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There is a preconception that maps are a visual media that don’t have sounds, but I would argue that they do. Not one of my maps has been given to me in silence: all have been accompanied an entire series of words and gestures. Especially the first type of maps, the directional ones, contain most or all of a particular list of the following visual/verbal clues: Instructions, Procedure, Time/Duration, Anticipation, and Failure/Missteps. Within my explanation I’ll be referring to a fantastic example: a map of tiny Scottsburg, Oregon that I acquired while exploring mostly-forgotten towns along the Oregon coast. Towns like this are the intersections of the visible and invisible; whose prosperous histories either failed or dwindled; yet within them remain traces of a certain, quiet presence where the past lives on. A conversation with the lady at the Scottsburg Post Office led to the creation of this map to direct me to a hidden cemetery from the 1800’s that I’d read about on a web site about ghost towns. As I eventually discovered, its location was nestled off a side street of Scottsburg that wound its way up a mountain, a journey which would’ve made Stephen King or David Lynch lapse into frenzied fits of writing.
It begins with [1] Instructions. Every map is made because of a specific purpose. When I’m on a 2 hour break from working at a school in a tiny, unfamiliar town, my purpose would be, “hmm there must be SOMEthing interesting around. I’m here so I might as well find out.” A good map provides the information we need, which will lead to meeting that purpose. And lead me it has, to exploring forgotten sculpture parks, historic train stations, haunted houses and obscure museums. In the case of Scottsburg, my intent was to discover the hidden cemetery. Since this endeavor proved successful, the map has fulfilled its function and left a telling memory.
The next characteristic would be [2] Procedure: This is the part where arrows are drawn, streets and landmarks and other graphically compelling little shapes and lines, and the person might reinforce this by pointing and gesturing all over the place. Scottsburg shows a great example of procedure; one glance at the map and I remember the tiny hand-carved sign that stood exactly at the crux of the forked upper-left arrow.
[3] Time/Duration: the most conscientious map makers might include a marker of time, i.e.: “This will take you about 15 minutes.” In completely foreign places, this is an incredible help, as we all know that doomed feeling of thinking to oneself something along the lines of “Hmm I’ve been driving for an awfully long time...and he never mentioned anything about crossing into Michigan, or driving past that tacky waterpark either....” A variation of this is included on Scottsburg’s “2 miles,” which leads to:
[4] Anticipation, a less mathematical version of Time/Duration. It provides marked places to look for in order to reassure us that we are going the right way. Back to our Oregon town: on the way, we were to look out for a Bridge, Bob’s Market (where we stopped for munchies: bananas, beef jerky, and trail mix that had a slight, nail-polish-like aftertaste), and a Trailer.
And finally, [5] Failure/Missteps. Some people include this, some don’t; it all boils down to phrases like “If you cross the train tracks, you’ve gone too far!”
Module IV: The Dark Duplex
Mental maps, as mentioned before, are not terribly accurate to the exact measurements of a space. The maps impressed in our minds convey our sense of a place more than hard, objective facts, just as the memories we carry of the street we grew up on are more meaningful than the exact mileage of it. A neighborhood, like a home, is a state of mind that varies from one person’s awareness to the next, and these personal maps are the world we live in. Tracing back from ancient petroglyphs and cave paintings at Lascaux all the way to digital cameras and electronic journals (otherwise known as blogs!), Humans have a tendency to document their lives; to externalize their memories lest they peel off and disappear. Documenting the external world is documenting ourselves, and asking for a map is like saying, tell me what you know – and we all know much more than we think we do. A quote that Jose Saramago burned in my mind ever since reading “The Stone Raft” elaborates that “everyone, independent of whatever skills he may possess has at one time or another said and done things far above his nature or condition,” if we just open our awareness to what we really do know, “how many fragments of deep knowledge would they be able to communicate, for we all know infinitely more than we think.”
We all do know infinitely more than we think....and what we ‘actually’ know is quite different than what we ‘think’ we know. To put this idea to practical use, I decided to meet with a fellow named Atom, who had graciously constructed a map for me over nine months ago, to see if he could still remember the information he’d provided back then. Unlike most of my situations, he created this map at home; it was a detailed diagram of the street in Minneapolis that he spent 14 years of his childhood living on. For each marked building was a corresponding, fascinating little story about a particular nuance of the place:
“This Krueger mansion had a chapel and a bomb shelter. Supposedly there were secret passageways.”
“Ms. Hall invited our cats into her home. She had a candy dish I liked.”
“We called Chris Biesanz 'Z-Lip' because he bit a phone cord when he was younger which left a scar.”
Fast-forward nine months, to where I instructed Atom to make a second version of the same street, without any forewarning and without letting him look at the original one. I wanted to see how much of the earlier map he really knew and could instantly recall from his memory. After about twenty minutes of him drawing and me munching greasy bar fries, he presented me with his new version and we compared the two. The differences we had found, and his very obvious consternation over a few extra houses in one area, a missing house in another, and a few scrambled/mismatched names, made the exercise more rewarding than I could’ve guessed. The Jones house in the first version was now “The Dark Duplex.” The Anderson house was now the Johnson house (he slapped his forehead over one: the original was correct; the Johnsons were just school friends who lived in a different neighborhood). The height of my map maker’s growing disquiet was a mysterious new addition to the second map: a house marked “Grimes,” in which he seemed to have no idea if that actually existed or even the reason why he had just inserted it there 10 minutes ago. After a few moments of utter confusion he vowed to call his mother to find out (I haven’t followed through on that part.)
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