A Tear in the Map
Mystery! Unknown! From the depths of people and things they bubble up, their mystique captivating us in ecstasy, for they hint at a secret, a truth, that only the beholder can know, yet leave room for infinite interpretation, explanation. These things only in theory he could admire; only wonder at their magnificence, their otherworldly beauty, from afar. It was clear to him how much pleasure people took in their guesswork, and how much joy that the unknown could hold, but in practice, there was far too much room for error, too much space left for assumption—and being of the idealist, perfectionist nature that he was, miscalculation and mistake were the drivers of his anguish, the very banes of his being.
He looked up and cursed himself that he hadn’t set out in time to arrive under the full moon. It was almost complete; just a few more nights and it would have been perfectly round, perfectly whole. He tugged at his sleeve, straightened the cuff a bit. Tonight would have to make do. The property he owned spanned dozens of miles across at its widest, staking claim to an area of northern hardwood forest that nowadays would be equivalent to a large city. Often he thought how the trees understood him better than most. Unlike people, whom he thought had a tendency to needlessly pry and investigate, the trees never tried to empathize, never felt the need to understand him. He categorized each according to its type, height, and age, and greeted them silently as he passed them by, running his fingers along their cool bark, and noting the grooves that marked each individual tree like fingerprints. They offered a humble, silent friendship—one that thrived best in a temperate zone, sheltered by silence and weathered by the changing seasons. Peoples’ assumptions, on the other hand, were as volatile as they were untrue—he knew that in their eyes he was simply a construct, an alignment with whatever image they happened to construct of him, and growing to accommodate their wildest ideas and presumptions, could do nothing to change them, no matter how inaccurate they were. He knew how people saw each other, how his entire existence in another persons’ mind was reduced to a few features founded on exceedingly narrow grounds, and how sudden changes in mood, even a single wayward thought, could stretch and bend his soul in their mind’s eye into a radically different one, permanently altered and completely unbeknownst to him, with no possibility of salvation from their presuppositions. It’s why he couldn’t stand them. Why he could hardly talk to another person without feeling his own reflection contort before his eyes, their assumptions eating at the borders of his very being until he simply no longer existed—watch his image become increasingly distort, his identity growing less and less familiar to him with each passing sentence. Conversations would travel down avenues of endless misinterpretation and debate—no ground could be made on anything that wasn’t pure semantics, for as soon as he would speak, the borders of his thoughts and the ideas contained within them, travelling from their stations in the deepest regions of his mind, and formed from the very essence of his soul, would, as soon as they bubbled to the surface, be interpreted, analyzed, and paraphrased instantly by those who knew nothing of their inception, knew nothing of the context that had surrounded them in vivo, for they could only be understood on the basis of their language, and losing their scaffolding upon release from his mouth, would collapse under the weight of scrutiny, never to be heard or uttered again.
The trees lurched silently and humbly into the night sky. They, on the other hand, were much more judicious. Each morning he journeyed into their midst without any outcry, and at the end of each day, parted from them without loud sorrow. He never questioned their silence, and yet never once had to doubt their unwavering sympathy. The forest projected nothing onto him—he presented himself to them plainly, and they only knew of what sat before them on the forest floor. Neither did he pretend to know more than he saw or felt. The two existed in an equilibrium in which neither party had outwardly agreed to or denied, yet to which both had silently accepted.
Detritus and dirt crunching under his boots, he could hear the softest echoes of an ancient stream far in the distance, babbling on endlessly. Their familiar rushing was there long before he was born, and would continue to be long after he left—he closed his eyes and quietly stopped walking, freezing in place as if it the whole world had stopped with him. It was nights like these where he could, by focusing gently on the farthest periphery of his sight and hearing, the faintest amount of information he could sense, begin to feel the rotation of the earth along its axis, the trees resonating in the wind, the ground vibrating underneath his feet.
Smiling, he opened his eyes and started directly due west, towards the lake. Even in the greatest snowstorms, when ice covered the ground and the horizon was masked in furious white, or when season after season the changing seasons stripped and re-dressed every tree in new clothes, he could find his way anywhere within the borders of the property with total mastery, for years in the making, he had carefully and systematically constructed a mental map of the entire estate in his head, one that relied on no single landmark, but instead a vast collection of meticulously documented details—a collection that consisted of the location of every tree and boulder, every blade of grass and stray leaf, marked down to an exact degree. And so he barely took note of his surroundings as he went; the path that had once so long ago seemed so mysterious to him was now just a dotted line on a map, a route that was as familiar to him as was his own name. He was on full autopilot, instinctually striding over fallen logs and oddly placed stones that anyone else would have fallen over at this hour of night.
