urbane, to comfort them

The nations of Tlön are congenitally idealist. But for Borges, and for academic history, idealism and being an idealist have a different meaning than the one of common-speech. Commonly, an idealist is someone whose belief in ideals, virtues or principles to live by, or a vision of a better world, lend them a kind of steadfast optimism. Frequently, they come to grief against hard facts, as Goethe and Joyce say of Hamlet — the disunity between their ideal and the harshness of cold reality leads their rose-tinted vision to ruin.

But philosophically, "idealism" is a whole nother cat and a whole nother canary. Borges mentions that the formal hypotheses of idealism, like those of George Berkeley's, are functionally unfalsifiable. ("Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction.") Here, you have the opportunity to introduce both a fundamental alternative to empiricism to your students! And, maybe more importantly, why and how our models of science, of the philosophy of knowledge, fall short of determining its veracity. What other kinds of notions are unfalsifiable in the same way? What makes such a notion valuable despite this lack, or dismissable because of it? Absent anything else, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius does function standalone vessel or vehicle for introducing the philosophy of idealism without needing the nuance of each different version espoused by different continental scholars over different centuries. Consider the parable of the copper coins:

Which on its face seems obviously plain to us (nine coins are lost, they persist in existing while they are lost, and in time each of the always-existing nine coins are found), and obviously wrong to them, where there is no reason at all to suggest a fixed unseen continuity connects the beginning to the end.

They explained that equality is one thing and identity another, and formulated a kind of reductio ad absurdum: the hypothetical case of nine men who on nine successive nights suffer a severe pain. Would it not be ridiculous—they questioned—to pretend that this pain is one and the same? They said that the heresiarch was prompted only by the blasphemous intention of attributing the divine category of being to some simple coins and that at times he negated plurality and at other times did not. They argued: if equality implies identity, one would also have to admit that the nine coins are one.

The key is to unhook everything you know about your methods of determining the phenomena around you, and replace the sensory simulacrum of reality you think you perceive with your perceptions themselves. They are the real thing. For a moment, suspended in this way, maybe after a second or third reading and resolving a few elementary questions in classroom discussion, they will see their very act of sight, their thought of thoughts, as the walls of the cave. I consider this disjoint with the rest of the students' lives, that burst of terrible clarity, to be entirely safe because it is not true. The disqualification of the idealist hypothesis is not a logical one that depends on enumeration; you do not need to nurse someone back to our side of the fence. It is the product of cultivation which is the benefit of culture and civilization. This is why the citizens of Tlön believe the way they do, as well, and perceive the common world in alien ways; it is inculcated through the massing power of culture.
But not everyone will make it under that ocean's surface, and in the long tail, one or two will find themselves struggling to come back up for air. This is not an ethical compromise: the former will live their lives without being upset about the sanctity of their continuum; for the latter, this experiment will still be helpful in finding that their oxygen supply was always already being limited by ideas similarly incongruous with our approximated amalgam of shared empirical reality.

I relate to you that there are two problems, on either end of a spectrum, that can lead philosophical individuals to be out of step with their fellow man. The first, and more loudly common, is the nihilist or solipsist: the difficulty in seeing other people as truly People. The second, however, is the projection of an idealist heart: the difficulty in seeing other people as truly Other. To these philosophers, and to those of Borges' Tlön, one man is all men.

 "There are no nouns in Tlön's conjectural Ursprache, from which the "present" languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word "moon," but there is a verb which in English would be "to moon" or "to moonate." "The moon rose above the river" is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlö, or literally: "upward behind the onstreaming it mooned." 

This, we are told, is the language of the dominant southern hemisphere of Tlön. Absent other contexts, it seems at first absurd; I think a "I think it can digging in the ground for tubers" kind of reaction is perfectly reasonable, coming as we do from a language whose interpretation of empiricism is materialist. This is to say, we believe the story that we tell about the world, that the sensations we have, the phenomena we experience, are indicative of a material reality, full of things. Nouns! A moon and a river, and their actions in and across space as agents. Not only this, but hidden inside the sentence is an implication of patterns of behavior we ascribe to these nouns, ideas of space and time and history and expectation that can be assigned to nouns, placed in their buckets, and used to shorthand syntax to get to meaning for the reader. To porridge from Austin, the locutionary act of saying "the moon rose above the river" is the words themselves, with an illocutionary act of saying "moons are Things that rise, and rivers are Things that moons can rise above", for the perlocutionary reciprocal effect of the hearer reinforcing their model of the universe.

