Episode 293: Who Is the Dreamer? (Borges' "The Circular Ruins")

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00]: Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having

[00:00:06] [SPEAKER_00]: 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

[00:00:14] [SPEAKER_00]: my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] [SPEAKER_05]: For one brief moment, I felt the heartbeat of creation, and it was one with my own.

[00:00:22] [SPEAKER_05]: We all feel like that all the time, but you don't hear us gassin' on about it.

[00:00:30] [SPEAKER_02]: Look, man in, huh?

[00:00:34] [SPEAKER_10]: Pay no attention to that bad good man.

[00:00:50] [SPEAKER_10]: Good.

[00:00:54] [SPEAKER_09]: They think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have, anybody can have a brain.

[00:01:08] [SPEAKER_07]: You're a very bad man.

[00:01:11] [SPEAKER_10]: I'm a very good man.

[00:01:13] [SPEAKER_10]: Just a very bad wizard.

[00:01:15] [SPEAKER_04]: Welcome to Very Bad Wizards.

[00:01:17] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:20] [SPEAKER_04]: Dave, we are like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream.

[00:01:26] [SPEAKER_04]: But, who is the dreamer?

[00:01:29] [SPEAKER_04]: Oh.

[00:01:31] [SPEAKER_03]: That's a good question.

[00:01:33] [SPEAKER_03]: You're Nate Silver's dream.

[00:01:34] [SPEAKER_03]: That's what you are.

[00:01:35] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm his fuckin' nightmare.

[00:01:37] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm gonna take him and all of his ilk down in my next book.

[00:01:43] [SPEAKER_03]: You're Nate Silver's nightmare after he had, like, a bad burrito one night, you know?

[00:01:47] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm his Kaiser Sosae.

[00:01:51] [SPEAKER_03]: You know what he's saying now?

[00:01:52] [SPEAKER_03]: He's like, I don't even think about you.

[00:01:56] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, you will.

[00:01:59] [SPEAKER_04]: The dreamer who dreams, by the way, which you don't get is a reference to the Upanishads,

[00:02:06] [SPEAKER_04]: but that's not how I came into contact with it.

[00:02:08] [SPEAKER_04]: It was a famous line in Twin Peaks Season 3.

[00:02:12] [SPEAKER_04]: But, it also relates to our second segment, which is...

[00:02:18] [SPEAKER_03]: The Circular Ruins by Jorge Luis Borges.

[00:02:22] [SPEAKER_03]: Fucking great story.

[00:02:23] [SPEAKER_03]: Just pause this and read it.

[00:02:25] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, great story.

[00:02:26] [SPEAKER_04]: I was texting you earlier.

[00:02:29] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm intimidated to try to get into it, even though it was one of the stories we covered in the seminar.

[00:02:34] [SPEAKER_04]: There was something about going through it this time that was just, like, this is a religious text almost.

[00:02:42] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, totally.

[00:02:42] [SPEAKER_03]: I was reading it and I was like, I think I texted you, like, it needs to go line by line.

[00:02:46] [SPEAKER_03]: It needs, like, little verse marks.

[00:02:47] [SPEAKER_03]: And it's, like, what? Five pages of the book, you know?

[00:02:50] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean, that's Borges'.

[00:02:52] [SPEAKER_04]: Like, nobody can do that like he can.

[00:02:55] [SPEAKER_04]: Here's a five-page story that will make you rethink everything you believe and feel about what's real.

[00:03:03] [SPEAKER_04]: All right, but first, you know, we were going to talk about kids who have had past lives and report that to their parents.

[00:03:14] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, like little two-year-olds who all of a sudden, like...

[00:03:17] [SPEAKER_04]: Who report past lives.

[00:03:18] [SPEAKER_04]: Who report, who clearly are or do have, like, somebody in them that was in the Holocaust as a child.

[00:03:27] [SPEAKER_04]: There was a long story about that, but I think we're going to put that to next week.

[00:03:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Because I got all riled up, as I tend to do with this kind of thing.

[00:03:36] [SPEAKER_04]: So there's a tweet from Derek Thompson.

[00:03:38] [SPEAKER_04]: This is the guy that millennials all look to for wisdom, like, including my brother.

[00:03:45] [SPEAKER_04]: We talked about him last episode, actually.

[00:03:47] [SPEAKER_04]: This was mostly a Derek Thompson podcast.

[00:03:49] [SPEAKER_04]: Like, do you remember when I just happened to bring up how he had talked about the Apple goggles on...

[00:03:59] [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, yeah, yeah.

[00:03:59] [SPEAKER_04]: ...the GoScience podcast and, like, he was like, this is the next big thing, you know?

[00:04:04] [SPEAKER_03]: Okay.

[00:04:05] [SPEAKER_03]: That gives me some context for you right now.

[00:04:07] [SPEAKER_04]: So seems like a nice guy.

[00:04:09] [SPEAKER_04]: We actually had a small interaction on Twitter.

[00:04:13] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure he's a nice guy.

[00:04:15] [SPEAKER_04]: So I guess Scientific American, this is the big thing, not my feelings about Derek Thompson.

[00:04:20] [SPEAKER_04]: Scientific American endorsed Kamala Harris for president because that will support science, health, and the environment.

[00:04:30] [SPEAKER_04]: So I think predictably at this point, like, a lot of people are like, you know, you shouldn't do that.

[00:04:36] [SPEAKER_04]: This is why everyone's polarized.

[00:04:37] [SPEAKER_04]: This is why people don't trust science.

[00:04:39] [SPEAKER_04]: This is why people don't trust vaccines.

[00:04:42] [SPEAKER_04]: An example of it that I happened to come across was Derek Thompson's tweet.

[00:04:45] [SPEAKER_04]: Ree, Scientific American's endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.

[00:04:50] [SPEAKER_04]: I wish I saw more scientists grappling with the tradeoffs at stake here.

[00:04:55] [SPEAKER_04]: In fact, a 2023 paper found that the journal Nature's endorsement of Joe Biden, one, caused large reductions in stated trusted nature among Trump supporters.

[00:05:09] [SPEAKER_04]: I'd love to know the set of those people.

[00:05:12] [SPEAKER_03]: No, yeah, I have thoughts about that.

[00:05:15] [SPEAKER_04]: Lowered the demand for COVID related information provided by Nature.

[00:05:22] [SPEAKER_04]: So ridiculous.

[00:05:25] [SPEAKER_04]: As I'm reading it, reduced Trump supporters trust in scientists in general.

[00:05:32] [SPEAKER_04]: And four, while estimated effects on Biden supporters trust were positive, small and mostly statistically insignificant.

[00:05:41] [SPEAKER_04]: I buy that last one.

[00:05:44] [SPEAKER_04]: A hundred percent.

[00:05:46] [SPEAKER_03]: Who is the very bad wizard's official endorsement?

[00:05:49] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know.

[00:05:50] [SPEAKER_04]: Cornel West.

[00:05:53] [SPEAKER_03]: OK, that's the end of the tweet, right?

[00:05:55] [SPEAKER_04]: That's the end of the tweet.

[00:05:56] [SPEAKER_04]: I, you know, I was just like, you've got to be kidding me.

[00:06:00] [SPEAKER_04]: It's annoying that Scientific American or Nature is, you know, offering political endorsements.

[00:06:06] [SPEAKER_04]: But it's equally annoying that people are getting like pearl clutching about it and thinking that this is why people don't trust scientists.

[00:06:13] [SPEAKER_04]: The actual problem is people trust scientists way too much.

[00:06:16] [SPEAKER_03]: That is not the actual problem.

[00:06:17] [SPEAKER_04]: It is the actual problem.

[00:06:19] [SPEAKER_03]: How have you become anti science?

[00:06:21] [SPEAKER_03]: But like beneath my nose, I.

[00:06:23] [SPEAKER_03]: That's a ridiculous thing to say.

[00:06:25] [SPEAKER_03]: Like, that's just insane.

[00:06:27] [SPEAKER_04]: No, that's insane.

[00:06:27] [SPEAKER_04]: Are you like an anti-vaccine advocate?

[00:06:29] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, just OK.

[00:06:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Sorry.

[00:06:32] [SPEAKER_04]: All I'm saying is people trust studies like this too much.

[00:06:36] [SPEAKER_04]: It's ironic to say the least to cite this study to show that, like, oh, no, like we have to be careful about people mistrusting science.

[00:06:45] [SPEAKER_03]: Right. So it's not that you think people are trusting scientists too much.

[00:06:49] [SPEAKER_03]: Then some people do.

[00:06:51] [SPEAKER_03]: Right. But what you're saying is that it won't have an effect on trusted scientists.

[00:06:54] [SPEAKER_04]: No, no, that's. Yeah.

[00:06:56] [SPEAKER_03]: OK, so the paper, like we don't need to go too much into there is fairly simple design.

[00:07:00] [SPEAKER_03]: They got Trump supporters and Biden supporters in a representative sample.

[00:07:04] [SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, you select for the right ratio of ethnicities and gender and all that education.

[00:07:11] [SPEAKER_03]: And they had half of them randomly assigned to read a message summarizing nature's endorsement of Biden.

[00:07:18] [SPEAKER_03]: And other half they read a country's control condition about like nature's new design for its Web site or something.

[00:07:24] [SPEAKER_03]: And then they asked people a bunch of questions about how much they trust the journal Nature, how much they trust scientists in general, how much they believe nature is unbiased.

[00:07:36] [SPEAKER_03]: And they looked at this broken up by Trump and Biden supporters, and they show that the Trump supporters who saw the Biden endorsement actually were reported lower trust in science and lower trust in nature as a publication.

[00:07:50] [SPEAKER_03]: So what about that do you think is not showing what the author claims?

[00:07:53] [SPEAKER_04]: OK, I don't think this is reported, although I didn't read it super closely.

[00:07:58] [SPEAKER_04]: How many of these people had ever heard of the journal Nature before?

[00:08:03] [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know. Like it probably isn't there. Like that's the big problem.

[00:08:07] [SPEAKER_04]: That's the question, right? Like and so let's say 10 percent, which would that strikes me as implausible that it would even be that high. Right.

[00:08:15] [SPEAKER_04]: Like if you shove some journal they've never heard of, tell them it's a science journal and then tell them they endorse.

[00:08:23] [SPEAKER_04]: Like, of course, they're not going to like they're going to say I've lowered my trust.

[00:08:27] [SPEAKER_04]: Like that's obvious if they haven't heard of it now, the kind of person that actually follows nature, the journal to the point where they actually are aware that nature endorses or doesn't endorse a presidential candidate.

[00:08:42] [SPEAKER_04]: That person is more than likely savvy enough to know the political leanings of like a large majority of the people who publish there.

[00:08:51] [SPEAKER_04]: And whatever performative thing that nature does will have no effect on them.

[00:08:55] [SPEAKER_04]: They already have their view of how much to trust nature. So that's my big problem.

[00:09:01] [SPEAKER_03]: 100 percent agree. Like to be charitable to the study.

[00:09:04] [SPEAKER_03]: I think this does show that Trump supporters who were shown this thing, like actually reported lower trust in this thing.

[00:09:11] [SPEAKER_03]: But like you said, like you show me just like insert name of journal here and tell me that they supported Trump and now tell me how much I trust that journal.

[00:09:19] [SPEAKER_03]: And like, yeah, but if I've never even thought of that journal in like ever. Right.

[00:09:24] [SPEAKER_03]: If it was like some fashion industry magazine or whatever that I've never even really thought about.

[00:09:31] [SPEAKER_03]: Of course, I'm going to think that it's less of a trustworthy magazine due solely because of my beliefs about the kind of person who endorses Trump.