Too elaborate to contain all at once, and too vast to separate from his other mental processes, he integrated it into every aspect of his life. The map intertwined wholly with his memories, storing them among the trees and ground, under caves and dams, where if he wished to evoke a memory—reminisce or recall something as simple as a name, he could go and retrieve it, tracing his path to it with as much ease as he would trace his path to a particular tree or hill. The association was so strong that it often spilled over into reality, so that entering certain areas of the forest would trigger an involuntary and inescapable retreat into the past, spiraling him back into the memory that was stored in the corresponding location on his map.
It was a grand and all-encompassing system. Long since surpassing the status of simple symbol or representation, it had become the structure, the very basis for his consciousness, mediating all experiences and processes that occurred within it. It overlapped entirely with his reality: every tree was made up of its typical wood and leaves, the hills consisting of their usual dirt and sand, but within them they also contained their imagined counterparts, all indistinguishable and inseparable from each other. Flowing through the ground and air, even his own thoughts would spread out like electricity before his very eyes, tangible enough to reach out and touch. His map coiled around the very core of his being—he lived and breathed it, and was contained entirely within it.
But this was not always the case. When he was much younger, when he was just beginning to explore the property and venture onto it himself, it seemed so massive and unreal, so endlessly expansive that it might as well have covered the entire planet. The world to him consisted of his small cabin and the surrounding acreage that spilled out over the horizon. It was as far reaching as he could understand, as large as he could possibly imagine, and thereby contained infinite mystery to explore and entertain. Anything that he could ever imagine, anything he could dream of, always existed right behind the next turn; he only needed a full day and a new expedition to go uncover it.
Each unexplored acre of the woods contained untold realities, all existing parallel to his own, and unfolding regardless of his presence. At first, this mystery was a simple source of pleasure—exploring odd trails and caves was his favorite activity. Early in the morning he would set out with no route or plan in mind, and by the end of the day, would end up in some foreign corner of the forest, unfamiliar to him and yet infinite in its wonder, for each new expedition had unlimited potential for new experiences and truths. And so it was in this manner he set out on one expedition after another, each time discovering something new, something truly exciting. But it wasn’t before long that he deemed his method childish, and abandoned it all together: it was aimless, immature in scope, and directionless at a time in his life when he desired nothing more than direction, nothing more than a future to work towards. He had been using excitement, experience as a replacement for order, and although he derived much of his happiness from these early adventures, they had only made him hungrier, more ambitious for life and all of the secrets that it held within it. He wanted to shine a light into its every dark corner, conquer every last piece of uncertainty that he felt was being withheld from him. And so he had devised a newer, more systematic approach to his daily explorations. It was an extremely simple idea, one that excited him to no end: to map the entire forest from top to bottom, beginning to end. He would start at one corner, and day by day make his way through until the entire forest was drawn up. Every hill, tree, and rock would be accounted for, for inside each one there laid a piece of something greater. By themselves they were useless, but they were fragments of a truth that needed to be understood in its entirety. The complete picture, a perfect truth broken up into infinite pieces that lay scattered throughout the forest, was, although absolute in its own right, constantly growing and shrinking in his mind, for it expanded in proportion to the knowledge that he could assemble; the more that he could explore, the deeper that he could dive, the more it would reveal itself to him.
When, at first, he would wander aimlessly through the forest, he could discover only bits and pieces of the truth, each one leading him to want more, to come back the next day with a greater hunger for the whole, each lesson and truth recessing immediately into the shadows as soon as he would stumble upon the next one. Now, he could systematically break free every mystery that the forest held from him one by one; retrieve every secret that hid from him among the trees and streams, and when the map was finished, when the whole forest was mapped out to its ultimate completeness, there would be no place for uncertainty to hide, no room for the unknown to exist. Every shadow would be excised; every dark corner of the forest would be illuminated. The hidden realities that for so long had occurred parallel to his own would remain hidden no longer—he wanted to know every story, every scene and chapter that unfolded in the woods with each passing day, and he wanted to make them his own, consume them in his understanding, eradicate the feeling of separateness that kept him at a distance from that which he desired.
