2016年6月17日 星期五

labyrinth 迷宮;Herbert Simon 訪 Borges (1899-1986) ; "Labyrinths"

1978年,我也許售劉森堯學長的影響,在英國買了企鵝版的Borges's Labyrinths。  Labyrinths 是1960年代美國編選的 Jorge Luis 文集,大家常說此書是魔幻大作家  Borges (1899-1986) 的無名傑作 (Nice: an unsung masterpiece by a writer's writer.)

Herbert Simon的著作也常用  labyrinth (迷宮)來比喻重要的人生/決策。
最有趣的是他的回憶錄有一章用文學來寫他的科學觀念,章首是Simon親訪 Borges 的問答。


labyrinth 迷宮
labyrinth
音節
lab • y • rinth
発音
lǽbərìnθ
labyrinthの変化形
labyrinths (複数形)
  • [名]
  • 1 迷宮;迷路;迷路園;曲がりくねった街路. ⇒MAZE 1
  • 2 混迷した事情[事件].
  • 3 ((the L-))《ギリシャ神話》ラビュリントス:Minos王が怪物Minotaurを監禁するために造らせた大迷宮.
  • 4 《解剖学》内耳迷路;篩(し)骨迷路.
  • [ラテン語←ギリシャ語labýrinthos]

  • labyrinth
  • Definition of labyrinth
  • noun
1a complicated irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze:you lose yourself in a labyrinth of little streets
an intricate and confusing arrangement:a labyrinth of conflicting laws and regulations
2 Anatomy a complex structure in the inner ear which contains the organs of hearing and balance. It consists of bony cavities (the bony labyrinth) filled with fluid and lined with sensitive membranes (the membranous labyrinth).
Zoology an accessory respiratory organ of certain fish.
  • Derivatives
labyrinthian
Pronunciation: /-ˈrɪnθɪən/
adjective
  • Origin:
  • late Middle English (referring to the maze constructed by Daedalus to house the Minotaur): from French labyrinthe or Latin labyrinthus, from Greek laburinthos











To his modern admirers, Donatien Alphonse François, Comte de Sade was also a revolutionary, one of the first writers and thinkers to explore the darkest labyrinths of the human soul. The jury is out on whether Sade was, in the contemporary sense of the word, a “sadist”.



前幾天在找 Kairos is the transliteration of the Greek word for qualitative time.The great chance )時碰到一本奇書:The Labyrinths of Information:Challenging the Wisdom of Systems by Claudio Ciborra  -2005
它基本上採取批評 IT系統書籍一般採取的「理性、科學、方法」之路數,而將其放在「人與日常生活」之維次來談。

我們看它各章章名,就可以了解語言與思想學問之難分難解【(內為一些可能解釋)】:
Table of Contents
1. Invitation
2. Krisis  judging methods
3. Bricolage improvisation hacking patching cut corners  (角を曲がらないで斜めに)近道をする大急ぎで事を処理する . French bricolage  kludge, tinkering. 、Italian       bricolage  DIY Portuguese    bricolage  hand-crafted hobbies.

4. Gestell  the power of infrastructure  
 German        Gestell      carcass, clothes dryer, column, cradle, creel, framing, housing, landing gear, pedestal, ride, shelf, shore, socket, spectacle frame, tripod, wooden framework. 海德格爾(Martin Heidegger )談技術之專名。)
5. Derive  drift and deviation
6. Xenia  XENIA host an innovation 組織最為主(認同);創新客
Plural 1. Of Xenium Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
"XENIA" is a name that signifies or is derived from: "the hospitality". 

7. Shih (建築與行動Albanian shih vide. VIDE 1. Imperative sing. of L. videre, to see; -- used to direct attention to something; as, vide supra, see above. Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) 
8. Kairos (and Affectio)
9. Methodological Appendix (Odos)



春上春樹的說法,也很可參考。


Haruki Murakami
“Things outside you are projections of what's inside you, and what's inside you is a projection of what's outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you're stepping into the labyrinth inside.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore





Borges and the Foreseeable Future


Published: January 6, 2008
THE Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges might seem an unlikely candidate for Man Who Discovered the Internet. A fusty sort who from the 1930s through the 1950s spent much of his time as a chief librarian, Borges (1899-1986) valued printed books as artifacts and not just for the words they contained. He frequently set his stories in a pretechnological past and was easily enthralled by the authority of ancient texts.


Sophie Basouls/Sygma-Corbis
Jorge Luis Borges in 1977.


Yet a growing number of contemporary commentators — whether literature professors or cultural critics like Umberto Eco — have concluded that Borges uniquely, bizarrely, prefigured the World Wide Web. One recent book, "Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds" by Perla Sassón-Henry, explores the connections between the decentralized Internet of YouTube, blogs and Wikipedia — the so-called Internet 2.0 — and Borges's stories, which "make the reader an active participant." Ms. Sassón-Henry, an associate professor in the language studies department of the United States Naval Academy, describes Borges as "from the Old World with a futuristic vision." Another work, a collection of essays on the topic from Bucknell University Press, has the provocative title "Cy-Borges" and is expected to appear this year.

