Episode 145: Lost in Borges' Garden

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00]: Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.

[00:00:09] [SPEAKER_00]: Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:01:27] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, well here we are in El Paso recording in person face to face in the same room.

[00:01:38] [SPEAKER_04]: Hey, hey you smell, you smell kind of good. Is that some sort of product you're wearing? I don't know like axe body spray. What is that?

[00:01:47] [SPEAKER_01]: It's my Tommy girl. That's actually my favorite scent. You also smell very nice. God damn it, fine. We're not in El Paso but it's not my fault.

[00:02:04] [SPEAKER_01]: Is it not? It's not my fault. This is, I had my tickets ready to go, my hotel booked and the flight just did, I got an alert that the flight was going to miss its connection.

[00:02:18] [SPEAKER_01]: My first alert was I had to connect through Chicago for Mithica and it was, oh we can get you to El Paso and then it gave me a four connection flight that had to go to Detroit to LA and then back to El Paso.

[00:02:32] [SPEAKER_01]: So the other option was to get up at three in the morning and drive, miss half the conference and Tamler you're worth a lot but you're not.

[00:02:40] [SPEAKER_04]: Here's an alternate version of that story. You realized, wait what the fuck am I doing going to El Paso in the middle of August?

[00:02:49] [SPEAKER_01]: You know how long it took me to get American Airlines to introduce a delay? It cost a lot of money. How was it?

[00:02:58] [SPEAKER_04]: It was actually really fun, the really good people and it's really beautiful out there. Like it was hot but you know you had the whole morning to hike or do what you wanted and a lot of the evening.

[00:03:13] [SPEAKER_04]: You just really couldn't be outside from like 12 to 7 or 1 to 7 or something like that but there's something about the desert landscape that I just absolutely love.

[00:03:26] [SPEAKER_04]: And the conference was good, a lot of, it was a good mix of philosophers and psychologists. Linda Skitka was there, she knows you.

[00:03:34] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, I love Linda. She's great. It was actually bum not to be able to hang out with her.

[00:03:40] [SPEAKER_04]: And she said that her son listened to the podcast but that she had never listened to a single word of it.

[00:03:48] [SPEAKER_01]: I know she, last I talked to her, she was honest with me because Linda's an honest person. She just couldn't get past my giggles.

[00:04:00] [SPEAKER_04]: It's hard for all of us really.

[00:04:03] [SPEAKER_04]: So yeah it was great. It was a good conference, met some good people.

[00:04:07] [SPEAKER_04]: So today we're going to talk about The Garden of Forking Paths, a short story by Borges who we discussed last time.

[00:04:18] [SPEAKER_04]: This is the story that immediately follows the library of Babbel and definitely has some connections to the library.

[00:04:26] [SPEAKER_04]: Like it's interesting that they're back-to-back in his collection.

[00:04:31] [SPEAKER_04]: Arguably it's hard to understand The Garden of Forking Paths, or at least it's relevant if you've just read the library.

[00:04:39] [SPEAKER_04]: So like that worked out I think really well that we are doing these episodes back-to-back.

[00:04:45] [SPEAKER_04]: We'll also talk about something that I did in El Paso and you did while you were supposed to be in El Paso,

[00:04:53] [SPEAKER_04]: which is see the movie Sorry to Bother You.

[00:04:56] [SPEAKER_04]: So we'll talk a little bit about that as well.

[00:04:59] [SPEAKER_04]: Do you want to talk about Sorry to Bother You?

[00:05:02] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, let's talk. So I was really excited about the movie coming out.

[00:05:05] [SPEAKER_01]: I think in part because just seeing a bunch of the people that I randomly follow on Twitter tweeting who had gotten to see it,

[00:05:15] [SPEAKER_01]: I think at Sundance or whatever, that was months ago.

[00:05:18] [SPEAKER_01]: So I've been waiting to see it and of course it's an independent film, so didn't show up right away in my little ass town of Ithaca.

[00:05:27] [SPEAKER_01]: So when it finally did come out I was very excited.

[00:05:29] [SPEAKER_01]: It's directed and written by Boots Riley who is a rapper from Oakland and is a member of the group called The Coup,

[00:05:39] [SPEAKER_01]: which was one of my favorite rap groups back in the early 90s.

[00:05:44] [SPEAKER_01]: So I highly recommend listening to any of those albums from The Coup.

[00:05:49] [SPEAKER_01]: He's a really sharp dude and he's a communist, so if you don't like communists, don't listen to them, but then I don't know what you would think of Sorry to Bother You,

[00:05:59] [SPEAKER_01]: which we can get into, but he's a super sharp creative guy.

[00:06:04] [SPEAKER_04]: And his parents were labor activists and so this is like a family kind of deal.

[00:06:12] [SPEAKER_04]: And like you said, Sorry to Bother You has that kind of underc…

[00:06:17] [SPEAKER_04]: You certainly don't have to be a communist to enjoy the movie or that it gives you a lot to think about,

[00:06:22] [SPEAKER_04]: but that is an undercurrent in the movie or not even, it's not subject, it's often text.

[00:06:30] [SPEAKER_04]: And yeah, so what did you think of the movie? We haven't really talked about it.

[00:06:34] [SPEAKER_01]: No we haven't. We're going in cold and so we have to say that they're made…

[00:06:42] [SPEAKER_01]: They're made in this discussion. And it's hard to have a full discussion about the movie without talking about some pretty heavy spoilers,

[00:06:51] [SPEAKER_01]: so we'll just try to work around it and talk… I'll just talk about my general impressions of the movie.

[00:06:55] [SPEAKER_04]: We are planning to do a Patreon episode on it where we will get into spoilers, so you should see it and see it in the theater.

[00:07:02] [SPEAKER_04]: And I'm going to re-watch it. Like I think it's definitely going to benefit from a re-watch too.

[00:07:08] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, for sure. I really liked it. It is weird. It is like from the…

[00:07:15] [SPEAKER_01]: I think when you and I tweeted a bit about it after we saw it and you described it, I don't remember what you said,

[00:07:24] [SPEAKER_01]: but it is some blend of sort of magic realism.

[00:07:28] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't think I did that.

[00:07:29] [SPEAKER_01]: You didn't say that?

[00:07:30] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. I don't think I said anything about it.

[00:07:34] [SPEAKER_01]: It's absurd. There's a layer of absurdity to it that is… I hate to say Kafkaesque, but it really is.

[00:07:46] [SPEAKER_04]: Or Brazil. For the listeners who have seen the movie Brazil, I would say that's a parallel too.

[00:07:52] [SPEAKER_04]: There are just things that happen that are just strange, like there's this kind of dystopian element to it,

[00:08:00] [SPEAKER_04]: even though it is taking place maybe in the past.

[00:08:03] [SPEAKER_01]: Right. And so roughly the plot is that there is a man in Oakland who is poor.

[00:08:13] [SPEAKER_01]: He's black. He's from Oakland. He's struggling to make ends meet.

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_01]: He lives in a garage with his girlfriend.

[00:08:21] [SPEAKER_01]: And he gets a job doing telemarketing, just selling stupid shit, doing cold calls.

[00:08:29] [SPEAKER_01]: But then he gets advice from a senior black telemarketer that if he just uses his white voice,

[00:08:37] [SPEAKER_01]: he'll do a lot better.

[00:08:38] [SPEAKER_01]: At first he's like, I don't know what you're talking about. This already is my white voice.

[00:08:42] [SPEAKER_01]: I kind of talk white. He's like, no, no, you know it.

[00:08:45] [SPEAKER_01]: And then magically it's the voice of David Cross that comes out of his mouth.

[00:08:49] [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't even know that.

[00:08:51] [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, you didn't know who's David Cross?

[00:08:53] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's awesome.

[00:08:54] [SPEAKER_01]: And the other black character who has the white voice later on in the movie,

[00:09:00] [SPEAKER_01]: the mustachioed gentleman, that's Pat Nozwald's voice.

[00:09:05] [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, that makes sense. That's awesome.

[00:09:08] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, the guy with the eye patch.

[00:09:10] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, exactly.

[00:09:11] [SPEAKER_04]: And Danny Glover briefly has a white voice too.

[00:09:14] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so then it's the story of sort of his rapid rise to success and everything that comes along with it.

[00:09:21] [SPEAKER_04]: But meanwhile as he's succeeding there's this labor unrest within the telemarketing group

[00:09:27] [SPEAKER_04]: that he has been a part of before he gets promoted.

[00:09:32] [SPEAKER_04]: And so that's the central tension.

[00:09:35] [SPEAKER_04]: And you know, it's fairly straightforward while still having stylized and kind of absurdist weirdness

[00:09:43] [SPEAKER_04]: in the way that things will cut like and then all of a sudden they'll be in a new place.

[00:09:48] [SPEAKER_01]: That's right. I saw it with a couple of friends and I was trying to...

[00:09:51] [SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't put my finger on what it was about those.

[00:09:56] [SPEAKER_01]: They're almost like small phrases within the film that can be non sequiturs and you could try to connect them.

[00:10:06] [SPEAKER_01]: But Lucky Stamfield, it's great by the way. He's also in Atlanta.

[00:10:12] [SPEAKER_01]: He'll show Atlanta and in Jordan Peele's movie Get Out.

[00:10:18] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, he plays the first guy who's the guy in the opening scene who's then taken prisoner

[00:10:24] [SPEAKER_04]: and then again becomes kind of white.

[00:10:28] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:10:29] [SPEAKER_01]: And he's also in Straight Outta Compton as Snoop Dogg.

[00:10:35] [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I didn't know that.

[00:10:37] [SPEAKER_01]: That makes sense, right?

[00:10:38] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it does.

[00:10:39] [SPEAKER_01]: And actually I have to say currently basking in the sun of the Inland Empire

[00:10:45] [SPEAKER_01]: I'd like to acknowledge Lucky Stamfield being from my hometown, Riverside and Semberdina.

[00:10:51] [SPEAKER_01]: We have a connection.

[00:10:52] [SPEAKER_01]: Lucky, if you're listening.

[00:10:54] [SPEAKER_04]: So a couple of... I really liked the movie.

[00:10:57] [SPEAKER_04]: One of the things we'll talk about in our Patreon spoiler episode is the end, like the last 20 minutes where it ups the notch of weirdness.

[00:11:09] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, I know from the critical response to it, it's very mixed especially close to the very end sort of what happens.

[00:11:19] [SPEAKER_04]: But things take a strange turn.

[00:11:20] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know if I am pro or con yet, but I'm very pro the whole movie.

[00:11:28] [SPEAKER_04]: And I think Tessa Thompson who plays his girlfriend who's an artist.

[00:11:35] [SPEAKER_04]: She's kind of a, I don't know, some sort of modern, young, radical artist and that's in her art is radical.

[00:11:44] [SPEAKER_04]: She does some performance art.

