Facsimile Magazine

Facsimile Magazine November 2011

Epilepsy Warning

Faxtop
Noah Sparkes with forks in beard, photo by Eleni Kontos Andy Rooney  in his Manhattan office at the CBS broadcast center in 1978, photo by Rene Perez Green blue false color optical illusion Visible anatomical horse

The Tornado

Damage from the Rochester, Minnesota tornado of 1883

It was an intensely humid day in Rochester on August 21, 1883, and when thunderheads began to form in the northwest, the residents became hopeful that rain would bring relief from the heat. The clouds instead brought a huge tornado that roared through the city. Mother Alfred and the Sisters safely waited out the twister in the convent cellar, but others were not so fortunate; many homes were destroyed and many residents injured.

Upon recommendation of Dr. Mayo, who was a good friend of the Sisters, the congregation cared for 40 injured residents at the convent the first night after the tornado. When the injured throughout Rochester were transferred to a makeshift hospital downtown, Mayo asked the Sisters to supervise the volunteer nurses.

Mother Alfred thought often about the tornado during the next few weeks, and became convinced that Rochester needed a hospital for future emergencies. But when she presented the idea to Mayo, he balked at the plan. A hospital as a difficult and costly task, he said: besides, hospitals were still perceived by people as places where the sick went to die. Despite this pessimistic analysis, Mother Alfred persisted. "Just promise me that you will take charge of our hospital," she told Mayo, "and we will set that building before you at once."

The doctor agreed, and the sisters of Saint Francis began saving money for the new hospital. In just four years, the congregation had put away $40,000, the amount that Mayo had originally estimated would be needed to construct the hospital. Mayo and his sons, who were now licensed doctors themselves, had meanwhile developed the building plans, and construction began in 1888.

Although the grand opening of the hospital was scheduled for October 1, 1889, it opened one day early when the Mayos decided that an emergency operation could no longer wait. On September 30, Dr. Charlie, assisted by Dr. Will, successfully removed from a patient's eye an cancerous tumor. Eight more patients were admitted within the week. Mother Alfred's vision had come true. Saint Marys Hospital had opened its doors to the sick.

Mother Alfred served as administrator of the hospital for the next several months, supervising the few Sisters who were assigned there as fledging nurses, delivering trays of food to patients, shoveling coal, and carrying water from the basement. She left Rochester in 1890, having decided that a younger Sister should lead the hospital into the future, and retired in Saint Paul. She died there in 1899.

Mother Alfred Moes portrait by Newman Kraft Sister Joseph Dempsey portrait by Newman Kraft

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

I

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors hare something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number or men. I asked him the origin of this memorable observation and he answered that it was reproduced in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar. The house (which we had rented furnished) had a set of this work. On the last pages of Volume XLVI we found an article on Upsala; on the first pages of Volume XLVII, one on Ural-Altaic Languages, but not a word about Uqbar. Bioy, a bit taken aback, consulted the volumes of the index. In vain he exhausted all of the imaginable spellings: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr... Before leaving, he told me that it was a region of Iraq of or Asia Minor. I must confess that I agreed with some discomfort. I conjectured that this undocumented country and its anonymous heresiarch were a fiction devised by Bioy's modesty in order to justify a statement. The fruitless examination of one of Justus Perthes' atlases fortified my doubt.

The following day, Bioy called me from Buenos Aries. He told me he had before him the article on Uqbar, in volume XLVI of the encyclopedia. The heresiarch's name was not forthcoming, but there was a note on his doctrine, formulated in words almost identical to those he had repeated, though perhaps literally inferior. He had recalled: Copulation and mirrors are abominable. The text of the encyclopedia said: For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe. I told him, in all truthfulness, that I should like to see that article. A few days later he brought it. This surprised me, since the scrupulous cartographical indices of Ritter's Erdkunde were plentifully ignorant of the name Uqbar.

The tome Bioy brought was, in fact, Volume XLVI of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. On the half-title page and the spine, the alphabetical marking (Tor-Ups) was that of our copy but, instead of 917, it contained 921 pages. These four additional pages made up the article on Uqbar, which (as the reader will have noticed) was not indicated by the alphabetical marking. We later determined that there was no other difference between the volumes. Both of them (as I believe I have indicated) are reprints of the tenth Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bioy had acquired his copy at some sale or other.

