Oh, the ways that this game convolutes. From my last post on the fantasy worlds of Asemic Writing… let’s see how the leaps and bounds went. Jorge Borges figured into the whole picture, based on his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which, while not Asemic Writing as it’s perfectly comprehensible in terms of language, followed in the whole made-up world genre – nothing all that different from various science fiction works. But, it got me thinking, and, to my chagrin, I realized that I’d never actually read any entire work written by Borges – how is that possible living here in Argentina? To be rectified, and I started with that story.

The story led me to Smerdis, a magus and prince of Persia, and son of Cyrus the Great. His life story led me to Darius the Great, Cyrus’ successor, following numerous battles, whose exploits to secure the throne are detailed in the Behistun Inscription, on Mount Behistun and the Persian story of Khosrow and Shirin, but I digress…. Darius credited his victories to Ahura Mazda (Did you know that Mazda means wisdom? Did you know that his name is also the source of the name for the Mazda Motor Corporation – another tangent, because the Japanese name is Matsuda Kabushiki-gaisha – literally “Matsuda Stock-Foreign Capital”, presumably a way of more or less saying “International Corporation”, from founder Jujiro Matsuda’s name, but when they translated it to English, they went for something that sounded similar and had a spiritual meaning) who is the principle diety in Zoroastrianism, the religion founded by the prophet Zoroaster, a.k.a. Zarathustra, which led me to both Freidrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen and Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30, the latter (and tying into the science fiction theme where I started) known by most of us from its opening fanfare, which is used in the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And listening to the whole piece (around half an hour, and which I’m pretty sure I’d never done before) made my morning. I didn’t try reading the book at the same time – it would have taken too long, and, I wanted to listen to the music.