[00:09:38] [SPEAKER_04]: And that's what the Trump supporters. But it was never an issue whether you trusted that that magazine or not.

[00:09:44] [SPEAKER_03]: It's a Schrodinger's cat. Right. It's like now that you tell me, like, of course, I'm going to say I trust them less.

[00:09:51] [SPEAKER_04]: So here's one possible reply to this is like, OK, but it's not maybe the journal nature, but they're going to trust science less.

[00:09:59] [SPEAKER_04]: It's like I just don't think that this will affect it. Like and I don't know.

[00:10:02] [SPEAKER_04]: Like I guess someone could run the study or whatever that dealt with this concern.

[00:10:07] [SPEAKER_04]: But the truth is people have pretty settled beliefs about like, you know, how much they trust science and how politically biased they think it is already.

[00:10:16] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, no, they do. And these I don't think nature's on anybody's radar.

[00:10:20] [SPEAKER_03]: I think what you've done is you've given them two bits of information. Here's science. Here's anti-Trump sentiment.

[00:10:27] [SPEAKER_03]: Do you trust science? And they're going to say no.

[00:10:30] [SPEAKER_03]: If you're a Trump supporter, like, of course.

[00:10:32] [SPEAKER_03]: Right. Yeah. So I agree, too. And I have other reasons to independent of the evidence, like the quote, to think that probably like they shouldn't be endorsing candidates.

[00:10:44] [SPEAKER_03]: Not because I don't think that we should stand up for, you know, like I think that you could take a strong pro science stance and be political about it.

[00:10:52] [SPEAKER_03]: But I just I find it useless to endorse. It's always struck me as a weird, overinflated view of the influence that you have.

[00:11:01] [SPEAKER_03]: Like who the fuck cares what science is?

[00:11:03] [SPEAKER_04]: That was exactly my and I don't know why it pisses me off, but it gives a fuck.

[00:11:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Nobody cares about this except the tiniest sliver of academics and journalists trying to drum something up. And Yoel.

[00:11:18] [SPEAKER_03]: When you all was talking, I was just thinking about that, about SPSP endorsing things.

[00:11:22] [SPEAKER_03]: I also think in principle, like it shouldn't. Sure. For its own sake.

[00:11:26] [SPEAKER_03]: But to think that anything that SPSP is an organization states like that publicly, like I would have quit it a long time ago, probably if I cared about that stuff.

[00:11:36] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, right. Everyone knows what SPSP thinks, you know, and the idea that it reduced people's trust about what nature says about COVID.

[00:11:45] [SPEAKER_04]: Like I can't even dignify that.

[00:11:49] [SPEAKER_03]: No, I worry sometimes that we're even feeding into this whole circle jerk of this stuff because like, who cares?

[00:11:58] [SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's a fine tweet, whatever. But like, I really don't think like I don't think I need to grapple with this scientific American endorsement.

[00:12:06] [SPEAKER_04]: So Liam Bright responding to that tweet saying like, it's not a tradeoff. There's no upside for doing it.

[00:12:13] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. And what I said was like, it's not a tradeoff because there's no effect period. But I think there's definitely no upside.

[00:12:20] [SPEAKER_03]: Right. The word tradeoff has become this stupid ass fucking like word.

[00:12:25] [SPEAKER_04]: Is that like Bayesian priors? Yes. Updating my priors.

[00:12:28] [SPEAKER_03]: Exactly. Yeah. It's like people need to realize the tradeoffs and it's just sort of this like Nate Silvery word.

[00:12:35] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. No, right. Liam is right.

[00:12:37] [SPEAKER_04]: And then what he said in reply to that was like, well, they could have been using the time that they wrote that endorsement to like work in a soup kitchen.

[00:12:44] [SPEAKER_04]: And then, yeah, absolutely. 100% agree. Like, yes, it was a waste of time to do it. Period.

[00:12:51] [SPEAKER_04]: All this does is amplify or let people even know who scientific American endorse.

[00:12:58] [SPEAKER_04]: It's not like, oh, like all these voters, these Trump voters are getting their scientific American in the mail.

[00:13:05] [SPEAKER_04]: And holy shit. Wait, now I'm not going to get my eighth booster shot anymore because they endorsed Trump or Conn.

[00:13:14] [SPEAKER_03]: For the record, I'm pro booster. I don't care. I don't care who endorses it or doesn't. If that's how you're making your decisions.

[00:13:22] [SPEAKER_04]: They can't find a vein anymore for days.

[00:13:27] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm doing it between my toes. I'm double booking under different names.

[00:13:34] [SPEAKER_04]: This is the biggest difference between us. I just have the two Johnson and Johnson shots. The one that doesn't work.

[00:13:41] [SPEAKER_03]: The Russian one. Yeah.

[00:13:44] [SPEAKER_03]: I just I also just loved to think about a Trump supporter who's like super into like, you know, tectonic geology and is getting their nature delivered to them to the door.

[00:13:55] [SPEAKER_03]: And then one day they're like, oh, I wanted to look out was the state of the evidence on, you know, the tectonic plate shifting.

[00:14:02] [SPEAKER_03]: And here I see them supporting Biden. That's well, I don't believe in this results anymore.

[00:14:08] [SPEAKER_04]: And climate change isn't real.

[00:14:14] [SPEAKER_04]: Look, are we better? Like we just spent a whole segment talking.

[00:14:20] [SPEAKER_03]: We just needed to talk about something before Borges.

[00:14:23] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. You wanted to put off grappling with the fact that like reincarnation is real.

[00:14:28] [SPEAKER_03]: So it's too real.

[00:14:31] [SPEAKER_03]: I would think you would like that. Actually.

[00:14:33] [SPEAKER_03]: Tupac has a line that I love. He says my only fear of death is reincarnation.

[00:14:37] [SPEAKER_03]: But it doesn't matter because you don't remember unless you're one of these weird two-bit people.

[00:14:39] [SPEAKER_03]: Like the two year olds in this piece.

[00:14:42] [SPEAKER_04]: All too well.

[00:14:44] [SPEAKER_04]: Like the haunting memories.

[00:14:47] [SPEAKER_04]: We'll be right back to talk about Borges' The Circular Ruins.

[00:15:55] [SPEAKER_03]: Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.

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[00:20:05] [SPEAKER_04]: All right, let's get to this absolutely mesmerizing Borges story.

[00:20:12] [SPEAKER_04]: The Circular Ruins.

[00:20:16] [SPEAKER_04]: This is in his collection.

[00:20:21] [SPEAKER_04]: It was in the Garden of Forking Paths.

[00:20:23] [SPEAKER_04]: I wouldn't say it's a plot-heavy story.

[00:20:26] [SPEAKER_04]: But David, what is the narrative of the Circular Ruins?

[00:20:31] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. In fact, it's so not plot-heavy that I think it's fairly easy to give a summary.

[00:20:36] [SPEAKER_03]: So the story is about a man who sort of finds himself in a forest and some in some circular ruins of an ancient temple and immediately gets to sleeping.

[00:20:47] [SPEAKER_03]: And he knows in the deepest of his core, he knows that his one task is to sleep and to dream.

[00:20:54] [SPEAKER_03]: And in his dream, to create a man of dream stuff.

[00:20:59] [SPEAKER_03]: And so the story is how he goes about doing that creation.

[00:21:03] [SPEAKER_03]: He finally creates that man, lets him loose into the world with the blessing of the gods.

[00:21:09] [SPEAKER_03]: And at the very end realizes through what happens that he himself is a dream.

[00:21:15] [SPEAKER_03]: He is being dreamed by somebody else.

[00:21:17] [SPEAKER_04]: Yes. He wanted to dream a man into reality.

[00:21:21] [SPEAKER_04]: Then realized that he himself is a dream.

[00:21:25] [SPEAKER_04]: We were talking about this before.

[00:21:27] [SPEAKER_04]: I think this is a story you have to read more than once or you have to not be me.

[00:21:34] [SPEAKER_04]: Because when I first read it, I was like, this is cool, but okay, there's a little twist at the end.

[00:21:41] [SPEAKER_04]: And for Borges, I thought he kind of was very explicit about the twist at the end.

[00:21:49] [SPEAKER_04]: And I was like, I don't want to give Borges story writing advice, but I think he gave us a little too much.

[00:21:57] [SPEAKER_04]: And now I just realized how completely idiotic all of that was.

[00:22:01] [SPEAKER_04]: Like there's so much going on in this story.

[00:22:03] [SPEAKER_04]: And maybe it took assigning it in my class, because the students were immediately much smarter than me about finding all the strange, mysterious aspects of the story.

[00:22:19] [SPEAKER_04]: In a way that it's not just, oh, he realized he was in the Matrix.

[00:22:25] [SPEAKER_04]: It's so far beyond that.

[00:22:27] [SPEAKER_04]: My head is swimming with all the different ways to try to interpret this story.

[00:22:31] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. I'm the same as you.

[00:22:33] [SPEAKER_03]: In fact, credit to our listeners who kept bringing this story up and then you assigning it and sort of co-signing that made me actually do it.

[00:22:42] [SPEAKER_03]: Because I had the same experience as you.

[00:22:45] [SPEAKER_03]: I remember reading it. I remember thinking it was clever.

[00:22:48] [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, on Borges in that M. Night Shyamalan reveal at the end, he was a dream.

[00:22:56] [SPEAKER_03]: But it's this journey.

[00:22:57] [SPEAKER_03]: You read it again and hopefully again.

[00:22:59] [SPEAKER_03]: It's like we said before, it's like five pages or something.

[00:23:02] [SPEAKER_03]: And all the journey stuff is important.

[00:23:04] [SPEAKER_03]: In fact, the reveal at the end is...

[00:23:06] [SPEAKER_03]: It's almost unnecessary.

[00:23:08] [SPEAKER_03]: It's almost unnecessary. I was going to say that.

[00:23:10] [SPEAKER_03]: We can talk about that, like what purpose that's serving.

[00:23:13] [SPEAKER_03]: But I don't think it's serving the purpose of being like the twist.

[00:23:17] [SPEAKER_03]: Over explaining.

[00:23:18] [SPEAKER_03]: The plot requires. Yeah. It's doing something else.

[00:23:21] [SPEAKER_04]: No, that's right. And Borges, of all people, would never spoon feed the reader.

[00:23:25] [SPEAKER_04]: And so actually I'm excited to talk about why he becomes so explicit in the end.

[00:23:33] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. And I have some thoughts.

[00:23:35] [SPEAKER_03]: So yeah. The other thing I want to say before we dive into it is the first time you read something or watch something,

[00:23:42] [SPEAKER_03]: you are so concerned with what's happening and how it's going to end that it's hard to pay attention to all of the details.

[00:23:50] [SPEAKER_03]: And so you're reading like I was reading this, whatever the first time was.

[00:23:53] [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm like, OK, so what's going to happen? What's this story about?

[00:23:56] [SPEAKER_03]: Is he going to be able to dream the guy or not?

[00:23:58] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. Yeah. And then like it kind of ends abruptly and you're like, oh, that's what it was about.

[00:24:03] [SPEAKER_03]: And you kind of forget the denseness of the journey in this story.

[00:24:07] [SPEAKER_03]: Like just the sheer amount of things that are packed into this.

[00:24:11] [SPEAKER_03]: In a meta way, it's like a great kind of fucking with you.

[00:24:14] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. Completely. Do you have an interpretation of what this is a metaphor for?

[00:24:23] [SPEAKER_04]: What theological or mythological traditions it's borrowing from?

[00:24:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Like what metaphysics it's exploring?

[00:24:33] [SPEAKER_04]: Like do you have something specific?

[00:24:36] [SPEAKER_03]: I went through a bit of a journey.