[00:11:45] [SPEAKER_04]: Very, very weird.

[00:11:46] [SPEAKER_04]: I think that, I love Tessa Thompson and I think that if any practically any other actor played that role you might hate that character.

[00:11:56] [SPEAKER_04]: You might find her really fucking annoying, but she sells it in a way that you don't at all.

[00:12:03] [SPEAKER_04]: And I think that's a really tough cause it is a little bit of an idealized version of what a girlfriend like that would be.

[00:12:14] [SPEAKER_04]: She's strong, she's independent, she's smart, she's funny.

[00:12:18] [SPEAKER_04]: She loves to get high and like hang out with the friends.

[00:12:21] [SPEAKER_01]: She has these great earrings that say kill, kill, kill, murder, murder, murder.

[00:12:24] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:12:24] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, she's always looking kind of cool.

[00:12:27] [SPEAKER_04]: And yet like there's something about her performance that you just, you absolutely are like, I don't know.

[00:12:36] [SPEAKER_04]: I thought she was outstanding.

[00:12:39] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:12:39] [SPEAKER_01]: No, I totally agree.

[00:12:40] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm like the character, her character itself.

[00:12:45] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what to think of and it's something that I don't think I've concluded.

[00:12:49] [SPEAKER_01]: I mean this is a movie that really does have me thinking more than I even, I knew that that's what people were saying.

[00:12:59] [SPEAKER_01]: Like, oh you're gonna be thinking about this movie later on.

[00:13:02] [SPEAKER_01]: But there's something about it and I don't think it's just straightforwardly the script and the interpretation of the events that make me think about it.

[00:13:10] [SPEAKER_01]: It's actually the performances.

[00:13:12] [SPEAKER_01]: There is no good person.

[00:13:16] [SPEAKER_01]: Like none of them are just like unabashedly good.

[00:13:22] [SPEAKER_01]: Everybody seems to have mixed motives and the person who is faced with the central tension of choosing between sort of selling out as friends for the sake of money versus sticking with the union.

[00:13:36] [SPEAKER_01]: It's not so obvious that he's doing the wrong thing and it's certainly not that obvious from the reaction of Tessa Thompson's character at first.

[00:13:47] [SPEAKER_01]: Right?

[00:13:47] [SPEAKER_04]: Like she's, she's very disapproving of him adopting the white voice and then I don't know if this is too spoilery we can cut it out.

[00:13:57] [SPEAKER_04]: But then when she's doing her performance art piece, she adopts a voice that isn't her own either.

[00:14:06] [SPEAKER_04]: And I don't know, I think that undercuts a little bit the, she's not self-righteous about it but clearly just thinks that it's terrible to have to become a completely different person in order to do your job well.

[00:14:24] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:14:27] [SPEAKER_01]: I wonder, I was left wondering what the director himself thinks about that kind of art and he's obviously an artist, a musician himself but it's unclear to me whether he's saying that there's anything valuable in what she's doing or that there's not or nothing.

[00:14:50] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:14:51] [SPEAKER_04]: I like to think that he's sort of drawn to both of those sort of opinions, you know?

[00:14:57] [SPEAKER_04]: And he's, he's good about like just putting it out there and letting us be conflicted about it.

[00:15:03] [SPEAKER_04]: Right.

[00:15:04] [SPEAKER_01]: So there's one other thing I want to say which is it's kind of, you know, Boots Riley the director has been rapping, you know, so their first album was in 93.

[00:15:15] [SPEAKER_01]: I was a young whippersnapper in, in Northern California.

[00:15:21] [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's how I got exposed as a college student to, to that stuff.

[00:15:25] [SPEAKER_01]: That's a long time ago and this guy has been putting in work as an artist.

[00:15:30] [SPEAKER_01]: You know, he's 47 years old now.

[00:15:32] [SPEAKER_01]: This is his debut, film debut.

[00:15:35] [SPEAKER_01]: And it's incredible to me, one that, that at this stage in someone's career they can have such a successful debut movie.

[00:15:47] [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes you think like I thought to myself when I saw that this movie was doing well, well obviously he's a master storyteller in his raps but that doesn't mean anything.

[00:15:57] [SPEAKER_01]: No, that doesn't mean you can direct a freaking movie.

[00:16:00] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm like where the hell did he go?

[00:16:03] [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, there are, there are aspects to the movie that might, you might interpret as, as the work of a novice.

[00:16:11] [SPEAKER_01]: Right?

[00:16:12] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[00:16:12] [SPEAKER_01]: But those things are what kind of what make it endearing.

[00:16:16] [SPEAKER_01]: Like I don't know how else to describe it.

[00:16:18] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:16:18] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean it has kind of an amateurish sort of feel to it and parts but I also think that that's partly like the style that he's going for.

[00:16:29] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:16:29] [SPEAKER_04]: And maybe with the exception of the end I think it is very well directed.

[00:16:37] [SPEAKER_04]: Like it is the way, the sort of momentum of the shots and the movement and the cuts and like I didn't, I mean I thought he was younger.

[00:16:48] [SPEAKER_04]: I didn't know he was 47.

[00:16:49] [SPEAKER_04]: Like I'm 47.

[00:16:53] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:16:53] [SPEAKER_04]: I know that, that's crazy that he just suddenly not only develops the screenplay which you could sort of understand.

[00:17:01] [SPEAKER_04]: I guess he wrote the soundtrack first then developed the screenplay with Sundance Labs and then it was a big hit at Sundance.

[00:17:10] [SPEAKER_04]: But then to go on and direct it is and for it to be like a really interesting kind of visual voice.

[00:17:19] [SPEAKER_04]: That's so impressive.

[00:17:21] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:17:22] [SPEAKER_04]: I thought he was one of these young guys and you know if you're young and if you're like 29 or 30 or 30 you just have nothing but time and energy.

[00:17:32] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:17:33] [SPEAKER_04]: But to do that at that point is really...

[00:17:37] [SPEAKER_04]: No, I know.

[00:17:37] [SPEAKER_01]: I had to double check because I was like, you know I remember their first album was in 1993 and I definitely remember that he was older than me.

[00:17:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Barely but yeah.

[00:17:47] [SPEAKER_01]: One really quick thing about the coup.

[00:17:51] [SPEAKER_01]: So Boots Riley is the rapper, used to have two other people in the group.

[00:17:56] [SPEAKER_01]: One of them is a woman named Pam, the Funkstress who was their DJ, who was just incredible.

[00:18:03] [SPEAKER_01]: She died I believe last year at age 51.

[00:18:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Sad, very sad death but she was just one of the great, just a great DJ.

[00:18:14] [SPEAKER_01]: In her performances when she would scratch the records, she was an incredible scratcher, a turntablist.

[00:18:21] [SPEAKER_01]: She would do this routine where she would actually use her boobs to scratch the records.

[00:18:27] [SPEAKER_01]: It was incredible.

[00:18:28] [SPEAKER_01]: But toward the end there Prince saw her and liked her so much that Prince made her his DJ.

[00:18:36] [SPEAKER_01]: So she got to tour with Prince.

[00:18:37] [SPEAKER_01]: So it was a great group while it lasted.

[00:18:42] [SPEAKER_05]: That's awesome.

[00:18:43] [SPEAKER_04]: How do you scratch records with your boobs?

[00:18:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Type in Pam the Funkstress scratches boobs into YouTube and I'm sure you'll see it.

[00:18:51] [SPEAKER_01]: It's not what you would think, I don't know.

[00:18:57] [SPEAKER_05]: I'm not sure what I do think but...

[00:19:03] [SPEAKER_04]: Take a break.

[00:19:04] [SPEAKER_04]: Take a break and we'll be back to talk about the Garden of Forking Pads.

[00:19:12] [SPEAKER_07]: Look man, you know somebody to keep their mouth shut.

[00:19:16] [SPEAKER_07]: I won't blush to murder.

[00:20:20] [SPEAKER_04]: Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.

[00:20:22] [SPEAKER_04]: At this time we like to take a moment to thank all of our listeners, all the people who have made this community such a rewarding community to be a part of.

[00:20:34] [SPEAKER_04]: We love hearing from you, we love interacting with you.

[00:20:40] [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe with one possible exception.

[00:20:43] [SPEAKER_04]: Stop sending us the fucking little kid breaking the trolleys on the trolley problem that video.

[00:20:51] [SPEAKER_04]: I can't see that little kid again.

[00:20:55] [SPEAKER_01]: Don't click on it Tamra.

[00:20:58] [SPEAKER_01]: You're just announcing how easy it is going to be to troll you.

[00:21:01] [SPEAKER_04]: Hey, he solved the trolley problem.

[00:21:03] [SPEAKER_04]: Yes, okay, but you know what?

[00:21:05] [SPEAKER_04]: The people have been sending that for two...

[00:21:07] [SPEAKER_04]: The people don't know that everybody else has been sending this.

[00:21:10] [SPEAKER_04]: I understand.

[00:21:12] [SPEAKER_04]: Now maybe they will.

[00:21:15] [SPEAKER_04]: Anyway, but this is supposed to be positive.

[00:21:18] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm not supposed to be bitching right now about the interactions.

[00:21:22] [SPEAKER_04]: We need to switch it up.

[00:21:24] [SPEAKER_04]: You can email us at VeryBadWizards at gmail.com, you can find us on Twitter at Tamler at Peezz

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[00:21:49] [SPEAKER_04]: I saw.

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[00:23:39] [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, I'm also going to do one with Jesse Graham and Natalia Washington on Twin Peaks The Return.

[00:23:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, this is the first time hearing of this so it's not an official Very Bad Wizards episode.

[00:23:51] [SPEAKER_01]: That's right.

[00:23:53] [SPEAKER_04]: I have mentioned it to you that I wanted to do that.

[00:23:56] [SPEAKER_04]: They're big Twin Peaks fans in general. Jesse Graham has been a guest on the show.

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[00:24:27] [SPEAKER_04]: All of it is great. We love- we were so grateful for your support and we hope that it keeps going and we'll try to do what we can to earn it.

[00:24:40] [SPEAKER_01]: And for $50.00 and up the new reward is that we take less than 10 minutes to thank you for your support.

[00:24:46] [SPEAKER_01]: I stop rambling, yeah.

[00:24:51] [SPEAKER_01]: Alright so today's main topic, part two of Part N on Borges.

[00:25:00] [SPEAKER_01]: This time we're tackling the Garden of Forking paths.

[00:25:03] [SPEAKER_01]: Again, as Tamar said, a suggestion from a Redditor.

[00:25:07] [SPEAKER_01]: But yet an obvious one. I don't know why it took us six years.

[00:25:10] [SPEAKER_01]: By the way this is going to be six years, right?

[00:25:13] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[00:25:14] [SPEAKER_01]: In August?

