Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story in which cartographers of an imaginary empire create a map with a one-to-one correspondence between it and the empire’s territory. The story, hilariously, is only one paragraph long. The brevity and the underwhelm mocks the unhinged ambitions of the story’s mapmakers.
The representation or summation of a thing is never coextensive with that thing. A map is the best example of this: the map is not the territory. A map that exactly represented every feature of the terrain would be useless. If it’s exactly the same size as its referent, you might as well just try your best to make your way through the place.
Maps are one thing. But what about our speech?
I think that, culturally, there is a flight in the opposite direction through reduction and minimization. I don’t know about where you are, but at least where I am I don’t have to look far for someone to become impatient with explanation, even when that explanation is being given to direct that person to the help they need.
Woof, that was a pretty lengthy way to describe it. Some folks would characterize it as “Bro’s yapping” and that would be it. That receptionist was carefully setting out all the steps you need to take, but okay: it was all a bunch of nothing. Got it. Ours is a world in which “TL;DR” is something that people unironically say and mean. And that is monstrously sad.
There’s a problem that maps onto this territory. Literary critic Cleanth Brooks described attempts to abstract the meaning of a poem as “the heresy of paraphrase.” A poem is an irreducible compound of word, sound, rhythm, tone, allusion; every component of the poem contributes to the poem’s meaning. The poem’s meaning requires the poem’s form, then, to be communicated. It cannot be broken down into something more basic, something detachable from the poem, something that signifies in a way that is more worthwhile than attending to the poem.
Whether Brooks is entirely correct in his assessment of the poetry genre is debatable. If poetry is only ever experienced, then it is never actually understood. Even still, Brooks helps to explain why “moral of the story” readings can feel so inadequate, because the flavor, the texture, the untranslatable qualities and dignity of the story are shaved off in favor of a one-sentence summary. Stories do show us what is good, what is true, what is commendable, sometimes by showing us what is despicable, abhorrent, or futile. But detaching a moral from the fabric of the story leaves the moral naked.
To talk about a poem or a story or a film requires a degree of interpretive summary. It’s inescapable. But is the summary ever sufficient? No, the satisfaction of provisional knowledge is better understood as a friendly invitation to further dialogue — to say more, not less. There is an enormous difference between Cleanth Brooks, who will dedicate entire chapters of a book to a close reading of a single poem, and someone who says, “‘The Raven’ is about a bird.” The same text, the same world, can be right in front of us, but what do we actually encounter? How much someone says will show you what they have received.
Navigating our shared world moment by moment requires summary and paraphrase in order to carry on traversing it. But to meaningfully occupy our time and our place we must also be skilled in careful exposition that can unpack what is condensed in experience. What is the movement worth when we are swept up in momentum but do not understand what is happening? Or how we became involved in it? Or what part we are to play in it now?
When we admit the map is not the territory, we need to then recognize that experience is not the world. Experience is the map, and the map needs a guide to get us through the world. It seems to me that we — take your pick: Westerners? Americans? the subjects of “social” media? — routinely treat them as synonyms: the truth is my experience.
But what is your experience? If you can only describe what happened in a sentence, did much of anything really happen? Can you really say you understood it? Or did you trust your phone to apprehend it and interpret it? More and more, our imaginations and our vocabularies, which go hand in hand, shrink to the scope of the reels and TikToks we guzzle down.
I’m tired of “Say less.” A diminished attention span makes for a diminished life, diminished discipleship, diminished love. We see less, so we say less, and in saying less, we see less.
All of us make decisions that occur in a split second, and in order to explain what took place or its significance for what preceded it or followed it, we must think and speak in a process of greater — sometimes vastly greater — duration than the event itself. We must interrogate a deep reservoir of meaning and intention and impulse that exceeds our consciousness of any single moment to apprehend the truth of that moment.
I think it’s safe to say that all of us have had times when we were asked, “Why did you do this?” and we could answer with little more than “I don’t actually know.” Sometimes we lie when we say this, but there are also many times when that’s as well as we know ourselves at that moment.
But that’s the thing. The truth of the event exceeds the moment you are asked to explain yourself. When you are the one asking “Why?” you know full well you would not accept “I don’t know” as an answer. We are the creatures that give an account of ourselves, that are called to give such an account. Reflect. Repent. Say more.
If you have been forgiven much, you love much. Conversely, the one who is forgiven little loves little (Lk 7:47). Do you say less because your love is little? Because you have not gathered how much you have been loved? How much stupidity has been endured and absorbed? Love more. Say more.
If you are married, think back to when you said, “I do.” Will those two words suffice for the rest of your life? Or do you need to continually show you do with more actions, more words? Say more.
In King Lear, a disguised Edgar is trying to guide his father, the Earl of Gloucester, away from despair. Gloucester wants to end it all and says, “Away and let me die.” Edgar doesn’t respond, “Say less.” What does he say instead? “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.”
Why might one read scripture or be subject to a preached word? Precisely because we are counting on the Lord to speak yet again. To say more.
The telling of the story of the world, a telling that would rightly call each thing what it is, would require exponentially more time than what actually elapsed in the unfolding of the events described in that telling. In this case, to bring to expression the meaning of every event in the web of human history would require a map larger than the territory.
The hope that is most properly a Christian hope is such a saying more: the judgment of a good and righteous Lord who sets everything properly in relation so as to disambiguate every element, both by itself and within the total context of the story, in relation to everything else. Then it will be visible as what it really was, when we could not — or would not — see it.
Discipleship is never-ending profession of faith in the creative Word who spoke all things into existence, who took on flesh and in one punctiliar moment balanced the scales, who exceeds all that can be said of him. For this reason it is a lifelong and more than lifelong attentiveness and unpacking, so as to continually rediscover the bottomless truth, beauty, and goodness of that Word.
The Lord, the world, scripture, your life: all are too dense, too textured and intricate to comprehend in a moment, much less in a sentence. All of everlastingness only begins to plumb the meaning and the significance of the One who has life in himself, the One who made all that is and made it meaningful and good and wondrous. How could we possibly grasp it all in a lifetime? How much less could we in thirty seconds?
So examine more. See more. Receive more. Say more.