[00:24:37] [SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, I would never be one to say that there's one interpretation.

[00:24:42] [SPEAKER_03]: I think that if you know, if you've ever listened to a podcast before, you know, that can't be the case.

[00:24:47] [SPEAKER_03]: But at least the one that I've been left with these past couple of days reading the story a few times.

[00:24:53] [SPEAKER_03]: It feels like this is a real soul searching or I don't know.

[00:25:00] [SPEAKER_03]: It's like getting deep into the soul of somebody who is a creative person,

[00:25:04] [SPEAKER_03]: like the creator of a work, a work of art specifically, maybe.

[00:25:08] [SPEAKER_03]: And all that mythological stuff that's going on to me seems very much a metaphor for the human creative process.

[00:25:17] [SPEAKER_03]: And the almost mystical or perhaps mystical feel that you have maybe as you're creating something

[00:25:23] [SPEAKER_03]: or as you're just consuming the things other people have created or something.

[00:25:27] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. Yeah. What about you?

[00:25:29] [SPEAKER_04]: Actually, I also find that to be the one that I've landed on.

[00:25:35] [SPEAKER_04]: Like you were saying, a creator in the broadest sense of the term.

[00:25:40] [SPEAKER_04]: Although I think artistic creation is what seems to fit a lot of the aspects of the story.

[00:25:45] [SPEAKER_04]: I will say though, like every time I read it, you know, you see explicit Gnosticism references.

[00:25:53] [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of Buddhist and Hindu ideas, you know, about the illusion, the mere appearance of your experience as you understand it.

[00:26:02] [SPEAKER_04]: Like there's like Adam and Eve and Genesis.

[00:26:06] [SPEAKER_03]: There's explicit references to Zoroastrianism in the language of Zand that he talks about.

[00:26:12] [SPEAKER_03]: The what?

[00:26:14] [SPEAKER_03]: Zoroastrianism when he says Zand.

[00:26:15] [SPEAKER_04]: What is that? What is Zoroastrianism?

[00:26:18] [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, Zoroastrianism is the sort of ancient religion of the Persians.

[00:26:23] [SPEAKER_03]: It's not widely practiced anymore, but it's one of the earliest religions to have like a cosmology with like a good God and evil one.

[00:26:30] [SPEAKER_03]: And there's sort of fights of some people believe it's a direct influence on some Christian thoughts.

[00:26:35] [SPEAKER_03]: But you know, Zoroastrianism, it's Zarathustra.

[00:26:37] [SPEAKER_03]: It's what Nietzsche referred to.

[00:26:39] [SPEAKER_04]: You seem so disappointed in me.

[00:26:42] [SPEAKER_04]: You're like, oh, oh God.

[00:26:45] [SPEAKER_04]: How embarrassing.

[00:26:46] [SPEAKER_03]: How embarrassing for you.

[00:26:49] [SPEAKER_03]: If that sounded like pretension anyway, I'm sorry.

[00:26:52] [SPEAKER_03]: I deserve it.

[00:26:54] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm a fraud in a lot of ways.

[00:26:56] [SPEAKER_03]: So Zand is like either the language, but it's actually properly refers to the set of commentaries on the ancient religious Zoroastrian texts.

[00:27:05] [SPEAKER_03]: And I guess there's like, I don't know enough, but there's symbolism of fire, which we'll talk about that's part of Zoroastrianism as well.

[00:27:11] [SPEAKER_03]: But it's all just like one big soup bowl of mystical tradition.

[00:27:16] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's definitely there and it's like a big part of the feel of the story.

[00:27:21] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly.

[00:27:21] [SPEAKER_03]: But there's so much more.

[00:27:23] [SPEAKER_03]: It's like you can't help but read into, he explicitly thinks of the man he's creating as his son.

[00:27:30] [SPEAKER_03]: And there were parts of it where I was like, this is just like, it is like having a child and releasing him into the world.

[00:27:35] [SPEAKER_04]: Yes, I had that same thought.

[00:27:37] [SPEAKER_04]: There's a point in the story where it's like, oh, like the kid is going to college and he both is happy, but also resents the kid for, you know.

[00:27:48] [SPEAKER_04]: Totally.

[00:27:48] [SPEAKER_04]: And last thing, it's funny that you said the M night Shyamalan.

[00:27:54] [SPEAKER_04]: Shyamalan.

[00:27:56] [SPEAKER_04]: Zoroastrian.

[00:27:57] [SPEAKER_04]: Because when you read it again and reread it, the so-called twist, much like the sixth sense, which I think is really good in this way, it seems so obvious once you reread it.

[00:28:11] [SPEAKER_04]: It's like he's telling you that this is a dream.

[00:28:14] [SPEAKER_04]: Like, he's kind of shaking you and slapping you and telling you no, that he's also in a dream.

[00:28:19] [SPEAKER_04]: Like there's so many little echoes.

[00:28:21] [SPEAKER_04]: The thing that he's preparing for is clearly the thing that he has done already.

[00:28:28] [SPEAKER_04]: And it's just, you know.

[00:28:29] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I don't know if there's a word for this artistic method or whatever technique is being used here, but you can get away with so much obviousness as long as it's before the thing that like ends up making it all obvious.

[00:28:42] [SPEAKER_03]: You know what I'm saying?

[00:28:43] [SPEAKER_03]: Because when you go back and reread it, you're like, oh no, the description of this man is almost identical to the description of the man he's creating.

[00:28:51] [SPEAKER_03]: You know, the lack of memory, the grayness, like all of that stuff.

[00:28:55] [SPEAKER_03]: You're like, oh, it should have been obvious.

[00:28:56] [SPEAKER_03]: But just because you don't get a lot of information until later, you've already kind of forgotten to like unify it with the stuff you read earlier.

[00:29:04] [SPEAKER_04]: That's exactly right.

[00:29:05] [SPEAKER_04]: I actually wanted to ask you about this.

[00:29:06] [SPEAKER_04]: This directly relates to what you were just saying, but then I thought it might be also saying something in addition.

[00:29:12] [SPEAKER_04]: So the translator of the book that I have is Andrew Hurley, and he has a note on the translation that I happened to read in conjunction with this.

[00:29:23] [SPEAKER_04]: And he says that Borges has like a kind of plain style in like some of the fictions in this period.

[00:29:31] [SPEAKER_04]: It is a quiet style whose effects are achieved not with bombast or pomp, but rather with a single exploding word or phrase dropped almost as though offhandedly into a quiet sentence.

[00:29:45] [SPEAKER_04]: This is a quote now.

[00:29:46] [SPEAKER_04]: He examined his wounds and saw without astonishment that they had healed.

[00:29:50] [SPEAKER_04]: The laconic detail, quote unquote, without astonishment comes at the very beginning of the circular ruins will probably only at the end of the story be recalled by the reader who will retrospectively and somewhat abashedly see that it changes everything in the story.

[00:30:06] [SPEAKER_04]: It is quintessential Borges.

[00:30:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Now, my question about that specific line.

[00:30:12] [SPEAKER_04]: So this is at the very beginning where this man claws his way into this strange circular temple.

[00:30:20] [SPEAKER_04]: But as he's clawing through, like you said, it's a forest and he's getting all caught up.

[00:30:25] [SPEAKER_04]: And then when he awakened, he saw without astonishment that his wounds were healed.

[00:30:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, of course.

[00:30:32] [SPEAKER_04]: Like it should cue us that his wounds were healed, that maybe this is a dream, you know, like us the reader.

[00:30:38] [SPEAKER_04]: But the fact that he saw it without astonishment, does that mean that he has some dim sense that he's a dream suspect?

[00:30:48] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think that the vibe of him sort of not even thinking about where he came from, to me is like a direct nod to like the fact that his memory has probably been wiped.

[00:31:02] [SPEAKER_03]: He doesn't have like the context to know how long it should even take to heal.

[00:31:06] [SPEAKER_03]: He might be a day old or whatever.

[00:31:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Right, right.

[00:31:10] [SPEAKER_04]: So like he doesn't know how long it takes normally for wounds to heal.

[00:31:14] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[00:31:14] [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, but yeah, he drags it.

[00:31:17] [SPEAKER_03]: So he drags himself out of a canoe into the sacred mud of the riverbank.

[00:31:21] [SPEAKER_03]: Already mud in the...

[00:31:23] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[00:31:24] [SPEAKER_03]: So that's how it opens.

[00:31:25] [SPEAKER_03]: And he goes into this temple and it's a circular ruins that have this stone figure of like, I guess, a horse or a tiger, which is also very dreamlike.

[00:31:38] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[00:31:38] [SPEAKER_04]: And that comes back.

[00:31:39] [SPEAKER_03]: Wait, what does it mean?

[00:31:40] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[00:31:41] [SPEAKER_03]: What does it mean that something is either a horse or a tiger, which had once been the color of fire?

[00:31:45] [SPEAKER_04]: If you can get that specific on which two it might be, then you would think you would know which one it is.

[00:31:51] [SPEAKER_04]: But you're right.

[00:31:52] [SPEAKER_04]: It's very dreamlike.

[00:31:53] [SPEAKER_03]: There are little things, and this is going to happen a couple of times.

[00:31:55] [SPEAKER_03]: There are little sentences that he puts in here that I'm not sure what the hell like I'm supposed to think about it.

[00:32:00] [SPEAKER_03]: So one of the things he says is that it's a village.

[00:32:02] [SPEAKER_03]: He finds himself in a village upriver, like you were saying, on the flank of the mountain where the language of the Zend, which is that Persian language, is uncontaminated by Greek and where leprosy is uncommon.

[00:32:13] [SPEAKER_03]: The hell?

[00:32:14] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. Why is that there?

[00:32:16] [SPEAKER_03]: Why is that there?

[00:32:18] [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it is a very biblical concern.

[00:32:21] [SPEAKER_03]: So I don't know if we're supposed to think that this is super remote or super in the past.

[00:32:27] [SPEAKER_04]: This ring in the temple was devoured by an ancient holocaust, and now this jungle is just invading it.

[00:32:35] [SPEAKER_04]: The malarial jungle, he calls it.

[00:32:37] [SPEAKER_04]: You can just picture this abandoned ruins that's just overgrown and possibly dangerous, certainly dirty and scratchy.

[00:32:49] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, right. Totally scratchy.

[00:32:51] [SPEAKER_03]: And he knows immediately that this is where he belongs.

[00:32:54] [SPEAKER_03]: Like he plops himself into this. He's a foreigner.

[00:32:58] [SPEAKER_03]: We'll find out that there are locals who sort of like are either afraid of him or they respect what he's doing.

[00:33:04] [SPEAKER_03]: But he knows immediately that he belongs in here and that his task is to dream.

[00:33:08] [SPEAKER_03]: But he also knows, who knows how, that there is a very similar circular ruin that hasn't yet been devoured by the jungle downstream.

[00:33:16] [SPEAKER_04]: The other people are pretty interesting.

[00:33:18] [SPEAKER_04]: They're even more shadowy than he is.

[00:33:21] [SPEAKER_04]: And maybe that makes us not question the degree to which he's completely shadowy.

[00:33:27] [SPEAKER_04]: He's a gray man. He has no name. He doesn't know his name.

[00:33:31] [SPEAKER_04]: There's different levels in the same way in a dream.

[00:33:35] [SPEAKER_04]: Like there are certain things that seem very real and certain things that are just blurry background.

[00:33:41] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you do get that sense that like reality isn't fully fleshed out here.

[00:33:46] [SPEAKER_03]: No, not at all. Yeah.

[00:33:48] [SPEAKER_03]: And then you talk about the mud and about like he's crawling out of the mud.

