created 2025-03-10, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025fictiontranshumanism
rel: Islands Stranger Photography - A Cultural History by Mary Warner Marion
Why I’m reading
Sync’d read with a friend, who recommended I’d read it based on overlap with different themes that interest me. I had seen Last Year In Marienbad many years ago and there might be some inspiration here. I’m hoping for a Mount Analogue type of revelation.
Introduction
The body is imaginary, and we bow to the tyranny of the phantom. Love is a privileged perception, the most and lucid not only of the unreality of the world but of our own unreality: not only do we traverse a realm of shadows; we ourselves are shadows. - Octavio Paz
Bioy on the Supernatural:
Through cracks that might open at enemy moment in the earth’s crust, a devil might grab you by the foot and drag you to hell. The supernatural as something terrifying and sad. While we play at throwing a ball against the wall in the back of the house, my friend Drago Mitre explains that heaven and hell are the lies of religion. I would like to go inside a three-way mirror, where the images would repeat themselves clearly. That supernatural as something attractive.
Bioy’s early writings suffered from the chaotic influence of Surrealism’s automatic writing and Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness. Then Bioy embraced Borges’ poetics of condensation and concision, which favored the speculative and the artificial over the novelist’s expansive representation of the human experience.
Prologue by Borges
In 1880s the adventure story was regarded as an object of scorn “I doubt very much whether an adventure that will interest our superior sensibility can be invented today.” For them the genre had fallen out of favor and was past use, pleasure derived was “puerile and nonexistent.”
Lovers may separate forever as a consequence of their love. Such complete freedom is tantamount to chaos.
The odyssey of marvels he unfolds seems to have no possible explanation other than hallucination or symbolism, and he uses a single fantastic but not supernatural postulate to decipher it.
I have been here before But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
The Invention of Morel
There is only one possible place for a fugitive like you - it’s an uninhabited island, but a human being cannot live there.
The island is the source of a fatal disease which “attacks the outside of the body and then works inward.”
But my life was so unbearable that I decided to go there anyway.
People, anachronistically dressed and dancing, have taken residence on the island as well, and he avoids their detection. The sound of their music blends with the island sounds.
By the moon’s metallic gleam (I could smell the stench of the fish canneries), he gave me instructions and a stolen boat. I rowed frantically, and arrived, incredibly, at my destination (for I did not understand the compass; I had lost my bearings; I had not hat and was will, haunted by hallucinations).
He searches for books on his research
I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness.
escorted by diligent swarms of echoes, many dimensions of the same echo… when I sigh, for example, I can hear the echoes of a sigh, both near and faraway, for two or three minutes afterward.
Two songs play incessantly, “Tea for Two” and “Valencia.”
Tea for Two
Tea for Two is a 1924 song. Youmans had written the basic melody idea of “Tea for Two” while he was in the navy during World War I.
I’m discontented With homes that are rented So I have invented My own Darling this place is A lover’s oasis Where life’s weary chase is Unknown Far from the cry of the city Where flowers pretty Caress the stream Cozy to hide in To live side by side in Don’t let it abide in My dream Picture you Upon my knee Just tea for two And two for tea Just me for you And you for me Alone
Valencia
“Valencia! In my dreams it always seems I hear you softly call to me Valencia! Where the orange trees forever scent the breeze Beside the sea Valencia! In my arms I held your charms Beneath the blossoms high above You loved me In Valencia long ago we found our Paradise of Love! In a magic dream of mem’ry I see you again In that old town far away Beneath skies of Spain That city of tender romances So shy were your glances And swift as the sunshine that dances Through the Orange Grove Valencia!”
One of these people, a woman, sits on the rocks to watch the sunset every afternoon. She wears a bright scarf over her dark curls; she sits with her hands clasped on one knee; her skin is burnished by prenatal suns; her eyes, her black hair, her bosom make her look like one of the Spanish or gypsy girls in those paintings I detest.
He’s drawn to her
I am certain that the greatest difficulty of all will be to survive her first impression of me. But surely she will not judge me by my appearance alone.
When there is so much to do, I do not have time to think of the woman who watches the sunsets.
NOTE
Sunsets, and sunrises as romantic scenes. The dawn of Pride and Prejudice. The Green Ray. Why is the sunset romantic?
I went back to see her the next afternoon and the next. She was there, and her presence began to take on the quality of a miracle.
