what we can map are our ideas about knowledge, not knowledge itself. and our ideas are hierarchical. i remember when i was a kid i wanted to map part of a local park that had a creek running through it. after i had drawn it roughly all over, i kept going back & refining the shapes i drew, ever more closely to the shapes i could perceive. but i got to a point where i realized i could only continue the process on another piece of paper & a smaller scale... but what was i doing really? generating a certain line out of a three dimensional edge. following a cycle of look-judge-record, over & over. was my first map, or a master-map on the largest possible scale, more real than one of the small maps? was it somehow above them? was it necessarily a good thing that i could talk as if i had been over much of that space, when i had actually only traversed a small, narrow portion of it? --and was this knowledge of the park, or was it knowledge of myself in a measuring mood? it was the product of a dance between them. when the dance ended, i carried beyond it a sense of familiarity, perhaps enough to remember it later. what we like to call knowledge is mostly a very complicated set of interlocking topics: because what we want above all, is to be able to keep on talking about things as if we knew them, could know them & keep them by making maps of them. i think it is because we know deep down we will lose them, & that our very selves are nothing but another kind of map, drawn upon a momentary portion of the melting & solidifying earth.
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