[00:33:51] [SPEAKER_03]: It's very also like creation of Adam, you know, being sculpted from mud.

[00:33:55] [SPEAKER_04]: Which again is explicitly referenced later, although in the Gnostic context.

[00:34:00] [SPEAKER_03]: Right. Okay. So he knew it was, he had this one goal, which was to dream a man.

[00:34:06] [SPEAKER_03]: Says the goal that led him on was not impossible, though it was clearly supernatural.

[00:34:09] [SPEAKER_03]: He wanted to dream a man.

[00:34:11] [SPEAKER_03]: He wanted to dream him completely in painstaking detail and impose him upon reality,

[00:34:16] [SPEAKER_03]: which is a really interesting way of saying it.

[00:34:18] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. And very Talon, Uckbar kind of idea where your ideas, your dreams are reality.

[00:34:26] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. Right. I mean, this is starts to get at the vibe that I had about like just the creative enterprise.

[00:34:32] [SPEAKER_03]: So he gets to dreaming because he knows that's how he has to create the man.

[00:34:37] [SPEAKER_03]: And it says at first his dreams were chaotic. A little later they became dialectical.

[00:34:41] [SPEAKER_03]: Did you have any thoughts about that specifically?

[00:34:43] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, it's a strange phrase, although I think like there's a lot of Plato in this.

[00:34:49] [SPEAKER_04]: What he's dreaming when the dreams become dialectical is him just giving lectures in this circular amphitheater.

[00:34:58] [SPEAKER_04]: And then there's just a bunch of students. He says clouds of taciturn students.

[00:35:02] [SPEAKER_04]: Again, they're just kind of faded out, you know, like in a Miyazaki movie or something on the train, you know.

[00:35:09] [SPEAKER_03]: It's liminal. Like I was going to say, but it's very liminal.

[00:35:14] [SPEAKER_04]: He would just lecture to them and then eventually realized that the students who are just passively taking what he said and writing it down.

[00:35:26] [SPEAKER_04]: Those are the ones that, you know, couldn't be worthy of being dreamt into existence.

[00:35:32] [SPEAKER_04]: But there was this group that would question things. Right.

[00:35:36] [SPEAKER_04]: And he says, like in a phrase we should talk about that those people had a little more pre-existence.

[00:35:44] [SPEAKER_04]: But connecting this to the dialectical part, like that's the Plato Socrates idea is that you need somebody objecting.

[00:35:53] [SPEAKER_04]: That is the dialectic is to, you know, offer hypothesis, raise an objection, come up with a way of refining your hypothesis and going back and forth

[00:36:02] [SPEAKER_04]: and trying to pin down by process of elimination, hone to the actual thing.

[00:36:08] [SPEAKER_04]: And I think in this sense, as he says explicitly, that's the only way you can emerge as an individual.

[00:36:15] [SPEAKER_04]: You can't be an individual if you're just going to be like, OK, that's true. That's true. That's true.

[00:36:19] [SPEAKER_03]: It is like a nod to Plato and I guess some combination of Plato's idealism and the dialectic.

[00:36:27] [SPEAKER_03]: And I found it interesting that that's how he began. So he begins in that amphitheater and like conjure students and is like weeding them out.

[00:36:37] [SPEAKER_03]: And every night he dreams or he also sleeps during the day when he can.

[00:36:40] [SPEAKER_03]: He's lecturing to the students about anatomy, cosmography, magic.

[00:36:44] [SPEAKER_03]: And he did not allow himself to be taken in by imposters, which is a good way to think about teaching.

[00:36:50] [SPEAKER_03]: He was seeking a soul worthy of taking its place in the universe.

[00:36:53] [SPEAKER_04]: That's an interesting line.

[00:36:55] [SPEAKER_03]: There's a few times in Borehead where he talks about just being having your existence justified.

[00:37:00] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. Yeah. Worthy of being like real is kind of an interesting concept.

[00:37:06] [SPEAKER_03]: It's like NPCs, you know, the non-player characters in video games, like the gray ones in the back who are just agreeing with him.

[00:37:13] [SPEAKER_03]: He's like, no, they don't have a shot at being real.

[00:37:15] [SPEAKER_03]: Like we need to start off with somebody who's objecting to what I have to say, who's talking back.

[00:37:20] [SPEAKER_03]: And it's very much like logos, right?

[00:37:22] [SPEAKER_03]: It is the logos of creation.

[00:37:25] [SPEAKER_03]: Yes. In the beginning was the word, the logos.

[00:37:27] [SPEAKER_03]: And it's interesting, though, because this attempt isn't going to be fruitful.

[00:37:31] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. I want to know what you think about that.

[00:37:34] [SPEAKER_04]: But yeah. And the other thing I would say, the connection to Plato and this idea of creativity is that Plato thought through this process, you actually give birth to beauty.

[00:37:44] [SPEAKER_04]: Like in the symposium, like you create beauty through this process of dialectic.

[00:37:51] [SPEAKER_04]: And so almost optimistically, you could think until you realize this is an aborted attempt, like, oh, this is how things get creative is through this give and take between two people trying to figure out the truth or trying to figure out what's real.

[00:38:08] [SPEAKER_04]: But like you said, he picks a student. There's a group of them that will question, but he picks one that looks like him.

[00:38:18] [SPEAKER_04]: A taciturn, sallow skinned young man, at times intractable with sharp features that echoed those of the man that dreamed him.

[00:38:26] [SPEAKER_04]: And so then he starts getting private tutoring, because this is how it works these days.

[00:38:31] [SPEAKER_03]: Just like Plato.

[00:38:34] [SPEAKER_04]: And the teacher is like, this is great. Like you're doing so well. And then he goes through this bout of insomnia. Can't sleep anymore. And if he can't sleep, he can't interact with the student.

[00:38:45] [SPEAKER_04]: And that's the last we hear of the student. Like the student's done. And so it was a totally aborted attempt. Yeah. I wonder what you think of it too.

[00:38:54] [SPEAKER_03]: Oh man, I don't think I know. But there is one thing that really resonated with me. Have you ever had a lucid dream?

[00:39:00] [SPEAKER_04]: Yes.

[00:39:02] [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so I went through this period of time where I was like, I read books on it and it was happening to me quite a lot. And it's amazing, right?

[00:39:10] [SPEAKER_03]: If you are fully aware that you're dreaming, I found it always hard to stay asleep. Like I would kind of just wake up on my own.

[00:39:17] [SPEAKER_03]: And it takes like in the way that Boris describes, a sort of tremendous amount of will to stay asleep.

[00:39:23] [SPEAKER_03]: And I remember the best lucid dream I ever had. And this is dumb, nobody wants to hear about people's dreams.

[00:39:30] [SPEAKER_03]: But the one thing that really resonated with me is that I remember focusing really hard on details in the dream and seeing them rich details.

[00:39:43] [SPEAKER_03]: I remember looking at a watch and seeing the design and I remember thinking my brain is doing this.

[00:39:49] [SPEAKER_03]: But it's sort of like at the expense of everything else around you. And I even had like, I don't know if it's from reading this, but I even had like an explicit,

[00:39:57] [SPEAKER_03]: like I was in a classroom in an amphitheater classroom and I was teaching and I told all the students that they were just my dream.

[00:40:03] [SPEAKER_03]: And I thought this was going to be like funny to tell them that they were all just part of my dream.

[00:40:06] [SPEAKER_03]: I've done that.

[00:40:07] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. They don't care. But it's hard. And so when he had this aborted attempt that he then lapses into this insomnia,

[00:40:16] [SPEAKER_03]: I got that feeling of you pour your heart and soul into something and sometimes it just doesn't go anywhere.

[00:40:21] [SPEAKER_03]: And that frustration that insomnia represented to me like just this sort of creative constipation.

[00:40:29] [SPEAKER_04]: That's what it seemed to me as an aborted work of art. But I feel like the lucid dream, because I've only had like a few of them and in all of them, like I just fly.

[00:40:39] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I fly too.

[00:40:40] [SPEAKER_04]: That's like, I'm like, this is so cool that I can do this. But you're right that you are struggling on that border of awake.

[00:40:47] [SPEAKER_04]: That's the only time I've had it is when I'm kind of in and out of waking and sleeping, I think.

[00:40:53] [SPEAKER_04]: And that's, I think, like what we're getting here. At various parts in the story, it becomes not clear when is this his dream, even in the reality of the story or is this real?

[00:41:05] [SPEAKER_03]: Yes. And even like the bringing to what I call reality of his eventual creature, like I'm not sure what metaphysically is happening there.

[00:41:14] [SPEAKER_04]: So this is just like waking up from the dream when you almost had it?

[00:41:20] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. Or just that what I realized in lucid dreaming is I would get fatigued from like I wasn't getting the proper rest from dreams.

[00:41:27] [SPEAKER_03]: Like as Borges later says, the normal dreams that people have where it just is a tremendous effort in the dream to like be in control of the thing.

[00:41:35] [SPEAKER_03]: And so I think that's just the only reason I bring it up is because it sounds like the description of somebody who's had those dreams.

[00:41:42] [SPEAKER_03]: Of course, he's using that to like make this other deeper point about creation.

[00:41:47] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. So one of the things that leads to the successful creation is he gives up the goal. He gives up the grasping. He gives up the trying to stay in the dream.

[00:41:58] [SPEAKER_04]: Right? Like so like, you know, when you try to stay in the dream too hard, it's probably when you wake up.

[00:42:04] [SPEAKER_04]: So I think that grasping, it was too premeditated. This idea of like picking these students up.

[00:42:12] [SPEAKER_04]: He's trying too hard. And then when he released all effort, released all goals, this is a lot of Buddhist illusions here.

[00:42:20] [SPEAKER_04]: And I'm sure other traditions too. But like it's when you release the goal that the goal can happen.

[00:42:27] [SPEAKER_04]: And when you don't want it and I bet and I think that's true with the dream.

[00:42:31] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. It's like getting a girlfriend when you're not looking.

[00:42:34] [SPEAKER_03]: He says he understood that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake.

[00:42:42] [SPEAKER_03]: He understood that initial failure was inevitable. He swore to put behind him the vast hallucination that at first had drawn him off the track and he sought another way to approach his task.

[00:42:51] [SPEAKER_03]: What you were saying, he abandoned all premeditation of dreaming and almost instantly managed to sleep for a fair portion of the day.

[00:42:57] [SPEAKER_03]: The few times he did dream during this period, he did not focus on dreams. He would wait to take up his tasks.

[00:43:01] [SPEAKER_04]: That's the key. Even when he would dream, he's not trying to grasp at it. He's not trying to stay in the dream.

[00:43:07] [SPEAKER_04]: He's not trying. It's like, okay, whatever. So I'm dreaming. I don't care. You know?

[00:43:12] [SPEAKER_03]: And from that, really, from that like letting go, which I mean, that part of it is so true. I think about the artistic process.

[00:43:19] [SPEAKER_03]: Like, I mean, there are so many examples of this. I was just listening to, it was musicians and they were talking about how some of the best songs in history were written in like minutes.

[00:43:32] [SPEAKER_03]: Usually under pressure, like the label needs one more or we only, we have a little bit more time in the studio. So why don't we try to come up with something?

[00:43:38] [SPEAKER_03]: When you try hard, like you couldn't be working on something for so long. And then you just like realize what the fuck am I?

[00:43:45] [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, this happens with writing. This has happened with me with beats. Like you just overcook it. You're just like, yeah, I've just lost sight of what I'm doing here.

[00:43:52] [SPEAKER_03]: Like the first version of this was so much better than all of these like 20 drafts in.

[00:43:57] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. And this is the fundamental, like instruction and meditation or at least the type that I practice is to let go and, you know, effortless and see what's there when you stop trying.

