Map Room 3: Borders, Edges, Zones of Transition

Today in the Map Room, a consideration of borders, edges and transitional zones.

Picture borders

We’ll get to how maps represent borders between territories, but let’s begin with the function of the border on a map, the graphic delimitation of the area of consideration. A map is always inscribed on a surface. Imagine you are out hiking in a place with many intersecting and branching trails, and you meet someone who asks you if you know the way to a certain spot. You grab a stick and etch the path into the ground, making what Tim Ingold calls a “gestural re-enactment of a journey.” Making a gesture map in this way, it’s unlikely that you would pause to draw a big rectangle around your map, placing its information in a frame. This would hold true whatever the surface you’re using for your map. The reason for this, according to Ingold, is that the map is an aid to a journey and not statement of knowledge about a territory. The only information needed in that gesture map is the relevant pathway, landmarks for knowing where you are on the path, and useful warnings of any potential pitfalls.

The frame around the map may be a purely decorative touch; it may be informational, using marks or shading to indicate the scale of the map’s representation. But I want to think mostly about the gesture that framing makes, that says: here a picture. Enclosed is a region. Although we understand that space does continue beyond the border of the map, something — some amount of world — has its completion within these boundaries.

Narratively the frame of the frontispiece map says, this is the world of the story. Everything you need to know, all critical sites, are contained within. The frame also says something about time. Whereas the gesture map is ephemeral in its use, the territory, drawn and inscribed with a border, suggests an entry into the record: a lasting, useful representation of a coherent portion of world. Borders separate the space outside the map from the space inside the map.

Borders

Within a map, we might find borders of a different kind: between states, counties, countries. Some borders follow lines and cuts that exist in real space: rivers, coastlines, hard-to-cross mountain ranges. Some borders are inscribed into real space through clearcutting or fence-building. But most borders are projections of what Ingold calls ghostly yet consequential lines.

Is the map, then, the region of ghosts made visible? Border lines on maps are often the strongest and most definite lines. One of my favorite border maps, however, honors the ghostiness of the political borderline and chooses something else to make definite. It’s called “The Map of Connections” by the Belfast-based cartographer and writer Garrett Carr. The Map of Connections maps the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in terms of its informal connections: holes that opened up, unofficial links in stepping stones, gates, wood planks laid across streams. On this map, the consequential ghostly political borderline between the two Irelands is a faint grey line against the brightly colored numbers and lines that mark the connections. The border is mapped for its holes, throughways and connections, in units not dissimilar to the middle school psychogeographers’ map from installment 2, with numbers on the map corresponding to small photographed images of the connection. The border here is represented for its permeability, the ghostly line its refused its checkpoints-only consequence by its nearest neighbors. Here’s an essay by Carr about the map and how it came to be.

A representation of the actual physical reality of the political border is offered in another map by Carr, the Map of Watchful Architecture. Here’s his description of that map’s logic:

“The Irish border is usually represented on maps as a line but this is not the reality on the ground. Instead it is now, and has always tended to be, managed from strong points dotted along its length. Even during the Troubles its security never came close to the extreme lockdown found in Western Europe’s border with the eastern bloc. The Irish border was never walled or fenced. Apart from on maps, it was never a line. The Map of Watchful Architecture portrays the border in a way more directly related to the facts on the ground, as a series of points, forming outposts, nets and rows. The map’s lay-out was the result of simply deciding what constituted watchful architecture and plotting all instances on or close to today’s borderline route.”

The link above is to Carr’s long essay on the making of the map. In his research into the origins of the different defensive points, he discovers that the defensive architecture is largely placed on ancient sites, prior fortresses, and that the borderline might actually have derived as a line drawn to connect these prior dots.

Does a border run through the space of your map? What kind of ghost is it? Does its ghost match its physical presence or does the line pair with something else actually manifest to enforce itself as an idea with consequence? The map-making question to draw out of this is about the line itself, the quality of the line, the color of the line, the porousness of the line.

3. Edges, Zones of Transition

What might a map say about edge or transition that is not told by a line? What about a cartography of transitional zone?

In this flood risk map of New York City, color provides an intermediate space of potential between land and sea.

Flood zone maps are made to assess risk and make planning decisions, but you can also read them off-label, so to speak, as maps of meeting places, mingling places.

