Date: December 15th, 2016 2:06 PM
Author: arrogant coffee pot travel guidebook
Jorge Luis Borges. Collected Fictions. Tr. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin 1998
The Lottery in Babylon
Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have
known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. Look here-- my right hand has no index
finger. Look here--through this gash in my cape you can see on my stomach a crimson
tattoo--it is the second letter, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol gives me
power over men with the mark of Gimel, but it subjects me to those with the Aleph, who
on nights when there is no moon owe obedience to those marked with the Gimel. In the
half-light of dawn, in a cellar, standing before a black altar, I have slit the throats of
sacred bulls. Once, for an entire lunar year, I was declared invisible--I would cry out and
no one would heed my call, I would steal bread and not be beheaded. I have known that
thing the Greeks knew not--uncertainty. In a chamber of brass, as I faced the strangler's
silent scarf, hope did not abandon me; in the river of delights, panic has not failed me.
Heraclides Ponticus reports, admiringly, that Pythagoras recalled having been Pyrrhus,
and before that, Euphorbus, and before that, some other mortal; in order to recall similar
vicissitudes, I have no need of death, nor even of imposture.
I owe that almost monstrous variety to an institution--the Lottery-- which is unknown in
other nations, or at work in them imperfectly or secretly. I have not delved into this
institution's history. I know that sages cannot agree. About its mighty purposes I know as
much as a man untutored in astrology might know about the moon. Mine is a dizzying
country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality; until this day, I have thought
as little about it as about the conduct of the indecipherable gods or of my heart. Now, far
from Babylon and its beloved customs, I think with some bewilderment about the
Lottery, and about the blasphemous conjectures that shrouded men whisper in the halflight
of dawn or evening.
My father would tell how once, long ago--centuries? years?--the lottery in Babylon was a
game played by commoners. He would tell (though whether this is true or not, I cannot
say) how barbers would take a man's copper coins and give back rectangles made of bone
or parchment and adorned with symbols. Then, in broad daylight, a drawing would be
held; those smiled upon by fate would, with no further corroboration by chance, win
coins minted of silver. The procedure, as you can see, was rudimentary. Naturally, those
so-called "lotteries" were a failure. They had no moral force whatsoever; they appealed
not to all a man's faculties, but only to his hopefulness. Public indifference soon meant
that the merchants who had founded these venal lotteries began to lose money. Someone
tried something new: including among the list of lucky numbers a few unlucky draws.
This innovation meant that those who bought those numbered rectangles now had a
twofold chance: they might win a sum of money or they might be required to pay a fine--
sometimes a considerable one. As one might expect, that small risk (for every thirty
"good" numbers there was one ill-omened one) piqued the public's interest. Babylonians
flocked to buy tickets. The man who bought none was considered a pusillanimous
wretch, a man with no spirit of adventure. In time, this justified contempt found a second
target: not just the man who didn't play, but also the man who lost and paid the fine. The
Company (as it was now beginning to be known) had to protect the interest of the
winners, who could not be paid their prizes unless the pot contained almost the entire
amount of the fines. A lawsuit was filed against the losers: the judge sentenced them to
pay the original fine, plus court costs, or spend a number of days in jail. In order to thwart
the Company, they all chose jail. From that gauntlet thrown down by a few men sprang
the Company's omnipotence--its ecclesiastical, metaphysical force.
Some time after this, the announcements of the numbers drawn began to leave out the
lists of fines and simply print the days of prison assigned to each losing number. That
shorthand, as it were, which went virtually unnoticed at the time, was of utmost
importance: It was the first appearance of nonpecuniary elements in the lottery. And it
met with great success--indeed, the Company was forced by its players to increase the
number of unlucky draws.
As everyone knows, the people of Babylon are great admirers of logic, and even of
symmetry. It was inconsistent that lucky numbers should pay off in round silver coins
while unlucky ones were measured in days and nights of jail. Certain moralists argued
that the possession of coins did not always bring about happiness, and that other forms of
happiness were perhaps more direct.
