What holds a dialogue?

Being positioned in a dialogue precedes any thought or wonderment about the dialogue. Speaking of the dialogue can only follow the indisputable recognition that people are in dialogue. The structure and phenomenology of the dialogue requires that a positionality toward (in) it be taken prior to any exercise of abstraction that seeks to deal with the (construed) objectivity/reality of the dialogue. Having spoken of positionality, one feels compelled to question the who of the positionality: who is in place to hold a dialogue? Can anyone indeed engage in a dialogue? And whoever that may be, the important point is who that one already is prior to the dialogue. Thus, it seems that being ought to precede dialogical dynamics. And it seems that the question of being when it comes to the dialogical context, which requires that the being positions itself (entering, remaining in and/or exiting the dialogue), the body is as crucial as the speech exchanged and shared in communication. Dialogue is not merely about disembodied words, but about the actual presence of bodies that intercommunicate such words. The body cannot be relegated to the speech emanating from these bodies, because for dialogue to exist at all, bodies must frame it. Hence, positionality, far from being solely abstract for attesting to the primacy of the ideological or moral position of the speakers, alludes to the singularly physical presence of speaking bodies.

A Wondrous New World

I am a virgin in the land of blogs.
Perhaps not so much as a reader.
For I have been following a few of them already.
But as I producer of them. A generator of more blogs.
More of which the WWW most likely does not need right now.
As with pretty much everything else on the web,
Such an indomitable excess of blogs .
As with everything else on the web as well,
what a disparity of quality among them.
What to read: A few.
What to avoid: Copious many indeed.
And yet, there is a public for almost all of them.
Hence, the WWW remains, as of yet, the most unregulated democracy yet.
With all the wanted and less wanted that comes with
unbounded heterogeneity.

El mundo Tlon — and its origin

A story that leaps forth from a fortuitous discovery, to end, as the conclusion of this first paragraph augurs, in buried obscurity in the drawer of a desk at an unknown hotel in a remote Argentinian town. What kind of discovery do objects for self-reflection and ordered knowledge seemingly endless yet unalterably finite, enable? Classic Borges.

In Spanish:

Debo a la conjunción de un espejo y de una enciclopedia el descubrimiento de Uqbar. El espejo inquietaba el fondo de un corredor en una quinta de la calle Gaona, en Ramos Mejía; la enciclopedia falazmente se llama The Anglo-American Cyclopaedía (New York, 1917) y es una reimpresión literal, pero también morosa, de la Encyclopaedia Britannica de 1902. El hecho se produjo hará unos cinco años. Bioy Casares había cenado conmigo esa noche y nos demoró una vasta polémica sobre la ejecución de una novela en primera persona, cuyo narrador omitiera o desfigurara los hechos e incurriera en diversas contradicciones, que permitieran a unos pocos lectores -a muy pocos lectores- la adivinación de una realidad atroz o banal. Desde el fondo remoto del corredor, el espejo nos acechaba. Descubrimos (en la alta noche ese descubrimiento es inevitable) que los espejos tienen algo monstruoso. Entonces Bioy Casares recordó que uno de los heresiarcas de Uqbar había declarado que los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres. Le pregunté el origen de esa memorable sentencia y me contestó que The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia la registraba, en su artículo sobre Uqbar. La quinta (que habíamos alquilado amueblada) poseía un ejemplar de esa obra. En las últimas páginas del volumen XLVI dimos con un artículo sobre Upsala; en las primeras del XLVII, con uno sobre Ural-Altaic Languages, pero ni una palabra sobre Uqbar. Bioy, un poco azorado, interrogó los tomos del índice. Agotó en vano todas las lecciones imaginables: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr… Antes de irse, me dijo que era una región del Irak o del Asia Menor. Confieso que asentí con alguna incomodidad. Conjeturé que ese país indocumentado y ese heresiarca anónimo eran una ficción improvisada por la modestia de Bioy para justificar una frase. El examen estéril de uno de los atlas de Justus Perthes fortaleció mi duda.

En inglés:

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejía; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers – very few readers – to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men. I asked him the origin of this memorable observation and he answered that it was reproduced in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar. The house (which we had rented furnished) had a set of this work. On the last pages of Volume XLVI we found an article on Upsala; on the first pages of Volume XLVII, one on Ural-Altaic Languages, but not a word about Uqbar. Bioy, a bit taken aback, consulted the volumes of the index. In vain he exhausted all of the imaginable spellings: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr . . . Before leaving, he told me that it was a region of Iraq or of Asia Minor. I must confess that I agreed with some discomfort. I conjectured that this undocumented country and its anonymous heresiarch were a fiction devised by Bioy’s modesty in order to justify a statement. The fruitless examination of one of Justus Perthes’ atlases fortified my doubt.

Every beginning must be repeated to begin…

Every beginning necessitates a myth that legitimates it as such. I begin this blog as what I hope becomes a long, pleasurable, perhaps even tortuous search for one, a myth, that is–a story that may give meaning to why the birth of this blog is taking place right here and now.

Such words opened my first post at a different blog that bears the same name as this one. Profaning has become a theme in my thinking life these days. I will eventually decided which one should live a quick death.

Till then. For now, I repeat this moment of beginning to assert the truism that every beginning must indeed create a myth of its own, one that codifies the fortunes embedded in many, many posts to arrive.