[00:44:08] [SPEAKER_04]: Let everything be. And that's what he does. And what I like about it is he does it even when things are starting to coalesce.

[00:44:17] [SPEAKER_04]: I think one of the things both with creativity and with a lot of these things is, okay, so then you get yourself into this relaxed, letting go state.

[00:44:27] [SPEAKER_04]: All of a sudden you see the glimmers of what it is that you're trying for. And then you go back to striving and grasping.

[00:44:34] [SPEAKER_04]: And that's the thing that he doesn't do in this case. And then it's become so methodical in terms of how he constructs it.

[00:44:44] [SPEAKER_03]: That evening he purified himself in the waters of the river, bowed down to the planetary gods, uttered those syllables of a powerful name that it is lawful to pronounce and laid himself down to sleep.

[00:44:52] [SPEAKER_03]: Almost immediately he dreamed a beating heart. And then that's where it starts. Every night he dreams. He doesn't touch it.

[00:44:59] [SPEAKER_03]: There's another thing like he's restraining himself from all that effort. He starts creating that heart and it says he dreamed it with painstaking love for 14 nights.

[00:45:11] [SPEAKER_03]: Each night he perceived it with greater clarity, greater certainty. He did not touch it. He only witnessed it, observed it, corrected it, perhaps with his eyes.

[00:45:18] [SPEAKER_03]: He perceived it. He lived it from many angles, many distances. And that's how he starts creating this second version of Adam.

[00:45:26] [SPEAKER_03]: The non-failed one. He's doing this weird mystical shit, saying the names of planetary gods or whatever.

[00:45:34] [SPEAKER_03]: And he's now crafting organs and skeletons and eyelids. And it says the countless hairs of the body were perhaps the most difficult task.

[00:45:43] [SPEAKER_03]: And I thought, is he dreaming like an Armenian guy? Why doesn't he just dream?

[00:45:50] [SPEAKER_04]: He could just dream me. That would save him a lot of trouble.

[00:45:57] [SPEAKER_03]: And he's dreaming him asleep, which I don't know if that's important here. But every night he's dreaming creating this guy. And even when he's fully formed, the man he's created is asleep in his dream.

[00:46:08] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, until he has an encounter with the fire god. So here's where it says in the story.

[00:46:14] [SPEAKER_04]: In the cosmogenies of the Gnostics, the Demiurges need up a red atom who cannot manage to stand. As rude and inept and elementary as that atom of dust was the atom of dream wrought from the sorcerer's knights.

[00:46:30] [SPEAKER_04]: So here he's saying like the kind of alternate creation story for Adam is that there's a god that is the supreme being and exists in the non-material realm.

[00:46:43] [SPEAKER_04]: That god emanated a bunch of eons, I guess. One of whom is Sophia. And Sophia without getting this okayed from above had a child by herself and that child is the Demiurge.

[00:47:03] [SPEAKER_04]: And then she realizes, holy shit, this is like a bastardization. This is like a deformed creature. Sends it off somewhere in the cosmos. Then this Demiurge creates our world, which starts with Adam, but it's in his deformed, like perverse image.

[00:47:23] [SPEAKER_03]: I didn't know any of this until today. I mean, I knew about the idea that the Demiurge created this bastardized material world and man in his fucked up form.

[00:47:34] [SPEAKER_04]: But what's interesting about it from what I read is that the Demiurge thinks he's like God, like the real God. And that explains, you know, in this view, a lot of the old-

[00:47:46] [SPEAKER_03]: They were like, that was Yahweh, the tribal God, who's telling people to kill women.

[00:47:50] [SPEAKER_04]: But he thinks, like he is the ultimate creator. So it's like the same idea of you think you're the ultimate creator or you're the ultimate source, but actually you're just the cast off bastard son of an eon. You know what I mean?

[00:48:09] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I hadn't put that together totally. Yeah, it's another nod to like what's going on.

[00:48:16] [SPEAKER_03]: It says that one afternoon the man almost destroyed his creation, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. And there's this parenthetical, he'd have been better off if he had.

[00:48:26] [SPEAKER_03]: Great little Borges touch.

[00:48:29] [SPEAKER_04]: Like what did he mean?

[00:48:30] [SPEAKER_04]: And who is this narrator then that like is making these kind of normative judgments?

[00:48:36] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, right. He's inserted himself. This is not an objective reporting.

[00:48:43] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, on the surface, I guess it's like then he wouldn't have found out that he was just a dream. But like, number one, it doesn't seem like he's enjoying this life currently.

[00:48:56] [SPEAKER_04]: But also number two, it's like, who is this narrator? Like I hadn't really noticed the narrator until that parenthetical.

[00:49:04] [SPEAKER_04]: Next he's going to endorse Kamala.

[00:49:07] [SPEAKER_03]: Why do you think he tried to destroy it?

[00:49:09] [SPEAKER_03]: I don't... frustration? Again, like the only thing I can make sense of is that this is like the creative act and sometimes you just are like, fuck this, you know?

[00:49:18] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, this is famously Nabokov took the manuscript of Lolita to the fire and his wife just stopped him from putting it into this barrel of flames.

[00:49:30] [SPEAKER_03]: So he goes to that god of that little circular temple that he's in that's maybe a tiger or maybe a colt.

[00:49:35] [SPEAKER_03]: And he just begs it to help him to breathe life into this.

[00:49:40] [SPEAKER_04]: Picture this idol that is just overgrown with like thorny vines and like dirt and mud.

[00:49:48] [SPEAKER_04]: And you can't tell whether it's a colt or a tiger, although you can tell that it's one of those two things somehow.

[00:49:55] [SPEAKER_04]: But then he goes to sleep and the statue fills his dreams.

[00:50:01] [SPEAKER_04]: In the dream it was alive and trembling, yet it was not the dread-inspiring hybrid form of horse and tiger it had been.

[00:50:09] [SPEAKER_04]: It was instead those two vehement creatures plus bull and rose and tempest too and all that simultaneously.

[00:50:17] [SPEAKER_04]: The manifold god revealed to the man that its earthly name was fire and that in that circular temple and others like it,

[00:50:26] [SPEAKER_04]: men had made sacrifices and worshipped it and that it would magically bring to life the phantasm that the man had dreamed.

[00:50:34] [SPEAKER_04]: So fully bring him to life that every creature save fire itself and the man who dreamed him would take him for a man of flesh and blood.

[00:50:42] [SPEAKER_04]: Fire ordered the dreamer to send the youth once instructed in the rites to that other ruined temple whose pyramid still stood down river

[00:50:51] [SPEAKER_04]: so that a voice might glorify the god in that deserted place.

[00:50:55] [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, there's so much here.

[00:50:57] [SPEAKER_04]: So first of all fire is ordering the dreamer who is the man, the gray man,

[00:51:02] [SPEAKER_04]: to send his youth once he is brought to life by fire to this other downstream exactly the same circular ruins to do exactly what he just did.

[00:51:15] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, like how do you not see at that point like what's going on?

[00:51:19] [SPEAKER_04]: But then this last sentence, in the dreaming man's dream the dreamed man awoke.

[00:51:27] [SPEAKER_04]: Like, whoa, like just trying to parse that.

[00:51:31] [SPEAKER_04]: In the dreaming man's dream the dreamed man awoke.

[00:51:35] [SPEAKER_03]: And so this is where like I was confused the first time I read it or whatever the first time this most recent time.

[00:51:41] [SPEAKER_03]: So like does that mean that he became real in the awake part of the dreamed dreaming man's dream?

[00:51:49] [SPEAKER_03]: I mean dreaming man's life?

[00:51:50] [SPEAKER_03]: But he says it's in the dreaming man's dream.

[00:51:53] [SPEAKER_03]: I know.

[00:51:53] [SPEAKER_03]: But then later on the guy just exists.

[00:51:56] [SPEAKER_03]: Are we to believe that the dreaming man is still dreaming all of this?

[00:52:00] [SPEAKER_03]: Or that somehow what the magic of the fire god was to bring him from the dream into like reality?

[00:52:08] [SPEAKER_03]: Was that the deal that he made?

[00:52:09] [SPEAKER_03]: And it's also interesting that while this guy had this deep sense that this was his only task in life was to create this dreamed man.

[00:52:18] [SPEAKER_03]: He clearly didn't know that he wouldn't be able to finish the job.

[00:52:22] [SPEAKER_03]: He prays to this fire god in desperation.

[00:52:25] [SPEAKER_03]: And in this like Mephistopheles kind of way, like he makes a deal with this fire god and he's like, OK, yeah, but I'll make him a real guy.

[00:52:34] [SPEAKER_03]: But then you have to send him downriver to do the same exact thing.

[00:52:37] [SPEAKER_03]: And it seems as if that was obviously just a predetermined thing that was going to happen.

[00:52:41] [SPEAKER_04]: But he doesn't remember because he's had his memory wiped.

[00:52:44] [SPEAKER_04]: What I think this shows in that last sentence is something I think Borges does all the time, which is there's this bleeding between fiction and reality, between dream and reality, between illusion and reality.

[00:53:00] [SPEAKER_04]: Like Borges stories, like all of his stories in reality, there's constantly stuff that's real in Borges stories, like real details.

[00:53:07] [SPEAKER_04]: But they're a little off sometimes or sometimes they're exactly accurate.

[00:53:11] [SPEAKER_04]: At this point, the story is barely even trying to separate the two.

[00:53:17] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:53:17] [SPEAKER_04]: Because you never know like in this way you used to in the story.

[00:53:21] [SPEAKER_04]: But from now on, it's very hard to tell like is this the man's dream or not?

[00:53:26] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. So all the stuff you said about the way that Borges fucks with those boundaries of what's real and what's not is brilliant.

[00:53:32] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure dissertations have been written about this.

[00:53:34] [SPEAKER_03]: A very subtle metafictional style that he employs that blurs the boundaries.

[00:53:40] [SPEAKER_03]: But in this case, it's within the story.

[00:53:42] [SPEAKER_03]: There's also like, you know, to bring the liminal back, a lot of the stuff that's happening, he's going out of his way to say it happens at twilight or at dawn.

[00:53:51] [SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[00:53:51] [SPEAKER_03]: In these moments of in-betweenness.

[00:53:54] [SPEAKER_03]: And that also just gives you that feeling of this moment.

[00:53:57] [SPEAKER_03]: There's something about the moment of in-betweenness that seems related to the act of creation for him in this story.

[00:54:03] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. Which goes back to what you were saying about lucid dreaming or just dreaming in general when you're kind of on that border.

[00:54:10] [SPEAKER_04]: So then, like you said, we don't get a sense now.

[00:54:14] [SPEAKER_04]: I think you assume he's awake even in the dream.

[00:54:18] [SPEAKER_03]: Either that or it's been completely, like you said, it's been completely lost.

[00:54:21] [SPEAKER_04]: The distinction has been completely blurred.

[00:54:23] [SPEAKER_04]: Because he carries out the fire's instructions for over two years, passes on the secrets of the cult of fire.

[00:54:30] [SPEAKER_04]: And here's where it just sounds like a parent who is raising a child and has to let the child go and blossom.

[00:54:39] [SPEAKER_04]: The mixed feelings about that.

[00:54:41] [SPEAKER_04]: But then I also like, this is actually kind of heartbreaking.

[00:54:44] [SPEAKER_04]: Under the pretext of pedagogical necessity, he drew out the hours of sleep more every day.

[00:54:50] [SPEAKER_04]: I guess because he only still is contacting him in his dreams.

[00:54:55] [SPEAKER_03]: In his dreams. Yeah.

[00:54:56] [SPEAKER_03]: So that's right. I guess that's explicit.