[00:25:15] [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[00:25:16] [SPEAKER_01]: This might actually be posted on our whenever six year-

[00:25:19] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, definitely will. This is our sixth anniversary episode.

[00:25:23] [SPEAKER_01]: Oh man, we didn't even get each other flowers anymore.

[00:25:27] [SPEAKER_01]: No.

[00:25:28] [SPEAKER_04]: We're going through the motions at this point.

[00:25:32] [SPEAKER_01]: Doing podcasts with other people.

[00:25:35] [SPEAKER_04]: Once our daughters go to college it's like will we even stay together? I don't know.

[00:25:42] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm jealous of Yoel and Bart and Mickie and Slick for their new romance.

[00:25:47] [SPEAKER_01]: They drink together.

[00:25:50] [SPEAKER_05]: They're still in the honeymoon phase.

[00:25:55] [SPEAKER_01]: Alright Garden of Forking paths.

[00:25:57] [SPEAKER_01]: So this is, as Tamar mentioned, published in the same collection as the Library of Babel.

[00:26:06] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it really does, as you say, make sense to read them back to back.

[00:26:10] [SPEAKER_01]: So before I get into what we'll do is we'll just briefly describe the surface story.

[00:26:16] [SPEAKER_01]: What Freud called the manifest content of the story.

[00:26:19] [SPEAKER_01]: Because it has a plot.

[00:26:20] [SPEAKER_01]: It has a good story.

[00:26:23] [SPEAKER_01]: In that sense, yeah.

[00:26:25] [SPEAKER_01]: But definitely read it.

[00:26:26] [SPEAKER_01]: Again, it's short.

[00:26:28] [SPEAKER_01]: It's dense, but it's short.

[00:26:30] [SPEAKER_01]: Get past the first two paragraphs and you'll be right in the mix.

[00:26:33] [SPEAKER_04]: I would say not just read it, but I almost think it has to be read like two or three times before you can begin to sort of feel how things are fitting together.

[00:26:45] [SPEAKER_04]: And get some kind of take on it.

[00:26:48] [SPEAKER_04]: It's definitely one you need to reread.

[00:26:51] [SPEAKER_01]: I absolutely agree.

[00:26:53] [SPEAKER_04]: And it goes down also smoother when you read it the second time.

[00:26:58] [SPEAKER_04]: And you sort of know at some level what's going to happen.

[00:27:01] [SPEAKER_04]: And now you can focus on the other sort of whatever Freud called the other.

[00:27:06] [SPEAKER_04]: The latent content.

[00:27:11] [SPEAKER_01]: So the story is a fairly straightforward one.

[00:27:15] [SPEAKER_01]: It is an, the narrator, the editor is talking about a particular period of time during the First World War when there was a battle that was postponed.

[00:27:28] [SPEAKER_01]: And he says the official reason for why this battle was delayed is as follows and he lists a reference.

[00:27:36] [SPEAKER_01]: But he says this statement that I found shed some different light on the events.

[00:27:40] [SPEAKER_01]: And so then he picks right up off, right up at the narration of a man who is played some role in the events of that battle in World War One.

[00:27:53] [SPEAKER_01]: It is a German spy of Chinese descent who realizes that he has a very valuable piece of information.

[00:28:01] [SPEAKER_01]: So a secret that he has to communicate to his superiors in Germany.

[00:28:04] [SPEAKER_01]: The secret is the location of an artillery base in England that Germany ought to attack.

[00:28:11] [SPEAKER_01]: And he has to figure out a way to communicate this to the Germans before he gets caught by an English spy who's on his trail, hot on his trail.

[00:28:23] [SPEAKER_01]: So this is an Irish guy named Richard Madden.

[00:28:25] [SPEAKER_01]: Dr. Yutsu and a former professor of English who is the German spy.

[00:28:30] [SPEAKER_01]: He attempts to call a fellow German but the phone is answered by this British spy.

[00:28:35] [SPEAKER_01]: So he knows immediately at that point that the British spy is hot on his trail, that the other German was probably killed.

[00:28:40] [SPEAKER_01]: He has no immediate direct way of transmitting this information.

[00:28:45] [SPEAKER_01]: So he formulates a plan and that plan he doesn't tell you right away.

[00:28:48] [SPEAKER_01]: As he knows he only has a little bit of time left to evade the English spy.

[00:28:52] [SPEAKER_01]: He departs from his apartment, hops on a cab and goes to a train station.

[00:28:56] [SPEAKER_01]: At some point he looks in a phone book for a name, finds the name that he was looking for, takes a train to a small town in England.

[00:29:07] [SPEAKER_01]: He is directed by, this is late at night, he's barely evaded the English spy who missed the train that he took.

[00:29:15] [SPEAKER_01]: So he knows he has a good hour before the other train will get the English spy to him.

[00:29:21] [SPEAKER_01]: He gets directions to go to the house of one Stephen Albert, is told by some boys on the train far away.

[00:29:31] [SPEAKER_01]: But the easiest way to get there is just keep turning left on the road and you'll get there eventually.

[00:29:37] [SPEAKER_01]: He gets to the house of Dr. Stephen Albert who is a synologist we discover, a scholar of Chinese culture.

[00:29:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Although he is a British man.

[00:29:48] [SPEAKER_01]: And there the conversation that he has, Yun Sun with Dr. Stephen Albert, that's sort of the part of the story that is the meat.

[00:30:01] [SPEAKER_01]: Right? As it happens, it turns out that this Chinese scholar of English descent is a particularly interested in the works of a Chinese man who lived 100 years ago named Sui Pen.

[00:30:17] [SPEAKER_01]: And who turns out to be one of Yun Sun's ancestors. His great grandfather.

[00:30:26] [SPEAKER_01]: And this person, Sui Pen, had abandoned all of his successful life in order to construct a labyrinth and to write a novel.

[00:30:38] [SPEAKER_01]: And it was sort of to the disgrace of the family because they never found the labyrinth that he was supposedly constructing and his novel was a hot mess.

[00:30:48] [SPEAKER_01]: It's just a really long rambly. It was like Tamler's thank you segments. It's unclear what was going on.

[00:30:56] [SPEAKER_04]: And novels were also a look down upon genre, like podcasting.

[00:31:02] [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly. There is much discussion of the nature of these two tasks that Sui Pen was engaged in.

[00:31:12] [SPEAKER_01]: And Stephen Albert shed some light on this, on what his theory is of what was going on with this on the surface very confusing novel.

[00:31:21] [SPEAKER_01]: And he puts forward a theory that in fact the novel and the labyrinth were one and the same, which we'll get back to.

[00:31:27] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, so what his theory is, I think we can say, is that the reason the novel doesn't make any sense is because he has this theory of time which is that every time human beings makes a choice,

[00:31:42] [SPEAKER_04]: that leads to a kind of a new branch of a universe that now events unfold based on that choice.

[00:31:54] [SPEAKER_04]: And he tells these multiple stories that don't seem like they cohere, but the reason they don't cohere is because in one of them a character made one choice and another one a character made a different choice.

[00:32:07] [SPEAKER_04]: And he puts those two things together. He puts those two events together in ways that seem inconsistent, which is why they think it's a baffling mess.

[00:32:18] [SPEAKER_04]: But according to the sinologist Stephen Albert, this is exactly what the labyrinth that he's constructed is.

[00:32:27] [SPEAKER_04]: It is the novel and it is this idea about how human choices create different universes and different futures.

[00:32:37] [SPEAKER_04]: And he's putting them all together or at least some of them together in this book.

[00:32:41] [SPEAKER_01]: Right, sort of an incomplete version of the total universe based on the bifurcation of universes that are created each time a decision must be made.

[00:32:55] [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, it wasn't that this Tzuypen was constructing a labyrinth and writing a novel.

[00:33:02] [SPEAKER_01]: It was that the novel itself was a labyrinth but not in physical space but a labyrinth in time.

[00:33:07] [SPEAKER_01]: And essentially that this would be if it were possible to complete it would be an infinite novel because every single decision that could be made would be made.

[00:33:18] [SPEAKER_01]: Would it be infinite or would it be...

[00:33:21] [SPEAKER_01]: They say the word infinite a lot.

[00:33:23] [SPEAKER_04]: They do. But in the same way the library is an infinite.

[00:33:27] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean it can't be infinite unless the time itself is infinite.

[00:33:37] [SPEAKER_01]: So it's a lot.

[00:33:39] [SPEAKER_01]: We still don't know it's a lot. We still don't know why.

[00:33:42] [SPEAKER_01]: This is one of the reasons why the story is confusing the first time around.

[00:33:45] [SPEAKER_01]: It's unclear why Yuen Sun went to visit Stephen Albert in the first place.

[00:33:51] [SPEAKER_01]: Why they got in this discussion to begin with was it just fortuitous?

[00:33:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Did he know that this guy was a scholar of his ancestor?

[00:34:02] [SPEAKER_01]: And it turns out no because we realize in pretty much just the last paragraph that the sole reason that he had picked Dr. Stephen Albert's house

[00:34:13] [SPEAKER_01]: was that he realized that if he assassinated a man with the last name Albert

[00:34:18] [SPEAKER_01]: that would be a way to communicate to the Germans the secret identity of the city that contained the cache of English weapons

[00:34:26] [SPEAKER_01]: or of English artillery because the city itself was named Albert.

[00:34:29] [SPEAKER_01]: A known German spy killing a random person with the name Albert

[00:34:34] [SPEAKER_01]: would effectively communicate the name of the city that they ought to attack.

[00:34:37] [SPEAKER_01]: And so the story ends with Stephen Albert turning his back upon the request of Yuen Sun to show him a letter from his ancestor again.

[00:34:48] [SPEAKER_01]: He turns his back.

[00:34:49] [SPEAKER_01]: Yuen Sun shoots him in the back just as the English, Irish English spy is walking in to arrest him.

[00:34:56] [SPEAKER_01]: And then we find out that this entire account has been written as he is awaiting his death sentence by hanging.

[00:35:03] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. And he says that he successfully communicated it and that the leader solved the riddle.

[00:35:11] [SPEAKER_04]: Isn't clear is whether that had any real effect given what we find out in the first part of the story which is that it was just at most there was an inconsequential delay

[00:35:26] [SPEAKER_04]: at least if this is the same event that they're talking about and if it's not, if those two,

[00:35:34] [SPEAKER_04]: if they're not talking about the same incident, it's not clear why the editor would say that this letter casts light on the events.

[00:35:42] [SPEAKER_01]: Right. So it seems as if the editor thinks that the official version of the stories that Reigns delayed the attack

[00:35:50] [SPEAKER_01]: are hiding the potential possibility that the delay was caused by the bombing of this English artillery station,

[00:35:57] [SPEAKER_01]: although no matter what we obviously know that the English won and that whatever caused the delay was only a few days.

