Aichi Prefectural Gym, Nagoya
14th June, 1990
att. 8000
In (the real) Jorge Luis Borges' 1940 short story 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', the discovery of one volume of a 1902 Encyclopedia Britannica leads the fictive Borges and his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares to learn about the land of Uqbar, presumed in the region of Iraq, and its unique culture.
One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe - and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives - is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon.
From the few concrete details and allusions to philosophical viewpoints (its people were extreme subjective idealists who held that the only contents of the world were one's mind) contained within this fragment, the entire world and people of Uqbar are reconstructed in absentia.
