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​The Pleasure of Exploring Possibilities:

springboards for reflection on Jorge Luis Borges and Alfred North Whitehead

Ever find yourself looking out the window, daydreaming about other worlds, while in geography class? The writer Jorge Luis Borges and the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead can lend you support. Borges was a master of inventing worlds that were both mundane and magical. Some call it magical realism. Whitehead offered a worldview that said possibilities were as real in their way as were actualities in their way, and that possibilities could be "felt" or "entertained" even apart from their actualizations, He added that it is more important that propositions be interesting than that they be true. Keep daydreaming.

Borges on Borges
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Grete Stern

​"I cannot say whether my work is poetry or not; I can only say that my appeal is to the imagination. I am not a thinker. I am merely a man who has tried to explore the literary possibilities of metaphysics and of religion." (Jorge Luis Borges)

The Task of Art: Jorge Luis Borges
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"The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy. A writer or any artist has the sometimes joyful duty to transform all that into symbols. These symbols could be colors, forms or sounds. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. You are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed, and eventually will be transformed. This revelation can appear anytime. A poet never rests. He’s always working, even when he dreams.

- Jorge Luis Borges (from the interview below: The Task of Art) 

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Mixing the Magical with the Mundane:

​Jorge Luis Borges

‘We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.' A typically paradoxical quote from the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges whose works have become classics and an influence not just on many Latin American novelists but on countless authors around the world. Yet although he is one of the most analysed figures in literature, even his greatest fans struggle fully to explain his writing. So who was Jorge Luis Borges? And what is it that makes his writing so compelling?
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To find out, Bridget Kendall talks to three Borges experts: Dr. Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, from the University of Kent, author of Borges and Joyce, An Infinite Conversation; Prof. Evelyn Fishburn, from University College London, author of Hidden Pleasures in Borges’s Fiction; and Edwin Williamson, Professor at Oxford University and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges.

"More Important that a Proposition
be Interesting than that it be True"
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The ‘production of novel togetherness’ is the ultimate notion embodied in the term ‘concrescence.’

In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

Both of these sentences come from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Put these sentences together, and you have the spirit of essayist, poet, and short story writer Jorge Luis Borges (1889-1986).

A beacon of magical realism, his life was devoted to a production of novel togetherness, creating interesting propositions such as: "We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real."

Such a proposition need not be true in order to be interesting. Borges had a clear and precise mind; his short stories are immensely detailed. But he was also drawn to labyrinths, including those that have no center. He enjoyed the journey and was at home with the world of Maybe.

Whitehead believed that the very make up of the physical universe includes novelty. And novelty comes to us, among other ways, through the mental side of our experience, where we, in Whitehead's words, entertain propositions.

Borges was an entertainer. He was at home in the world of possibilities. He knew, perhaps better than Whitehead, that it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

- Jay McDaniel

Physical and Mental
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Note to Whiteheadians
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Ever need to be reminded:

• that every moment of experience has a mental pole as well as a physical pole,
• that the mental pole includes imaginative feelings by which what is received from the world can be rewoven into imaginative worlds,
• that these worlds can be as interesting and as “real” in their ways as what is physically received,  
• that these worlds are largely composed of symbols
• that the content of these worlds can evoke philosophical and religious questions that have no clear or final answers
• that one task of the artist is to create these worlds: to turn life into magic.
• that maybe there's a mysticism in this magic, but maybe not
• that "maybe" may be  one of ideas we have, but maybe not 
• that possibility is part of the makeup of the universe​

 
Read Borges. 

Examples of Possibility Exploration
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Whitehead's Speculative Philosophy

Borges' Short Stories

Science Fiction

Borges' Poetry

Pure Mathematics

Daydreaming in Geography Class

Daydreaming in Geography Class

always looking out the window
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I'm the kid who ran away with the circus
Now I'm watering elephants
But I sometimes lie awake in the sawdust
Dreaming I'm in a suit of light
Late at night in the empty big top I'm
All alone on the high wire
Look, he's working without a net this time
He's a real death-defier

I'm the kid who always looked out the window
Failing test in geography
But I've seen things far beyond just the schoolyard
Distant shores of exotic lands
There, the spires of the Turkish Empire
It's six months since we made landfall
Riding low with the spice of India
Through Gibraltar, we're rich men all

​I'm the kid who thought someday we'd be lovers
Always held out that time would tell
But time was talking, I guess I just wasn't listening
No surprise if you know me well
And as we're walking toward the train station
There's a whispering rainfall
'Cross the boulevard you slip your hand in mine
In the distance the train calls

I'm the kid who has this habit of dreaming
Sometimes gets me in trouble too
But the truth is I could no more stop dreaming

 Borges' Poems in Spanish
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​English speakers can also sample translations of Borges’ poetry here and here. Or dive into the translation of “Arte Poetica,” or “The Art of Poetry” here.

The Task of Art
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Profile of a Writer
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"Sitting down with Arena, the elderly Borges speaks without hesitation on his relationship to language, his discovery of his own limitations as a writer, the regimes that have ruled his homeland, his professional life spent at libraries (including his time as director of Argentina’s Biblioteca Nacional), and his accelerating blindness. We see scenes of life in Borges’ beloved Buenos Aires. We see the writer stepping carefully through the city streets, cane in one hand, feeling the buildings with the other. We see, perhaps most fascinatingly of all, dramatized passages of Borges’ most famous stories: “Funes the Memorious”, about a peasant condemned to remember everything perfectly, losing his ability to generalize, and thus to think; “The Circular Ruins”, about a man attempting to dream another human being into existence, detail by minute detail; “Death and the Compass”, about a detective who either accidentally or deliberately walks straight into a villain’s elaborate, tetragrammaton-based trap. Borges’ fans tend to think of his stories as thoroughly wrapped up in, and inseparable from, the text that constitute them, but some of these segments convince me that, as movies, they wouldn’t turn out half-bad."

The Craft of Verse Lectures
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