[00:54:58] [SPEAKER_03]: That he hasn't been popped out of the dream yet. Or if he ever is.

[00:55:02] [SPEAKER_04]: But I like under the pretext of pedagogical necessity, it's like, I feel like I've done that exact thing.

[00:55:08] [SPEAKER_04]: It's not even a metaphor.

[00:55:10] [SPEAKER_04]: I've probably been like, no, stay, Lye. I want to teach you about blah, blah, blah.

[00:55:14] [SPEAKER_03]: Oh my God. Like you said, it's heartbreaking.

[00:55:17] [SPEAKER_03]: It's heartbreaking for us specifically too.

[00:55:19] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. I felt the same exact way.

[00:55:22] [SPEAKER_03]: But then I also, when he said he redid the right shoulder, I was like, what the fuck?

[00:55:26] [SPEAKER_03]: Like this to me was like the leprosy line. I'm like, wait, why would that detail?

[00:55:29] [SPEAKER_04]: He redid the right shoulder, which was perhaps defective.

[00:55:32] [SPEAKER_04]: So just up till that line, I think, oh, this is revising a big work.

[00:55:37] [SPEAKER_04]: And you're just fiddling with like this chapter needs a little, you know, like, and that's a nice thing to do.

[00:55:44] [SPEAKER_04]: But then he says, when he closed his eyes, he would think, now I will be with my son or less frequently.

[00:55:52] [SPEAKER_04]: The son I have engendered is waiting for me and he will not exist if I do not go to him.

[00:55:58] [SPEAKER_03]: What's the distinction there?

[00:56:00] [SPEAKER_03]: Okay. Like I get the pain.

[00:56:02] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:56:02] [SPEAKER_03]: It's also like you're going to send out your child into the world.

[00:56:05] [SPEAKER_03]: You want them to be prepared.

[00:56:06] [SPEAKER_03]: You want them to be great.

[00:56:08] [SPEAKER_03]: You know, so you, you're making up reasons to stay.

[00:56:11] [SPEAKER_03]: And then sometimes you're just like, you know, hey, like I said, my little daughter to school, like you got to wipe her mouth right before I get her into school.

[00:56:17] [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I don't want her showing up like a little off.

[00:56:20] [SPEAKER_03]: And then it says that happiness when he closed eyes now will be with my son.

[00:56:23] [SPEAKER_03]: That's the happy thought.

[00:56:24] [SPEAKER_03]: Then that second one, the son I have engendered is waiting for me and he will not exist if I do not go to him.

[00:56:30] [SPEAKER_03]: Is I feel like the more dysfunctional isn't the right word, but it's a more of the fear.

[00:56:37] [SPEAKER_03]: It's not just like I want to be with my creation.

[00:56:41] [SPEAKER_03]: I want to take part in this.

[00:56:43] [SPEAKER_03]: It's more the fear of when I let go, it's not going to be mine anymore.

[00:56:48] [SPEAKER_03]: When I put this out into the world, it will become something else.

[00:56:51] [SPEAKER_03]: And we've talked about this explicitly before that once you put a creative thing out into the world, it kind of isn't yours anymore.

[00:56:58] [SPEAKER_04]: So that's one way of looking at it.

[00:57:00] [SPEAKER_04]: But it's not exactly what it says, right?

[00:57:03] [SPEAKER_04]: It's that it will not exist if I don't go to it.

[00:57:06] [SPEAKER_04]: But maybe he means he won't exist in the form that I created him if I do not go to him.

[00:57:13] [SPEAKER_03]: Or it could be like just a neurotic, like wrong belief that like I need to be there for him to exist when it's not true anymore.

[00:57:20] [SPEAKER_04]: And I think it's interesting that it's less frequent.

[00:57:23] [SPEAKER_04]: This kind of tortured phrase, the son that I have engendered is waiting for me and he will not exist if I do not go to him as a character, as a personality, as something real.

[00:57:35] [SPEAKER_04]: If I'm not with Eliza and I don't like show her this movie, she's going to have the same stupid taste that everybody has.

[00:57:43] [SPEAKER_03]: And here's what I don't know.

[00:57:45] [SPEAKER_03]: Like he might be wrong in the sense that the fire god has already breathed life into him.

[00:57:50] [SPEAKER_03]: And so he doesn't actually need to keep.

[00:57:51] [SPEAKER_03]: It could be like this weird sort of like still holding on to something even after the fire god has given him.

[00:57:58] [SPEAKER_03]: Or it could just be like you say, really?

[00:58:01] [SPEAKER_03]: Like if I don't dream, this guy won't exist.

[00:58:03] [SPEAKER_03]: Like that seems pretty straightforward.

[00:58:05] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the son I have engendered.

[00:58:07] [SPEAKER_04]: It's just so weird those two, the juxtaposition of those two sentences are so different in just style and form.

[00:58:16] [SPEAKER_04]: He says then gradually the man accustomed the youth to reality.

[00:58:20] [SPEAKER_04]: But again, we don't, is this out of his dream or is this in his dream?

[00:58:24] [SPEAKER_04]: You never get that transition of like now the son exists in my waking world because I think it's just over.

[00:58:34] [SPEAKER_03]: I read this maybe five times in English and twice in Spanish.

[00:58:38] [SPEAKER_03]: And only now am I realizing how much Borges abandoned the distinction.

[00:58:43] [SPEAKER_03]: Like I thought maybe I was missing something or maybe like, okay, like maybe the fire god did pop.

[00:58:47] [SPEAKER_03]: I just didn't realize how blatantly.

[00:58:50] [SPEAKER_04]: If anything, it says that he is dreaming it.

[00:58:54] [SPEAKER_04]: Like the times that it does explicitly address that question, it says that he's always dreaming, which is kind of interesting.

[00:59:00] [SPEAKER_03]: But then that very beginning of the next paragraph, gradually the man accustomed the youth to reality is now just endorsing that the dream is reality.

[00:59:08] [SPEAKER_04]: Exactly. Without ever saying and in fact saying the opposite before.

[00:59:13] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:59:14] [SPEAKER_03]: It's just like metaphysical levels.

[00:59:16] [SPEAKER_03]: Like they're all real.

[00:59:17] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, right.

[00:59:18] [SPEAKER_04]: Like I mean, that's the whole point is like one is not more real than the other.

[00:59:22] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[00:59:23] [SPEAKER_04]: So he sends him on these like go to missions to put flags on mountaintops, which is weird.

[00:59:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:59:31] [SPEAKER_03]: It's like he's testing.

[00:59:33] [SPEAKER_03]: He's like beta testing his son's capabilities.

[00:59:35] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[00:59:36] [SPEAKER_04]: And then saw with some bitterness.

[00:59:38] [SPEAKER_04]: This is another like this is the parenting thing, you know, that his son was ready, perhaps impatient to be born.

[00:59:46] [SPEAKER_03]: Interesting that he's not born yet.

[00:59:47] [SPEAKER_03]: What has to happen here?

[00:59:49] [SPEAKER_03]: Like he's been molded and created.

[00:59:50] [SPEAKER_03]: He's been breathed into life.

[00:59:52] [SPEAKER_03]: He's been like, you know, trained for two years.

[00:59:54] [SPEAKER_04]: He's been putting flags on mountains.

[00:59:57] [SPEAKER_04]: So again, you might think, OK, this is when he's now wakes up.

[01:00:01] [SPEAKER_04]: But no, he just kisses him, sends him off to the jungle and he goes to the other temple whose ruins bleached in the sun downstream.

[01:00:11] [SPEAKER_04]: So exactly the same thing.

[01:00:13] [SPEAKER_04]: And he had come from upstream.

[01:00:14] [SPEAKER_04]: So this is just this Asher, the eternal circle.

[01:00:20] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, which I guess is fair enough given the title.

[01:00:23] [SPEAKER_04]: But first, so the son would never know that he was a phantasm so that he would believe himself to be a man like other men.

[01:00:31] [SPEAKER_03]: The man infused him a total lack of memory of his years of education, which is also heartbreaking because what in order to give him that independence, he has to like erase the memory of everything that he did with his father.

[01:00:44] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that's right. It's an act of like a real sacrifice there.

[01:00:48] [SPEAKER_04]: I didn't even think of that.

[01:00:50] [SPEAKER_04]: What do you think of the fact because this comes back that he is so worried about his son knowing or finding out that he's a phantasm?

[01:00:58] [SPEAKER_04]: Is it like is this some kind of lurking fear that he has about himself?

[01:01:03] [SPEAKER_03]: It's like being super worried that like your friend is gay when really you're the gay one.

[01:01:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Oh no, that's me.

[01:01:13] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but the thought that it would be a terrible discovery.

[01:01:17] [SPEAKER_03]: Maybe it's just like pure ego protection.

[01:01:19] [SPEAKER_03]: Like to bring it back to the parenting thing, one of the worst thoughts is of your child going through something like terrible or even embarrassing or rejection.

[01:01:29] [SPEAKER_03]: Like that's a terrible thought that they would be humiliated.

[01:01:32] [SPEAKER_04]: And feel like a fraud, you know, feel like.

[01:01:36] [SPEAKER_03]: But it's weird that in this whatever metaphysical shadowy world that he would think that that's something.

[01:01:44] [SPEAKER_04]: So then the kid goes and you know he's done, he achieved his life's goal.

[01:01:52] [SPEAKER_04]: And so now the days are just the same.

[01:01:54] [SPEAKER_04]: He says he imagined perhaps that his unreal son performed identical rituals in other circular ruins downstream.

[01:02:02] [SPEAKER_04]: It really is just slapping you like multiple times like Humphrey Bogart and like to just tell you.

[01:02:09] [SPEAKER_04]: And then, you know, at night he didn't dream or I like this line actually or dreamed the dreams that all men dream.

[01:02:16] [SPEAKER_04]: Could be a metaphor for retirement like oh shit like what do I do now?

[01:02:20] [SPEAKER_04]: Like this was my whole purpose.

[01:02:22] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and the language that he's using here where he says his perceptions of the universe's sounds and shapes were somewhat pale.

[01:02:29] [SPEAKER_03]: The absent son was nourished by those diminutions of his soul.

[01:02:32] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[01:02:32] [SPEAKER_03]: Which is kind of a crazy thought like is it that his son is feeding off of the sort of like fading?

[01:02:39] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you know, that's what they do.

[01:02:41] [SPEAKER_03]: They suck our fucking life energy.

[01:02:45] [SPEAKER_03]: These kids.

[01:02:46] [SPEAKER_03]: And all we want is for them to FaceTime us.

[01:02:50] [SPEAKER_03]: So he's fading. His existence is fading. He's becoming less real.

[01:02:55] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[01:02:55] [SPEAKER_03]: But it says his life's goals have been accomplished. The man lived on now in a sort of ecstasy.

[01:03:00] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, which is like at first it was like weariness and sameness.

[01:03:05] [SPEAKER_04]: But now as he gets paler, he becomes more ecstatic.

[01:03:10] [SPEAKER_04]: Again, you could definitely look at this as a kind of awakening.

[01:03:15] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[01:03:15] [SPEAKER_04]: But not one which seems to have this certainly unambiguously happy ending.

[01:03:21] [SPEAKER_04]: But I think like in a lot of these Borges stories, underneath it all instead of this like shining light or golden flower unfolding, it's just more dreariness.

[01:03:33] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[01:03:34] [SPEAKER_04]: This is super interesting actually.

[01:03:36] [SPEAKER_04]: So two rowers, he had rowed, right?

[01:03:39] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, or he at least popped out of a canoe.

[01:03:42] [SPEAKER_04]: So now two rowers wake him and he can't see their faces.

