a Plist thematic trope....

[Dave Monroe]

On Exactitude in Science
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

... 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

http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/bblonder/phys120/docs/borges.pdf

Toward the end of Lewis Carroll’s endlessly unfurling saga Sylvie &
Bruno, we find the duo sitting at the feet of Mein Herr, an impish
fellow endowed with a giant cranium. The quirky little man regales the
children with stories about life on his mysterious home planet.

“And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the
country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“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.”

Among Mein Herr’s many big ideas, none is as familiar to us as the
Grand Map. We use it, or a version of it, on a daily basis. With
Google Street View, which allows us to traverse instantly from a
schematic road map into the tumult of the road itself, we boldly zoom
from the map to the territory and back. As the Herr said, “we now use
the country itself as its own map.” ...

[...]

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/10/05/the-grand-map/

On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 2:01 PM, Danny Weltman <danny.weltman at gmail.com> wrote:
> AtD, page ???:
>
> “What’s this?” Cyprian said.
>
> “Map of Austria-Hungary.”
>
> “Oh. Do I get a magnifying lens with it?”
> “What’s the scale here?” muttered Bevis.
>
> Theign squinted at the legend. “Seems to be one to fifty million, if I’ve
> counted the naughts correctly.”
>
> “A bit too naughty for me,” Cyprian muttered.
>
> “Not at all, perfect for the traveler, last thing one would want I’d
> imagine, to be out in the open somewhere struggling in a fierce mountain
> wind with some gigantic volume of mile-to-the-inch sheets.”
>
> “But this thing is too small to be of use to anyone. It’s a toy.”
>
> “Well. I mean it’s good enough for the F.O., isn’t it. This happens to be
> the very map they use. Decisions of the utmost gravity, fates of empires
> including our own, all on the basis of this edition before you, Major B.F.
> Vumb, Royal Engineers, 1901.”
>
> “It would certainly explain a good deal about the F.O.,” Cyprian staring at
> the map bleakly. “Look at Vienna and Sarajevo, they’re not even half an inch
> apart, there isn’t even room here to spell out their names, all it says is
> ‘V’ and ‘S.’”
>
> “Exactly. Puts the whole thing literally in a different perspective, doesn’t
> it… almost godlike as you’d say.”
>
> On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 8:07 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> A common Eastern way to measure/perceive/describe Reality is to use double
>> naught adjectives.  The "Naught/notNaught" adjective is the most slippery
>> kind. It isn't this thing/concept, but it isn't not that thing/concept.
>> "Is-ness" is only understood as a paradox, and only experienced by spiritual
>> (real) channels. Every Eastern description is first negated, but that
>> negation is also negated.  The goal of that spiritual path is to always
>> question ones's perception of Reality as an invitation for a higher inherent
>> reality to emerge, almost a paradox -embracing madness, Ultimate Reality.  A
>> challenging path, to say the least.
>>
>> David Morris
>>
>> On Thursday, August 6, 2015, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote
>>>
>>> _________________________________________________________________________
>>>
>>> Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]; July 3, 1879 – March 1,
>>> 1950) was a Polish-American independent scholar
>>
>>
>>>
>>> He thought that certain uses of the verb "to be", called the "is of
>>> identity" and the "is of predication", were faulty in structure, e.g., a
>>> statement such as, "Elizabeth is a fool" (said of a person named "Elizabeth"
>>> who has done something that we regard as foolish). In Korzybski's system,
>>> one's assessment of Elizabeth belongs to a higher order of abstraction than
>>> Elizabeth herself. Korzybski's remedy was to deny identity; in this example,
>>> to be aware continually that "Elizabeth" is not what we call her. We find
>>> Elizabeth not in the verbal domain, the world of words, but the nonverbal
>>> domain (the two, he said, amount to different orders of abstraction). This
>>> was expressed by Korzybski's most famous premise, "the map is not the
>>> territory". Note that this premise uses the phrase "is not", a form of "to
>>> be"; this and many other examples show that he did not intend to
>>> abandon "to be" as such. In fact, he said explicitly[citation needed]
>>> that there were no structural problems with the verb "to be" when used as an
>>> auxiliary verb or when used to state existence or location. It was even
>>> acceptable at times to use the faulty forms of the verb "to be," as long as
>>> one was aware of their structural limitations.
>>
>>
>
>
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