Sunday, April 25, 2010

Fragments of empire

The two photos below inspired a post by the witty & industrious Michael David Murphy on his whileseated site. He imagines an installation of life-sized, distortion-free photographs of the fading mural in a nearby gallery "free and clear of the elements."

"I'd really like to see that," he says.

I remembered the one-paragraph Borges' story about an empire in which the science of cartography has become so exact only a map on a one-to-one scale with the empire itself will suffice. The story ends, "...succeeding Generations… came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome... In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar..."

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