'To which no concept is adequate': Final Rellections 1

...or ghosts of pure form in the libraries of babel.

I have spent an inordinate amount of my life in libraries. I have made trips abroad to visit particular libraries. I have gone through the many idiosyncratic and obstructive procedures libraries impose in order to access their special collections. I have worked hard to get on the right side of some truly irascible librarians, who hold the keys to special cabinets, while rolling my eyes at the antics of those who treat such librarians as defective waiters or domestics. And I've experienced that peculiar brand of academic ecstasy at uncovering some previously unknown text, lost to the sands of time, or at proving what I suspected to be likely, after carefully untying the cords holding together a fragile and broken miscellany of paper that began life as a book. Handling something rare, maybe the sole survivor of its kind, the object itself a document of struggle and censorship, always brought a visceral thrill, a kind of subtle reverence for where this book had come from and where it had been in the intervening years.

                     Erik Desmazieres, illustration for Borges' The Library of Babel

The freestyle hermeneutics of 'The Wall and the Books', in which Borges speculates about the motives of the Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti when he ordered the building of the Great Wall and decreed the burning of all books gives the lie to the simple historical explanations for the phenomena. 'There is no mystery in the two measures…. he built the wall because walls were defenses; he burned the books because the opposition invoked them in order to extol former emperors.'  Hunting for the larger meaning, Borges notes that those who were found preserving books were sentenced to work on the wall, and thus begins speculating:

Perhaps the wall was a metaphor, maybe Shih Huang Ti condemned those who worshipped the past to a work just as vast as the past, as stupid and useless. Perhaps the wall was a challenge and Shih Huang Ti thought: 'Men love the past and I can do nothing against this love, nor can my executioners, but some time there will be a man who feels as I do, and he will destroy my wall, as I destroyed the books, and will erase my memory and will be my shadow and my mirror and will not be aware of it.' Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled in the empire because he knew it was fragile and he destroyed the books because he understood they were sacred books, or rather books that taught that which the entire universe teaches or the consciousness of every man.

Rather than a search for a grand narrative or an encompassing ideological truth, as he says a little later, he thinks it is likely that the grand idea of the wall and the burning of the books 'touches us by, over and above, the conjectures it allows'.  The wall and the books are valuable to Borges precisely because they conjure possible interpretations: they seem meaningful, but render up no precise meaning.

Contingency, speculation, contemplation, individual interpretation, all fly in the face of the face of the single-voiced authority. As a library is a cacophany of views and theories and demands, so even a single text can be a starting point for a multiplicity of perhapses, none of which need to be completely correct. This is not, by the way, the absurdity of historicism, but the pleasure of thought, of human ingenuity.

In contrast, there is the voice of Authoritah.

Like this, Climate Change Minister Edward Davey's speech 'Climate Change, Acting on the Science', delivered on June 4 2013 to the Met Office, warning of the 'danger' of giving a platform to those who would question the corrupt Religion of Gaia:

Some sections of the press are giving an uncritical campaigning platform to individuals and lobby groups who reject outright the fact that climate change is a result of human activity.

Some who even deny the reality of climate change itself.
This is not the serious science of challenging, checking and probing.

This is destructive and loudly clamouring scepticism born of vested interest, nimbyism, publicity seeking contraversialism or sheer blinkered, dogmatic, political bloody-mindedness.

This tendency will seize upon the normal expression of scientific uncertainty and portray it as proof that all climate change policy is all hopelessly misguided – from pursuing renewable energy to emissions targets themselves.

By selectively misreading the evidence, they seek to suggest that climate change has stopped so we can all relax and burn all the dirty fuel we want without a care.

This is a superficially seductive message, but it is absolutely wrong and really quite dangerous.

 Not so very far from the Chinese Emperor, then. Nor from that darling of the Progressives, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Social Contract, in which the individual is subsumed into the herd for the greater good, here outlining his ' Civil Religion':

There is a purely civil profession of faith of which the sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject. While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the state whoever does not believe them — it can banish him, not for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished to death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.

If anyone behaves as if he does not believe them...  This is Goya's Reason-shorn-of-imaginative-play run to its chilling extreme, where the contents of the individual mind remains incarcerated within a socially-co-operative body. Like Kafka's perfect son and worker in Metamorphosis, there will come a point where such a conformity turns into frank monstrosity, to be met with even greater monstrosity from the external world.

 Imagination, creativity, difference, contestation, play, wit, satire, slippage, all represent a threat to the grandest of narratives of Authoritah - be fearful, be safe. Such a story long left behind the underpinnings of the European Enlightenment at its most brightly lit:

An aesthetical Idea [is] an intuition of the Imagination, to which no concept is adequate. And it is by the excitation of such ineffable Ideas that a great work of art affects us (Kant, Critique of Judgment)

Every or any book from a finite or infinite library - even a seemingly incoherent book - has a pattern to it.  But the pattern is infinite, and the full meaning of the book can never be made manifest: it is a sentence spoken in the hope of being understood, a bridge thrown out to an unseen shore.