Let me tell you about my favorite Borges story, Katabasis.
Like so much of his work, it's framed as a Silk Road campfire tale, or maybe a fragment of a manuscript from antiquity (I forget which), but of course it's really an exploration of mathematical concepts and the nature of infinity.
The story follows a young godling. No longer human, not quite divine. We learn her backstory: tragedy, ambition, a desire to seize power.
She hears rumors of something kept in the throne room of the underworld. An artifact. A font of power.
The underworld's depth is disputed. Some say it contains seven rooms. Others, seven times seven. One mystic even dares to claim the rooms of the underworld number seven to the seventh power, seven times over: 7^7^7^7^7^7^7. A tower of sevens, a number that could not be written, only described as a process.
The disagreement seemed fatal - how can you plan for maybe-seven, maybe-more-than-the-stars? How can you even begin to plan?
Nevertheless, she set out to build a map of the underworld. She would begin by learning to understand its component parts. These parts (repeated however many times) made up the whole, and so she would start by learning them.
There are three types of room in the underworld:
- A staircase, leading deeper into the underworld.
- A chamber with many doors, each leading deeper into the underworld.
- The throne room, and the treasure.
For each type of room there would of course be many variants - chambers carved into living rock, chambers of carved and jointed stone, well-lit chambers of velvet and coral. Staircases of bone and black iron and sharp obsidian.
There was, of course, only one throne room.
She knew she could not proceed if she tried to hold the full shape of it. So she wouldn't try.
She would merely investigate each single room, chase down each lead, spread herself thin across the surface of the world. Every investigation would yield the seeds of the next, and so on, and so on.
Having assembled the map, she readied herself to descend. At every room, she would apply this procedure:
- On encountering a staircase: descend, and at the bottom: trusting that beyond the gate at the bottom lies the treasure, take and return with it
- On encountering a chamber: try each door, and trusting that one of them will contain the treasure, take and return with it
- When you enter the throne room: seize the treasure.
She began.
- In a mountain city where they wrote in knotted cord, she found a legend about the staircase leading from this world to the next, and a hint at what might lie beyond:
- the name of a priest who was thought to know more
- A staircase, later, taller than that mountain city. She read the knots by hand-feel in the dark. A day and a half to descend. At the bottom she met herself:
- Was handed the treasure, climbed back up
- In a city of white marble and olive trees, she found information about a certain chamber, what it contained, and what might lie beyond each of its seven doors:
- A drunk in a seaside tavern
- A tomb in which certain secrets were inscribed
- A name written on a rock at low tide
- & etc.
- A chamber, later, of polished brass and seven doors. Behind each door, herself:
- Shaking her head — not here
- One that refused to meet her eye
- One smirking, pressing the treasure into her hands
- & etc.
- In a city of the dead, all cenotaphs and priests with stitched-shut mouths, she learned the truth about the throne room.
- She entered the throne room. She took the treasure. She left with it.
She emerged.
(I'm eliding a lot, of course — cycles of receiving and handing over, meetings between her and herself, what was learned. The time they nearly came to blows. That other time, when a group of her selves met in a chamber that was all marble baths and flowing water. You can see her grow throughout the journey, in this stutter-step recursive way, even if the flow of time isn't exactly linear.)