We read the article with some care. The passage recalled by Bioy was perhaps the only surprising one. The rest of it seemed very plausible, quite in keeping with the general tone of the work and (as is natural) a bit boring. Reading it over again, we discovered beneath its rigorous prose a fundamental vagueness. Of the fourteen names which figured in the geographical part, we only recognized three - Khorasan, Armenia, Erzerum - interpolated in the text in an ambiguous way. Of the historical names, only one: the impostor magician Smerdis, invoked more as a metaphor. The note seemed to fix the boundaries of Uqbar, but its nebulous reference points were rivers and craters and mountain ranges of that same region. We read, for example, that the lowlands of Tsai Khaldun and the Axa Delta marked the southern frontier and that on the islands of the delta wild horses procreate. All this, on the first part of page 918. In the historical section (page 920) we learned that as a result of the religious persecutions of the thirteenth century, the orthodox believers sought refuge on these islands, where to this day their obelisks remain and where it is not uncommon to unearth their stone mirrors. The section on Language and Literature was brief. Only one trait is worthy of recollection: it noted that the literature of Uqbar was one of fantasy and that its epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön... The bibliography enumerated four volumes which we have not yet found, though the third - Silas Haslam: History of the Land Called Uqbar, 1874 - figures in the catalogs of Bernard Quartich's book shop 1. The first, Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen uber das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien, dates from 1641 and is the work of Johannes Valentinus Andrea. This fact is significant; a few years later, I came upon that name in the unsuspected pages of De Quincey (Writings, Volume XIII) and learned that it belonged to a German theologian who, in the early seventeenth century, described the imaginary community of Rosae Crucis - a community that others founded later, in imitation of what he had prefigured.

That night we visited the National Library. In vain we exhausted atlases, catalogs, annuals of geographical societies, travelers' and historians' memoirs: no one had ever been in Uqbar. Neither did the general index of Bioy's encyclopedia register that name. The following day, Carlos Mastronardi (to whom I had related the matter) noticed the black and gold covers of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia in a bookshop on Corrientes and Talcahuano... He entered and examined Volume XLVI. Of course, he did not find the slightest indication of Uqbar.

II

Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer of the southern railways, persists in the hotel at Adrogue, amongst the effusive honeysuckles and in the illusory depths of the mirrors. In his lifetime, he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen; once dead, he is not even the ghost he was then. He was tall and listless and his tired rectangular beard had once been red. I understand he was a widower, without children. Every few years he would go to England, to visit (I judge from some photographs he showed us) a sundial and a few oaks. He and my father had entered into one of those close (the adjective is excessive) English friendships that begin by excluding confidences and very soon dispense with dialog. They used to carry out an exchange of books and newspapers and engage in taciturn chess games... I remember him in the hotel corridor, with a mathematics book in his hand, sometimes looking at the irrecoverable colors of the sky. One afternoon, we spoke of the duodecimal system of numbering (in which twelve is written as 10). Ashe said that he was converting some kind of tables from the duodecimal to the sexagesimal system (in which sixty is written as 10). He added that the task had been entrusted to him by a Norwegian, in Rio Grande du Sul. We had known him for eight years and he had never mentioned in sojourn in that region... We talked of country life, of the capangas, of the Brazilian etymology of the word gaucho (which some old Uruguayans still pronounce gaucho) and nothing more was said - may God forgive me - of duodecimal functions. In September of 1937 (we were not at the hotel), Herbert Ashe died of a ruptured aneurysm. A few days before, he had received a sealed and certified package from Brazil. It was a book in large octavo. Ashe left it at the bar, where - months later - I found it. I began to leaf through it and experienced an astonished and airy feeling of vertigo which I shall not describe, for this is not the story of my emotions but of Uqbar and Tlön and Orbis Tertius. On one of the nights of Islam called the Night of Nights, the secret doors of heaven open wide and the water in the jars becomes sweeter; if those doors opened, I would not feel what I felt that afternoon. The book was written in English and contained 1001 pages. On the yellow leather back I read these curious words which were repeated on the title page: A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr. There was no indication of date or place. On the first page and on a leaf of silk paper that covered on of the color plates there was stamped a blue oval with this inscription: Orbis Tertius. Two years before I had discovered, in a volume of a certain pirated encyclopedia, a superficial description of a nonexistent country; now chance afforded me something more precious and arduous. Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody.

