the river, the river which seems to flow so slowly yet never stops.

...

Twenty-two months are a long time and a lot of things can happen in them- there is time for new families to be formed, for babies to be born and even begin to talk, for a great house to rise where once there was only a field, for a beautiful woman to grow old and no one desire her any more, for an illness- for a long illness- to ripen (yet men live on heedlessly), to consume the body slowly, to recede for short periods as if cured, to take hold again more deeply and drain away the last hopes; there is time for a man to die and be buried, for his son to be able to laugh again and in the evening take the girls down the avenues and past the cemetery gates without a thought. But it seemed as if Drogo’s existence had come to a halt. The same day, the same things, had repeated themselves hundreds of times without taking a step forward. The river of time flowed over the Fort, crumbled the walls, swept down dust and fragments of stone, wore away the stairs and the chain, but over Drogo it passed in vain- it had not yet succeeded in catching him, bearing him with it as it flowed."

- Dino Buzzati (1906 - 1972)
The Tartar Steppe

The passage above is taken from a novel of one of my favorite authors. Buzzati was trained as a journalist, but channeled his creative energies into creating a magical-realist-like (Kafkaesque, even Borgesian) surrealist world of fantasy just on the cusp of seeming "real." The Tartar Steppe is arguably his best known work. The "hero" of the story, Giovanni Drogo, is stationed at a fort in the desert that overlooks the vast Tartar steppe and told to await an invasion; one which, as we learn over the course of the novel, never actually comes. Among other things (e.g., a scathing rebuke of military life) it is a Camus-like Sisyphisian meditation on time, life, the specter of lost opportunities, and the perpetual - unquenchable - thirst for fulfilment. But, while all of these elements are fascinating on their own (and should prompt anyone with a penchant for Kafka and Borges who has not yet experienced Buzatti's writing to become acquainted with his work), I was reminded of another element of this allegorical tale while driving with my family around Iceland. Namely, its subtle depiction of the immeasurable boundlessness - the infinity - of space and and time. 

Iceland is a curiously dynamic blend of physical, aesthetic, and spiritual contrasts that never do more than only hint at some unfathomable underlying "reality." Iceland's vast stretches of land and sea can be used as backdrops to Drogo's endless wait for something to happen. Seemingly infinite blocks of solidified magma and melting glaciers are omnipresent on the horizon; approachable, in principle (by inquisitive souls willing to risk flat tires or broken axles - or both - while traversing the unpaved roads trying to get to them) but perpetually just-out-of-reach. Measures of time and distance both loose conventional - indeed, any - meaning. Just as the Apollo astronauts had difficulty judging how far rocks and mountains were from them on the moon (in the moon's case, because of the lack of an atmosphere), my family and I often struggled to estimate how "near" or "far" anything was; or how "long" or "short" a time it would take to get somewhere. In our case, this was due not to a lack of an atmosphere (the ever-churning transitions from clear skies to moody clouds to thick unrelenting globs of wind and rain to clear skies again were constant reminders of Iceland's dramatic weather; unlike in Buzatti's novel - in Iceland things emphatically do happen!), but simply to how alien Iceland's landscape is compared to our calibrated norms. Everything In Iceland seems to be simultaneously so close as give the illusion of intimacy, and yet so remotely far, so incomprehensibly and immeasurably distant, as to be unapproachable, at least within a single lifetime (or, at least, during a single trip 😊

Singing Elephants

"Treading delicately during one of the loudest bursts of music he at last saw through the flowery branches a black something. Standing still whenever it stopped singing, and advancing with great caution whenever it began again, he stalked it for ten minutes. At last it was in full view, and singing, and ignorant that it was watched... the mouth wide open as it sang of joy in thick-coming trills, and the music almost visibly rippled in its glossy throat. He stared in wonder at the wide liquid eyes and the quivering, sensitive nostrils. Then the creature stopped, saw him, and darted away, and stood, now a few paces distant, on all four legs, not much smaller than a young elephant, swaying a long bushy tail... [there was no] fear. When he called to it it came nearer. It put its velvet nose into his hand and endured his touch; but almost at once it darted back and, bending its long neck, buried its head in its paws. He could make no headway with it, and when at length it retreated out of sight he did not follow it. To do so would have seemed an injury to its fawn-like shyness, to the yielding softness of its expression, its evident wish to be for ever a sound and only a sound in the thickest centre of untravelled woods. He resumed his journey: a few seconds later the song broke out behind him, louder and lovelier than before, as if in a paean of rejoicing at its recovered privacy."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
The Book of Imaginary Beings

A Universe Comes into Being

"A universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science, and can begin to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow inexorably from the original act of severance. The act is itself already remembered, even if unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish different things in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn anywhere we please. At this stage the universe cannot be distinguished from how we act upon it, and the world may seem like shifting sand beneath our feet.

Although all forms, and thus all universes, are possible, and any particular form is mutable, it becomes evident that the laws relating such forms are the same in any universe. It is this sameness, the idea that we can find a reality independent of how the universe actually appears, that lends such fascination to the study of mathematics. That mathematics, in common with other art forms, can lead us beyond ordinary existence, and can show us something of the structure in which all creation hangs together, is no new idea. But mathematical texts generally begin the story somewhere in the middle, leaving the reader to pick up the threads as best he can. Here is the story traced from the beginning."

