—————–
“Contemplate hexagonal air normal closets each
the is railing endlessly say
great of dictum
Centre hexagons and not capital exists
librarian elegant the seated
up says
books remote each and that have established”
(An acrostic text, generated by taking two short aphorisms about chance by Jean Baudrillard and using them to “read through” a translation of “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges)
—————–
Baudrillard suggests that we expect order to arise out of chaos in order to resist chaos in what amounts to a desperate conflict, a Sisyphean campaign, waged against an eternal entropy—hence, “Chance tires God”; however, Baudrillard also suggests that, because chance makes tolerable the brutality of fatality, chance is tiresome, not because God must always prevent it, but because God must always produce it, doing so in order to free us from a nightmarish determinism, in which every effect has a primal motive, a causal reason, for which someone, even God, might have to bear the guilt and the blame—hence, “Chance lets us breathe.” Chance provides us with a solid alibi, absolving us of any responsibility for the accidents that befall us, even though we might suspect that, at some fatal level, we have somehow willed these disasters into existence. God has nevertheless seen fit to take pity upon us and has let us off the hook for these catastrophes. He has forfeited his duty to account for everything by leaving the task of organizing things to a blind deity—randomness itself. Has not the modern writer also begun to suffer from this same kind of godly ennui, refusing to be held accountable for the words upon the page, desiring instead to let these words organize themselves haphazardly? Do we not even now yearn in secret for our own writing to write itself so that we might be free of its taxing labour?
Comments for this post are closed.