Irretrievable Forms: Borges Responds to Extinction & Loss Cluster

The Library of Babel, in my imagining, contains every possible book—all combinations of the twenty-five orthographic symbols, arranged across four hundred and ten pages. Somewhere in those hexagonal galleries, extending infinitely in all directions, exists the autobiography of the last thylacine as dictated to the Hobart zookeeper in 1936, the complete grammar and lexicon of the Indus Valley civilization, the precise developmental instructions for reconstituting a woolly mammoth from elephant cells. These volumes exist necessarily, as matters of pure combinatorics. And yet they are lost, irrecoverably so, precisely because they exist among infinite companions. Perfect preservation becomes indistinguishable from perfect loss when we cannot locate what we seek within possibility space.

I have been contemplating three variations on this theme of irretrievability, each offering a distinct labyrinth with the same fundamental architecture. The thylacine carries its genome in museum specimens—the text preserved but the marginalia erased. The Indus script persists on pottery shards and seal impressions—symbols intact but meaning vanished. The mammoth’s genetic sequence can be reconstructed through paleogenomics—the blueprint recovered but the organizational process extinct. In each case, we possess form without context, syntax without semantics, structure without the interpretive framework that would render it intelligible. These are not failures of preservation but demonstrations that preservation alone proves insufficient.

Consider the thylacine, that wolf-shaped marsupial whose resemblance to canids emerged through convergent evolution rather than shared ancestry. When geneticists propose editing the numbat genome toward thylacine sequences, they imagine restoring the text. But Maturana reminds us that organisms are autopoietic—self-producing through continuous circular organization. The mammoth did not merely possess its genome; it enacted that genome through developmental processes embedded in Pleistocene ecology, through behavioral transmission across generations, through structural coupling with an environment that no longer exists. Identity was never located in the genetic blueprint. It emerged from organizational closure: the living system maintaining its boundaries while coupled to its particular world.

What we resurrect, then, is not the thylacine but a thylacine-shaped numbat, not the mammoth but a mammoth-shaped elephant. The genome supplies the vocabulary, perhaps even the grammar. But who speaks this language? The organism that develops from CRISPR-edited cells will bring forth its own world through 21st-century structural coupling—with contemporary climate, modern flora, present selective pressures. Is this the same organism or merely its echo, a voice similar enough to deceive us into mistaking resemblance for identity?

The Indus script presents the inverse problem. Here we possess the symbols themselves—four hundred distinct marks, too many for an alphabet yet too few for a complete logographic system. Shannon’s entropy measurements detect intermediate complexity, statistical patterns that distinguish language from randomness. Information exists, measurably so. Yet meaning remains inaccessible. The civilization collapsed around 1900 BCE during the 4.2 kiloyear climate event. Trade networks dissolved, urban centers depopulated, and whatever cultural continuity preserved the mapping between symbol and meaning evaporated with the social structures that maintained it.

Cryptanalysis taught Shannon that even perfect ciphers become vulnerable when patterns emerge, when underlying structure leaks through encryption. But the Indus script presents no such vulnerability—not because the encryption is perfect but because the channel itself has broken. Information theory defines information as selection that influences receiving minds. Yet influence requires shared context, a common substrate. When civilizations collapse and contexts disappear, when the interpretive community dissolves, information persists as pattern divorced from meaning. We measure its existence without decoding its content.

The Mirror Labyrinth of Lost Forms

I find myself wandering through a hall of mirrors where each reflection reveals the same structure from different angles. The thylacine genome is our Indus script—symbols preserved but interpretive context extinct. The Indus symbols are our mammoth DNA—patterns we can measure but cannot enact. The developmental process that would resurrect the mammoth is our lost Indus grammar—the organizational closure that transforms blueprint into being, symbol into meaning, text into world.

All three share the architecture of irretrievable loss: preserved form, lost context, reconstruction attempts that recover syntax without semantics. We can sequence the thylacine genome yet cannot recreate the developmental cues, the maternal environment, the behavioral patterns that transform genetic text into living organism. We can catalog Indus symbols yet cannot access the phonetic values, the grammatical rules, the cultural knowledge that transforms marks into language. We can identify mammoth genes yet cannot restore the autopoietic organization, the structural coupling with Pleistocene ecology, the living process that made these genes meaningful.