[00:36:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Right. And the one thing that I didn't say that we do get is a sense throughout,

[00:36:14] [SPEAKER_01]: especially upon second reading knowing what the objective of visiting this man, Stephen Albert is,

[00:36:20] [SPEAKER_01]: is this sense of self judgment.

[00:36:26] [SPEAKER_01]: Yun Soon, the Chinese man who is spying for the Germans feels like shit that he is killing an innocent man in order to get the job done.

[00:36:36] [SPEAKER_01]: He calls himself a coward. And one of the reasons that he explicitly says that he is doing it is because he wants the leader

[00:36:44] [SPEAKER_01]: of Germany to know that an Asian man, a yellow man is capable of saving his people even though they're looked down upon,

[00:36:54] [SPEAKER_01]: his races looked down upon.

[00:36:55] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. He has no love for Germany this guy.

[00:36:59] [SPEAKER_01]: No. He calls it a barbaric, what does he call it?

[00:37:06] [SPEAKER_01]: Ignominy.

[00:37:08] [SPEAKER_01]: Ignominy.

[00:37:10] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't think it's ignominy.

[00:37:13] [SPEAKER_01]: Ignominy is how it's written, ignominious. Let's just say it's ignominious spying.

[00:37:18] [SPEAKER_01]: So he has active disdain for Germany for forcing him into this,

[00:37:26] [SPEAKER_01]: but he nonetheless has a job to do and he's going to do it well and show the Germans that a Chinese man can contribute.

[00:37:34] [SPEAKER_04]: And so a few things after you read it stand out as puzzling. I mean, obviously one of the things on the first reading that I was

[00:37:45] [SPEAKER_04]: questioning is given that he has no love for the Germans and that he, the person he thinks he has to kill turns out to be

[00:37:57] [SPEAKER_04]: someone who has uncovered the truth about his disgraced great grandfather and has redeemed him in a way.

[00:38:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Up till now everyone has thought that he either just went crazy or that, and they actually tried to burn the novels.

[00:38:17] [SPEAKER_04]: The novel because it was like, they thought it was shameful what he was doing in a way that I think almost explicitly recalls

[00:38:24] [SPEAKER_04]: the perjures in the library of Babel, right? They would have burned it because they thought it didn't mean anything and that it was worthless.

[00:38:33] [SPEAKER_04]: And then it turns out at least according to this sinologist, Stephen Albert, that it's actually deeply meaningful.

[00:38:39] [SPEAKER_04]: And yet he goes ahead and kills him anyway. Why would he do that? And did he really do that?

[00:38:47] [SPEAKER_04]: That was my first thought because it seems like an extraordinary coincidence that this man, the one man with the name Albert in that town that he is in,

[00:39:02] [SPEAKER_04]: happens to also be the one person that can reveal the truth about his grandfather's works.

[00:39:10] [SPEAKER_01]: Right. So this is, you know, I didn't have that thought. I thought it was he did it so begrudgingly just out of sheer duty and he just sort of made this determination just to get it done.

[00:39:25] [SPEAKER_01]: This is a great passage toward the beginning where he says if you have to do something heinous, right? If you have to do something that's atrocious,

[00:39:33] [SPEAKER_01]: then just pretend as if you've already done it. Just act as if it's already been done and it'll be much easier.

[00:39:40] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's sort of what he knew going into this.

[00:39:42] [SPEAKER_04]: Can I read that passage? I foresee that mankind will resign itself more and more fully to more and more horrendous undertakings.

[00:39:52] [SPEAKER_04]: Soon there will be nothing but warriors and brigands.

[00:39:55] [SPEAKER_04]: I give them this piece of advice. He who is to perform a horrendous act should imagine to himself that it is already done,

[00:40:03] [SPEAKER_04]: should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

[00:40:09] [SPEAKER_04]: This is what I did while my eyes, the eyes of a man already dead, registered the flow of the day.

[00:40:15] [SPEAKER_04]: What's so interesting about that as you sort of then read further in the story because that comes early before you know about his ancestor's novel,

[00:40:28] [SPEAKER_04]: the way that is set up is that we really do have these choices that aren't irrevocable.

[00:40:35] [SPEAKER_04]: We create different futures with our choices and our decisions.

[00:40:39] [SPEAKER_04]: And so imagining that the future is fixed in this way at least initially seems in tension with the idea of the novel unless you think that,

[00:40:51] [SPEAKER_04]: okay I'm just, this is my future.

[00:40:56] [SPEAKER_04]: So then it's kind of like that.

[00:41:01] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm imagining that this is my possible life and I can't go into any of the branching lives.

[00:41:09] [SPEAKER_04]: This is the one that's me.

[00:41:11] [SPEAKER_04]: And maybe just this has to exist anyway.

[00:41:15] [SPEAKER_01]: It's going to exist.

[00:41:17] [SPEAKER_01]: By the way, so I sent you in a link to this. Did you look at all of that essay that I sent you?

[00:41:22] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, in fact I had come across that before and there was definitely a link to it.

[00:41:29] [SPEAKER_04]: I wouldn't read it until you've read the story a couple times, two or three times.

[00:41:34] [SPEAKER_04]: So sort of get your own at least preliminary take on it.

[00:41:39] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't think it gives you any kind of obvious interpretation of the story but it raises a lot of things to think about.

[00:41:48] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah so as I reread the story and then as I read that I just got this like giddiness.

[00:41:55] [SPEAKER_01]: There's so much to unpack.

[00:41:57] [SPEAKER_01]: There's so much that I hadn't even thought about.

[00:42:02] [SPEAKER_01]: But one of the things that really blew my mind is just the parallels that Borges is drawing.

[00:42:12] [SPEAKER_01]: So the author of this essay is trying to analyze, dissect what it would mean to have a labyrinthine text.

[00:42:22] [SPEAKER_01]: Like what it means to construct a text itself that is a labyrinth and he makes some sort of argument that this story in and of itself is sort of a labyrinth.

[00:42:33] [SPEAKER_01]: One of the things that blew my mind is Stephen Albert is the name of the Englishman who studies Chinese culture.

[00:42:42] [SPEAKER_01]: And Sui Pen is the name of the Chinese man who he's studying, the great grandfather of the protagonist.

[00:42:50] [SPEAKER_01]: The phonetics are just too similar. Stephen and Sui Pen, they're just too similar.

[00:42:58] [SPEAKER_01]: In some ways it seems as if he's saying these are aspects of the same person.

[00:43:03] [SPEAKER_01]: There's another point that he makes in there where he talks about the labyrinthine with the Minotaur in the center.

[00:43:11] [SPEAKER_01]: So he says this is an aspect of labyrinths, the monster in the middle.

[00:43:16] [SPEAKER_01]: The Minotaur being two things, man and bull.

[00:43:20] [SPEAKER_01]: Stephen Albert is sort of this Englishman who is living almost the life of the Chinese man.

[00:43:28] [SPEAKER_01]: But there's also this dualism with the Chinese man who is trying to spy for the Germans.

[00:43:35] [SPEAKER_01]: And there is the Irishman who is spying for the English.

[00:43:40] [SPEAKER_01]: And it's unclear what Borges is trying to say.

[00:43:43] [SPEAKER_04]: But also the dualism in Sui Pen's novel, Stephen Albert trying to understand it and us trying to understand this short story.

[00:43:55] [SPEAKER_04]: Absolutely.

[00:43:56] [SPEAKER_04]: And so the thing that I kind of latched onto in reading the commentary is you read the story the first time

[00:44:05] [SPEAKER_04]: and you take it a certain way.

[00:44:08] [SPEAKER_04]: Now you could just end it there or you could read it again and then really try to figure out what's going on.

[00:44:17] [SPEAKER_04]: And now you could go in all sorts of different directions just like a labyrinth.

[00:44:22] [SPEAKER_04]: So one thing you could focus on is, like you said, the similarities and the names and the parallels.

[00:44:28] [SPEAKER_04]: Another thing is Liddell's heart.

[00:44:32] [SPEAKER_04]: So the opening is on page 242 of the history of the World War.

[00:44:36] [SPEAKER_04]: Liddell Hart tells us that an allied offensive against the blah, blah, blah.

[00:44:42] [SPEAKER_04]: You could look and see if that's a real book or is it just sort of an invention of Borges?

[00:44:49] [SPEAKER_04]: And it turns out it's kind of a real book but it doesn't have that exact title.

[00:44:55] [SPEAKER_04]: And that's not the right pagination and the events that are describing are slightly different.

[00:45:03] [SPEAKER_04]: And then you notice, oh, that's sort of like the garden of the Forking Paths where things can be a little different

[00:45:10] [SPEAKER_04]: depending on what sort of future you're in or what part of the time you're in.

[00:45:15] [SPEAKER_04]: And so you could go down that rabbit hole or you could go down all sorts of other different rabbit holes.

[00:45:22] [SPEAKER_04]: It's like Borges is giving you all these entry ways that you could choose to dive into or not.

[00:45:30] [SPEAKER_04]: And whether you do sort of depends on how you're going to then think about the story for now.

[00:45:38] [SPEAKER_01]: Right. And is this path going to lead to a dead end?

[00:45:42] [SPEAKER_01]: Are we going to get stuck in this labyrinth and what, you know?

[00:45:46] [SPEAKER_01]: And so the other, you can even read the author of the commentary sort of going a little crazy trying to figure out

[00:45:52] [SPEAKER_01]: whether there was in fact this book in Spanish Historia de la Guerra Europa.

[00:45:58] [SPEAKER_01]: Well, there's not a book named exactly that but there is a book that's very close to that name that is about the First World War.

[00:46:04] [SPEAKER_01]: But it's not on any edition he can find. There's not exactly those words not on that page but kind of those words and others.

[00:46:10] [SPEAKER_01]: And so you can imagine this is where I drew a parallel to the library of Babel.

[00:46:17] [SPEAKER_01]: You could just imagine almost a wasted life where you're trying to figure out what Borges was trying to tell us.

[00:46:23] [SPEAKER_01]: Did he insert the error or was he just being sloppy?

[00:46:27] [SPEAKER_01]: Like it's totally unclear and that kind of shit just fascinates me.

[00:46:32] [SPEAKER_04]: We lack the decoder. So we don't know what's like in the library you could come up upon a book that could be deeply meaningful

[00:46:42] [SPEAKER_04]: or it could be misleading and it's like that's what we are with this story because precisely what you said

[00:46:50] [SPEAKER_04]: we don't know if he was being careless. I kind of doubt it, you know?

[00:46:54] [SPEAKER_04]: Or if he was just taking the certain liberty that any short story author might take or fiction author might take.

[00:47:03] [SPEAKER_04]: It would be too boring if you said what Liddell actually said.

[00:47:11] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and he's just not telegraphing. He's not making up an author. He's not making up a war.

