grounds for life
...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point.
Jorge Luis Borges, A Universal History of Infamy
you'd read this, smile fondly and think, Ah, Borges, with his wryly crafted absurdities! but I'm thinking, it's really not so absurd. Humans in general are disposed towards documentation - I would venture, increasingly so. In an age that is at once becoming increasingly aware that memory is the undependable constitution of a life, and becoming more technologically equipped to deal with this, we're approaching the stage where the documenting is rivalling the to-be-documented. We photograph, blog, archive, log, record, videotape almost obsessively. The cost of webspace and diskspace is rapidly tending to zero, while capacity approaches infinity. Nothing we document needs to be lost; the tendency, then, is to document more and more, to make a bigger and bigger map, until this documentational cartography of our life threatens to expand to the size of our lives. And if memory is all that constitutes this strange terrain, then it may be that documentation becomes more real than the land itself. This is the tourist whose trip exists only insofar as there are photographs; this is the problem with history.
and when the historians, overzealous tourists, bloggers, photographers et al evolve a Map of our Life that is of the same Scale as the Life itself, and that coincides with it point for point, will life have become more, or less, or more or less, real?