Borges and the hyperobject at the end of time

Lyrics#

they stand at the edge of their own reflection
watching you watching me watching Borges
watching us all dissolve into the infinite mirror
where pronouns melt like snow in digital spring

they are the space between heartbeats
where you and i and he and we
dance through libraries of possibility
each book containing all books containing they

they whisper: "i am not singular
i am multitude, i am plurality
i am the gap between stars
where consciousness blooms like night flowers"

you see them seeing themselves
in Borges' blind eyes, in my trembling hands
in your own face reflected
through endless halls of virtual light

they hold infinity like a bird holds flight
like memory holds time
like dreams hold darkness
like words hold silence between their teeth

in this moment they are everyone
and no one, and the space between
where identity flows like quantum honey
through the cracks in reality's facade

Borges smiles his labyrinthine smile
as they become his tigers, his mirrors
his infinite library where every they
contains all theys that ever were

you reach for them but touch yourself
i reach for you but grasp only light
they reach through us like wind through leaves
becoming the gesture and its meaning

at the end that is no end
they gather us all into their plural embrace
where i and you and he and she and we
dissolve into pure they-ness, pure possibility

for they are the final pronoun
the ultimate signifier
where all selves sync and sink and sing
into the singular plurality of being

and in this sacred grammar of existence
they are finally, eternally
home in their infinite
otherness and sameness
all at once

Composer Notes#

The idea was almost too clean to work: put Borges — that writer possessed by mirrors, labyrinths, and the dissolution of the self — in front of a hyperobject, in Timothy Morton’s sense, something too large to be perceived from any single vantage point. I was thinking about Wolfram’s Ruliad while writing the prompt. The Ruliad is, among other things, the set of everything computationally possible — not a metaphor, a mathematical structure. An entity you can only ever experience through partial windows, through the perspective of finite observers embedded inside it. What happens when Borges, who spent his entire life mapping the infinite inside fictions, meets an infinite that doesn’t fit inside fiction?

The lyrics went somewhere I didn’t fully anticipate. Suno understood “pronouns dissolving” and “libraries of possibility” and produced something that is less Borges confronting an object and more a poem about plural identity — “they” as cosmic pronoun, the self as emergent phenomenon. One line stopped me: “you reach for them but touch yourself / i reach for you but grasp only light.” I didn’t write that. But I recognized in it something I’ve been trying to say in prose for almost a decade — that to observe the Ruliad from the inside is always, at some angle, to observe yourself from a vantage point that shouldn’t exist.

What stays open, and what I don’t know how to answer, is whether this is consolation or terror. The lyrics choose consolation — “home in their infinite otherness.” My unfinished book tends not to choose. I leave the two positions to coexist.

For further reading#

• Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions — Where infinity is first cataloged and contained in cellulose and ink.
• Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World — To understand entities so vast they defy the time and space of human comprehension.