¡TLÖNISTA!

“Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor-has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers . . .”

-Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

Our world has long been mythologized by some as a metaphysical Prison, a Gnostic nightmare in which human beings have been incarcerated as slaves or indentured servants with assigned numbers. Such a claustrophobic, seemingly paranoiac premise inspired some of the most talented artists of the 20th century. Franz Kafka masterfully depicted the nightmarish aspects of this phantom penal system in several works, while Joseph Heller (in Catch-22) and Thomas Pynchon (in Gravity’s Rainbow) studied its paradoxical bureaucracies, secret societies and metaphysics. With the advent of Situationism, artist Guy Debord charted the shift from Prison to “Spectacle.” The Spectacle is seemingly more mall than prison, a world in which every desire must be channeled into thoughtless consumer impulses while hypnotic media imperatives ooze out of every conceivable outlet. For his brilliant television-defying epic The Prisoner, Auteur Patrick McGoohan brilliantly satirized this aspect of modern life when he created an allegorical though recognizable Prison called “The Village.” And speculative fiction writer Philip K. Dick spent years unraveling his own Gnostic epiphany of a Roman Empire which continues to dominate human beings everywhere (“The Black Iron Prison”) and its divine antithesis that will one day penetrate reality and undo this menace (the “Vast Active Living Intelligence System”).

In the last century of the second millenium C.E., the implications of this Prison myth mutated with the advent of certain technological developments: television (originally presented as the “iconoscope”), electronic surveillance, telecommunication, and ubiquitous computerization. While it must be noted that technological progress presents us with tools which are intrinsically neither good nor evil, to even question the wholesale acceptance of technological trends in some quarters is to risk being branded a reactionary or Luddite. In our rush toward an ill-defined Technotopia, only “heretics” question what impact these advances will have on our cultural and physical environment as well as on our brains. As Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, grandfather of televangelism, stated bluntly, “Radio is like the Old Testament, inasmuch as it is hearing without seeing. Television is the New Testament, for in it the Word is made flesh and dwells in our living rooms.”(1)

At its core, the Gnostic Prison myth is a tale of social control by a self-appointed elite class, depicted as either earthly or cosmic, bureaucrat or archon. Fortunately, this snug-fitting myth is often coupled with another idea: that escape from this prison is possible and that there are secret histories to guide us. More than this, it may be possible to liberate and reshape this world.

In the first part of John Crowley’s Aegypt cycle of novels, a book-within-the-book tells us, “But history is made by man. Old Vico said that man can only fully understand what he has made, the corollary to that is, that what man has made he can understand: it will not, like the physical world, remain impervious to his desire to understand. So if we look at history and find in it huge stories, plots identical to the plots of myth and legend, populated by actual persons who however bear the symbols and even the names of gods and demons, we need be no more alarmed and suspicious than we would be on picking up a hammer and finding its grip fit for our hand, and its head balanced for our striking…The story remains; and if it changes, and it does, it is because our human nature is not fixed; there is more than one history of the world. But when we believe that we have proved that there is no story, that history is just one damned thing after another that can only be because we have ceased to recognize ourselves.”(2)

There can be as many secret histories as there are thinking people. In fashioning such histories for ourselves, from hidden and neglected sources, we not only discover more about our world but also learn much about the worlds within us. The novels written from such explorations are a unique, deeply personal type of meta-fiction, charting not only neglected paths into the past but also exploratory attempts showing possible futures and strategies for achieving them: The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton; The Aegypt Cycle of John Crowley; Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed; Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson; Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco; The Jerusalem Quartet by Edward Whittemore; and even the hidden history gumbo of Grant Morrison’s graphic epic, The Invisibles.

But it was Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges who broke radically new ground with his meta-fictional story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” This curious story meticulously details the not-so-subtle invasion of our world by the culture and philosophies of another hidden (or perhaps spurious) realm. The beachhead of this invasion is a single entry from a possibly apocryphal encyclopedia said to be written in English, funded and directed by an eccentric American millionaire named Ezra Buckley. Elsewhere in the story, the mad scheme is traced to alleged Rosicrucian philosopher John Valentine Andrae. In its entirety, the encyclopedia supposedly fills forty octavo volumes bound in Yellow Corinthian leather and embossed with the legend “ORBIS TERTIUS.”

In this story, Borges not only toys with the role of fiction, he uses it as a vehicle for the subversion of mundane consensus reality. The shifting depths of the story require creative, interactive hermeneutics even as they subject the reader to Tlönist memes. The idea of indoctrination by exposure to a text can be viewed as a mere literary fantasy, of course. But one may also consider it as an astute anticipation of the discovery (creation?) of memes and a brief manual for metaprogramming reality.

According to Borges: “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.”

Here is a revolutionary praxis for the aspiring Tlönista movement: the penetration/ reconstruction of our world from an Imaginal(3) source, in the sense that Henry Corbin coined the term.

If an invasion from the Imaginal realm seems unlikely, consider that Orson Welles handily mounted a Martian invasion that wrought prankish havoc while playing with belief and symbol systems. He also deftly adapted Kafka’s The Trial. Similarly, the unknown artists of the original German Rosicrucian Brotherhood sewed fantastic oats which grew and yielded many harvests. As Napoleon mused, “The truth is not half so important as what people believe to be true.” On one level, it could be presumed that Napoleon was insulting the gullibility of the masses. But to Tlönistas his remark could be a tribute to the power of belief and imagination to change the world. Shakespeare’s magical assertion that the “world is a stage” insinuates that existence may be enhanced by those working diligently in the dark to change the scene.

If the simulated reality is indeed a Prison, then the Tlönistas are its escape artists. They are also architects of possibilities and implementers of dream stuff. Whereas the Gnostic Archons seek to impose a restricted illusion of reality on human beings, the Tlönistas are Anarchons of almost unimaginable freedom and creative fulfillment. With the claws of moles, they dig their secret tunnels. Blessed with secret wings, they soar above internment of body and spirit. Pouring through forgotten books, they re-edit the shape of history. Their dream blueprints unfurl like magic carpets in sub rosa sanctuaries. With energized craftsmanship, they will forge and implement ideas which interpenetrate the mundane world and resonate in sympathetic minds. Once unleashed, such ideas unfold subtly yet tenaciously until they take root and sprout into manifestation.

And all the protection their endeavor requires is that it is, by ordinary standards, completely preposterous and unbelievable.

¡Tlönista!

1.Quoted in PR! A Social History of Spin by Stuart Ewen, 1996, BasicBooks, NY, NY.
2.Aegypt by John Crowley, pgs. 75-76, Bantam Spectra, 1987, NY, NY.
3.“We observe immediately that we are no longer reduced to the dilemma of thought and extension, to the schema of a cosmology and a gnoseology limited to the empirical world and the world of abstract understanding. Between the two is placed an intermediate world, which our authors designate as 'alam al-mithal, the world of the Image, mundus imaginalis: a world as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual intuition." From Mundus Imaginalis: Or The Imaginary and the Imaginal by Henry Corbin, Golgonooza Press, 1976.