Design » § In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. –Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 (On Exactitude in Science . . . Jorge Luis Borges)

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§ In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. –Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 (On Exactitude in Science . . . Jorge Luis Borges)

by Emmet Byrne at 7:43 pm 2008-01-17
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Junk Drawer

2 Comments:

Yes! Borges!
When will someone apply this vast and useless map thought to performance?

Comment by Charles Campbell — 1/18/2008 @ 1:06 am
The field of topics within the Borges catalogue is as infinite as his library, but for anyone interested on some more stuff related to 1:1 maps here’s a little bit -

50 years or so before Borges wrote the story under consideration, Lewis Carroll wrote a short one called The Man in the Moon (within the compilation Sylvie and Bruno Concluded). In it, a man from a unique Nation describes their map after being questioned…

-"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
-"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

More recently, Umberto Eco wrote a story called “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1″ in How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Stories. Apparently it’s a metaphor for library administration (certainly of interest to Borges).

hope this is of continued interest for ya.

…on an aside, i’m relatively new to the walker design blog, i wanted to say i appreciate all the fine posts of images/interviews/research/flat-file foraging et al. you’ve got a regular reader here for sure.

-joel

Comment by joel stillman — 1/21/2008 @ 7:42 pm

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