The Alpha and the Omega

[De Batz]

This is an idea that I don't know if I am good enough at writing - or indeed at thinking - to execute. But here it is anyway.

 

 

I found it. The aleph, the everything-in-one-place. In the rubble of a demolished building in Buenos Aires, I found it. One generally regards Borges as some sort of fantasist, and his creations as the product of an over-active imagination too well-read for its own good. But it is real, and it is magnificent and terrible. Borges imagined that it contains all of space at a point, but he missed something, or perhaps his source was inadequate. Perhaps Borges himself preferred not to recognise the truth.

This thing – if 'thing' is the right word for it – doesn't just contain all points in space. It couldn't, because the universe isn't like that. It doesn't make any sense to talk about points in space at the same time, because there is no meaning to this phrase 'at the same time', unless from the perspective of a particular observer. What the aleph contains – and again, I find the word inadequate – is everything, all the events of the universe. At first I couldn't read it, didn't recognise the awesome power that it might give the competent user. But I perservered, and saw through the mists, the swirling and nebulous streams of what seemed at first to be nonsense. After a time, I began to see shapes emerge. I didn't understand what they were, because the didn't look like anything familiar, and it was some time before I recognised them as nothing bigger than atoms. I had thought them planets or stars initially, but I trained myself to perceive through it, to interpret what I was seeing. I cannot speak for how long it took, because time within the aleph is not like time outside, and though I experienced many years – uncountable lifetimes, if I am not mistaken – my beard had grown little when I returned to myself, suggesting the passage of but a few hours.

The aleph has given me everything, my own past, future, distant, near. I have visited every corner of the universe and seen its beginning and end. And it has destroyed me, torn my mind apart. I wonder if perhaps there is no one who could have fared any better, although I do not wish to seem arrogant. The aleph has given me alpha, omega, and all points in between. I know everything.

 

It is killing me. And yet I know that it will not kill me. My end approaches, and no one can change that. No one can help. Hope and fear are extinguished, anticipation means nothing, nor does memory. Funes was lucky, he had but a lifetime, and a short one at that.

[Ron Blanco]

I found it very engaging, DB.

 

It might make an interesting prologue for a novel. Is that what you had in mind?

[De Batz]

Perhaps the afterword as opposed to the foreword. The idea is that this guy is a sort of modern Quixote, who, having read too many Borges stories and Umberto Eco novels, sets out in search of the Garden of Forking Paths, and the Library of Babel, and The Island of the Day Before. I think his actual finding of one of these objects might have to be left until the end... Or it could, in the seemingly de rigeur style of many modern novels, be the early revelation that demands the backstory be told.

 

Thanks for reading again. I really appreciate it.

[Ron Blanco]

Interesting DB. Will it be serious or farcical?

 

Your extract makes me wonder how the modern world might react to someone who is all-knowing. Would she be worshipped, or hunted by ne'er-do-wells?

[De Batz]

Hunted, I suspect. By such august bodies as the News of the World, who would then be able to cease phone-hacking...

 

That's a possible line for the story, but the generative idea is that Borges and Eco and the likes of Rushdie are all realists in their fiction about things they wouldn't be realists about in 'real' life. To follow that, it seems that finding the aleph can't be the prelude to a novel, it has to be the end of both the search and the story.

 

Unless of course the finder is just deluded or lying.

 

Andy

[De Batz]

In reply to the first question, I think it would have to be both. Serious in how it's written, farcical in content. The two writers I keep mentioning were both obsessed with the Quixote story, and its contribution to the scope of potential ways of thinking. Both were looking, in their own writing, to make a similar contribution. I wonder whether there is anything left to discover...

[Ron Blanco]

I see it's a different story to the one you have in mind, DB, but even so, it's quite interesting. I suppose there might be some factions who would feel theatened by the all-knowing one, such as the world's super-powers, religious organisations and bookmakers?

[Mr Doctor]

Fun ideas. I like The Aleph short.