This map comes from a historical atlas that shows the migration and expansion of different peoples in a series of maps. There are no hard, political edges here of the kind that belong to modern states. The only border is a projected line of the spread of technological knowledge: “the edge of bronze working.” Each people is represented as a particular type of shading or hatch marks; peoples in expansion are given dynamic rays pointing into their future.

Here is the same area, marked by land type. Instead of the line that marks a border, whole zones are shaded. In both this and the map of peoples in expansion, zone replaces line.

PROMPTS

I’m imagining this series of map considerations as a set of tools that all take a slightly different angle of approach and emphasis to a complex project. Taken alone, their attentions might lead to formal or elegantly constrained stories. Folded into each other, they hopefully help with the work of worlding a story, whether or not all the maps are directly useful in what you’re telling.

For this installment’s map-making prompts, it will be useful to have a story to work with: either one you are already developing (and possibly mapped for its visibilities in the last installment), or a borrowed story from the reservoir of all the stories you know. You could also map a region from scratch, making up the story world as you map it, but you’ll have to supply yourself with whatever generative windows you need to invent it.

You can use this installment’s maps for both geographic and symbolic space. Geographic space is what it sounds like: something that corresponds to the lived world space in which your story happens. Symbolic space is some degree of abstraction from geographic space. We mapped in symbolic space in installment 1 — bypassing geography and instead finding meaningful shape to tell us how to arrange our maps in space. Symbolic space might allow you to consider a dimension of your story particular to the focus on borders and edges. A border or edge in symbolic space might be between the spoken and the unspoken, between the realm of influence of one character and that of another, between what happens in daytime and what happens in the dark. Follow your intuition toward whichever kind of map feels most useful. Either way, what is inside the map is the world of your story.

Map-Making Prompts

The following offerings are layers. You can use as many of them as appeal, possibly all laid into the same map.

1. Its frame

What happens if you begin with the border of the picture? A border separates the space inside the map from the space outside. What will you make your border out of? What images, words, or marks can perform the ritual of this separation? Where does the story get close to its own edges, and are they marked? Have you chosen a frame? If you’ve made a map without a border, consider instead what is in that proximal zone, just beyond the map, what is outside the image that, without a wall, might find its way in?

2. Its borderlines

Do borderlines run through the region you are mapping? Are they ghostly lines without apparent physical analog? (If so, what consequences of crossing over them?) Are they lines that match existing physical edges or barriers? (If so, how and why does one physically cross them?) Does the line have a linear logic or is it the dot-to-dot of a joined array of points?

3. Its edges and transitional zones

Where in the map does a more subtle transition take place? Between what and what? Play with different ways to represent the transitional zone graphically — play with color, with cross-hatching, shading. Think too about different categories of transition that might co-exist in your map.

WRITING FROM THE MAP

Borderlands are zones of activity and significance, zones that may be fraught, but also zones where new negotiations are possible. Borderlands are zones of traffic; each border to some degree regulates what can pass through it without friction and what is rejected, arrested, or tariffed in some way. Transitional zones may present less of a formal mode of passage, but they too require some kind of accommodation, some kind of bending. Borderlands and transitional zones can be spaces of both wound and repair.

Study the map you have made: its frame, marking the inside and outside of the story, its borderlines, its zone of transition. In a series of short sketches, write passages of your story that touch on those places of border-crossing or transition. What does foregrounding border thinking offer to your attention? What elements of the story come into relief at these edges? Can thinking through the border or transitional zone prompt you to discover a further population in the world of your story? Who else interacts with that border zone? Who else might appear?

Post Script: two reading recommendations that sprung to mind as I wrote this installment.

The first is to read Gloria Anzaldúa, whose work addresses the forms of life made possible in the geographic, social, and personal borderlands between cultures, languages and identities. I recommend seeking out her last book, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro. Here’s a short essay on the lessons of Anzaldúa’s exploration of nepantla, the Nahuatl word meaning “in-between,” with excerpts from Anzaldúa and glosses on them by AnaLouise Keating, who edited Light in the Dark.

I’m also thinking of the essay by the anthropologist Michael Taussig on Walter Benjamin’s death in 1941, as he attempted to cross the border between France and Spain and the memorial that marks the spot. That essay is called “Walter Benjamin’s Grave” and can found in a collection by the same name.

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks.

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now.

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment.

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”?

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them?

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others.

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it.

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?