Spatial Design: "At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater"

October 20, 2005

"At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater"

Borges describes a fantastic world, through the conventional device of an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia has entries for weather, Paris, mammals and Uqbar. Uqbar is a place, a nation in the fact that it can appear in an encyclopedia under 'nation', but that's where the comparison ends. Uqbar exists in collective minds, in platonic forms, in perception and understanding, and Uqbar ends when nouns and definitions and when objective understanding are involved.

Uqbar's true nature is in realm of possibility. Borges opens me up to the fantastic, to the potentially possible, to the unexplainable becoming real. The jarring part of the reading, outside the quantifiable nature of Uqbar as a 'nation' placed in an encyclopedia, is the story of someone on Uqbar dying. Maybe that was the use of a conventional word in an unconventional sense. The people of Uqbar never die and they were never born. Somewhere they exist and someplace else they cease to exist and yet they always are.

For me, this was a meditation on perspective and direction. What is, what is not and what could be might easily be switched around.

Posted by Bukhin, Mike at October 20, 2005 07:29 PM