In the "Eleventh Volume" which I have mentioned, there are allusions to preceding and succeeding volumes. In an article in the N. R. F. which is now classic, Nestor Ibarra has denied the existence of those companion volumes; Ezequiel Martinez Estrada and Drieu La Rochelle have refuted that doubt, perhaps victoriously. The fact is that up to now the most diligent inquiries have been fruitless. In vain we have upended the libraries of the two Americas and of Europe. Alfonso Reyes, tired of these subordinate sleuthing procedures, proposes that we should all undertake the task of reconstructing the many and weighty tomes that are lacking: ex ungue leonem. He calculates, half in earnest and half jokingly, that a generation of tlonistas should be sufficient. This venturesome computation brings us back to the fundamental problem: Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor - an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly - has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers... directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan. This plan is so vast that each writer's contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, and irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally. Let it suffice for me to recall that the apparent contradictions of the Eleventh Volume are the fundamental basis for the proof that the other volumes exist, so lucid and exact is the order observed in it. The popular magazines, with pardonable excess, have spread news of the zoology and topography of Tlön; I think its transparent tiger and towers of blood perhaps do not merit the continued attention of all men. I shall venture to request a few minutes to expound its concept of the universe.

Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language - religion, letters, metaphysics - all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlön's conjectural Ursprache, from which the "present" languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word "moon,", but there is a verb which in English would be "to moon" or "to moonate." "The moon rose above the river" is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: "upward behind the onstreaming it mooned."

The preceding applies to the languages of the southern hemisphere. In those of the northern hemisphere (on whose Ursprache there is very little data in the Eleventh Volume) the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say "moon," but rather "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky" or any other such combination. In the example selected the mass of adjectives refers to a real object, but this is purely fortuitous. The literature of this hemisphere (like Meinong's subsistent world) abounds in ideal objects, which are convoked and dissolved in a moment, according to poetic needs. At times they are determined by mere simultaneity. There are objects composed of two terms, one of visual and another of auditory character: the color of the rising sun and the faraway cry of a bird. There are objects of many terms: the sun and the water on a swimmer's chest, the vague tremulous rose color we see with our eyes closed, the sensation of being carried along by a river and also by sleep. These second-degree objects can be combined with others; through the use of certain abbreviations, the process is practically infinite. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word. This word forms a poetic object created by the author. The fact that no one believes in the reality of nouns paradoxically causes their number to be unending. The languages of Tlön's northern hemisphere contain all the nouns of the Indo-European languages - and many others as well.

It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time. Spinoza ascribes to his inexhaustible divinity the attributes of extension and thought; no one in Tlön would understand the juxtaposition of the first (which is typical only of certain states) and the second - which is a perfect synonym of the cosmos. In other words, they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas.

This monism or complete idealism invalidates all science. If we explain (or judge) a fact, we connect it with another; such linking, in Tlön, is a later state of the subject which cannot affect or illuminate the previous state. Every mental state is irreducible: there mere fact of naming it - i.e., of classifying it - implies a falsification. From which it can be deduced that there are no sciences on Tlön, not even reasoning. The paradoxical truth is that they do exist, and in almost uncountable number. The same thing happens with philosophies as happens with nouns in the northern hemisphere. The fact that every philosophy is by definition a dialectical game, a Philosophie des Als Ob, has caused them to multiply. There is an abundance of incredible systems of pleasing design or sensational type. The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one such aspect. Even the phrase "all aspects" is rejectable, for it supposes the impossible addition of the present and of all past moments. Neither is it licit to use the plural "past moments," since it supposes another operation... One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present memory 2. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe - and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives - is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.

Amongst the doctrines of Tlön, none has merited the scandalous reception accorded to materialism. Some thinkers have formulated it with less clarity than fervor, as one might put forth a paradox. In order to facilitate the comprehension of this inconceivable thesis, a heresiarch of the eleventh century 3 devised the sophism of the nine copper coins, whose scandalous renown is in Tlön equivalent to that of the Eleatic paradoxes. There are many versions of this "specious reasoning," which vary the number of coins and the number of discoveries; the following is the most common:

On Tuesday, X crosses a deserted road and loses nine copper coins. On Thursday, Y finds in the road four coins, somewhat rusted by Wednesday's rain. On Friday, Z discovers three coins in the road. On Friday morning, X finds two coins in the corridor of his house. The heresiarch would deduce from this story the reality - i.e., the continuity - of the nine coins which were recovered. It is absurd (he affirmed) to imagine that four of the coins have not existed between Tuesday and Thursday, three between Tuesday and Friday afternoon, two between Tuesday and Friday morning. It is logical to think that they have existed - at least in some secret way, hidden from the comprehension of men - at every moment of those three periods.