The lower-caste neighborhoods of the city voiced a different complaint. The members of
the priestly class gambled heavily, and so enjoyed all the vicissitudes of terror and hope;
the poor (with understandable, or inevitable, envy) saw themselves denied access to that
famously delightful, even sensual, wheel. The fair and reasonable desire that all men and
women, rich and poor, be able to take part equally in the Lottery inspired indignant
demonstrations--the memory of which, time has failed to dim. Some stubborn souls could
not (or pretended they could not) understand that this was a novus ordo seclorum, a
necessary stage of history.... A slave stole a crimson ticket; the drawing determined that
that ticket entitled the bearer to have his tongue burned out. The code of law provided the
same sentence for stealing a lottery ticket. Some Babylonians argued that the slave
deserved the burning iron for being a thief, others, more magnanimous, that the
executioner should employ the iron because thus fate had decreed. There were
disturbances, there were regrettable instances of bloodshed, but the masses of Babylon at
last, over the opposition of the well-to-do, imposed their will; they saw their generous
objectives fully achieved. First, the Company was forced to assume all public power.
(The unification was necessary because of the vastness and complexity of the new
operations.) Second, the Lottery was made secret, free of charge, and open to all. The
mercenary sale of lots was abolished; once initiated into the mysteries of Baal, every free
man automatically took part in the sacred drawings, which were held in the labyrinths of
the god every sixty nights and determined each man's destiny until the next drawing. The
consequences were incalculable. A lucky draw might bring about a man's elevation to the
council of the magi or the imprisonment of his enemy (secret, or known by all to be so),
or might allow him to find, in the peaceful dimness of his room, the woman who would
begin to disturb him, or whom he had never hoped to see again; an unlucky draw:
mutilation, dishonor of many kinds, death itself. Sometimes a single event--the murder of
C in a tavern, B's mysterious apotheosis--would be the inspired outcome of thirty or forty
drawings. Combining bets was difficult, but we must recall that the individuals of the
Company were (and still are) all--powerful, and clever. In many cases, the knowledge
that certain happy turns were the simple result of chance would have lessened the force of
those outcomes; to forestall that problem, agents of the Company employed suggestion,
or even magic. The paths they followed, the intrigues they wove, were invariably secret.
To penetrate the innermost hopes and innermost fears of every man, they called upon
astrologers and spies. There were certain stone lions, a sacred latrine called Qaphqa,
some cracks in a dusty aqueduct--these places, it was generally believed, gave access to
the Company, and well- or ill-wishing persons would deposit confidential reports in
them. An alphabetical file held those dossiers of varying veracity.
Incredibly, there was talk of favoritism, of corruption. With its customary discretion, the
Company did not reply directly; instead, it scrawled its brief argument in the rubble of a
mask factory. This apologia is now numbered among the sacred Scriptures. It pointed out,
doctrinally, that the Lottery is an interpolation of chance into the order of the universe,
and observed that to accept errors is to strengthen chance, not contravene it. It also noted
that those lions, that sacred squatting-place, though not disavowed by the Company
(which reserved the right to consult them), functioned with no official guarantee.
This statement quieted the public's concerns. But it also produced other effects perhaps
unforeseen by its author. It profoundly altered both the spirit and the operations of the
Company. I have but little time remaining; we are told that the ship is about to sail--but I
will try to explain.
However unlikely it may seem, no one, until that time, had attempted to produce a
general theory of gaming. Babylonians are not a speculative people; they obey the
dictates of chance, surrender their lives, their hopes, their nameless terror to it, but it
never occurs to them to delve into its labyrinthine laws or the revolving spheres that
manifest its workings. Nonetheless, the semiofficial statement that I mentioned inspired
numerous debates of a legal and mathematical nature. From one of them, there emerged
the following conjecture: If the Lottery is an intensification of chance, a periodic infusion
of chaos into the cosmos, then is it not appropriate that chance intervene in every aspect
of the drawing, not just one? Is it not ludicrous that chance should dictate a person's death
while the circumstances of that death--whether private or public, whether drawn out for
an hour or a century--should not be subject to chance? Those perfectly reasonable
objections finally prompted sweeping reform; the complexities of the new system
(complicated further by its having been in practice for centuries) are understood by only a
handful of specialists, though I will attempt to summarize them, even if only
symbolically.