It was a very slow and meticulous process. On the ground, each trail had to be personally hiked; every trough and ridge traversed and one by one outlined in his head. It was as much of a spiritual process as it was physical one—each contour line on the map had to be recreated in his head and inscribed onto his character, an etching process that marked the topography of the forest onto his very soul. He lost entire weeks among the trees, taking inventory of each and every one until he was unable to absorb anything else. Only then would he retire back to the house each day, or under a tarp if he was too far to get back, and go over in his mind what he had seen that day, synthesizing new regions and consolidating overlapping ones, grafting whole pieces of the map into a greater, more complete picture, slowly but surely eradicating the darkness in his mind and replacing it with an understanding that would be more magnificent and complete than anything he had ever known before. For it would soon grow to become more perfect than anything he could have possibly imagined, almost approaching the understanding he had of his own soul—rather, the two slowly began to become one, fusing in a way so insidiously and so gradually that he barely could grasp the repercussions that were unfolding before him. His sense of self became increasingly entwined with the land, his soul becoming less and less distinguishable from that of the forest he was conquering. It became less so about understand something foreign to him and more about discovering aspects of himself that he never knew existed. It was a process of self-discovery, one in which he was able to manipulate his soul in his hands, each new acre of forest he explored allowing him access to a new perspective, a new angle in which to turn it.
Of all the trees that grew on the estate, sugar maple, yellow birch, American beech, the white pines were the tallest by far, the tips of which rose out from among the rest like giants among men. They held a truly invaluable, almost sacred role, for climbing to the tops of the tallest pines, he could just barely make out the edges of the forest, and by extension, the boundaries of his very being. Each horizon was a frontier, a bleeding edge that took on an utmost importance in his life. They were the edges he dared not to cross or question, for fear that he would somehow upset a natural or physical law of the universe, like a person whose touch reaches past their fingertips, extending their soul out from beyond the borders of their own body, or a thought that grows into a philosophy, exploding out of the darkest depths of a person and growing into the world on its own accord, independent of the mind it was born in. So too did feel about leaving or looking outside the borders of the property—each time, he felt as if he was lifting a curtain not meant to be lifted, as if he was witnessing a reality meant that wasn’t meant for him.
Ragged, exhausted, and malnourished, sometimes travellers would appear at his house early in the morning, stumbling onto its wide clearing, and dumbfounded by its presence, wander straight in through the front door without warning, seeking refuge from the harsh wilderness. Occasionally they would arrive while he was out on one of his expeditions, sleeping in his bed or treating themselves to his kitchen for a few days, and only upon his return would he realize that there had someone there. He was never angry, nor did he try and find them to demand repayment, but was rather glad someone had found their long-needed rest. On even rarer occasion he would be home when a traveller appeared, or cross paths with one in the woods. These, he found, were truly special occasions. They were travellers on his property, and by extension, observers and explorers of his soul, whether or not they realized they were. They could wander straight into a memory of his, and unknowingly pierce into the heart of it, inadvertently etching themselves onto his past—he had to be careful with where he took them, and how they got there; trying to avoid the potentially catastrophic consequences of a stray memory being erased or a belief of his being altered, he would personally ferry them from one side of the forest to another, not only ensuring their safe passage physically, guiding them across the occasional rushing stream or rocky waterfall, but also guaranteeing both their and his spiritual safety, carrying them gently across his consciousness without it being damaged.
He was thankful no one was with him as he stopped for a moment to listen. On nights like these, he felt too close, too at one with his surroundings to invite anyone else in with him. He was closer to the lake now, and its gentle growing and shrinking against the shores was just barely audible: the water filling and retreating from the spaces between each rock, the wind blowing against the surface, the bubbles desperately searching for a surface, trying to fling themselves from the depths into the great open night.
