Weird Studies Episode 209 – At Home in the Labyrinth, with Murakami and Borges
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Mar 25, 2026 They read Murakami’s eerie “Cream” and Borges’s maze-like “The Garden of Forking Paths.” They wander through time as a labyrinth, retrocausation, and stories that loop back on themselves. They explore indeterminacy, double-thinking, and how meaning emerges in wandering rather than at an end.
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Future Contingents Make Time A Labyrinth
- The problem of future contingents frames time as a labyrinth where multiple possible futures coexist rather than a single pre-true statement.
- J.F. Martel and Phil Ford use Aristotle's sea battle riddle to show statements about the future can be neither true nor false until realized, opening a realm of coexisting possibilities.
Murakami Uses Mundane Details To Sustain Weird Indeterminacy
- Murakami's Cream stages mundane, unconnected incidents to produce sustained indeterminacy rather than clear causal links.
- The narrator finds an invitation to a mountain concert hall that appears abandoned, which constellates disparate details into eerie mood without resolving them.
Invitation To A Mountain Concert That Wasn't There
- The narrator recalls getting a printed postcard invitation to a mountain concert and finding the concert hall overgrown and empty.
- He sits in a nearby arbor, hears an unseen loudspeaker preaching, has a panic attack, then meets an odd old man who speaks of a circle with many centers and no circumference before vanishing.