The language of Tlön resists the formulation of this paradox; most people did not even understand it. The defenders of common sense at first did no more than negate the veracity of the anecdote. They repeated that it was a verbal fallacy, based on the rash application of two neologisms not authorized by usage and alien to all rigorous thought: the verbs "find" and "lose," which beg the question, because they presuppose the identity of the first and of the last nine coins. They recalled that all nouns (man, coin, Thursday, Wednesday, rain) have only a metaphorical value. They denounced the treacherous circumstance "somewhat rusted by Wednesday's rain," which presupposes what is trying to be demonstrated: the persistence of the four coins from Tuesday to Thursday. They explained that equality is one thing and identity another, and formulated a kind of reductio ad absurdum: the hypothetical case of nine men who on nine nights suffer a severe pain. Would it not be ridiculous - they questioned - to pretend that this pain is one and the same? They said that the heresiarch was prompted only by the blasphemous intention of attributing the divine category of being to some simple coins and that at times he negated plurality and at other times did not. They argued: if equality implies identity, one would also have to admit that the nine coins are one.

Unbelievably, these refutations were not definitive. A hundred years after the problem was stated, a thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch but of orthodox tradition formulated a very daring hypothesis. This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one subject, that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and that these beings are the organs and masks of the divinity. X is Y and is Z. Z discovers three coins because he remembers that X lost them; X finds two in the corridor because he remembers that the others have been found... The Eleventh Volume suggests that three prime reasons determined the complete victory of this idealist pantheism. The first, its repudiation of solipsism; the second, the possibility of preserving the psychological basis of the sciences; the third, the possibility of preserving the cult of the gods. Schopenhauer (the passionate and lucid Schopenhauer) formulates a very similar doctrine in the first volume of Parerga und Paralipomena.

The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first. The basis of visual geometry is the surface, not the point. This geometry disregards parallel lines and declares that man in his movement modifies the forms which surround him. The basis of its arithmetic is the notion of indefinite numbers. They emphasize the importance of the concepts of greater and lesser, which our mathematicians symbolize as > and <. They maintain that the operation of counting modifies the quantities and converts them from indefinite into definite sums. The fact that several individuals who count the same quantity would obtain the same result is, for the psychologists, an example of association of ideas or of a good exercise of memory. We already know that in Tlön the subject of knowledge is on and eternal.

In literary practices the idea of a single subject is also all-powerful. It is uncommon for books to be signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. The critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres...

Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete.

Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent. Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to his expectations. These secondary objects are called hronir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer. Until recently, the Hronir were the accidental products of distraction and forgetfulness. It seems unbelievable that their methodical production dates back scarcely a hundred years, but this is what the Eleventh Volume tells us. The first efforts were unsuccessful. However, the modus operandi merits description. The director of one of the state prisons told his inmates that there were certain tombs in an ancient river bed and promised freedom to whoever might make an important discovery. During the months preceding the excavation the inmates were shown photographs of what they were to find. This first effort proved that expectation and anxiety can be inhibitory; a week's work with pick and shovel did not mange to unearth anything in the way of a hron except a rusty wheel of a period posterior to the experiment. But this was kept in secret and the process was repeated later in four schools. In three of them failure was almost complete; in a fourth (whose director died accidentally during the first excavations) the students unearthed - or produced - a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or three clay urns and the moldy and mutilated torso of a king whose chest bore an inscription which it has not yet been possible to decipher. Thus was discovered the unreliability of witnesses who knew of the experimental nature of the search... Mass investigations produce contradictory objects; now individual and almost improvised jobs are preferred. The methodical fabrication of hronir (says the Eleventh Volume) has performed prodigious services for archaeologists. It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future. Curiously, the hronir of second and third degree - the hronir derived from another hron, those derived from the hron of a hron - exaggerate the aberrations of the initial one; those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second; in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original. The process is cyclical: the hron of the twelfth degree begins to fall off in quality. Stranger and more pure than any hron is, at times, the ur: the object produced through suggestion, educed by hope. The great golden mask I have mentioned is an illustrious example.

Things became duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.

Postscript (1947). I reproduce the preceding article just as it appeared in the Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1940), with no omission other than that o f a few metaphors and a kind of sarcastic summary which now seems frivolous. So many things have happened since then... I shall do no more than recall them here.

