created, 2025-02-14 & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025borgesvandalismlanguageisland
rel: Islands Survey of Vandal, Fake and Replica
These parables say that representation is always partial, else it would not be representation, but some kind of haunting double. But the terra incognita spaces on maps say that knowledge also is an island surrounded by oceans of the unknown. They signify that the cartographers knew they did not know, and awareness of ignorance is not just ignorance; it’s awareness of knowledge’s limits.
The Yellow emperor shows the poet his palace.
Gradually they left behind the long procession of Western terraces: like the tiers of an almost boundless amphitheater they dropped down toward a paradise or garden whose metal mirrors and elaborate juniper borders hinted at the labyrinth. At first they let themselves get lost gleefully as if in a game.
The passages of the labyrinth are deceptive, appearing straight but subtly curved to form a circle in secret.
The walk continues through oblique rooms, gardens and imagery with inscrutable purpose. Dreams and reality becomes confused. They remain lost.
Every hundred paces a tower pierced the air; in their eyes, they were all the same color, and yet the first one was yellow and the last one scarlet, so fine were the gradations and so long the sequence.
At the last of these towers that marked the of their incredible journey, the poet, “removed of the sights that so astounded the others,” makes a composition “that some say consisted of a single line of verse” or even a single word.
Distilled in this poem is the entire enormous palace they have walked, down to the finest detail.
All of the shadows in twilight and day, all the moments lived.
The Emperor says that in doing so the poet has “taken away” his palace and by the sword the poet is executed.
Others tell the story differently. There cannot be two identical things in the world: as soon as the poet recited the poem (they tell us), the palace disappeared as if blasted and swept away by the final syllable. Of course, legends like this are mere fiction. The poet was the Emperor’s slave and died accordingly. His poem fell into oblivion because that was what it deserved. His descendants are still searching for the word that is the world, but they will not find it.