Borges: Day 3

Selections from the "Bestiary"

• Share your monster idea with us! (5-10 min.)

"The Book of Sand"

• Prompt: Consider infinity. Infinity according to Jorge Borges. Write about it. Join the debate! (Here's another site (article) that might help...)

"The Garden of Forking Paths"

• The Psychology of Choice
• Write your own "choose your own adventure" or have fun with Margaret Atwood's Happy Endings.

Poetry:

"A Wolf"  - Write about an animal; connect the animal to past cultures or mythology; what is assumed about the animal (and how does it surprise us?)

"Adam Cast Forth" - Write about a dream you had (or all of us had); write about a Biblical story in a new and unexpected way.

"One Morning in 1649" - Write about a historical or legendary figure; write a sonnet about something you love (or write a sonnet about a historical figure...); write a poem that rhymes.

"Limits" - Select a line from Shakespeare and rework or rewrite it; write about your own limits; select a word from each line of "limits" and use it in your own poem draft; write about boundaries or expansion (the infinite)

"A Compass" - Write about important words or an important word; write about the other, who is also you; write about the similarities of things that are not similar; visit an ancient city and reference what you find there

"Fragments of an Apocryphal Evangelist" - Rewrite a section of the Bible or a sacred text; come up with your own 'fragments' of ideas or adages. Here are more examples: Book of Proverbs; List of Adages; Aphorisms by Theme

ANOTHER BORGESIAN PROMPT: Read and play around with some of these "mind-blowing" ideas. Choose one (or more) and write...

• Our experience of time is relative to our perspective of it. If you’re ten years old then one year is equivalent to a tenth of your existence and is incredibly long. By the time you’re 100, it’s one percent of your existence and seems to pass in the blink of an eye. By that logic, the first moment of existence could’ve felt like an eternity...
• That you will literally never know what someone else perceived. They can never show you their perception. For example, I only know what I see as red but what your notice as red could look different and I would never know.
• There are over 7.4 billion people on this planet. Each with their own hopes, dreams, failures, relationships, goals, and we don't even know 0.01 percent of them.
• I could be the only actual “human”. From my perspective, I’m the only one that exists. You might be able to pass all the tests that make you “human”, but you can’t and never will be able to prove that there is anything behind those eyes.
• Nothing proves or disproves the idea of a god.
• Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.
• New York City is further south than Rome, Italy.
• Mammoths went extinct 1,000 years after the Egyptians finished building the Great Pyramid.
• There are more public libraries than McDonald's in the U.S.
• Humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas.
• You know names of colors--you can't actually describe what a color looks like. And this is most prevalent when trying to explain what color some object or place is to a blind person with no concept of color.
• If you woke up one day and found that on the inside you were actually fully mechanical, so an AI, how would it affect you? You have lived your whole life with the same rights as humans, but what would happen to those rights? Would you still deserve the same rights as humans or not? Aside from the material you are made of, you are still as human as anyone else after all.
• "You are the universe experiencing itself." To think that we have the same physical matter in our bodies that was once in a star before it exploded. [Maybe the Bible was right, and Atom was the first thing in existence...? From atoms come eve-nings...]
• We measure time as circular; time is both linear AND cyclical
• Light is a wave AND a particle
• We're alone in the universe, but probably not
• The flat-earth conspiracy is spreading...
• I have just changed your entire life by making you read this list or even this comment. It’s almost imperceptible, but your life is now different--and you are not the same person now that you were when you started reading this...

HOMEWORK: None. Complete any writing prompts we wrote or started today. Complete any Borges' stories/poems we did not read together in class.