In March of 1941 a letter written by Gunnary Erfjord was discovered in a book by Hinton which had belonged to Herbert Ashe. The envelope bore a cancellation from Ouro Preto; the letter completely elucidated the mystery of Tlön. Its text corroborated the hypotheses of Martinez Estrada. One night in Lucerne or in London, in the early seventeenth century, the splendid history has its beginning. A secret and benevolent society (amongst whose members were Dalgarno and later George Berkeley) arose to invent a country. Its vague initial program included "hermetic studies," philanthropy and the cabala. From this first period dates the curious book by Andrea. After a few years of secret conclaves and premature syntheses it was understood that one generation was not sufficient to give articulate form to a country. They resolved that each of the masters should elect a disciple who would continue his work. This hereditary arrangement prevailed; after an interval of two centuries the persecuted fraternity sprang up again in America. In 1824, in Memphis (Tennessee), one of its affiliates conferred with the ascetic millionaire Ezra Buckley. The latter, somewhat disdainfully, let him speak - and laughed at the plan's modest scope. He told the agent that in America it was absurd to invent a country and proposed the invention of a planet. To this gigantic idea he added another, a product of his nihilism (4): that of keeping the enormous enterprise a secret. At that time the twenty volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were circulating in the United States; Buckleyy suggested that a methodical encyclopedia of the imaginary planet be written. He was to leave them his mountains of gold, his navigable rivers, his pasture lands roamed by cattle and buffalo, his Negroes, his brothels and his dollars, on one condition: "The work will make no pact with the impostor Jesus Christ." Buckley did not believe in God, but he wanted to demonstrate to this nonexistent God that mortal man was capable of conceiving a world. Buckley was poisoned in Baton Rouge in 1828; in 1914 the society delivered to its collaborators, some three hundred in number, the last volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. The edition was a secret one; its fourty volumes (the vastest undertaking ever carried out by man) would be the basis for another more detailed edition, written not in English but in one of the languages of Tlön. This revision of an illusory world, was called, provisionally, Orbis Tertius and one of its modest demiurgi was Herbert Ashe, whether as an agent of Gunnar Erfjord or as an affiliate, I do not know. His having received a copy of the Eleventh Volume would seem to favor the latter assumption. But what about the others?

In 1942 events became more intense. I recall one of the first of these with particular clarity and it seems that I perceived then something of its premonitory character. It happened in an apartment on Laprida Street, facing a high and light balcony which looked out toward the sunset. Princess Faucigny Lucinge had received her silverware from Pointiers. From the vast depths of a box embellished with foreign stamps, delicate immobile objects emerged: silver from Utrecht and Paris covered with hard heraldic fauna, and a samovar. Amongst them - with the perceptible and tenuous tremor of a sleeping bird - a compass vibrated mysteriously. The princess did not recognize it. Its blue needle longed from magnetic north; its metal case was concave in shape; the letters around its edge corresponded to one of the alphabets of Tlön. Such was the first intrusion of this fantastic world into the world of reality.

I am still troubled by the stroke of chance which made me witness of the second intrusion as well. It happened some months later, at a country store owned by a Brazilian in Cuchilla Negra. Amorim and I were returning from Sant' Anna. The River Tacuarembo had flooded and we were obliged to sample (and endure) the proprietor's rudimentary hospitality. He provided us with some creaking cots in a large room cluttered with barrels and hides. We went to bed, but were kept from sleeping until dawn by the drunken ravings of an unseen neighbor, who intermingled inextricable insults with snatches of milongas - or rather with snatches of the same milonga. As might be supposed, we attributed this insistent uproar to the store owner's fiery cane liquor. By daybreak, the man was dead in the hallway. The roughness of his voice had deceived us: he was only a youth. In his delirium a few coins had fallen from his belt, along with a cone of bright metal, the size of a die. In vain a boy tried to pick up this cone. A man was scarcely able to raise it from the ground. It held in my hand for a few minutes; I remember that its weight was intolerable and that after it was removed, the feeling of oppressiveness remained. I also remember the exact circle it pressed into my palm. The sensation of a very small and at the same time extremely heavy object produced a disagreeable impression of repugnance and fear. One of the local men suggested we throw it into the swollen river; Amorim acquired it for a few pesos. No one knew anything about the dead man, except that "he came from the border." These small, very heavy cones (made from a metal which is not of this world) are images of the divinity in certain regions of Tlön.

Here I bring the personal part of my narrative to a close. The rest is in the memory (if not in the hopes or fears) of all my readers. Let it suffice for me to recall or mention the following facts, with a mere brevity of words which the reflective recollection of all will enrich or amplify. Around 1944, a person doing research fro the newspaper The American (of Nashville, Tennessee) brought to light in a Memphis library the forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Even today there is a controversy over whether this discovery was accidental or whether it was permitted by the directors of the still nebulous Orbis Tertius. The latter is most likely. Some of the incredible aspects of the Eleventh Volume (for example, the multiplication of the hronir) have been eliminated or attenuated in the Memphis copies; it is reasonable to imagine that these omissions follow the plan of exhibiting a world which is not too incompatible with the real world. The dissemination of objects from Tlön over different countries would complement this plan... (5) The fact is that the international press infinitely proclaimed the "find." Manuals, anthologies, summaries, literal versions, authorized re-editions and pirated editions of the Greatest Work of Man flooded and still flood the earth. Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a resemblance of order - dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism - was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly plant? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws - I translate: inhuman laws - which we never quite grasp. Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty - not even a that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars... A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.

Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.

Notes

  1. Haslam has also published A General History of Labyrinths.
  2. Russell (The Analuysis of Mind, 1921, page 159) supposes that the planet has been created a few minutes ago, furnished with a humanity that "remembers" an illusory past.
  3. A century, according to the duodecimal system, signifies a period of a hundred and forty-four years.
  4. Today, one of the churches of Tlön Platonically maintains that a certain pain, a certain greenish tint of yellow, a certain temperature, a certain sound, are the only reality. All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.
  5. There remains, of course, the problem of the material of some objects.
Sister Domitilla DuRocher portrait by Newman Kraft Lines of Blaschko

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Gödel, Escher, Bach book purchase receipt

The Mayo Heritage

1864

Dr. William Worrall Mayo moves to Rochester to examine new recruits for the union Army.

1883 + 1888

Dr. Mayo's two sons, William J. and Charles H., join him in practice after finishing medical school.

1883

A tornado strikes Rochester. Mother Alfred Moes, of the Sisters of Saint Francis, proposes to build and staff a hospital if Dr. William Worrall Mayo and his sons will provide medical care. Saint Marys Hospital opens in 1889 with 27 beds.

Sister Mary Brigh Cassidy portrait by Newman Kraft

Tinted Contacts

We reach Chase
Plaza, "a vulgar contraction,"
sloping like a Page
to a made bed...

We enter from the rear,
naturally. There are no
Front Doors
here, the Front is
exclusively
for Effect:

it admits Nothing

The large extrusive
panes, whose geometry once
imbathed the Plaza
in a speculative aether,
have been blinkered
to conserve
Force the entire place
grows moss, acquiescing
to the fact.

Obama is there
in thick "sunsetter" kicks
and typeface,
having long replaced
his face with something so
Continuous
it resembles the outlay
of liquid displaced
by direct deposit
in the Bank of Chase.

Funny. I utter an Oath; its type is
More Charitable
than the deposit
is itself.

The heat is pulverizing.

Wait! That's no
Heat! They've switched
to Force, to Green
the Oeconomy!

You can tell.
The people huddle, stimulating
their digits eying arcana
willing litter.

I am approached by a
twenty seven year old
Reverend, with rare command
of his verbal. Say!

I say. Is that your Ship?

No, he replies. That
is the Tip of the Iceberg.

A Tip? a fellow demi
monde interjects,

misapprehending
the approach. What

Should I buy?

His face has adopted
the peevish mien

of a tax lien.

You should not.
It is You have been bought

with your pants down
No Less

let me direct that slush

to That inverted obelisk
pit over there, it used to
1
help register the enormity
of this Icon, now it Holds Its

2 in
like an Old Man Besides
we can't leave It Here,

It would shake
management.

Never have I so
requisited the commonplace
lessons of a boyhood
How to clean ones
ass hole with Moss

for instance. I had brought three
Green Burrito
Wraps
In, now one is left Out
in its postconsumer
form, my calves are
squatting, homeless men—

Then I see Dick Severin
Fuld, formerly of Lehman
Bros

He looks mossy, good
with Moss

Hey Dick! How do you
clean your ass hole
with this moss here

I require.

Do you just peel
it off the wall, like a facial
strip Or wait get a grip
Dick, do
n't slip

Fuld goes crashing
down, in a Mound

the mons pubis
of the Statue
of Liberty

I later realize
is what most relates
this Trip

I see you've had
an Accident Severin Dick
luckily for you
moss is Boss

Then I whip him
with my model cross!

Claymated Crystal
Change Propane and glass
Twitters candied Cuttlefish
is the treated Entree and
a section of Exelon signature
electric eel edifies
the managistic types whose
antic commingling
SCREWS THE ROOM into an
Arc de Triomphe frown
It's Easter at Chase Plaza
Year of our Disciplination
I've discovered the buffet
Chase lambs and giblets
and particular moss

SNEEZE! and in the After
Instance of this lapse I hear
strains of a Bo Diddley beat
If that diamond ring don't shine,
He gonna take it to a private eye
before revivifying

Luckily I've been seated
beside a mental girl with the lay
nervousness and observational
good humor of a Country Abbot
How did you stumble in
here I inquire Was it a
Planned Trip or is the prelude
more Magical and if so
please relate it?