Speaking to her would be an alarming experience. I did not even known whether I had any voice left.
I watched her from my hiding place. I was afraid that she would see me, so I came out, perhaps too abruptly. Even so, her composure was not altered; she ignored me, as if I were invisible.
He finds out her name is Faustine whilst watching her play tennis with Morel who she seems interested in. He tramples on the narrator’s garden.
The narrator considers that the appearance and disappearance of Faustine is the result of experimenting with new roots.
Thought
Concept: a person that appears when under certain conditions only. This, possible poison, must be used for keeping the relationship with this true, but figment being.
Now that I have lost Faustine I should like to submit these problems to a hypothetical observer, a third person.
It occurred to me (precariously) that these could be beings from another planet, whose nature is different from ours, with eyes that are note used for seeing, with ears that do not hear. I remember they spoke correct French. I enlarged the forgoing monstrosity: this language may be a parallel attribute to our worlds, but the words may have different meanings.
Now I understand why novelists write about ghosts that weep and wail. They dead remain in the midst of the living. It is hard for them, after all, to change habits - to give up smoking or the prestige of being great lovers. I was horrified by the thought that I was invisible; horrified that Faustine, who was so close to me, actually might be on another planet (the sound of her name made me sad); but I am dead, I am out of reach, I thought; I shall see Faustine, I shall see her go away, but my gestures, my pleas, my efforts will have no effect on her. And I knew that all of those horrible solutions were nothing but frustrated hopes.
Morel came back. They spoke together for a moment and I managed to hear Morel say: “… if I told you that all your words and actions were being recorded.”
Faustine walked by on her way to the rocks. My love for this woman has become annoying (and ridiculous: we have never even spoke to each other!)
Morel: “My abuse consists of having photographed you without permission. Of course, it is not like an ordinary photograph; this is my latest invention. We shall live in this photograph forever. Imagine a stage on which our life during these seven days is acted out in complete detail. We are the actors. All our actions have been recorded.”
Morel: “I could have told you when we arrived ‘we shall live for eternity”
“When I finished my invention it occurred to me, first as mere exercise for imagination, then as an incredible plan that I could give perpetual reality to my romantic desire.”
“My hopes of making her love me have receded now; I no longer have her confidence, nor do I have the desire, the will, to face life.”
Each of the various senses are captured and can be transmitted via dials. An example is made of turning up the olfactory dial, which will result in smelling a woman who is there, but not seeing her. Turning up all the dials results in the simulacrum.
Consciousness is even reconstructed by the synchronization of the senses, “we have no valid reason to deny it to the persons created by my machinery.”
Thought
The only way to know if you are in a cycle of repetition is to have the repetition start, to be in the cycle. You have a button and it will repeat the next hour of your life when you touch it, after an hour has passed. You press it. Your hour is identical the hour of if you had not pressed it. You will not know it works till it repeats.
rel:Property of a Random Shuffle
To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares; to be in love with one of those images was far worse than being in love with a ghost (perhaps we always want the person we love to have the existence of a ghost.)
It is possible that every need is basically spatial, that somewhere the image, the touch, and the voice of those who are no longer alive must still exist (“nothing is lost”).
Future people will be able to resurrect the death by channeling their vibrations.
He now views Faustine “dispassionately” but he has been following her for days, “other nights I lie on a mat on the floor, beside her bed. It touches me to have her so close to me, and yet so unare of this habit of sleeping together that we are acquiring.” (fucking hell…)
The fact that we cannot understand anything outside of time and space may perhaps suggest that our life is not appreciably different from the survival to be obtained by this machine.
rel:Why there’s a sign of Simulation
He hypothesizes some kind of palimpsest of paradises, where innumerable collections like this are overlaid over one another, all acting independently.
He seeks signs of Faustine loving Morel, but now finds none.
He seeks to know where she lives, if she lives.
I do not know which flies are real and which are artificial.
To the person who reads this diary and then invents a machine that can assemble disjointed presences, I make this request: Find Faustine and me, let me enter the heaven of her consciousness. It will be an act of piety.
Disorder and Love in La Invencion de Morel
In his 1932 essay, “El arte narrativo y la magia,” Jorge Luis Borges postulates causality as the central problem of the novel. He distinguishes between two causal processes of writing narratives: the natural process and the magical process.
Due to Borges’s vision of a chaotic real world, this natural process continuously results in an endless and uncontrollable number of operations.