Among the scores of Borges stories, a core group — including "Funes the Memorious," "The Library of Babel" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" — first appeared in the United States as "Labyrinths" in the early 1960s. With their infinite libraries and unforgetting men, collaborative encyclopedias and virtual worlds conjured up from the printed page and portals that watch over the entire planet, these stories (along with a few others like "The Aleph") have become a canon for those at the intersection of new technology and literature.

New Directions, the publisher of "Labyrinths," reissued the collection in May, for the first time in more than 40 years. In a sign of the changing times it includes an introduction from William Gibson, the cyberpunk author. (The original, by contrast, came with a preface from André Maurois of the Académie Française.)
By 1955 Borges had lost his sight yet was appointed director of the National Library of Argentina. Assessing his predicament (the digital age predicament) of having access to so much information and so few ways to process it, Borges wrote in "Poem of the Gifts," "No one should read self-pity or reproach into this statement of the majesty of God, who with such splendid irony granted me books and blindness at one touch."
What follows are excerpts from prophetic Borges short stories — translated by Andrew Hurley in "Borges: Collected Fictions" (Penguin Books) — and examples of those prophesies fulfilled.

Infinite Encyclopedia
THEN "Who, singular or plural, invented Tlön? The plural is, I suppose, inevitable, since the hypothesis of a single inventor — some infinite Leibniz working in obscurity and self-effacement — has been unanimously discarded. It is conjectured that this 'brave new world' is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebrists, moralists, painters, geometers, ... guided and directed by some shadowy man of genius. There are many men adept in those diverse disciplines, but few capable of imagination — fewer still capable of subordinating imagination to a rigorous and systematic plan. The plan is so vast that the contribution of each writer is infinitesimal." "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940)
NOW Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia project that began in 2001, now has a total of more than nine million articles in more 250 languages. There are more than 75,000 "active contributors," many of whom remain anonymous. As it grows and becomes ever more influential, its operating logic remains a mystery. A favored saying among Wikipedia's contributors is: "The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work."

Life Is Like A Blog
THEN "Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day. 'I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began,' he said to me. ... And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap." "Funes" (1942)
Now The path from diary to blog to the frequently updated "microblog" has now descended to "life-logging." Not content merely to record their thoughts or even daily activities, life-loggers record and preserve everything they see, hear, say and read during the day. The world-recognized early adopter is Gordon Bell, a 73-year-old computer programmer who wears an audio recorder as well as a tiny camera that snaps a picture every 60 seconds. A 2006 profile in Fast Company described Mr. Bell as at one time being "worried about filling up his hard-drive space too quickly." He adds a gigabyte of information a month and figures that an average 72-year-old person would require one to three terabytes, "a hefty amount of storage."
Nothing Is Forgotten
THEN "I was struck by the thought that every word I spoke, every expression of my face or motion of my hand would endure in his implacable memory; I was rendered clumsy by the fear of making pointless gestures." "Funes" (1942)
Now There once was a time when a poet could assert that "the revolution will not be televised." But today, of course, even a politician's informal meet-and-greet will be recorded for posterity. Senator George Allen of Virginia learned this in 2006 when a tape of him calling his opponent's videographer a "macaca," a racially tinged epithet, spread like a virus across the state and, soon, the world. He lost his re-election bid.

Universal Library
THEN "From those incontrovertible premises, the librarian deduced that the Library is 'total' ... that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. ... When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist." "The Library of Babel" (1941)

Now In announcing that an ambitious international project to digitize universities' book collections had passed the 1.5 million mark, one of its organizers, Raj Reddy, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, proclaimed in November: "This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language." To others, the Internet itself is the Universal Library, where readers can search for recipes, medical treatments, barroom trivia or perhaps even Google themselves
****

This Craft of Verse
Borges, Jorge Luis
Mihailescu, Calin-Andrei
Through a twist of fate that the author of Labyrinths himself would have relished, these lost lectures given in English at Harvard in 1967–1968 by Jorge Luis Borges return to us now, a recovered tale of a life-long love affair with literature and the English language. Transcribed from tapes only recently discovered, This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candor, wit, and remarkable erudition of one of the most extraordinary and enduring literary voices of the twentieth century. It stands as a deeply personal yet far-reaching introduction to the pleasures of the word, and as a first-hand testimony to the life of literature.

***
Tonight's Art Moment is "Glass Labyrinth" by Kansas City native and acclaimed artist Robert Morris. This sculpture is a true labyrinth with one single path. Visitors walk from the entrance to the center and must retrace their steps to the exit. Labyrinths are found throughout history—in prehistoric cave drawings, ancient Greek mythology and in the stone floors of French cathedrals to guide meditative walking. Contemporary in form and material, "Glass Labyrinth" is a popular interactive part of the Sculpture Park.

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