Thursday, March 17, 2011

Prompt 3, Time

“Space is not conceived as having duration in time” (74).

Lauren Olamina in the Parable of the Sower brings forth a utopian world in which people shape God and this God is Change. Humans shape the world around them which in term shapes humankind. This cyclical continuity is compounded by Borges belief in a lack of time.

According to Borges each moment is separate from the one before or after it. An event that occurs has no connection to its cause or effect, it just is: “The world is not an amalgam of objects in space; it is a series of independent acts—the world is successive, temporal, but not spatial” (73). Instead, he propagates the illusion that an event merely has an association with whatever had caused it or had been affected by it: “…the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the scorched earth is considered an example of the associate of ideas” (74). With this association there is little to determine, predict, or change. Life continues in the moment in which the current event occurs.

This separation of cause and effect denies humans the consciousness of shaping Lauren’s god of change, the god that shapes the world around them. Each person would live in the moment, “causing” events around them, but not linking the relationship and thus living in each moment, with the following moment being the changed they had just created. To follow the previous example, one would half-extinguish a cigarette. One would walk away. The cigarette would reignite. The sparks would catch a nearby napkin on fire. This chain could lead to the forest burning down, but the original person who half-extinguished their cigarette would not have the mental schema to attribute the action to its effect. The world has changed, the forest has been decimated, God has visited, but the person has no knowledge of this cycle. Every act done by a human would have similar reaction: no knowledgeable consequences.

The world of Tlon takes this lack of sequential time a step farther because it refuses to endorse time altogether. “One of the schools of philosophy on Tlon goes so far as to deny the existence of time; it argues that the present is undefined and indefinite, the future has no reality except as present hope, and the past has no reality except as present recollection” (74). Again, each moment carries only what can be carried in the moment. There is a singular hope for the future in any moment, but not over the course of moments. There is no plan, no map of action in order to provide the imagined future. Lauren would not be able to provide an utopian world because she already has the mental capabilities for hope. Implicitly stated through Borges arguments, is the lack of thought able to be provided to humans in a utopian world.

Lauren states in her Earthseed verses at the beginning of chapter three:

God is Power-
Infinite,
Irresistible,
Inexorable
Indifferent
And yet, God is Pliable-
Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos,
Clay.
God exists to be shaped.
God is Change.

Yet for as powerful as God is, there is no relationship between man and God, according to Borges. It cannot be a teacher that allows humans to realize the actions that ought to be next taken, but the force that is changed as an afterthought, which changes the world in miracles. This is the only way in which a utopian world can be a reality. Human consciousness stands in the way of complete contentment, complete happiness. When the world constantly amazes—constantly changes in miraculous ways—humans reach the ideal life of a utopian world. There is no goal to achieve, no obstacles to overcome, there is nothing in life but the present living and the concurrent changing environment in which one lives.

2 comments:

  1. Your opening quote is clever.

    I like how your 1st paragraph starts, but this sentence bothers me: "This cyclical continuity is compounded by Borges belief in a lack of time." You aren't doing anything to bring the two texts together in this sentence; you assume they ought to be. This is dangerous, although you may fix it up over the course of the paper.

    This essay proceeds erratically. I found your reading of Borges to be thoughtful and provocative - as a gloss and extension of the Tlonian ideas about time, it worked very well. Your attempts to connect those ideas about time to Butler are mixed. On the one hand, I didn't understand what you were trying to do at all, at first - it seemed like your attempt to read Lauren through Borges was purely arbitrary, since she is, in fact, a character who believes in causality, and tries to get people to think more, not less, in terms of causality.

    This section complicated things for me, though: "When the world constantly amazes—constantly changes in miraculous ways—humans reach the ideal life of a utopian world. There is no goal to achieve, no obstacles to overcome, there is nothing in life but the present living and the concurrent changing environment in which one lives." It's a beautiful passage, and it seems like an attempt to understand *any* utopian world as being necessarily disconnected from causality. Then - I think - you want to move "utopia" into being an interior state, not an exterior one, one which is founded in or identified with the absence of causality.

    Really, this is all pretty fascinating, and it almost seems like the beginning of a Borges story (albeit with you as the author). It's very promising - but at the same time, your attempt to connect these idea with Lauren seem far from obvious to me. If you could do so, maybe through the verses, that would be awesome. Or maybe this is a really the start of a Borgesian story-essay which goes in very different directions.

    Fascinating but problematic.

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  2. Much like Borges, I found this a little difficult to follow along. I'd recommend maybe a little more structure, but then that might take away from what you may be trying to accompolish with your argument. I thought that your use of Lauren's phrases were of particular complication. Maybe if you revise this, you could structure at least that portion and then become Borges like when you start to discuss Borges and bringing the two together. But overall this is what seems to be a good argument from what I could follow.

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