The further we push description, the more it drifts from the thing described. What begins as a gesture to bring the world close becomes, over time, a mechanism of distance. The machinery of representation translates immediacy into abstraction, and the cost is intimacy itself. To know through description is also to estrange: the signal replaces the presence, the measure displaces the felt, the account takes precedence over the encounter. Our attempts to secure certainty in language turn into structures of disaffection, a kind of self-sustaining dissociation that feeds on its own abstractions.
This absence of isomorphism—this gap where description and reality fail to coincide—is not simply error, but the very logic by which worlds persist. The map is never the territory, yet the map keeps being drawn, not as a flaw but as a necessity. It is a recursive game of make-believe in which language presents itself as the measure of all things, when in fact it is always measured by the world that sustains it. The approximation is not weakness; it is the substance of reality’s reflection, always incomplete, always imperfect, yet generative. To mistake the approximation for the whole is alienation, but to see the imperfection as the condition of continuity is to glimpse the truth that absence itself is formative.
Daedelus Kite 