Are those your coat or cock
tails making all that fancy talk
sit is what she advances before
crashing through a glass ceiling,
abrupting my focus

her Actual commentary
of such Scope and hilarity
as to Obviate my Business
yet Sentiment overlays
this charge becomes immediately

Love

So that, chewing on my coattails
in defined amplitudes, we go
to exploring the Bloom of the Hall
dissevered from ourselves and
delaying contact Each time
her face is undone thick and protean
my mood is exposed

It is like foam, moderated
by degree alone.

We bypass a necrosis of amped
Traders of both sexes monkeying
with their hair talking laboriously
on their recent trip to HARRAH'S
casino in Ft Worth when the
elevator's ring stings and they depart
through a flap like THAT

Such that
We're alone in a titanic dram
the size of a Large Bank
Fizzy Water falls in
sheets along one wall, draining
into a marble trough
full of pennies. Peeking through
a gap in the moss I glimpse
Northern Trust.

The animal rights traders have Left
Their stock on the floor, big heifers
Mordant steers and different brand
Deodorants, the place Smells like
Intestinal cheese and the animals
Look baleful. Their Human Principals
Have tried to Lower the cap on pain.

There is no cap on pain

making pain

a Perfect Marketplace.

Milady has a cosmic affinity for Animal,
a near spiritual conveyance. Come
Here my pretty lug, she coos to a Beluga Ox of obvious indecision. The Ox approaches

Lumbering XOXOXOXO

I am overcome by a kind of trepidation
A single incision in my spine
Spreads, its pain is precise my pleasure is
Not Precise I seem to float
Where am I going

Her hands involve the overhanging jelly lips
of the OX

picking pennies from its nose.

Take my mouth in your Ayurvedic hand,
Montana,

I mutter, betrothed.
I have been gashed by a branding pin
Whose location I cannot disclose.

her Successive strands have begun
their sex mirroring I have begun
my morning entombment, aiming them In
to the interior fingerings aiming them Off
The random display is still
My cheek, accustomed to moss,
grows shamrock
A free hand
turns the dial on the safe
with *my free hand*

consummating an agreement
The dial turns, like an enormous
Exhalation
entered into a diary.

When a State Custodian vaults In
to View, scraping the glass ceiling.

Listen! I gasp.

It sounds like women kissing!

She sets down her pole, to which
is attached a Moppy Head
resembling My Own. I am Agape.

This Instrument will sweep the Toxins
offshore, to Lesbos, the infamous
Haven—harboring these days
betwixt its well foliate shoals
the Receiver Ships.

Her wink is chain link.

From whence did you fetch your Masque?
I ask the sunburned interloper,
her skirt Sewn in the middle
to form ExPants, her skin a shade
of Seitan. Adding, convivially, It Heightens
the Moment.

From a banker, she declaims,
brushing my act OFF, and beginning
to show the steers the door.

But your honor That Ram
is not aquatic It will be depressed
aboard your ship This floor traded
in its Pain It is non-toxic
Feel this Dial
Its exhalation will broaden your grasp

And Besides What kind of Banker
has or had a Moppy Head like That,
That Effigy! has?

A Green Banker, she replies.
He laundered Emissions. I met him
in the Elevator

And she continues to sweep the assets
Out, to a waiting Ark
hovering 100 football yards about
above Dearborn Avenue

PICARESQUE
pronounced "dead"

It was on the outside just inside 6
o'clock, as if the end of long OBLOQUY
were a cover syntax for the porno
for your mother, that a Jay occurred
at our penthouse slip
atop Chase Bank farre out in the city
of Loops, and we were taken away

consensually, Themes of risk and
reward played on skeins
of coruscating bird thang, each suasion
a rep in the endless SYNTAX
It was Tax Day, in fact...
We had the wiring...
Only there was no end. There was no thinking.
Simply attitude, and suicideation.

Her Terrestrial knock opens
the window's plate, her shift
the world's sacrum at shift
her beak a bad streak
her eye a glass Navajo atlas
her coat a bedazzling oil sum
of miscreance and chance
her temper a litigious tactic
but a symptom, too, of lactose
intolerance
her talcum an outcome of aloe
her rebbe a Santa from Cairo,
IL,
her pedantry a coal of morse
code,
her only hope a good return
her breath conflated with death
her breast
the exchange of formalities
presented at impact
her stethoscope impressed
to her own heart,
which is, clearly, her bailiwick;

and a flotilla of fine feathers
is seen to seek
the market's bottom,
whose situation
supplies our parameter.

The bird's reflection is none
the worse. Her hoody, and
the sunshade of a neighboring
larch, form the shape
of the bank's uptick; the song
is good. None of it is missymphony.
I'm wearing the pants,
as it happens, and have
the view. Peru,

Tinted Contacts read by Adam Weg

Sister Generose Gervais portrait by Newman Kraft Doctors operating on Wang Yue Yue

1892

The first partner, Augustus W. Stinchfield, M.D., is added to the Mayo family practice. More physicians are invited to join, thus beginning the concept of an integrated group practice. The team approach naturally leads to a division of labor, specialists in different fields working together.