So, an exercise for the reader: consider traditionally oriented sentences and try and restate them in the usual speech of Tlön. Try it!

1. Why did the chicken cross the road?
2. It's easy to tell the depth of a well.
3. The cat chased the mouse to the wall.
4. It's raining cats and dogs.
5. Hearts starve as well as bodies: give us bread, but give us roses.

This exercise is a useful one for you or for your students, to quickly find themselves out of depths interpreting materialist figurative speech into the patter of Tlön. If this seems difficult at first, consider that it is no more difficult than first learning to see the world of numbers in a base other than 10, or first embarking into the world of language where every word has a gender. It is at least easier than using L'Hôpital's rule, and the average person can with some effort do any of these things, but! it is a skill that not a one of us has practice in. To what extent should poetry be reduplicated? Well, the more scant language of the northern hemisphere helps solve that problem by making translation harder, where:

They do not say "moon," but rather "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky" or any other such combination. In the example selected the mass of adjectives refers to a real object, but this is purely fortuitous. The literature of this hemisphere (like Meinong's subsistent world) abounds in ideal objects, which are convoked and dissolved in a moment, according to poetic needs. At times they are determined by mere simultaneity. There are objects composed of two terms, one of visual and another of auditory character: the color of the rising sun and the faraway cry of a bird. There are objects of many terms: the sun and the water on a swimmer's chest, the vague tremulous rose color we see with our eyes closed, the sensation of being carried along by a river and also by sleep. These second-degree objects can be combined with others; through the use of certain abbreviations, the process is practically infinite. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word. This word forms a poetic object created by the author.

One starts to wonder whether Borges was in fact just making a joke about the Ursprache of German. But in both hemispheres of Tlön, they have not avoided the noun entirely; "upward behind the onstreaming it mooned" is notably dependent on that eternal important it. In our imperial tongue, in this our vegetable reality, consider the usefulness of what we call gerunds, or verbs that become nouns. From this we get the foreign "onstreaming" with some novelty, but the capacity for our common language to handle these -ing verbal noun forms is ever-growing. In the twenty-first century, we've been verbing nouns, but in the twentieth, there was just as much nouning of verbs. Composite poetic-objects, on the other hand, are a feature of nearly every literature that predates modern English. A summoned construction of disparate parts, as imagined or experienced by a combination of senses, is not so opaque at all; it is frequently the beginning and end of common poetry. From here, we must next interrogate why these seemingly theorycrafted languageforms have the features that they do, and how through the simple trick of continental philosophy they might rise to the prestige of meaning.

 

 

For the conjugation of English readers, we indirectly derive nearly every use of "tl" from Nahautl. The reader may recognize the "coatl" and "quezacoatl" from their uses in history, Aztec culture and mythology, and correctly or not from popular culture fantasy (from Magic the Gathering's Naya setting to Final Fantasy 8's main character.) In the kitchen, chocolatl and chipotle are mostly obvious, but avocado (ahuakatl) and tomato (tomatl) are perhaps more unexpected places for the digraph to appear in our everyday speech.

Borges uses it in the name of the setting of Tlön (and the title of the story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius), as an easily identifiable unplaceable other. It's intentionally otherized, but not treated as a salad of letters like a Mxyzptlk — instead, Tlön is unexpected and unique to the mouth, but easy to say. When Borges speaks of "a generation of Tlönistas", we immediately understand what he means; Tlön passes the wug test. My instinct is to call "tl", as non-Nahuatl speakers would pronounce it, a kind of voiceless alveolear lateral fricative; but those who know more phonetics than I do call it a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate, which makes some sense, because it starts with a stop. The tip of the tongue tips us off to Tlön, and the soft l shapes our vowel to the n.

When our protagonists fail to find Uqbar in their encyclopedias, they begin searching for other literations of the easily spoken phonemes: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr, before returning to our titular Uqbar and its aberrant Anglo-American appearance. This digression makes it easy for any reader to approximate the sounds expected by the title.

The Orbis Tertius we will arrive at by the end of this story and of Teaching Tlön, but I will for now say that it is simple latin, and not a fantastic neologism at all. Pronounced in the latin style or in the english interpretation, you, your students, or your interlocutors will do just fine.