[01:03:47] [SPEAKER_04]: So obviously very dreamlike.

[01:03:50] [SPEAKER_04]: And they told him of a magical man in a temple in the north, which is where he sent his son, a man who could walk on fire and not be burned.

[01:04:00] [SPEAKER_04]: So then he thinks, oh shit, that's my son.

[01:04:04] [SPEAKER_04]: And if he can't be burned, and he's going to know that he is a mere simulacrum.

[01:04:11] [SPEAKER_04]: This came up in our death in the compass.

[01:04:14] [SPEAKER_04]: Me not being able to pronounce simulacrum.

[01:04:17] [SPEAKER_04]: It's a hard word.

[01:04:19] [SPEAKER_04]: To be a man, this is what you were alluding to, to be not a man but the projection of another man's dream.

[01:04:24] [SPEAKER_04]: What incomparable humiliation, what vertigo.

[01:04:27] [SPEAKER_04]: Vertigo is obviously I think a big thing that a lot of characters in Borges feel when like the ground is shaking.

[01:04:35] [SPEAKER_04]: You don't know like what's real, what's not.

[01:04:38] [SPEAKER_03]: What did you make of that next sentence?

[01:04:40] [SPEAKER_03]: Every parent feels concern for the children he has procreated or allowed to be procreated in happiness or in mere confusion.

[01:04:48] [SPEAKER_03]: That in happiness or in mere confusion is saying like no matter how you created a child,

[01:04:53] [SPEAKER_03]: like whether you were just confused or whether you were like happy about creating it, you're going to feel concern.

[01:04:58] [SPEAKER_03]: I guess.

[01:04:59] [SPEAKER_04]: It was only natural that the sorcerer would fear for the future of the son he had conceived organ by organ, feature by feature

[01:05:06] [SPEAKER_04]: through a thousand and one secret nights.

[01:05:08] [SPEAKER_04]: I think it's almost defensive.

[01:05:10] [SPEAKER_04]: It's almost like he is a kind of narrator of his own story saying like,

[01:05:15] [SPEAKER_04]: Come on, it's only natural.

[01:05:16] [SPEAKER_04]: It's only natural that I would do this, but really he's fearing it about himself.

[01:05:21] [SPEAKER_04]: And this is where the dream is just like it's no longer sustainable.

[01:05:24] [SPEAKER_04]: It's been trembling and now it completely shatters.

[01:05:29] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[01:05:34] [SPEAKER_01]: Future magician, one chance out between two worlds.

[01:05:48] [SPEAKER_01]: Fire.

[01:05:56] [SPEAKER_03]: And then he has this very poetic pass at the end of his meditations came suddenly,

[01:06:00] [SPEAKER_03]: but it was foretold by a drought, distant cloud as light as a bird upon a mountaintop.

[01:06:06] [SPEAKER_03]: And then the sky was the pinkish color of a leopard's gums.

[01:06:11] [SPEAKER_03]: That's so good.

[01:06:12] [SPEAKER_03]: It's so good.

[01:06:14] [SPEAKER_03]: And the clouds of smoke that rusted the iron of the nights.

[01:06:16] [SPEAKER_03]: Then at last, the panicked flight of the animals.

[01:06:19] [SPEAKER_04]: That's such a great image too.

[01:06:20] [SPEAKER_04]: Just like this huge fire in this forest and they're all just running.

[01:06:25] [SPEAKER_03]: And he realized for that which had occurred hundreds of years ago was being repeated now.

[01:06:28] [SPEAKER_03]: All right.

[01:06:29] [SPEAKER_03]: So this theme of repetition, but it's happening again.

[01:06:31] [SPEAKER_03]: And so it's moving from where his, where his dream son was, who had walked through the flames.

[01:06:35] [SPEAKER_03]: I guess the fire is now moving toward him.

[01:06:38] [SPEAKER_03]: In the birdless dawn, the sorcerer watched the concentric Holocaust close in upon the walls.

[01:06:42] [SPEAKER_03]: For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the water,

[01:06:45] [SPEAKER_03]: but then he realized that death would be a crown upon his age and absolve him from his labors.

[01:06:50] [SPEAKER_03]: He walked into the tatters of the flame, but they did not bite his flesh.

[01:06:54] [SPEAKER_03]: They caressed him, bathed him without heat and without combustion.

[01:06:58] [SPEAKER_03]: With relief, with humiliation, with terror,

[01:07:01] [SPEAKER_03]: he realized that he too was but appearance, that another man was dreaming him.

[01:07:05] [SPEAKER_03]: Okay.

[01:07:06] [SPEAKER_04]: When I first read that, like I said,

[01:07:08] [SPEAKER_04]: I thought, I don't want to tell Borges his business, but he should have ended it at combustion.

[01:07:15] [SPEAKER_04]: He walked into the tatters of flame, but they did not bite his flesh.

[01:07:19] [SPEAKER_04]: They caressed him, bathed him without heat and without combustion, period.

[01:07:22] [SPEAKER_04]: Let the reader figure out the rest, you know?

[01:07:26] [SPEAKER_04]: But then like I realized I'm sadly, pathetically wrong, I think,

[01:07:31] [SPEAKER_04]: because first of all, you need that like really cryptic with relief, with humiliation, with terror.

[01:07:37] [SPEAKER_04]: It's like three totally different things.

[01:07:40] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:07:43] [SPEAKER_04]: He realized that he too was but appearance.

[01:07:45] [SPEAKER_04]: And then that other detail at the end, that another man was dreaming him is almost more specific.

[01:07:53] [SPEAKER_04]: Like really all he should realize at this point is that he's but appearance.

[01:07:57] [SPEAKER_04]: But I think that's actually like awesome, the line.

[01:08:00] [SPEAKER_04]: And especially the relief, humiliation and terror.

[01:08:04] [SPEAKER_04]: I wonder what you make of that.

[01:08:05] [SPEAKER_03]: It didn't feel like so inconsistent that somebody could be feeling all those three things in this moment.

[01:08:11] [SPEAKER_04]: I feel like you can get two of them, or I don't know, like relief and terror don't seem to me to hang together.

[01:08:18] [SPEAKER_04]: Humiliation and terror could go.

[01:08:19] [SPEAKER_04]: And humiliation and relief even, you know?

[01:08:22] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, right.

[01:08:23] [SPEAKER_03]: Sometimes like you got to hit bottom, you know?

[01:08:28] [SPEAKER_03]: Right. Fine. Now everybody knows, you know, I have like a third nipple.

[01:08:33] [SPEAKER_03]: So I don't know what to make of the emotions other than that seems like what you would have when you realize you weren't real, that terror.

[01:08:42] [SPEAKER_03]: And the humiliation I don't get so much.

[01:08:44] [SPEAKER_03]: But like what is that about like that fear that he had for his son and that he now is experiencing for himself, that you're not real?

[01:08:50] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, so if we go to the creation interpretation, creation metaphor, I think Borges, he really thought we're all kind of telling the same story over and over again.

[01:09:04] [SPEAKER_04]: And we're just borrowing from our traditions.

[01:09:08] [SPEAKER_04]: And even in Borges and I that like one page story talks about how it's not like me anyway.

[01:09:15] [SPEAKER_04]: It's just like some total of the tradition that I've been introduced to.

[01:09:20] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, you could look at it as this is what a creator at some point who maybe thought they were some shining jewel of originality actually realizes that what the creator does is borrow from this pool of ideas that have been shuffled around for thousands and thousands of years.

[01:09:43] [SPEAKER_04]: And it's both. It's a relief to feel like you don't have the responsibility of, you know, being that Kazasui, you know, like.

[01:09:53] [SPEAKER_04]: But then also it's a little humiliating because you thought you were.

[01:09:56] [SPEAKER_04]: The terror, I think, might be like existentialist thing.

[01:10:01] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly.

[01:10:02] [SPEAKER_03]: I think that totally makes sense.

[01:10:04] [SPEAKER_03]: The humiliation part.

[01:10:06] [SPEAKER_03]: One time, like I years ago, I was like fucking around.

[01:10:10] [SPEAKER_03]: I made this little tune on my iPad and I played it for somebody and they're like, oh, that's exactly the tune of this song.

[01:10:16] [SPEAKER_03]: And like I realized, like, I didn't know what song it was, but I just it just been like a copy in my mind.

[01:10:22] [SPEAKER_03]: And like that was embarrassing.

[01:10:24] [SPEAKER_03]: But it's hubris to think that you ever were.

[01:10:26] [SPEAKER_03]: And like you, I read a little bit of hubris in this guy.

[01:10:30] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but.

[01:10:31] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, hubris isn't but a willful oblivion to like the fact that he might not be Kazasui.

[01:10:37] [SPEAKER_04]: Certainly the hubris of a creator that thought that they were, you know, the first person to have some idea that Shakespeare and Homer and Schwanza or whatever already had.

[01:10:50] [SPEAKER_04]: Like Borges was always very upfront that that's what I think he thought.

[01:10:53] [SPEAKER_04]: But like the other stuff, what this says about like whatever metaphysics this story is exploring.

[01:11:02] [SPEAKER_04]: That's the part that I'm less clear about.

[01:11:06] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm not sure. So like that last bit where he says that he realized that he too was but appearance that another man was dreaming him.

[01:11:13] [SPEAKER_03]: Like to me that the necessity of that nailing home that another man was dreaming him is it seems to me to be pointing to this sort of like eternal recursion thing where you need that one other link to realize that who knows how far back this chain goes.

[01:11:30] [SPEAKER_03]: Like all of reality is dreams of dreamers, of dreamers, of dreamers, dreamers.

[01:11:34] [SPEAKER_03]: And if he had that realization in that moment, that is a terror, like terrible in the terror sense.

[01:11:41] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's cosmically terrifying because he might be the only person, you know, like at this point.

[01:11:48] [SPEAKER_04]: That's what he, you know, there might be him in the fire God and then other iterations of him further down river forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.

[01:11:59] [SPEAKER_03]: Like, which is the most Borgesian thing.

[01:12:01] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean, exactly. Like, think about it like he is just dreaming himself into existence, wiping his memory.

[01:12:10] [SPEAKER_04]: And it's a little memento that way.

[01:12:12] [SPEAKER_04]: The fact that he wipes his memory and like this exact same thing happens in a exactly the same circular ruin with the same fire God who some dim recollection.

[01:12:25] [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe it's different at the margins. Maybe like sometimes he doesn't have the aborted amphitheater thing.

[01:12:32] [SPEAKER_04]: But I guess the way I read it here is no, it probably all just is this guy that's caught in this loop of creating himself.

[01:12:43] [SPEAKER_04]: And so it's becomes Uroboros. What's that?

[01:12:46] [SPEAKER_04]: Uroboros.

[01:12:47] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I never know how to say it. Uroboros.

[01:12:51] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, this is the tail, the snake eating its own tail.

[01:12:54] [SPEAKER_03]: But why do you say it's the same guy? Like, is the son like it's a different consciousness. I mean, it's.

[01:13:00] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, we don't know that. Right. Because he gets his memory wiped. So it could just be the same consciousness, but at a different stage in life.

[01:13:10] [SPEAKER_04]: I guess the one thing is that he seems to realize the son that he can be consumed by fire before the father does.

[01:13:20] [SPEAKER_03]: Before the father does.

[01:13:21] [SPEAKER_04]: We don't know that that's true. We just know that these two shadowy figures come and tell him that.

[01:13:26] [SPEAKER_04]: And so that just like maybe part of this guy's eternal life is that at a certain point, his sense of reality starts to break down.

[01:13:36] [SPEAKER_04]: I guess that's the way I see it because of how gray and like shadowy everybody is.

