Joe Lamantia.com

I’ve been look­ing at ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing for the past few weeks, work­ing on the first install­ment of what will be a recur­ring col­umn in UXMat­ters, and it’s had me think­ing a lot about Borges’ enig­matic Para­ble of the Palace.

I’m not exactly sure what the res­o­nance is — it lit­er­ally popped into my head a few weeks ago — but the con­nec­tion has stuck with me. Maybe it’s the quan­tum uncer­tainty of the tale? Or the ambi­gu­ity of the sym­bols. Are design­ers the poet? It feels that way some days. Is the palace the world around us? Maybe we’re also the emperor…
With­out fur­ther ado, I present the para­ble in it’s entirety.
Para­ble of the Palace
by Jorge Luis Borges
That day the Yel­low Emperor showed his palace to the poet. Lit­tle by lit­tle, step by step, they left behind, in long pro­ces­sion, the first westward-facing ter­races which, like the jagged hemi­cy­cles of an almost unbounded amphithe­ater, stepped down into a par­adise, a gar­den whose metal mir­rors and inter­twined hedges of juniper were a pre­fig­u­ra­tion of the labyrinth. Cheer­fully they lost them­selves in it — at first as though con­de­scend­ing to a game, but then not with­out some uneasi­ness, because its straight allées suf­fered from a very gen­tle but con­tin­u­ous cur­va­ture, so the secretly the avenues were cir­cles. Around mid­night, obser­va­tion of the plan­ets and the oppor­tune sac­ri­fice of a tor­toise allowed them to escape the bonds of that region that seemed enchanted, though not to free them­selves from that sense of being lost that accom­pa­nied them to the end. They wan­dered next through antecham­bers and court­yards and libraries, and then through a hexag­o­nal room with a water clock, and one morn­ing, from a tower, they made out a man of stone, whom later they lost sight of for­ever. In canoes hewn from san­dal­wood, they crossed many gleam­ing rivers–or per­haps a sin­gle river many times. The impe­r­ial entourage would pass and peo­ple would fall to their knees and bow their heads to the ground, but one day the courtiers came to an island where one man did not do this, for he had never seen the Celes­tial Son before, and the exe­cu­tioner had to decap­i­tate him. The eyes of the emperor and poet looked with indif­fer­ence on black tresses and black dances and golden masks; the real merged and min­gled with the dreamed–or the real, rather, was one of the shapes the dream took. It seemed impos­si­ble that the earth should be any­thing but gar­dens, foun­tains, archi­tec­tures, and forms of splen­dor. Every hun­dred steps a tower cut the air; to the eye, their color was iden­ti­cal, but the first of them was yel­low and the last was scar­let; that was how del­i­cate the gra­da­tions were and how long the series.
It was at the foot of the penul­ti­mate tower that the poet (who had appeared untouched by the spec­ta­cles which all the oth­ers had so greatly mar­veled at) recited the brief com­po­si­tion that we link indis­sol­ubly to his name today, the words which, as the most ele­gant his­to­ri­ans never cease repeat­ing, gar­nered the poet immor­tal­ity and death. The text has been lost; there are those who believe that it con­sisted of but a sin­gle line; oth­ers, of a sin­gle word.
What we do know–however incred­i­ble it may be–is that within the poem lay the entire enor­mous palace, whole and to the least detail, with every ven­er­a­ble porce­lain it con­tained and every scene on every porce­lain, all the lights and shad­ows of its twi­lights, and every for­lorn or happy moment of the glo­ri­ous dynas­ties of mor­tals, gods, and drag­ons that had lived within it through all its end­less past. Every­one fell silent; then the emperor spoke: “You have stolen my palace!” he cried, and the executioner’s iron scythe mowed down the poet’s life.
Oth­ers tell the story dif­fer­ently. The world can­not con­tain two things that are iden­ti­cal; no sooner, they say, had the poet uttered his poem than the palace dis­ap­peared, as though in a puff of smoke, wiped from the face of the earth by the final syl­la­ble.
Such leg­ends, of course, are sim­ply lit­er­ary fic­tions. The poet was the emperor’s slave and died a slave; his com­po­si­tion fell into obliv­ion because it mer­ited obliv­ion, and his descen­dants still seek, though they shall never find, the word for the universe.