Which brings us back to tl. Since Borges wrote Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, we've seen another major "Tl___" show up in popular culture: the Tleilaxu of Frank Herbert's Dune universe. Creepy transhumanist genetic engineers, they perhaps reflect the idealist nature of Tlön in their own unique way, by resolving all of humanity into a small number of recursively reborn bodies and relived experiences. To them, it is copulation and not mirrors that are abominable, as their methods of rebirth have no need or want for the contemptible procreation of our contemporary era. Their methods ultimately arise from the determination against thinking machines; I admit to being unsettled by their approach, and perhaps would rather leave this reference in its past. To my memory, I would remember Arkady Martine's novels as having given us "Tleixcalaanlitzim", but that would be in error; while much of the language of A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace is drawn from Nahuatl, its central empire is Teixcalaan, without the digraph.

Consider this altogether then to be an opportunity to teach and to learn of Nahuatl as a language, of the Triple Alliance as a polity, of parallels your students will recognize between it and the Athenian Leagues. You might even delve deep into the poetry, into the role of the Valley of Mexico city states, and their reflection in their contemporary merchant city-states of Italy. By what right have your students been starved of this? What comprehensive study of Hamlets could leave out Nezahualcoyotl? Let that starvation end with a sumptuous feast. At the end of your journey with Tlön, you may have both romanticized these pasts and considered a danger in that romanticization.

A problem with a different kind of romanticization—with latinization—is evident in how letters and names become locked in constant place, and how we derive pronunciation from them. In this way we can have "coyote" and "axolotl", which have in common speech entirely diverged to meet their spelling, despite the fact that both should historically have been borrowed through Spanish to English from the same Nahuatl final phoneme (coyōtl, āxolōtl). Of course, the Nahuatl that emerges from empire is too a product of empire, and its most recognizable modern feature, the spelling of "tl", is almost certainly the result of Spanish colonial efforts to unify disparate aspects of the languages of the conquered. Sapir and Whorf both studied the /tɬ/, from which we get Whorf's law! If your students are still with you, and if you are still with me, let us next dig deeper into the unusual languages of Tlön in-the-fiction, and what their nounlessness might mean under the more general Sapir-Whorf.

The antidote to omelasposting is the experience of other allegory.

Josephine the Songstress (Josefine, die Sängerin, 1924) is the last great work of Franz Kafka, written before and published after the author's death. It concerns Josephine, the one and only musician of a rustic and hardworking population, whose songs stir the hearts of the laborers, but who seeks to set herself apart from the work. It is a short story with an obviously fallible narrator; the narrator is infinitely dismissive of her, but here is Kafka's magic: at the same time, he speaks of the certainty of her being. It is this juxtaposition of dismissiveness towards art and the artist with the love of the experience of art, love held in tension like embroidery thread, a desperate and un-comprehended love. Unknowable love is the bedrock of mutual care.

What is special about Josephine? That the narrator is thinking about these things and writing them down. He—and I think you will find he is he, though if you disagree please feel free to share it—is at a lagrange point of contradiction. He is of the type which is incurious, and there is little I have less patience for than incurious men. But! He is transformed by the act of writing down his experience, in his meandering emic narrative. He will propose something, and then spend ten lines telling you how it is not, precisely, true; why judging only from his own experience the thing mentioned as noteworthy is not noteworthy at all. It eats its own tail by doubling back on itself in this way, spiraling and looping like a tapestry or knot, but it also eats its own tale the other way: no matter the ink spilled to spell a detail out as not noteworthy, it was still a detail noted. He found it worthy of being noted, this thing out of the regular. His reaction to this is to soothe himself by saying it cannot be out of the regular. But he did notice it. This, I think, forms an illustrative kind of double consciousness, or perhaps a dialectic.

Josephine is a short twenty pages, but sits as a masterpiece in Kafka's style, the artistic deployment of the idiosyncrasies of the german language to make sentences whose length is uncanny and who stop at unexpected points. I fail at German the way I fail to play the piano; a soul of infinitely varied talents must still be lacking in many, pursuant to our little hours above the soil. But in English, reading Josephine, one must choose to be charmed by a style that lulls the reader, that never excites them, that always downplays its own charm. The result is the opposite of dense; it is precisely easy to read but one never feels that they have made any progress until the end. But then, having spiraled their way through the vertiginous passages of everyday language, the kind of story an unstoried teller would tell (the way everyday people fail to plot a direct course in their own recounting), the reader finds themselves having grasped an infinite other in a moment. The power of allegory then unleashes itself at once, portraying the reader as both the narrator and subject, as the judge and the judgéd outre. Suddenly, everywhere you look you see Josephine, and the magic is complete.