G is for Gauchos in the Garden of Forking Paths

Starting with a few images from my Picture Collection research for the letter G, including:

The Queen at the Rock of Gibraltar

An Athanasius Kircher Giant

I put them together adding some grass, creating a miniature Matto Grosso in the foreground replacing Queen Elizabeth...

That grass reminded me of Gauchos, and of Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths".  You can get a brief sense of his text from my own sampled cut-up version (another miniature):

    I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.

    A labyrinth of symbols... An invisible labyrinth of time.

    Ts'ui Pen must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.


    In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend.


    I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.

And so,  in my Garden,  a fractured chorus line of 1940s gauchos joined the last renaissance man's seventeenth century giant to frolic on the grass in the shadow of Gibraltar...