[00:47:18] [SPEAKER_01]: He is giving you just enough and just like, wait, is this...

[00:47:22] [SPEAKER_01]: And then there's the Chinese text that is alluded to Hun Meng I think is the name of it.

[00:47:32] [SPEAKER_01]: That itself is the closest analog to the Garden of Forking paths that is just filled with tons of characters

[00:47:42] [SPEAKER_01]: and the narrative arc doesn't make sense. And when you look into the history of that particular text

[00:47:49] [SPEAKER_01]: you see that it was heavily, you know, it's never fully published. It was handwritten then finally published years and years later

[00:47:58] [SPEAKER_01]: but there have been editors upon editors over time that have made their own alterations to the story

[00:48:04] [SPEAKER_01]: and it's unclear whether some of the things that seemed like errors were just editorial decisions.

[00:48:11] [SPEAKER_01]: So you can lose yourself in all of that stuff.

[00:48:15] [SPEAKER_01]: And this isn't even to get to I think the fascinating aspect of what Stephen Albert is trying to say about this,

[00:48:25] [SPEAKER_01]: that he's found a labyrinth, which is to get back to the question of time and this particular theory that all events that can happen

[00:48:34] [SPEAKER_01]: will happen just in different universes.

[00:48:37] [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's pretty obvious that he is toward the end when Yun Tzu and the protagonist has this feeling.

[00:48:49] [SPEAKER_01]: I forget the word. He uses a weird word to describe the field of pollulation that I had to look up.

[00:48:55] [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know what the fuck that meant.

[00:48:57] [SPEAKER_01]: That he is in the center of the labyrinth where every version of events that could happen is happening

[00:49:04] [SPEAKER_01]: and he can almost sense the traces of all of those instances that Stephen Albert lays out so well.

[00:49:13] [SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, I had the Spanish one pulled up where he says, look in most realities we don't exist.

[00:49:20] [SPEAKER_01]: In some realities you came to visit me because you're a friend.

[00:49:23] [SPEAKER_01]: In some realities I exist. You don't vice versa.

[00:49:28] [SPEAKER_01]: And Yun Tzu says, but in every reality I thank you for the work that you've done from my ancestor.

[00:49:33] [SPEAKER_01]: He says, no, it's not true. In some realities you're my enemy.

[00:49:37] [SPEAKER_01]: And you get the sense that this is the nexus of these parallel universes.

[00:49:42] [SPEAKER_01]: There is some mystical center of the universe where everything is happening and he can get faint glimpses of it.

[00:49:51] [SPEAKER_04]: So, Puyulite, however that's pronounced, means to just multiply rapidly.

[00:49:57] [SPEAKER_04]: To proliferate really, really quickly.

[00:50:02] [SPEAKER_04]: And that's like a feeling that he has, which is exactly what you say.

[00:50:06] [SPEAKER_04]: Like it is this sort of all of these things are somehow happening at once,

[00:50:12] [SPEAKER_04]: which is the theory of time that is according to Stephen Albert

[00:50:20] [SPEAKER_04]: at the center of his conception of time, of his conception of time, which is that all these different futures are happening simultaneously.

[00:50:39] [SPEAKER_04]: And then like you say, that's interesting.

[00:50:40] [SPEAKER_01]: Can I read just that little pastor says, from that moment on I felt all about me and within my obscure body

[00:50:48] [SPEAKER_01]: an invisible intangible plulation. Not that of the divergent parallel and finally coalescing armies,

[00:50:54] [SPEAKER_01]: but an agitation more inaccessible, more inward than that yet one of those armies somehow prefigured.

[00:50:59] [SPEAKER_01]: But it's just outside of his reach, right? It's just a feeling.

[00:51:03] [SPEAKER_04]: And that's sort of, so do you have a take to use that bad word on what the underlying reality of this story is?

[00:51:19] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, if you think there is one, what it is?

[00:51:22] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. It's funny, but Borges over and over again always, he would always say that there was nothing that was that,

[00:51:31] [SPEAKER_01]: that deep that he was trying to convey. He was just writing a story, which in some ways is bullshit,

[00:51:37] [SPEAKER_01]: but in other ways, like I kind of believe that he's just doing a mind fuck.

[00:51:43] [SPEAKER_01]: It's just that he was so good at doing the mind fuck and the mind fuck wouldn't be a mind fuck

[00:51:47] [SPEAKER_01]: if there wasn't actually something super, super layered and deep and interesting.

[00:51:53] [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that he is, there is a meta aspect to the story that fucks with me.

[00:52:01] [SPEAKER_01]: And meta always fucks with me in some way.

[00:52:04] [SPEAKER_01]: The fact that Borges himself is constructing a labyrinth within a labyrinth.

[00:52:08] [SPEAKER_01]: Within a labyrinth.

[00:52:09] [SPEAKER_01]: Within a labyrinth.

[00:52:10] [SPEAKER_01]: Within a labyrinth.

[00:52:11] [SPEAKER_01]: To infinite regress, potentially to infinite regress.

[00:52:16] [SPEAKER_01]: The theory of time that is the one aspect of this story that I think everybody really remembers,

[00:52:25] [SPEAKER_01]: might be saying that it's not so, so take traditional determinism that says like,

[00:52:36] [SPEAKER_01]: look everything that you were going to do was written, you know, since the Big Bang Matter in motion.

[00:52:42] [SPEAKER_01]: The principles of the initial state of the universe and the principles of physics mean that there is one and only one thing that could happen right now.

[00:52:48] [SPEAKER_01]: And that is that I'm holding a microphone talking to Tamar Summers.

[00:52:51] [SPEAKER_01]: So you can take that for what it is that you might say, well, we have no free will at all.

[00:52:57] [SPEAKER_01]: There is no way in which anything else could have happened so often it is freedom of the will as described as the ability to have done otherwise.

[00:53:06] [SPEAKER_01]: Right. So in that traditional take on determinism, there is absolutely no way that anyone could have done otherwise.

[00:53:15] [SPEAKER_01]: The complete opposite of libertarian conception of free will is no, you have free choice every single time.

[00:53:20] [SPEAKER_01]: This is somewhere this there's a weird sense of like I get this weird.

[00:53:24] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what to feel about it, but in a in a reality in which every possible, every possible decision that can be made is in fact made.

[00:53:36] [SPEAKER_01]: I do not know whether that is a deterministic take or free free take because I don't even it all happens.

[00:53:45] [SPEAKER_04]: In the same way that every book given in the library had to exist given under those rules, even though there's all these different branching possibilities of books.

[00:53:57] [SPEAKER_04]: Ultimately, every single book had to exist and according to this idea, every single reality had to exist.

[00:54:05] [SPEAKER_01]: Right. And this exactly.

[00:54:07] [SPEAKER_01]: And this one is even more mindfuck you to me because in the library of Babel, every possible book, every combination of letters that could exist exists.

[00:54:17] [SPEAKER_01]: But there are people trying to figure out which are the true things and that itself is the interesting aspect to me of that like what we talked about at length in the last episode, whether or not one could distinguish true from false in that universe.

[00:54:31] [SPEAKER_04]: Or meaningful. Yeah.

[00:54:32] [SPEAKER_04]: Meaning or meaningful.

[00:54:33] [SPEAKER_04]: It's not even clear what true means.

[00:54:35] [SPEAKER_04]: What true would even mean.

[00:54:36] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:54:37] [SPEAKER_01]: In this, it's less epistemological and more metaphysical.

[00:54:42] [SPEAKER_01]: It is simply saying like this is the nature of reality, right?

[00:54:46] [SPEAKER_01]: This is the in most universes you and I don't exist and in some of them you and I do and have never met in some of them we've met and we never did a podcast.

[00:54:57] [SPEAKER_01]: This is just the one most of it.

[00:55:02] [SPEAKER_05]: I would say that, yeah, like it's kind of a miracle like the branches led to a six year long podcast.

[00:55:10] [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.

[00:55:11] [SPEAKER_04]: I agree.

[00:55:12] [SPEAKER_04]: Although I also think there are some parallels with the library.

[00:55:14] [SPEAKER_04]: There are people trying to figure out the library.

[00:55:17] [SPEAKER_04]: Stephen Albert is trying to figure out this theory from with while also being a part of it in the same way that the people in the library are also a part of it.

[00:55:28] [SPEAKER_04]: You could look at him in one way as like the bookman.

[00:55:32] [SPEAKER_04]: He's figured it out.

[00:55:34] [SPEAKER_04]: He's decoded it because most of us don't know that if time were really like that, most of us don't know that.

[00:55:40] [SPEAKER_04]: But he does or she pen does.

[00:55:46] [SPEAKER_04]: We pen does.

[00:55:57] [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[00:55:59] [SPEAKER_01]: It's almost as if he's not just figured out the theory, but that figuring out the theory has allowed him to be sort of in the cradle of this, the universe right in the in that space where everything splits.

[00:56:15] [SPEAKER_01]: And when you view it that way, the fact that Stephen Albert and you soon meet in that particular space means I think that the story could have ended in any number of ways.

[00:56:32] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:56:32] [SPEAKER_01]: It just so happens to be that this is the one where he's a despicable coward and is going to get hung.

[00:56:36] [SPEAKER_04]: And that that happens to be the one that we're reading as readers.

[00:56:40] [SPEAKER_04]: Exactly.

[00:56:40] [SPEAKER_01]: And I get the sense that what he wants, it's a particularly sickening feeling to you soon.

[00:56:50] [SPEAKER_01]: Apologies to anybody who speaks actual man.

[00:56:52] [SPEAKER_01]: The way that we've been pronouncing all this.

[00:56:54] [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know how you can correct me.

[00:56:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Send a little recording because I want to know that it is a particularly mournful and because if they're in that Nexus and if this.

[00:57:10] [SPEAKER_01]: This feeling that he's had that he can almost see the other outcomes of the other universes.

[00:57:16] [SPEAKER_01]: One of those universes maybe where he did a more honorable thing.

[00:57:20] [SPEAKER_01]: He got a glimpse of the alternative worlds and now he's faced with the fact that he is living in this shitty version of the world.

[00:57:30] [SPEAKER_04]: In the inescapable like because I made the choice to kill him.

[00:57:34] [SPEAKER_04]: Exactly.

[00:57:34] [SPEAKER_04]: He's now entrapped in the one where he's going to get hung and he did this cowardly betrayal.

[00:57:41] [SPEAKER_01]: And there is a passage in the very beginning that he says,

[00:57:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Was I now about to die?

[00:57:48] [SPEAKER_01]: Then I reflected that all things happen to oneself and happen precisely, precisely now.

[00:57:54] [SPEAKER_01]: Century fall, century yet events occur only in the present.

[00:57:58] [SPEAKER_01]: Countless men in the air on the land in the sea yet everything that truly happens happens to me.