Let us imagine a first drawing, which condemns a man to death. In pursuance of that
decree, another drawing is held; out of that second drawing come, say, nine possible
executors. Of those nine, four might initiate a third drawing to determine the name of the
executioner, two might replace the unlucky draw with a lucky one (the discovery of a
treasure, say), another might decide that the death should be exacerbated (death with
dishonor, that is, or with the refinement of torture), others might simply refuse to carry
out the sentenceÖ. That is the scheme of the Lottery, put symbolically. In reality, the
number of drawings is infinite. No decision is final; all branch into others. The ignorant
assume that infinite drawings require infinite time; actually, all that is required is that
time be infinitely subdivisible, as in the famous parable of the Race with the Tortoise.
That infinitude coincides remarkably well with the sinuous numbers of Chance and with
the Heavenly Archetype of the Lottery beloved of Platonists. Some distorted echo of our
custom seems to have reached the Tiber: In his Life of Antoninus Heliogabalus, Aelius
Lampridius tells us that the emperor wrote out on seashells the fate that he intended for
his guests at dinner--some would receive ten pounds of gold; others, ten houseflies, ten
dormice, ten bears. It is fair to recall that Heliogabalus was raised in Asia Minor, among
the priests of his eponymous god.
There are also impersonal drawings, whose purpose is unclear. One drawing decrees that
a sapphire from Taprobana be thrown into the waters of the Euphrates; another, that a
bird be released from the top of a certain tower; another, that every hundred years a grain
of sand be added to (or taken from) the countless grains of sand on a certain beach.
Sometimes, the consequences are terrible.
Under the Company's beneficent influence, our customs are now steeped in chance. The
purchaser of a dozen amphorae of Damascene wine will not be surprised if one contains a
talisman, or a viper; the scribe who writes out a contract never fails to include some error;
I myself, in this hurried statement, have misrepresented some splendor, some atrocity
perhaps, too, some mysterious monotony.... Our historians, the most perspicacious on the
planet, have invented a method for correcting chance; it is well known that the outcomes
of this method are (in general) trust-worthy--although, of course, they are never divulged
without a measure of deception. Besides, there is nothing so tainted with fiction as the
history of the Company.... A paleographic document, unearthed at a certain temple, may
come from yesterday's drawing or from a drawing that took place centuries ago. No book
is published without some discrepancy between each of the edition's copies. Scribes take
a secret oath to omit, interpolate, alter. Indirect falsehood is also practiced.
The Company, with godlike modesty, shuns all publicity. Its agents, of course, are secret;
the orders it constantly (perhaps continually) imparts are no different from those spread
wholesale by impostors. Besides--who will boast of being a mere impostor? The drunken
man who blurts out an absurd command, the sleeping man who suddenly awakes and
turns and chokes to death the woman sleeping at his side--are they not, perhaps,
implementing one of the Company's secret decisions? That silent functioning, like God's,
inspires all manner of conjectures. One scurrilously suggests that the Company ceased to
exist hundreds of years ago, and that the sacred disorder of our lives is purely hereditary,
traditional; another believes that the Company is eternal, and teaches that it shall endure
until the last night, when the last god shall annihilate the earth. Yet another declares that
the Company is omnipotent, but affects only small things: the cry of a bird, the shades of
rust and dust, the half dreams that come at dawn. Another, whispered by masked
heresiarchs, says that the Company has never existed, and never will. Another, no less
despicable, argues that it makes no difference whether one affirms or denies the reality of
the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3091697&forum_id=2#32148127)