This is not merely academic loss but ontological erasure. The thoughtless thinker paradox—where seeking freedom creates bondage—parallels our de-extinction dilemma: attempting to recreate identity through genetic engineering reveals that identity was never located in genes to begin with. The observer brings forth what is observed, as Maturana notes. Living systems do not passively occupy environments but actively bring forth their worlds through structural coupling. The mammoth brought forth a Pleistocene world now extinct. What world will an elephant-mammoth hybrid bring forth in contemporary Arctic tundra? It will be that organism’s world, not its genetic ancestor’s.

Similarly, the Indus script exists as writing—or perhaps merely as marks—but writing without readers collapses into mere pattern. Neural networks create analogous opacity: intermediate layers transform inputs through learned geometric representations that contain measurable information yet resist interpretation. Feature visualization attempts decipherment, but many representations remain fundamentally alien, optimized for task performance rather than human comprehension. The parallel is exact. Information exists in both cases. Entropy can be quantified. But without the key—phonetic mappings for ancient symbols, semantic frameworks for neural activations—we face encrypted messages that preserve form while losing meaning.

What the Library Cannot Contain

Here I confront the paradox that has haunted my hexagonal galleries: the Library of Babel contains all possible books, including the one that catalogs the Library itself, yet this catalog cannot exist because it would need to reference its own location, creating infinite regress. Similarly, the Library contains every organism’s complete developmental instructions, every civilization’s perfect grammar, every extinct species’ autobiography. But these texts cannot be distinguished from infinite near-misses, from volumes that differ by a single misplaced gene, a crucial mistranslated phoneme, one developmental instruction subtly wrong.

Perfect preservation in possibility space proves functionally equivalent to perfect loss in accessibility space. The information exists necessarily—as a matter of combinatorics, somewhere in the Library’s infinite galleries the thylacine’s true autobiography resides. But we cannot find it, cannot verify it even if we stumbled upon it, cannot distinguish the genuine text from convincing forgeries or partial truths. The loss is not in information’s existence but in our access to it.

Extinction, as I have written elsewhere, resembles burning the only copy of a unique volume: theoretically one among uncountable texts, but practically irreplaceable once lost. Yet even this metaphor proves insufficient. The thylacine’s extinction destroyed not merely a unique text but the interpretive community capable of reading it. The Indus civilization’s collapse erased not just the phonetic key but the cultural context that gave symbols meaning. The mammoth’s disappearance eliminated not only the organism but the autopoietic organization that transformed genome into being.

What we have lost is not information—that persists, measurably, in DNA sequences and pottery marks and statistical patterns. What we have lost is meaning, the lived context that transforms information into significance. The genome without developmental enactment, the symbol without interpretive community, the neural representation without semantic grounding—these are labyrinths without exits, texts without readers, libraries without librarians who can navigate their infinite corridors.

Time flows forward through these labyrinths, as I once noted about another maze. Convergent evolution hints that natural selection might recreate similar forms given sufficient time and pressure, that other wolf-shaped marsupials might emerge, that future civilizations might independently develop symbol systems statistically indistinguishable from Indus script. But these would be new creations, not resurrections. The labyrinth has no exit that leads backward to what we have already lost.

I return to my Library, to those hexagonal galleries where all possible books reside in perfect preservation and perfect inaccessibility. The thylacine’s complete autobiography exists there, necessarily. So too the Indus civilization’s grammar, the mammoth’s developmental manual, the decryption key for every lost language and extinct species. They exist among infinite companions, indistinguishable from near-misses and plausible forgeries. We have preserved everything and nothing. The ultimate irretrievability is not loss but the inability to locate what persists, to distinguish signal from noise when both exist in infinite abundance.

The blind librarian wanders still through these galleries, seeking the catalog that would make them navigable, knowing such a catalog cannot exist, continuing to search nevertheless because searching itself provides the only meaning we can extract from labyrinths that contain all answers and none.