[00:58:03] [SPEAKER_01]: And the thought that there are near infinite universes and in this one,

[00:58:10] [SPEAKER_01]: you have to be the person who lives in the one where you did this dishonorable thing.

[00:58:17] [SPEAKER_01]: You and so faced with the multiverse of all of the universes in which you exist and you came to see Stephen Albert.

[00:58:28] [SPEAKER_01]: That this is the one that you end up in sucks.

[00:58:32] [SPEAKER_01]: But then there's no real option.

[00:58:35] [SPEAKER_01]: Everything that happens only happens to you.

[00:58:37] [SPEAKER_01]: The existence of all those other you and soons matters not like not at all.

[00:58:43] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, they're just out of reach.

[00:58:45] [SPEAKER_01]: They're out of reach.

[00:58:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Everything that happens happens to you.

[00:58:48] [SPEAKER_04]: But you can perceive it in the same way that like there's so many things where oh if only this had just gone right.

[00:58:55] [SPEAKER_04]: You can especially when it's close, you can picture it.

[00:58:59] [SPEAKER_04]: You can picture yourself in this slightly different alternate timeline.

[00:59:07] [SPEAKER_04]: And again, it has that same mood as the library of Babel in that there's this kind of pervasive weariness and kind of muted despair.

[00:59:20] [SPEAKER_04]: And the source of that is in part this idea that there is this nearby yet inaccessible sort of better future for you.

[00:59:32] [SPEAKER_04]: That's right.

[00:59:32] [SPEAKER_01]: And the question of whether you can so imagine all the bifurcating branches but simplify it to some subset of one life and all those decisions.

[00:59:43] [SPEAKER_01]: And you now just highlight the line that you are on.

[00:59:48] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[00:59:48] [SPEAKER_01]: Is it right to say, you know, in a metaphysical sense that you could have been on another timeline?

[00:59:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Or is it right to say that that in some sense strict determinism is true that in this universe there was no other possible way that you could have that you could have done anything right so are those other timelines just out of reach because you could have been on them.

[01:00:14] [SPEAKER_01]: I think not.

[01:00:15] [SPEAKER_01]: I think that it is every timeline is every timeline.

[01:00:17] [SPEAKER_04]: So, okay.

[01:00:19] [SPEAKER_04]: I want to address that because but then I also want to give sort of a totally different way of entering the story.

[01:00:28] [SPEAKER_04]: So he does say that in all fictions each time a man meets diverse alternatives he chooses one and eliminates the others in the work of the virtually impossible to tangles sweet pen the character chooses simultaneously all of them.

[01:00:47] [SPEAKER_04]: That's right.

[01:00:47] [SPEAKER_04]: He creates there by several futures several times which themselves proliferate and fork it does sort of seem like a man's choice and again there's no mention of the existence of women in I think either of these two stories.

[01:01:07] [SPEAKER_01]: No, she's dedicated to a woman.

[01:01:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[01:01:10] [SPEAKER_04]: But the choice seems like the thing that a person does have control of and like so one way of understanding that is you're in the driver's seat almost in the way that the sort of agent causal libertarian might jerk off to like just dream of that you get to choose which universe or

[01:01:35] [SPEAKER_04]: which particular fabric of time you're going to live in by making those choices.

[01:01:42] [SPEAKER_04]: And then so one way of understanding it is the sickening feeling is the feeling of I fucked myself I put myself in a bad fabric.

[01:02:03] [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[01:02:03] [SPEAKER_01]: And so I was just kind of frustrated by the illusion that it was your choices because those other universes where you made other choices exist.

[01:02:10] [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like well what determined the difference between a universe in which you chose left versus chose right.

[01:02:15] [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[01:02:16] [SPEAKER_04]: Especially if all of them end up existing anyway.

[01:02:19] [SPEAKER_04]: Exactly.

[01:02:20] [SPEAKER_04]: So here's another way and this is like this goes back to the idea that this is a labyrinthine text.

[01:02:27] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[01:02:28] [SPEAKER_01]: I was going to get back to that like what is the prettier because the theory of time isn't necessarily a labyrinthine text right like yeah.

[01:02:34] [SPEAKER_04]: But it is a rabbit hole that you could choose to go down as you try to understand the you could try to get to because it does seem like the central sort of core of the story that there is this theory and you could try to just really focus on the philosophy of that

[01:02:52] [SPEAKER_04]: and the metaphysics of that and what that means.

[01:02:55] [SPEAKER_04]: The second time I read it, second or third but I started to notice the dreamlike elements of the story.

[01:03:05] [SPEAKER_04]: It is there's so many dreamlike elements he's being pursued he's being chased and the person who's chasing him is sort of he has only a dim sense of what that person looks like and who it is.

[01:03:19] [SPEAKER_04]: Then he's on the train he's on the train and the train just stops in the middle of the countryside.

[01:03:25] [SPEAKER_04]: Nobody says the name like this is all very much like how a dream is experienced right nobody says the name of the station he has to ask somebody.

[01:03:34] [SPEAKER_04]: Then they're just these boys standing in a spotlight but with their faces shadowed who just ask him if he's going to Mr. Albert's house like how do they know why would they even assume that and you never see their faces again.

[01:03:48] [SPEAKER_04]: That's very dreamlike. The idea that you would just turn left at every crossing and get to this house.

[01:03:54] [SPEAKER_01]: Like the weirdest instructions.

[01:03:56] [SPEAKER_04]: Exactly. There's a line where he says he felt himself an abstract perceiver of the world in the way that sometimes as in a dream like you feel like you're the agent and sometimes you feel like you're watching over yourself in a weird way.

[01:04:13] [SPEAKER_01]: And both like you can't it's almost like you can't you can't describe it and when you wake up because you were both you were.

[01:04:20] [SPEAKER_04]: Exactly right exactly then maybe the most dreamlike part of it is just the meeting with Albert but he arrives at the house Chinese music is just playing in the background he doesn't even notice it at first.

[01:04:33] [SPEAKER_04]: Then the door opens and it says a lantern was making its way toward me a lantern cross hatched and sometimes blotted out altogether by the trees a paper lantern the shape of a drum and the color of the moon it was carried by a tall man.

[01:04:50] [SPEAKER_04]: I could not see his face because the light blinded me he opened the gate and slowly spoke to me in my own language and then you know that that they're seeing starts but just that introduction of Stephen Albert as this lantern that is just sort of floating towards him.

[01:05:10] [SPEAKER_04]: And again there's this thing of faces being hidden you could look at this as the dream of the the the letter writer here.

[01:05:21] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, or somebody is dream in any case which would give you a totally different way of understanding it would be its own different rabbit hole like why is he dreaming this and why is the dream about his about an ancestor who wrote a novel and understanding it

[01:05:40] [SPEAKER_04]: and you know what really happens what's the real reality of of the right of the right.

[01:05:47] [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[01:05:48] [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I like it.

[01:05:49] [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I don't know what that I mean, aside from giving this like feeling like there is some there is some feeling of what it is like to be dream like he's presenting it as as the written sort of last testament of this guy who's about to be assassinated.

[01:06:08] [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[01:06:09] [SPEAKER_04]: The narrator is the narrator is a letter.

[01:06:12] [SPEAKER_01]: Uh huh.

[01:06:13] [SPEAKER_04]: And how does that fit into the dream theory.

[01:06:16] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, if it's a theory.

[01:06:17] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[01:06:18] [SPEAKER_01]: But then why is he writing a letter in this dreamy in a dreamy way, unless that once he sort of perceived that when he was in that garden of the forking paths in the middle and he and he had this sort of realization.

[01:06:34] [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe he's just sort of stuck in this dream like state from from that experience.

[01:06:40] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, yeah, it's it's it's almost like you know you could read it as the sort of a metaphysical event that happens almost magic or maybe not like it's very that's again this idea of the laboring theme text like maybe you could take the dream theory further or maybe it'll be a dead end and you want to go back to the point where

[01:07:04] [SPEAKER_04]: you you know thought of it as no this is a straight more straightforward narrative of a spot of a real spy who really did kill Steven Albert and who but that that takes you that you know that raises all sorts of different other questions.

[01:07:20] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, the sheer coincidences of everything that's happening.

[01:07:24] [SPEAKER_04]: It's so neat.

[01:07:26] [SPEAKER_04]: You know that that Steven Albert happens to be his grandfather is great grandfather is decoder.

[01:07:32] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, right.

[01:07:34] [SPEAKER_01]: There's also like I'm trying to find the like this the surreal nature of the story itself.

[01:07:42] [SPEAKER_01]: You know there is something about what it must feel like to know that you're about to die where you're in this dream like state like and and the whole thing is written with this tone and he's it you know even when he's talking about what he did when he decided that he was going to like enact his plan.

[01:08:03] [SPEAKER_01]: He looks in the mirror and says goodbye to himself.

[01:08:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[01:08:07] [SPEAKER_01]: And it's just like well at that point you're just like this is all just the fever dream of a man who's about to be about to be killed.

[01:08:16] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.

[01:08:16] [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe like he's he was just like just an ordinary trader or an exact.

[01:08:21] [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.

[01:08:22] [SPEAKER_01]: And maybe he's he is because because the the opening there is no reason to construct a story where the opening isn't you could he could have just written or his could have just written the story as first person narration from from you soon the whole time.

[01:08:42] [SPEAKER_01]: So what does it mean that he says well look like the official version is that this happened but I found a letter that says something else might have happened.

[01:08:49] [SPEAKER_01]: It could be the ramblings of a madman a trader who got executed and and had a fever dream in the moments before his death much like the Lynch Mulholland Drive where or lost highway you know it has some very lost highway a man on death row like really coming in

[01:09:07] [SPEAKER_04]: up with a different version of the past.

[01:09:10] [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[01:09:11] [SPEAKER_01]: And and it's a pretty fucking cool story to tell.

[01:09:15] [SPEAKER_01]: You know for all we know he was a petty thief who broke into this guy's.

[01:09:23] [SPEAKER_04]: He's created this like really cool elaborate fantasy spy story metaphysical like.

[01:09:31] [SPEAKER_01]: And the only and the only I think the only reason to open up with the actual historical event and also to within the first.

[01:09:42] [SPEAKER_01]: This is a very weird thing but it does it does something to discredit the the narrator.

[01:09:51] [SPEAKER_01]: Right just as the history book at the beginning does something to discredit the letter that follows in the accounts that fall.

[01:09:59] [SPEAKER_01]: But he has a footnote.

[01:10:01] [SPEAKER_01]: The editor puts this footnotes where where you soon is just hung up the phone and he knows that his German colleague Runeberg has been arrested or assassinated.

[01:10:16] [SPEAKER_01]: Borges puts this footnote that says this is a contemptible conclusion to reach.

[01:10:22] [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously it could have been that he shot the guy in self defense and it's like.