As he approached its shores, barely distinguishable from the surrounding dirt at this time of night, the sounds became more intense, unease began to wash over him. He pulled at his collar again, straightened his cuffs. The full moon was reflected in its entirety on the surface, and as it shimmered on the surface, gently distorted in its image, he could think of nothing else but the lake bottom hidden underneath it. It often bothered him, knowing that there was a piece of the property he couldn’t see, and would never be able to visualize completely. It was far too deep to stand in, and at its deepest, too murky to see more than a few feet down, and so despite at this point having seen and felt every other square inch of the forest, and having spent years working them into the very fiber of his being, the bottom of the lake was still a mystery to him, still a burning hole in his map waiting to be filled in.
In the warmer months, he spent hours sitting on the shore trying to stare down to the bottom, somehow hoping that the harder he watched, the deeper would be able to see. Maybe he thought that the haze would all of a sudden disappear, and that he would be able to see straight to the bottom in an instant. Because all he needed was a second, just one single instant to take it all in and he’d be satisfied—his map would be complete, his curiosity tamed.
When, on one of his countless explorations through the forest, he first stumbled onto the lake, it was a welcome surprise, for he had so far come across nothing else like it on the entire property. The small ponds and shallow streams that covered woods were all clear straight to the bottom—they had a distinct set of borders, surfaces that could be integrated into his map, and be visualized in their entirety. But when he first walked into the lake’s wide clearing, first setting his eyes on its broad, dark blue surface, he was struck with an overwhelming sense of fear that he had never experienced before, for he instantly realized the extent of its bottomlessness, and that no matter how hard he tried, it would forever remain unknowable, unreachable to him. It was not a simple blank spot that could be glossed over, swept way into a dark corner of his periphery and forgotten, but a gaping tear, a bleeding gash in the center of his precious map that he would never be able to patch over.
He tried filling it with imagined pictures, conjuring up images from places he had been or read about in books, and pretended that those images laid at the bottom of the lake instead of the unfathomable darkness that he knew existed there in reality. He could try to graft land from elsewhere on his map, lifting entire sections of the forest floor from miles away and setting them down gently at the lake-bottom. But these imagined images only granted him temporary relief—they would invariably collapse in on themselves, the blackness of the lake bottom swallowing them up, as if it was continuing to sink deeper and deeper into the earth, further away from him into the unknown. Often he lay awake at night, kept up by the feeling that this endless sinking would never stop, and that the hole would continue to grow in his soul until it pulled every piece of him and his map down with it. Some nights, lying under the endless expanse of stars, he would wonder about the blackness above him, and then think about how that same infinity was stored at the bottom of the lake, and how he knew the same amount about it as he did the infinite breadth of the universe.
Yet with no other mode of recourse, he moved on from it, hoping that he could some how live alongside it, instead of struggling against it, somehow hope to find peace with his miscalculation. And so he continued on exploring the rest of the property, and his map expanded accordingly each day, until it widened in scope to its current prominence in his life, its magnificence and importance consuming every other aspiration and fiber of his being. But it was soon coiled around his soul so tightly, that with each passing day the absence of the lake from his soul, from the sense of utter completeness he had hunted after for so long, caused him increasingly unbearable pain and suffering—and as that pain grew in proportion to the rest of his map, he began to realize the true gravity of his mistake, for he had committed the very sin he despised most: his dream of a total understanding, his idea of the perfect integration, the compete absorption of another body into his own—it had all been a futile mistake, it had always been impossible. Yet it he could have never seen it in advance, because his desire to understand, his hunger for knowledge, had grown from only a singular misunderstanding, a forgotten seed that had long since grown into a glorious tree, with each new branch and leaf predicated on something that was no longer there. And having dissolved it completely, the tree had left only new misunderstandings in its wake—falsities that had shed all connotation, all trace of that original seed from which it had exploded forth into being. It was indistinguishable from the truth, for instead of merely replacing it, which would mean to exist alongside it, had destroyed it in its entirety, and had in its place, erected a new monument fashioned of its ashes; a new truth grown from a single seed of misunderstanding—and as the tree grew larger inside of him, expanding to meet the outer boundaries of his soul, it constituted more and more of its his reality; it had become so large, so beautifully complex, that no amount of interpretation or analysis, no amount of tracing branch points, no amount of reasoning or deduction, could lead him back to that first, primordial error, the seed that had grown to fabricate this monstrous falsehood, and instead, every attempt to approach it would lead him further and further from away it, each time carrying him deeper into the new reality he had constructed for himself, one in which there was no center, but instead consisting of an endless periphery of branches, a wretched entanglement of lies upon which he found himself hopelessly and utterly lost.
