August 28, 2004
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Maps
I’m a big fan of maps. Aerial photography. Atlases. Graphs. Charts. The kind of all-at-once multiple stories a map can tell. Follow the watershed, compare it to the towns. Find a town at the top of the watershed on the map, and then imagine what it’s like there. Imagine how the town came to be. Imagine how it continued until now, and how long it’ll be there.
I remember being a little kid and seeing a map, and thinking that all those dots with names next to them were so very permanent. A perfect black circle denoting something very specific. A town, a city. The lines between states.
I remember in geography class there was a discussion of the various kinds of borders that could exist between states (as in US states, or sovereign states, take your pick). We looked at US states like Oklahoma, whose borders are primarily straight lines decided by politics, until you get to the Red River border with Texas which squiggles and meanders like the most pissed-off earthworm ever to exist.
I remember being asked if the border between Europe and Asia was primarily geographical or political. The border was defined as the Ural Mountains. I couldn’t answer the question. The mountains are geographical, but the border is arbitrarily assigned to those mountains. I was supposed to answer that the border was geographical, but it’s not. It’s not exactly political, either; it’s wholly arbitrary. There are rivers on either side of those mountains; why do we not say the dividing line is one of those rivers?
Someone, once upon a time, said the Urals were the border, and that stuck. The various cultures of people living there don’t think they’re either European or Asian, at least they didn’t before someone told them there was a distinction.
So rather than illustrate how idiotic a question this was, I sat in a half-dumbfounded state, arguing with myself whether I was ready to defend my position.
That’s what school was for me, mostly: Asking myself if I was ready to defend my position. My arbitrary border. I was smarter than the teachers, or at least, had more on my mind than they’d know what to do with, and I was constantly trying to figure out what other students I dared make eye contact with. I was (and still am) bad at speaking in front of people, as in a class. In P.E. class I couldn’t win: I got beat up regardless of whether I made eye contact or not.
Maps are fascinating to me because you can look at old ones and compare them to new ones. Once upon a time a cartographer diagramming the west coast of North America would note that ‘there be monsters here.’ I’m not so sure that’s untrue in the present, but if that monster has a street address, you can get driving directions on MapQuest.
Today I don’t worry about eye contact. Today I fuck with people’s minds. Earlier today I was back in the University district beating a guy to the punch when it came to begging for spare change. It’s an emtpy satisfaction, however.
Towns and cities rise and prosper and crumble, and their dots on the map fade with time. The roads that connect them return to the soil. Human endeavour thrashes through, leaves a road, then eventually abandons it for something else. Soon there’s nothing left for maps to describe. New towns, new roads, new maps.
Comments (3)
I can stare at maps for hours, especially old ones that bring time as well as place into focus. I even have my favorite old map sites including this one of New York City. Of course I didn’t argue often with the teachers but battled the same questions, as my son has, driving his teachers nuts because thinking isn’t part of the curriculum in most schools.
For a portrait of someone with more on his mind than his psychiatrist knows what to do with, see Intelligence Test (Log24.net, 8/19/03). Perhaps he (the patient) was thinking of all-at-once multiple stories. Have you considered the possibility that Aspies are a new, superior, mutation? Not a new species yet, though… I assume interbreeding with homo sapiens is still possible. (For non-Aspies… That was an attempt at humor.)
I’m an aerial photo junkie. We use them at work all the time, and I’m always playing with the online program and finding my friends houses.