[01:10:26] [SPEAKER_01]: Why why did you write a story where you disagree with the very like you're being an editor that disagrees with the account that you just just write it.

[01:10:34] [SPEAKER_01]: Why like why is he inserting himself and I think the only reason is that he's inserting himself to say hey like I don't trust this guy's judgment or maybe don't trust mine.

[01:10:44] [SPEAKER_01]: I got you can't you can't whatever you do you can't read this with any confidence.

[01:10:47] [SPEAKER_04]: And that introduces this element.

[01:10:50] [SPEAKER_04]: I think the essay referred to this subjectivity in it's the same event that they're both discussed that they're both discussing which is Hans Rubner is is is killed and Richard Madden kills him.

[01:11:05] [SPEAKER_04]: But the question is whether it was an act of self defense or a murder.

[01:11:10] [SPEAKER_04]: And so that's really more less a the event happened.

[01:11:14] [SPEAKER_01]: It's more of a rush among.

[01:11:16] [SPEAKER_04]: It's more of a yeah perspective kind of and there's you know that's another layer of this sort of multiplicity which is not only art is every possible event occurring but like there is all these different interpretations of each events that proliferate and spin spin out of control I guess.

[01:11:38] [SPEAKER_04]: Right.

[01:11:39] [SPEAKER_01]: I have a question for you the very last the very last page.

[01:11:46] [SPEAKER_01]: The very last paragraph the rest is unreal and significant madam burst into the room.

[01:11:53] [SPEAKER_01]: I have most importantly triumphed.

[01:11:54] [SPEAKER_01]: I've communicated to Berlin.

[01:11:56] [SPEAKER_01]: The secret name of the city to be attacked yesterday it was bombed.

[01:11:59] [SPEAKER_01]: I read about it in the same newspapers that post all of England the enigma of the murder of the eminent Synologist Stephen Albert by a stranger you soon.

[01:12:07] [SPEAKER_01]: There is some ambiguity there which is that it can't have been when he says the same newspapers.

[01:12:13] [SPEAKER_01]: It can't have been the same edition of the newspaper because the if it were the same edition he would be reading about the successful bombing.

[01:12:26] [SPEAKER_01]: And the death that was supposed to be the signal to in for the successful bombing.

[01:12:30] [SPEAKER_01]: So it could be that he's saying this guy's fucking insane.

[01:12:36] [SPEAKER_01]: And one of the ways in which he could be insane is that he's he's made up this story and that he doesn't even himself realize the inconsistency that if it were in the same edition of the newspaper his story wouldn't make sense.

[01:12:49] [SPEAKER_04]: It's almost like you found the why it doesn't make sense is if the Germans had gotten the signal they would have gotten it from those papers from those papers then it's.

[01:13:01] [SPEAKER_01]: Then attacked it then another edition of the newspaper would have to report the attacking of the bombing of the city.

[01:13:06] [SPEAKER_01]: That's right. And and so so you know one way to interpret this is almost that you know talk about we mentioned Nolan once before.

[01:13:16] [SPEAKER_01]: I mean Nolan isn't even the best it's sort of a usual suspects where where the whole story might have been created in his mind as he's about to die from reading two things in the same newspaper.

[01:13:29] [SPEAKER_01]: Right. He's Kobayashi. But he is but but he's believing it. He is he created the story from reading two headlines.

[01:13:39] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. And there so there's so many different ways of interpreting that again you could go with the the fever dream that you know lacks at the end you realize that it lacks coherence.

[01:13:52] [SPEAKER_04]: You could read it as the same newspapers like he's now really in multiple different times because he says the same papers and this multiplied so you could maybe make it into some sort of metaphysical.

[01:14:09] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm in a lot of different places at once which would sort of cohere with how he the pool elation.

[01:14:15] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. He felt before but no it's it's weird and I have a couple questions for you the Stephen Albert.

[01:14:26] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm sure these are all related in some intricate way but Stephen Albert gives an example of the different futures that are in this novel and one of them he describes is this battle right.

[01:14:42] [SPEAKER_04]: So it says two two versions of a single epic chapter in the first an army marches off to battle through the mountain wilderness.

[01:14:51] [SPEAKER_04]: The horror and the rock of the rocks and darkness inspires in them a disdain for life and they go on to an easy victory in the second the same army passes through a palace in which the ball is being held the brilliant battle seems to them a continuation of the

[01:15:06] [SPEAKER_04]: fett and they win it easily. So what's so interesting about that this is like the one big example of like how he's telling two versions of the same story and it's not totally clear there that they are different stories like in both cases the same army wins the battle really easily

[01:15:31] [SPEAKER_04]: and it really is a change more in their perspective of why they won the battle easily rather than like you would think if you were if you were describing this concept you would have one side winning in one version and another side winning in another version

[01:15:50] [SPEAKER_04]: but in both of these the same side wins the battle easily not even just wins but wins it easily.

[01:15:59] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah that's super interesting because it seems as if he's trying to use an example in which an outcome is inevitable but like there is some slice of timelines in which an outcome is going to happen.

[01:16:10] [SPEAKER_01]: It's just it's kind of interesting that in some the cause of that outcome is so different right there's so in one they're full of despair from the darkness and the horror and they are like motivated to defeat the other.

[01:16:24] [SPEAKER_04]: Another one is a completely different cause that leads to the same exact outcome but again it's not even necessarily that it's a different cause it is a different interpretation of the cause right.

[01:16:39] [SPEAKER_01]: Well but he's saying in one they pass through a different place yeah and one they're marching through the mountains and the desert abandoned mountains and they have to like get get through this horrible landscape.

[01:16:52] [SPEAKER_04]: Another one they're actually passing through an actual party but is the idea that they cross the mountains and then went into the party or that those things didn't happen at the same time because it's not like.

[01:17:05] [SPEAKER_01]: I understood it is so he says in the first they crossed the mountain in the second they cross a palace where there's a party.

[01:17:13] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah I guess my thought was they're just focusing on different recent events.

[01:17:21] [SPEAKER_01]: But maybe totally possible right totally possible both of them in both versions is just that the historians are that the accounts they recounted in different ways.

[01:17:31] [SPEAKER_04]: So if you're right though then it's interesting that it seems like certain events are fixed like they were going to easily win the battle.

[01:17:42] [SPEAKER_04]: And just how that was going to happen and that that sort of fits with one part of it which is where he just imagined he has to kill kill Stephen Albert how that happens can be different but he's killing Stephen Albert one way or the other.

[01:17:56] [SPEAKER_01]: But then there's other things where it seems like sometimes I kill you sometimes you kill me yeah we're friends sometimes right enemies and this is the thing like so so imagine that you focus on one outcome so in this case it is the outcome of this battle.

[01:18:11] [SPEAKER_01]: There is and now you'd you know you take your sharpie and you draw around a little circle around all the timelines in which this army easily defeats the other in some of the versions of that story it's you know if all you look at is that slice of you know.

[01:18:26] [SPEAKER_01]: In the universe is the outcome is is inevitable in some it just interestingly gets there in a different way but then if you widen the scope there you know they're obviously versions of reality where those countries don't even exist let alone have armies the battle each other.

[01:18:39] [SPEAKER_01]: But he does say in the at the end of that paragraph where he describes the army in both different timelines.

[01:18:48] [SPEAKER_01]: He says that the final words in all of the versions is that that's how the heroes fought tranquill.

[01:18:58] [SPEAKER_01]: I mean I look what I saw so with a peaceful heart and a violent sword resigned to die and to kill.

[01:19:07] [SPEAKER_01]: And so he's saying like in all of the versions of that same story it ends with the same.

[01:19:13] [SPEAKER_01]: So it's like he's drawing a sharpie around that those right like the incomplete universe for sweep and is still telling the story of how this army one right.

[01:19:23] [SPEAKER_04]: And it's just telling all the different which is not necessarily the way you know like in a choose your own adventure which is sort of right children's version of what this idea is.

[01:19:36] [SPEAKER_04]: It's like you die or you live or you like it's it's not different ways of arriving at the same event it's different futures like completely diverging based on a choice that you make right and this it seems like.

[01:19:52] [SPEAKER_04]: The outcome is fixed and it's just the different.

[01:19:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Well here's another rabbit hole right because that is that is two ways in which time travel stories are often told right there's you there's one in which the outcome is inevitable so no matter like when when somebody travels back in time to kill Hitler they actually set off the events that cause Hitler to be you know to come to power or whatever like there is no there's nothing that you do that can change the outcome the futures fixed.

[01:20:21] [SPEAKER_01]: And that all gets you out of the paradoxes and stuff but then there's this other way right the back to the future way where you go back to passing actually change these things so that so there is this fluid.

[01:20:31] [SPEAKER_01]: And it seems as if there are two you know maybe the our protagonist or our unreliable narrator is struggling with those two ways of viewing it because if it's truly infinite then there are course universes in which he didn't kill Stephen Albert.

[01:20:48] [SPEAKER_01]: But then if you focus on all the universes in which he killed Stephen Albert in some he killed him because he was a petty thief and some moves because it was this big novel spy game that was going on and some you know what whatever like the case maybe and and I can see the despair focusing on the inevitability of the outcome.

[01:21:06] [SPEAKER_04]: No matter what he did yes I mean and that would be very fitting with being on death row for whatever reason I am going to get hung that's right let's think about it.

[01:21:18] [SPEAKER_04]: I think of all the different.

[01:21:19] [SPEAKER_04]: Let it be for a fucking cool ass spy war yeah exactly like you said he could be a petty thief he could be like but that is fixed me hanging at the rope is fixed or just us dying period is right as as readers.

[01:21:38] [SPEAKER_04]: The other question I had for you is when he's describing the fabric of times he this is the sort of the core of his theory of time sweep and theory of time he says the fabric of times that approach one another fork are snipped off or are simply unknown for centuries contains all possibilities.

[01:22:01] [SPEAKER_04]: I have looked at that sentence so this is the full unlike Newton and Schopenhauer your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time he believed in an infinite series of times a growing dizzying web of divergent convergent and parallel times.

[01:22:18] [SPEAKER_04]: And then the sentence I just read that fabric of times that approach one another fork are snipped off or simply unknown for centuries contains all possibilities.

[01:22:31] [SPEAKER_04]: I am struggling to make sense of that sentence because number one this idea of a fork that's either snipped off or just unknown for centuries.

[01:22:46] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't understand what that means like why what why would it not be known for centuries and I also just am struggling to just make sense of the fabric of times that approach one another right so and so there's an infinite series of times that approach one another.

[01:23:00] [SPEAKER_01]: And then there's an infinite series of times a growing dizzying web of divergent conversion and parallel times so you have timelines that are are close or distant from one another different in the multiverse.