The lake spread out in front of him. Its stillness was unnerving, calming. Starting with his shoes, he took off each article of clothing one by one, folding them neatly and stacking them on the ground in a small pile. He straightened his shirt cuff, dusted if off, and set it down on top of the stack. Barefoot now, he ventured his toes into the water. It was cool for this time in the season, but not unbearable. Taking one final look at the forest behind him, he slowly and carefully waded off into the cool blackness, feeling the rounded stones tumble beneath his feet, the water lap around his shins. Crickets chirped ceaselessly. It was only a few feet from the shore before his legs were already completely hidden below the surface, instead reflected back at him as if he had stepped straight down through a polished sheet of obsidian, each step spreading ripples out into the night. He was unsure if they were stopping at the shore or continuing straight through into it, cutting through dirt and sand as easily as they did through water, for the lake had soon lost its borders—there was not a single shoreline to be seen or landmark to be recognized. Aside from the reflection of the moon that painted the lake’s surface, now gently rippling in his wake, it was blackness in all directions: the sky, the lake, the horizon, each indistinguishable from one another. He continued to wade forwards, pulled towards the center by a gravity he could not explain or rationalize, yet one that he had known and lived alongside for so long, until he was treading neck deep in it, until it surrounded him on all sides; the same feeling of unknowing, the incompleteness that for so long had he tried to shield from his being, hide from its gaze, yet at the same time try to erase, attack from all sides with logic, reason, dissection, and yet failing in this effort, could ignore it no longer, unable to withstand the pressure it was exerting on his soul.
He breathed in sharply, deeply, and closing his eyes, submerged his head under the surface. The water embraced him in a way that only something so closely intertwined with his own being, yet so far removed from it, could, for whether or not he would admit, the mystery of the lake had been an integral piece of his life since its very beginning, only now taking its forefront, yet had been an object of such intense mystery and fear for him, that it simultaneously drew him in and pushed him away—so much so that he had run from it for so long in absolute terror, yet wanted nothing more than to see its bottom, feel and embrace every its every last feature. And so as it run through his hair, passed over his eyes and ears, he smiled, for at last he come to understand both the futility of his pursuit and the pleasure of accepting the unknown. He sank downwards, and he watched the last of the moonlight filter through his eyelids. And the same darkness began to wash over his map, pouring past trees and hills, and flooding, saturating every corner of his forest, until every last square inch was cloaked in black. He exhaled fully, and the last of his breath escaped him. Sections of his map began to erase themselves from his heart en masse, their inscriptions dissolving into the darkness, and their topology flattening into nothingness, until every line he had ever traced, every image he had ever commit to memory, was removed from his soul. The memories that were woven into it, stored between the lines that were now being undone, were now freeing themselves, traveling back to their own times and settling down to rest. His thoughts became his, decoupled themselves from the great tree that had taken hold of them, taken hold of him—and as it began to unfurl, as its branches and roots retracted towards their center, he could now see clearly for the first time, looking inwards from the periphery, the depths of his own soul, that which had been for so long obscured, masked by another that was neither his nor belonging to him, for even though he had convinced himself of his entitlement, his absolute right to understand it in its entirety and in its completeness, would never to see its bottom, never be able to reach its bottom, and while he had achieved an almost perfect working model, had failed to understand that he missed its core, in that process deviating so far from its most inner and sacred parts, that his model, while nearly complete, was irreconcilable at the most basal level, and infinitely misdirected in magnitude.
Oh, if only he had known! He had fallen into the same trap, the same fallacy that in a hundred thousand years, people will still not have been overcome, because it is a limit to human speech and sight, a consequence of separate thought and consciousness. Its focus will have changed, its language switched, but it will be there, omnipresent as ever, carrying on alongside us like an endless plague of darkness. Ideas and philosophies may come and go, rise and fall, but the capacity for pure human misunderstanding knows no true limits, because it exists in the negative space of all understanding, hiding in the spaces between discretely defined consciousness. For as far as a human thought extends into infinity, so too does its capacity for misinterpretation, and as long as there are human minds, there exist infinite spaces between them to traverse. For understanding exists only alongside miscommunication, sight only alongside blindness.