[HN Gopher] Borges on Chaos Theory
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Borges on Chaos Theory
Author : mrcgnc
Score : 54 points
Date : 2024-06-11 15:54 UTC (2 days ago)
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| empath75 wrote:
| The tie to chaos theory is pretty weak, but I love Borges, and
| especially love that story, and this was an excellent analysis of
| it.
| ineptech wrote:
| Agreed, we need a postscript from the author explaining that he
| set out to avoid drawing a comparison with chaotic systems, but
| after months of editing and tearing up handwritten drafts found
| himself arriving at one anyway.
| josh-sematic wrote:
| Yeah, I love Borges but this was kind of a stretch. There are
| better Borges stories that would fit the chaos theme better
| too. "The Lottery in Babylon" might work as it explores how
| much chance influences our lives.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _I love Borges the author because he appears to have
| understood, at an intuitive literary level, deep truths about
| reality that physicists and mathematicians hadn 't even
| discovered in his time._
|
| I doubt we need to go all the way to physicists and
| mathematicians.
|
| > _...Menard invented a whole new way to read, one where you
| deliberately imagine the text as written at a different time and
| by a different author, leading to radically different
| interpretations of the original text._
|
| A simpler explanation is that Borges had some experience (don't
| we all?) with partisans, reviewers, and even scholars, who seem
| wilfully to imagine their chosen text as written at a different
| time and by a different author than it had been.
|
| [Given the nice discussion in TFA of changing connotations of
| symbols: are there genres beyond Country&Western where the chorus
| stays syntactically the same but semantically changes after
| intervening verses? My current goto example is Husky's "I only
| Roll 'Em", where the title is indeed the first line of the
| chorus, but the listener's interpretation of "roll" and "them"
| changes over ~150 seconds.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK9nx7e9IGM ]
| andybak wrote:
| > A simpler explanation is that Borges had some experience
| (don't we all?) with partisans, reviewers, and even scholars,
| who seem wilfully to imagine their chosen text as written at a
| different time and by a different author than it had been.
|
| I don't think this does the Menard story justice (although I'm
| not sure I buy the interpretation you're critiquing either)
|
| You're on the right lines but you paint it as some kind of
| irritated put down of bad interpretations. I think Borges
| trying to probe (in a witty and playful way) the thing that we
| all do when when we attempt to read something from another time
| or place. He's not particularly passing judgement as I don't
| think he is claiming there's an easy way round the problems.
|
| EDIT - I've just done the thing I _hate_ other people doing -
| replying to a comment without reading TFA properly. I 'll
| remedy this but I want my reply to stand because I disagree
| with your characterisation and it's currently the top comment.
| jll29 wrote:
| The comment about context is spot on; linguists call the
| mentioned phenomenon "associative meaning" after Leech (1981:
| 18).
|
| The OP uses the Italian fascism symbol. Hitler's appropriation of
| the symbol for the sun - taken from Hinduism, Buddhism, and
| Jainism (and apparently in some places in Africa, too) - can also
| be used to explain it: it has forever changed the _associative
| meaning_ of it - and now the symbol (legally banned in Germany
| outside of historic educational/research context) evokes images
| not of sun workship, but of the worst evils committed by mankind:
| gas chambers with scratch marks of human fingernail, human skin
| turned into lamp shades and piles of starved bodies, tens of
| millions dead one way or another (holocaust and WWII). That
| history leaves a sad, repulsive, shocking and painful memory
| imprinted on one's brain (assuming one has some empathy and
| conscience), and seeing the symbol in the 19th century would be
| quite difference in comparison; this memory association cannot be
| "un-thought" (and as moral obligation, shouldn't!).
|
| On a related note, looking at the European elections, it is
| shameful and beyond believe that some want to turn back the clock
| (actual fascists) or to protest-vote like the folks did in the
| 1930s (coward followers).
|
| Leech, Geoffrey N. (1981) _Semantics: The Study of Meaning_ (2nd
| ed.), London: Penguin).
| oiuerncn wrote:
| >human skin turned into lamp shades
|
| a human skin lampshade was reported to have been displayed by
| Buchenwald concentration camp commandant Karl-Otto Koch and his
| wife Ilse Koch, along with other human skin artifacts.[2][3][4]
| Despite myths to the contrary, there were no systematic efforts
| by the Nazis to make human skin lampshades.[5]
|
| Source:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampshades_made_from_human_ski...
|
| >soap made from human corpses
|
| The Yad Vashem Memorial has stated that the Nazis did not
| produce soap with fat which was extracted from Jewish corpses
| on an industrial scale
|
| Source:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_made_from_human_corpses
|
| The German Corpse Factory or Kadaververwertungsanstalt
| (literally "Carcass-Utilization Factory"), also sometimes
| called the "German Corpse-Rendering Works" or "Tallow
| Factory"[1] was one of the most notorious anti-German atrocity
| propaganda stories circulated in World War I. In the postwar
| years, investigations in Britain and France revealed that these
| stories were false.
|
| [...]
|
| Rumours that the Germans used the bodies of their soldiers to
| create fat appear to have been circulating by 1915. Cynthia
| Asquith noted in her diary on 16 June 1915: "We discussed the
| rumour that the Germans utilise even their corpses by
| converting them into glycerine with the by-product of soap."[7]
| Such stories also appeared in the American press in 1915 and
| 1916.[7] The French press also took it up in Le Gaulois, in
| February, 1916.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Corpse_Factory
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > human skin turned into lamp shades
|
| This is horseshit. Even the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem says
| that concentration camp lampshades made of human skin were
| problem _myth_. The one extant example was tested in 2012,
| seems it 's just cow leather.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lampshade
| just_a_quack wrote:
| A lot of (probably valid) criticism in these comments. Personally
| I find the comparison between strange attractors and hermeneutics
| really fun. I imagine the self-similarity in interpretations
| could be attributed to something akin to the "universal human
| experience". It's like we're iterating the hermeneutic circle...
| Whether or not that is something Borges intended I suppose is up
| to interpretation!
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