hrönir

or
[On the uncertainty of a past to be invented]

While reading Umberto Eco's "On Literature" (on loan from Valentina) it is impossible not come across a number of references to my beloved Borges, who is after all one (if not the one) of Eco's main influences. I ended up spending half of last Saturday reading Eco's essays in parallel with re-reading some of Borges' finest pieces. And then I reached "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", one of his most important works and my personal favourite.
I am not going to be the first, and certainly not the last to point out the number of ways in which Borges has acted as a "prophet" of modern science (hypertexts, www, reference networks are only a few examples). Nonetheless, there is -to my opinion- something really original in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". Here Borges describes the conspiracy of some of humankind's greatest minds to create a fictional world whose foundations are based on completely subjective and anti-scientific concepts. The planet "Tlön" is an ultra-platonic universe, whose founding principle is an indisputable, extreme idealism and whose classic culture comprises -according to Borges- "only one discipline: psychology".

The most remarkable of all things "Tlönian" though is the fact that -here comes the best- "centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality". Enters the astonishing concept of the "hrönir". These are objects which literally come to existence once someone laboriously tries to imagine them. A guy loses a pencil, starts to look for it persistently imagining where it could be, ends up in finding it on his desk, but we are no longer talking about the pencil he lost. That one is still lying on the bus seat, having fallen out of his pocket. Apart from other aspects (which Borges fails or avoids to mention) the "hrönir" have provided invaluable service to Tlön's archaelogists who are in the position to better interrogate as well as to modify the past, sometime making it as unpredictable as the future.

Leaving Tlön and coming back to the cynical Earth, it appeared to me that there is a striking similarity between the production of the hrönir and the results of my scientific research (or even worse, everybody's scientific research). You see, more and the more often I find myself trying really hard to make something appear, where it once not existed. Data are just too stubborn to corroborate your elegant predictions and hypotheses. As time pressure and lack of money renders the repetition of their natural production (that is the experiments) impossible, they simply need to be re-invented.

But as Tlön only existed once(?) and only(?) in the all-too-powerful borgesian imagination, I find myself unable to produce some convincing, hrönir-like results to support my work. It seems that my way of thinking is either too materialistic (an abominable sin in Tlön) or that I am so unbearably romantic to keep hoping that the day will come, when the numbers will add up, the plots will fall into place and the statistics will need no fine-tuning.

But then again, the inhabitants of Tlön also have a name for the objects that come to existence out of hope. They call them ur.