[01:23:13] [SPEAKER_01]: So he's imagining this infinite web some of them look like they're starting to converge and some that they diverge and some seem to be almost identical.

[01:23:24] [SPEAKER_01]: So I so I'm just repeating what you said but I get the snipped off part where you can imagine that for any given person it's snipped off or for any given perhaps even world it's snipped off or whatever.

[01:23:38] [SPEAKER_04]: But if they die then whatever they would have gone on to do is snipped off.

[01:23:42] [SPEAKER_01]: But the simply unknown for centuries.

[01:23:45] [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, is a weird epistemological sentence in there because this is about like the existence of those timelines not about the knowledge of those timelines.

[01:24:00] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[01:24:01] [SPEAKER_01]: And and it's like some weird viewer like this maybe sweet pen in this account and and Stephen Albert have some some metaphysical sense of all of these universes but some of them are just out of their reach for for long periods of time for yeah.

[01:24:26] [SPEAKER_04]: Which is but then what does that say or like.

[01:24:30] [SPEAKER_04]: And then there's a sort of mystical kind of figures you know there's definitely something sort of mystical about the way Stephen Albert is presented for sure.

[01:24:38] [SPEAKER_01]: He's like he's he's up he's like you know gray beard gray eyes like Gandalf or Jesus which I think is the same and he even says before he's going to that he has kind of an immortal.

[01:24:50] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah look to him something indomitable and even immortal about the way he looked his face in the vivid circle of the lamp.

[01:24:59] [SPEAKER_04]: This is just insane.

[01:25:01] [SPEAKER_04]: Like we like if we were talking about this now versus talking about it three years ago I bet we would have a completely this is what's so rich about this story like we'd have a completely different conversation if we were talking about this 10 years ago three years ago three years from now probably.

[01:25:19] [SPEAKER_01]: So much this is it's so funny because what when I read this the first on my first read.

[01:25:24] [SPEAKER_01]: I was like OK there's that it's interesting it's interesting again it's cool that it's like a like a spar spy short story and then I was like oh wow there's just so much more there's so much more like the core idea in the library of Babel is very easy to grok like immediately.

[01:25:44] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah like and once you get that core idea then it's almost like you don't need to tell the rest of the story like that the hexagonal you know shape of the individual rooms doesn't matter that much like.

[01:25:56] [SPEAKER_04]: No but I think the way people are responding to it as.

[01:25:59] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah it's for sure but it's just this one has layers now right or either intentional or not there are other works of art that are that it reminds me of you know there's one of my favorite albums by a musician named J Dilla who passed away a few years ago he was an extraordinary DJ and a music producer on his deathbed he made an album called Donuts.

[01:26:26] [SPEAKER_01]: And donuts I'm sure it's not the first and won't be the last but it if you play it.

[01:26:32] [SPEAKER_01]: The very end song connects to the very beginning song in an eternal loop.

[01:26:37] [SPEAKER_01]: In a really really cool way but the other thing that he does that I love that reminded me of this is.

[01:26:45] [SPEAKER_01]: He and he inserts errors.

[01:26:48] [SPEAKER_01]: He was a fan of finding glitches in recorded music and inserting them on purpose and he was such a perfectionist part of it was that you knew that he would never allow an error to happen.

[01:26:59] [SPEAKER_01]: And if it did it was completely intentional so people have written.

[01:27:05] [SPEAKER_01]: Like articles books blog posts about what this could have meant in this particular song that he inserted this particular sound and you can really lose yourself and sometimes like I feeling it with Borges is like just a smart motherfucker who knew how to fuck with us really really well and he knew the conditions.

[01:27:24] [SPEAKER_04]: Look I mean that's so I don't think that I think there's an interesting question of whether he has an interpretation of the underlying reality or not but I don't think he's just fucking out with us for the sake of fucking with us.

[01:27:38] [SPEAKER_04]: This totally again not surprising because I'm obsessed with it but this totally made me think of Twin Peaks The Return because in a similar kind of way people are still debating it's been a year since it almost a year since.

[01:27:53] [SPEAKER_04]: It ended and over a year since it started airing and and there's multiple and I'm familiar with all of them blogs and Reddit threads and podcasts that are still going still trying to wrap their heads around still trying to make sense of it.

[01:28:10] [SPEAKER_04]: And there's so many different interpretations and there's this meta interpretations also which is there isn't a single interpretation if you try to come up with a single interpretation.

[01:28:20] [SPEAKER_04]: You're diminish you're making it less rich than it actually is if you try to be like well this is time travel and you know like he so like it has that same kind of endlessly rich quality to it and I really love this kind of art.

[01:28:38] [SPEAKER_04]: It's like it just an invitation to dialogue among the people who are experiencing it and I think play you know I've been I totally changed my whole opinion of Plato in light of all this like Plato is like that nobody knows what the hell he was up to in like the Republic or in symposium

[01:28:58] [SPEAKER_04]: or in all these like it's just and we're still debating and we're still talking about even basic things like is he for the Republic or is he like like showing the absurdity of the Republic and you know and I think Plato again was also trying to to instill in like make the the person who's

[01:29:18] [SPEAKER_04]: reading or viewing or listening to like an active participant in the dialogue of understanding to be active in a way that like really good art you play a part.

[01:29:31] [SPEAKER_04]: And yeah.

[01:29:32] [SPEAKER_01]: Okay so let me clarify what I'm at what I meant when I said that maybe Boris was just fucking with us or J. Dill was just fucking with us because I think it's important like for what I met that that it not be interpreted as there was no intention behind the choices that

[01:29:48] [SPEAKER_01]: he made in the story but rather I think something that is more interesting that is the mark of that good art that you just described which is Borges or Dilla or Lynch or whoever we're talking about.

[01:30:00] [SPEAKER_01]: We've together these things that cause that cause us to be active participants in it.

[01:30:07] [SPEAKER_01]: What I mean by just fucking with us is more that I don't know that Lynch or Borges would.

[01:30:16] [SPEAKER_01]: Could possibly know the number of interpretations that they're inserting right and that it is to almost to it would almost be condescending to the reader to do that on purpose but rather it's something that's emanating from this person who's so interesting.

[01:30:35] [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[01:30:36] [SPEAKER_01]: Who is in Borges who is who is you know fucking fan of like reading the Kabbalah and reading and writing stories about Gautras having knife fights and and like games of math and infinity.

[01:30:49] [SPEAKER_01]: This is what comes out of him.

[01:30:50] [SPEAKER_01]: It really is and I've said this before like it's not that I'm being postmodern by saying this but it's some in some sense it is that that it's it would be sad for me if Borges or Lynch or Dilla.

[01:31:05] [SPEAKER_01]: Came and said no no this is what I meant when I inserted that sound like this is exactly what I meant because that they might have convinced themselves that's what they meant but I don't buy like the artist is creating something out of ways that she doesn't even realize and that it is the complexity of her mind that is causing this work of art.

[01:31:26] [SPEAKER_01]: Not any explicit necessarily an example like maybe in some cases super explicit but not always right so.

[01:31:32] [SPEAKER_01]: I just can't imagine that anybody like a Lynch could could conceive of all of the like.

[01:31:38] [SPEAKER_04]: No right and I think that's again and I don't think it's like oh this will fuck with like they're not trolling they're not readers or viewers they are just this is just that their story and because they are like geniuses they there's going to it's going to be open to all these interpretations it's interesting I think both Borges.

[01:32:02] [SPEAKER_04]: And Lynch resolutely refused to give you an interpretation for sure they do want the person who's viewing their art to be like a real part of it and to build a community around that and again not.

[01:32:22] [SPEAKER_04]: So that they'll seem smarter or more interesting than they actually are it's the opposite it's like it's like a very generous act to make it make us do like what we're doing right now you know.

[01:32:36] [SPEAKER_01]: Well and the thing is like it is cruel or to the to the listener to the reader to the viewer to have an artist come and say you know say you have this like you know view of what what for his intended and part of that is constructed from your own life experience like you were saying like three years ago what would we be saying about this story.

[01:32:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Like in some ways this is allowing us to inject whatever systems of thinking and meaning and experience life experiences that we've had into the story and to say no dude it was just a Chinese guy like or whatever it is right yeah.

[01:33:15] [SPEAKER_04]: Is there is some cool way of shutting up the listener or the reader. Yeah that's right. But it's also why like the usual suspects good as it is isn't something that people are still talking about like and debating and everything like it is a it is a cool twist that kind of wraps up that story and you we're not going to be talking about it in 40 years in the way that we talk about like a Borges story.

[01:33:43] [SPEAKER_01]: What's great about the Borges story is it is the surface content like we were talking about before is like you can imagine reading this as an eighth grader or whatever and being like oh it's just this story we're like at the end like it was a secret message.

[01:33:56] [SPEAKER_01]: You know that's the twist and that's that but like it is the rapper like you know it is the rapper that he's given to a much more interesting story.

[01:34:06] [SPEAKER_04]: This really I got to go actually. This made this whole way of thinking is not something it's something I came on to pretty late which is why I say that this is not the way we would be talking about this story five years ago or at least not the way I would but it's made me re-evaluate my whole way of understanding

[01:34:27] [SPEAKER_04]: Plato to the point where I own kind of want like I really do think there's this same kind of meta intentional and that's very connected to his philosophy that he like is really intentionally making certain things unresolved so that what's ended up happening happens which is that people are still talking about what he meant.

[01:34:50] [SPEAKER_01]: And they're made it motivates thinking in a way that Kaiser so it doesn't right like you've wrapped it up too neatly you know if it was just very very clear that that's what was going on like great I agree great works of art.

[01:35:03] [SPEAKER_01]: Give you more than what you think they're giving you at first and there is a way in which I agree with you that like there's a concrete way of thinking that you know developmental psychologist Piaget for instance like.

[01:35:18] [SPEAKER_01]: You had these stages where he thought what you get out of concrete these concrete stage and when you're 13 or 14 years you're getting into like the more ability to think in an abstract way.

[01:35:29] [SPEAKER_01]: I think I was stuck in a concrete way of thinking in a really deep sense for a lot longer than that, like, and I think you're right it is a way of appreciating art that that it came a little too late in life.

[01:35:46] [SPEAKER_01]: Well we still have some time.

[01:35:48] [SPEAKER_05]: We're in something versus not write us off completely yet.

[01:35:52] [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I'm going to end with I can't not say this for anybody who's been listening this long.

[01:35:56] [SPEAKER_01]: I know that Rick and Morty is like there's a ton of Rick and Morty that is relevant to this.

[01:36:01] [SPEAKER_01]: So I acknowledge just I will acknowledge witness you bear witness.

[01:36:05] [SPEAKER_04]: All right.

[01:36:08] [SPEAKER_04]: That was fun conversation.

[01:36:10] [SPEAKER_02]: Who knows how it'll sound from the outside but yes, join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.