A Note on the Finite Infinite Library: McBorges' and Influenced Forgetting

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2163

Jorge Borges wrote a powerful and wonderful short story called The Library of Babel, where the universe is basically composed of books the center of which is an anti-black-book-hole. I was thinking about this in a waiting room a few hours ago, and thinking of the Infinite in general, all of which somehow led me to the Finite Library and Forgetting. 

["The Librarian", is a 1566 work by Giueseppe Archimbaldo, 1526-1593, who painted incredible portraits such as this at a time when expressioin in this form would have been extremely uncommon--his semi-Boschian sense and image palette makes him the Vermeer of constructed object painting, I think.]

In a country set into thin mists, compulsive and repetitive feeding instruments were replaced with Ideaoterias. Rather than an endless maps of interwoven McDonald's restaurants set at predictable intervals, there are libraries.

1. Each library contains 10,000 books.

2. All 10,000 books are the same from library to library.

3. Each location must organize their 10,000 volumes differently, each grouping identifying ideas inherent in the contents of each volume, in support or negation of one another, arranged with other books that were complimentary, or supplementary, or antagonistic, or worse, or better.

    4. The organization of thought contained in those 10,000 volumes would be different from location to location, the librarian-explorers having organized the library so that the books were freed into new spaces.

    5. The number of books is finite; the infinite aspect is the continuous shifting of material and the expanding structure for the display of ideas. The simplest aspect of this arrangement makes it possible for every book to actually be seen. (Even in cursory browsing the mind has certain expectations of what-come-next when browsing a shelf, sweeping past things that have been swept-past before, rejected or unneeded for whatever reason. The deeper aspect is for the association of ideas by the placement of book, the arrangements suggesting themselves for the reader to have a new experience witn an old idea or book or set of books.

    6. The McBorges' Library is a learning, memory, and forgetting experience.

    7. Forgetting may be a key to making these libraries an infinite experience: re-re-re-etc.-learning does not imply necessarily that the learned bits will be cumulative, and useful. Maybe the best we can do is have learned and re-learned bits in a new context, making it possible to have more ideas; this means that a certain amount of forgetting is necessary, where that forgetting unleashes existing associations of ideas.

    8. At McBorges', forgetting is an important aspect of learning, but really only in regard to what it would take to open the possibilities for new ideas by rearrangement of old relationships. The palaces of memory work hand-in-hand with the Palaces of Forgetting.