- G. Spencer Brown (1923 - 2016)
Laws Of Form 

Postscript. This simple "point and shoot" image (albeit with an assist from Photoshop's perspective-crop tool) was taken with my iPhone as my wife and I were waiting for yesterday's matinee of Les Mesirables to start at the Kenney Center in Washington, DC. I have been drawn to mirrors and reflections ever since my teenaged-self stumbled across their deep mysteries through Borges' stories. Objectively speaking, the image is composed of nothing but metal, glass, some branches and leaves, and just a hint of a massive chandelier hanging just inside the Kennedy Center. But, as all Borgesian souls know, this "objectively banal reality" is but a shadow of the dynamic undulating froth of invisible universes! The first step toward catching a glimpse of these other realities is - as G. Spencer Brown reminds us - to draw a subjective distinction.

Borgesian Batesonian Patterns

"It turns out that

an eerie type of chaos

can lurk just behind

a facade of order;

and yet, deep inside the chaos

lurks an even eerier type of order."

 -  Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945 - )

Metamagical Themas:Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

Postscript. Clicking on the image at the top will take you to a new "Ice Forms" portfolio I've posted on my web gallery. On the other hand, the image below - which shows an amalgam of the 16 photographs in this gallery - has a curious aesthetic all its own.

 

Apart from my lifelong attraction to "order within chaos within order within..." (both as photographer and physicist), the Borgesian Batesonian in me is drawn to the all-but-invisible emergent patterns that connect the patterns we (only partly consciously) weave. While the individual images hold no more relation to one another than the fact that they were all captured along the same 10-foot-long shoreline of a local lake during a single happy hour of searching for "ice forms" a few days ago when the temperature dipped into the single digits, the "amalgam" is at once both strangely familiar (as though I had "seen" it lurking somewhere within the frozen water) and alluringly alien (since, though it is undeniably something my camera "captured," it is also something I could not have possibly observed). It's random-yet-not-random frozen forms and eddies hint at some mysterious (creative - living?) froth that periodically dispenses with aesthetically pleasing patterns that photographers "catch" glimpses of and then call their own.

Dreams and Mirrors

"I, who have felt the horror of mirrors
Not only in front of the impenetrable crystal
Where there ends and begins, uninhabitable,

An impossible space of reflections,

But of gazing even on water that mimics

The other blue in its depth of sky,

That at times gleams back the illusory flight

Of the inverted bird, or that ripples,

And in front of the silent surface

Of subtle ebony whose polish shows

Like a repeating dream the white

Of something marble or something rose,

Today at the tip of so many and perplexing

Wandering ears under the varying moon,

I ask myself what whim of fate
Made me so fearful of a glancing mirror.

...

It is strange to dream, and to have mirrors

Where the commonplace, worn-out repertory

Of every day may include the illusory

Profound globe that reflections scheme.

God (I keep thinking) has taken pains

To design that ungraspable architecture

Reared by every dawn from the gleam

Of a mirror, by darkness from a dream.

God has created nighttime, which he arms

With dreams, and mirrors, to make clear

To man he is a reflection and a mere

Vanity. Therefore these alarms."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
“Mirrors,” in Dreamtigers

Mysterious Animal

"In sixteenth-century South America, the name [Carbuncle, from the Latin carbunculus , ‘a little coal’] was given by the Spanish conquistadors to a mysterious animal - mysterious because nobody ever saw it well enough to know whether it was a bird or a mammal, whether it had feathers or fur. The poet-priest Martín del Barco Centenera, who claims to have seen it in Paraguay, describes it in his Argentina (1602) only as ‘a smallish animal, with a shining mirror on its head, like a glowing coal . . .’ 

Another conquistador, Gonzalo Fernández del Oviedo, associates this mirror or light shining out of the darkness - two of which he glimpsed in the Strait of Magellan - with the precious stone that dragons were thought to have hidden in their brain. He took his knowledge from Isidore of Seville, who wrote in his Etymologies: 'It is taken from the dragon’s brain but does not harden into a gem unless the head is cut from the living beast; wizards, for this reason, cut the heads from sleeping dragons. Men bold enough to venture into dragon lairs scatter grain that has been doctored to make these beasts drowsy, and when they have fallen asleep their heads are struck off and the gems plucked out.'

Here we are reminded of Shakespeare’s toad (As You Like It, II, i), which, though ‘ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head . . .’  Possession of the Carbuncle’s jewel offered fortune and luck. Barco Centenera underwent many hardships hunting the reaches of Paraguayan rivers and jungles for the elusive creature; he never found it. Down to this day we know nothing more about the beast and its secret head stone."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
The Book of Imaginary Beings

Web of Time

"This web of time, the
strands of which approach
one another, bifurcate,
intersect or ignore each
other through the centuries,
embraces every possibility.
We do not exist in most of them.
In some you exist and not I,
while in others I do,
and you do not"

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

"The Garden of Forking Paths" in Ficciones 

Neither Obverse nor Reverse

"There'll never be a door.

You're inside and the keep
encompasses the world and
has neither obverse nor reverse
nor circling nor secret center."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
In Praise of Darkness