[01:13:42] [SPEAKER_04]: Like, it doesn't seem like that this guy is any different than the son that is going to do the exact same thing that he is.

[01:13:51] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. Or maybe the question is like, what is the consciousness that is dreaming? You know, how far back does it go?

[01:13:57] [SPEAKER_03]: Like, what is at least if not the same, like there is only one consciousness in the sense that it's like a Russian nesting doll that just goes on forever.

[01:14:06] [SPEAKER_03]: And what is the one consciousness that got this going?

[01:14:10] [SPEAKER_03]: And I guess there's a little hint to maybe what the fear is here in the opening quote from Lewis Carroll.

[01:14:18] [SPEAKER_03]: And if he left off dreaming about you, where the fear is like, there's one guy who's doing all the dreaming.

[01:14:25] [SPEAKER_03]: Like, he would just like domino, just destroy all of reality if he wakes up.

[01:14:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, see, that's the thing that I think you could interpret it either way.

[01:14:34] [SPEAKER_04]: You could interpret it as the domino like model where there is this hierarchy of dreamers and, you know, maybe there is this one person in reality that everybody's existence depends on.

[01:14:48] [SPEAKER_04]: And definitely the Through the Looking Glass quote maybe lend support to that.

[01:14:54] [SPEAKER_04]: But there is also the ouroboro of this is a cycle. This is something that has a self-sustained infinite loop kind of.

[01:15:03] [SPEAKER_03]: That's the infinity part is what I think he must be referring to, because, you know, the thought that there is no end to who is.

[01:15:12] [SPEAKER_03]: It's very, of course, for his obsession with his infinities that the thought that all of reality is just people dreaming people.

[01:15:21] [SPEAKER_03]: And there is no one prime dreamer. Maybe it is the infinite library.

[01:15:26] [SPEAKER_03]: The thousand and one nights.

[01:15:28] [SPEAKER_03]: That's nested. Yeah, I have. Like, it's great. It's like nested upon nested upon nested.

[01:15:32] [SPEAKER_04]: But then ends with the same story. So it's like dominoes that are in a circle that keep going.

[01:15:39] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's great because it pops down level. So you have people within stories telling stories about people.

[01:15:45] [SPEAKER_03]: And you sometimes don't realize what level you've popped into until you finally pop out back out where it's Scheherazade again.

[01:15:53] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. Yeah. And I think a lot of like Hindu literature has this kind of nesting dolls thing where it's really hard to know.

[01:16:02] [SPEAKER_04]: We did something like this in my I'd never heard of it before and I can't even the Poncho Tantra.

[01:16:09] [SPEAKER_04]: But I remember just with my class trying to keep track of like which dream we were in, like it's a fourth level level.

[01:16:16] [SPEAKER_04]: Like I would even do like quizzes and about like where they were and just just to see if they've been reading to get even close would be incredible.

[01:16:26] [SPEAKER_04]: Which actually leads me to another point I have that I struggle with this.

[01:16:30] [SPEAKER_04]: So on the one hand, this does seem very Hindu Buddhist of like actual reality as we experience it is an illusion.

[01:16:40] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, it's like a dream. But in the various different versions of that, eventually there's a way of seeing through the illusion and arriving at what's real,

[01:16:53] [SPEAKER_04]: which is usually but not exclusively, but usually like really good and beautiful.

[01:16:59] [SPEAKER_04]: Like I think in the Christian way to it's like light. It's undifferentiated. It's or it's all connected. It's interconnected.

[01:17:06] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. This clearly has the you know what you think is real is an illusion. Your goals, your purpose.

[01:17:15] [SPEAKER_04]: That's all an illusion. But there's no sense of the underlying reality. And I think like Borges was more pessimistic than a lot of these traditions.

[01:17:23] [SPEAKER_04]: Totally.

[01:17:24] [SPEAKER_04]: In thinking that we can in any way get to that underlying reality.

[01:17:29] [SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely. I think it's a great way of putting it. Like all of those traditions are feeding into these ideas, but it's very Borgesian.

[01:17:35] [SPEAKER_03]: And like what if it's all just this infinite series of dreams? Like there is no veil to be pierced.

[01:17:40] [SPEAKER_03]: Right.

[01:17:41] [SPEAKER_03]: Like that is just is what it is. What is, is this.

[01:17:44] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. What is, is the illusion. There's no getting underneath it. There's no getting beyond it.

[01:17:49] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't think there's a underlying metaphysics that he thinks maybe is real, but certainly not something that we can pierce.

[01:17:59] [SPEAKER_04]: Not accessible.

[01:17:59] [SPEAKER_04]: Not accessible.

[01:18:00] [SPEAKER_04]: Exactly. No, I think that's right.

[01:18:02] [SPEAKER_04]: Which is why I think a lot of his stories have this kind of weariness and this just.

[01:18:06] [SPEAKER_03]: Totally. And little glimmers of happiness. And maybe if there is a happiness there, it's just like the moments.

[01:18:15] [SPEAKER_03]: You know, here was the moments that he spent with his son that brought him happiness. And that's what matters.

[01:18:21] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. It's funny. Like if I had to put mood wise, I would put this with the library of Babel, which also had this kind of gloom,

[01:18:29] [SPEAKER_04]: this kind of bleakness that just was pervading the whole story. Like in addition to whatever the plot was, there's just this, you know,

[01:18:37] [SPEAKER_04]: it's obviously a lot more defined and precise in the library than this where everything's hazy, but it's that same kind of mood of just everybody is trying to get something that probably there's no way they can get.

[01:18:52] [SPEAKER_04]: And they know that deep in their hearts.

[01:18:54] [SPEAKER_03]: It's outside of their grasp. In this case, yeah, this is that different vibe. Like you said, the grayness, the lack of definition, the whatever liminality, however you would say that.

[01:19:06] [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, same vibe. Like reality is dizzying and confusing. And yeah, I don't know. It's almost like maybe it's better to be stuck in the illusion.

[01:19:19] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. Or you're fucked regardless.

[01:19:23] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, you're just fucked.

[01:19:24] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, I think you're also fucked if you don't try to pierce the illusion or like there's not a lot of happy paths in this story.

[01:19:34] [SPEAKER_03]: No. You know, in Gödeleischer Bach, Hofstadter is talking about like these levels, like nested levels. And he's talking about Bach and he's describing this piece of music.

[01:19:47] [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know enough and I don't remember and I can't even describe it right. But basically, like when you create a tension and you resolve it musically, you've created this tension, you resolve it.

[01:19:57] [SPEAKER_03]: But Bach has this piece where he creates this tension, but then he like moves into a different thing and creates a different.

[01:20:04] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but he creates a different source of tension and then yet a different one. So he's nested at three levels and he resolves two of them.

[01:20:11] [SPEAKER_03]: And he ends the piece resolving the two, but you don't realize that he hasn't actually resolved the one that he started with.

[01:20:19] [SPEAKER_03]: And there is something that that vibe like gets me where it's like if you think about it, you'll never like you'll never be able to pop out all the way to like the deep reality.

[01:20:29] [SPEAKER_03]: So like just be happy with what you're popping into.

[01:20:32] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, be happy with your kid until you send him down river. Enjoy that you can't be burned, you know.

[01:20:39] [SPEAKER_03]: And every once in a while, I'll notice that like the layers of layers upon metaphysical layers are so infinite and mind blowing that maybe every once in a while you can grasp for a moment what infinity is like the Aleph.

[01:20:53] [SPEAKER_03]: You can maybe look into have a mystical experience and feel the ineffable infinity.

[01:20:58] [SPEAKER_04]: But then you'll be immediately like drawn back into the illusion and the most petty, the pettiest part of the illusion.

[01:21:06] [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, fuck this guy who fucked the woman I love. I'm just going to gaslight him into thinking that it's not real.

[01:21:17] [SPEAKER_03]: Right. And maybe that same thing that's happening in this dreamer where the effortful process of trying to like create the man led to failure.

[01:21:27] [SPEAKER_03]: If we try too hard to grasp like the fundamental reality, like we're going to over intellectualize and we're not going to really get it.

[01:21:34] [SPEAKER_03]: The only time we really get a glimpse of it is in these sort of mystical, non-rational moments. But we can't hold on to it. You can't grasp it.

[01:21:42] [SPEAKER_04]: But even that, like even when he released effort, that didn't lead to as it does in a lot of the, you know, the stuff that I practice and then I read about, you know, it doesn't lead to a gradual understanding of what reality actually is.

[01:21:59] [SPEAKER_04]: It leads to just the same thing happening over and over again.

[01:22:03] [SPEAKER_03]: And in fact, he says probably shouldn't have done this to begin with. Like he probably should never have made this guy.

[01:22:10] [SPEAKER_04]: So there's a complete lack of the optimism I think of like these mystical traditions, you know?

[01:22:18] [SPEAKER_03]: You're right. And it's a sneaky pessimism because you read this and you're just like, oh, cool thought. Like ever. You know, this guy was also a dream. But like it's deeply pessimistic.

[01:22:26] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. There's no – it doesn't seem like there's a path where like, oh, he could have had like a good life where or gotten to the bottom of what experience and what's actually real.

[01:22:41] [SPEAKER_04]: And it was all preordained. Like this was going to happen.

[01:22:43] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. And it's going to continue happening and yeah.

[01:22:46] [SPEAKER_04]: There is something that's more – I guess maybe this is the terror word. Like if it was just, oh, I'm part of this – that would be one thing.

[01:22:55] [SPEAKER_04]: But if it's just more iterations of just me doing this over and over again, so I feel like that son is actually just me and there's nobody else.

[01:23:06] [SPEAKER_04]: There's something about that that takes the existential void to a different level.

[01:23:12] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. That's a terrifying thought for some reason. I don't know. I can't quite explain why, but it is a terrifying thought.

[01:23:20] [SPEAKER_04]: The other reason I like the – well, I don't know if this actually matters.

[01:23:24] [SPEAKER_04]: But that line from the Upanishads, we are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream.

[01:23:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Comparing it to like a spider weaving the web, like that kind of sounds like he is the dreamed person.

[01:23:40] [SPEAKER_04]: He is being dreamed by himself and then living inside the dream.

[01:23:44] [SPEAKER_04]: So that's I think the other kind of connection for me that makes me at least think that's a possible nod that Borges is making.

[01:23:53] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. It's just recursive.

[01:23:54] [SPEAKER_04]: All right. Speaking of recursive, we could talk about this forever and ever.

[01:24:01] [SPEAKER_03]: Forever, yeah.

[01:24:02] [SPEAKER_04]: All right. Great story. Is this like the best Borges story, the most quintessential Borges?

[01:24:06] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know, man. It's up there.

[01:24:07] [SPEAKER_04]: It's up there.

[01:24:08] [SPEAKER_03]: It's up there. I still think the Library of Babel has to be the most quintessential.

[01:24:12] [SPEAKER_03]: That's the most quintessential.

[01:24:14] [SPEAKER_03]: Can you be most quintessential or is it just the quintessential?

[01:24:16] [SPEAKER_04]: I guess, yeah. Relatively. More quintessential than – closer to the form of a Borges story.

[01:24:23] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to make a list one day. I'm going to reread them all.

[01:24:26] [SPEAKER_03]: Top 10 Borges.

[01:24:27] [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

[01:24:28] [SPEAKER_04]: We should do that.

[01:24:29] [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe we should.

[01:24:30] [SPEAKER_04]: I think it would be ridiculous because it would change if I did it the next week probably and reread all of them.

[01:24:37] [SPEAKER_04]: Just take the averages.

[01:24:39] [SPEAKER_04]: We'll do a linear regression.

[01:24:41] [SPEAKER_04]: All right. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.