1905

Louis Wilson, M.D., develops a rapid new way to diagnose surgical specimens (quick-frozen tissue stained with methylene blue), which allows Mayo surgeons to explore, diagnose and repair, all in one operation.

Wang Yue Yue image brun

1914

Mayo isolates thyroxin, the principle active component of the thyroid gland -- only the second time a pure hormone has been isolated.

1915

Doctors come from all over the world to observe and learn, leading to the organization of one of the world's first formal graduate training programs for physicians, the Mayo School of Graduate Medical Education.

1919

The Mayos turn over the assets of Mayo Clinic to the nonprofit Mayo Properties Association, the forerunner of MAyo Foundation.

Jorge Luis Borges at the Hotel Beaux, 1969. Photo by Pepe Fernández

1920

Mayo develops a system for grading cancer on a numerical basis that is adopted worldwide and still used today.

1934

Edward Kendall, Ph.D., isolates cortisone, a hormone from the suprarenal cortex that will later be used to treat rheumatoid arthritis with dramatic results.

1944

First therapeutic application of streptomycin to treat tuberculosis. The patient is a 21-year-old woman in the last stages of pulmonary tuberculosis, and she is cured. Until then, the scientific community was convinced that nothing would ever kill tubercle bacilli in humans.

Ursula Bogner, 1978

Swiss Penal Code: Article 115

Inciting and assisting someone to commit suicide (Verleitung und Beihilfe zum Selbstmord)

A person who, for selfish reasons, incites someone to commit suicide or who assists that person in doing so will, if the suicide was carried out or attempted, be sentenced to a term of imprisonment (Zuchthaus) of up to 5 years or a term of imprisonment (Gefaängnis).

Happy illustration by Danielle Karmo Mayo brothers stamp, printed  September 11, 1964 Deighton - Het Miljarden-Monstrum Chiemi Manabe

1950

Edward Kendall, Ph.D., and Philip Hench, M.D., are awarded the Nobel Prize for the isolation and first clinical use of cortisone.

1955

Mayo is among the first medical centers to perform successful open heart surgery to repair congenital heart abnormalities after refining the gibbon heart-lung bypass machine (known as the Mayo-Gibbon heart-lung bypass machine).

1969

The first Food and Drug Administration-approved total hip replacement in the United States s performed at Mayo Clinic,heralding the advent of joint replacement.

Bond of Union by M. C. Escher, 1956 Occupy Oakland protesters at the Oakland docks. Photo by Seng Chen Nana Raep

1973

Mayo introduces the first CT scanner in North America.

1986

Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., opens.

1987

Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., opens, and St. Luke's Hospital, Jacksonville, Fla., becomes part of Mayo Clinic.

1992

Mayo begins to form Mayo CLinic Health System, a regional network of clinics and hospitals. Decorah (Iowa) Medical Associates is the first practice acquired by Mayo.

1998

Mayo Clinic Hospital opens in Phoenix, Ariz.

Philip Forbes Henshaw... on natural systems Snakes optical illusion by Akiyoshi Kitaoka Wang Yue Yue facsimile The mind as a wild garden, with each new awareness growing in a deep soil of spirit, wisdom, mime, image, wit, purpose, love, dream, passion, feeling, hope, thought, need, voice and belief, along with all the other dimensions of consciousness you nourish by Philip Forbes Henshaw

2002

Mayo Clinic is the first multicenter clinic to receive "comprehensive cancer center" designation for its entire cancer program.

2005

Mayo Clinic has one of the largest Electronic Medical Record systems in the world, providing efficient, coordinated, safe and high-quality care.

2005-2009

Mayo completed its first comprehensive fundraising campaign exceeding its $1.25 billion goal by $102 million. More than 286,000 donors worldwide gave during this unprecedented undertaking to propel Mayo Clinic's mission and vision.

2008

Mayo Clinic opens a new, 214-bed hospital on the Florida campus.

2010

The Mayo Clinic Board of governors approved efforts to further integrate Mayo Health System and Mayo Clinic, including a name and band change of the system to Mayo Clinic Health System.

X-ray of a sloth, photo by John Nyakatura/FSU Dr Black Jack operates on Pinoko Full body CT scan A tiny portion of Douglas R. Hofstadter's semantic network from Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid Impossible colors Molecular model of H. pylori urease enzyme
Woman's heart