Map Room 1: Mnemonics, Instruments of Return

The ideas in this installment are indebted to Tim Ingold’s book Lines: A Brief History. I didn’t want to create thicket of scholarship here — only some people enjoy that kind of thicket — but I’m including a long excerpt from that book as a post-script and citation. 

*Listen to this installment as a podcast on Pelagic Radio: find it on apple podcasts or on spotify.

CONSIDERATION

Maps can help us move into places we’ve never been, or comprehend terrains we haven’t mastered, and it’s common to think of them as tools for moving into not-yet-known spaces. But today’s mapping consideration begins in the opposite facing: toward maps as instruments of return and recuperation. 

Our experiment will be to create maps by laying language into a page as a way of marking pathways of return to some kind of grounding knowledge or memory. We then play with ways to “read out” the maps in order to write from them. 

For this experiment we need to get particularly flexible with the idea of what a map is, so let go of the conventional contemporary idea of a map as a high-level abstract representation of a terrain of settled knowledge or space. Instead think of the map itself a terrain to move into: a vessel of experience. Map as enterable space of memory. Map as mnemonic. Today, think of mapping’s spatial aspects (whether geographic or abstract) as holding, activating markings for the recuperation to the present mind of something needed from the past. Whereas with a conventional map, it’s easy to treat the materiality of the map as a kind of transparent layer over the real terrain to which it refers, here the map on its paper or screen surface is the terrain. To move with the map is to read it. 

Bring to mind the physical page of a sacred text in a medieval manuscript. The exact religious nature of the sacred is less important here than the idea that the text holds something to which the reader wants to link back (the etymology of religion: re-link). The words are the cartography, the matter that leads back to some foundational wisdom, tuition, memory, or binding commitment. These things of the past are knit into the present experience of the reader through the act of reading. (And also the act of listening, as the earlier sense of reading meant to read something out, to read it aloud to an audience.) Ingold describes this sense of writing as a means of recovery, in opposition to writing as record, archive, or closure. 

It’s tempting to think of recovery as a return to what we might think of the content of the language — raised as we’ve been in a lingering dualism that treats the embodied act of speaking as wholly separate and even subsidiary to the silent communication of ideas through written language — as if that silence was a signal of immateriality and the immateriality was a signal of essence or deeper reality. But the interest here is in the recovery of specific words and sentences, their saying (whether aloud or silently in mind) inseparable from their meaning — almost like a scrapbook made entirely of words. Moving through text, marginalia, and illustration the reader of this map-mnemonic finds their way, like following a trail. Different trails might be found in further readings, different paths taken at different speeds through a contemplative space. 


PROMPTS

EXPERIMENTAL QUESTION: Can a map whose shape is symbolic or abstract act as a container of memories, pointing toward a story form that is an act of recuperation?  

Note: This installment’s prompt has three stages to be used over three sessions of writing. You can take each stage as a single session. Or you might repeat some or all of the three prompts daily for three days.

STAGE 1: Sourcing/Summoning

Bring your attention to a particular period of time in a particular place that you would like to recall to mind, the energy of which you would like to restore to your life in the present moment. This might be a personally important memory, or it might bear on something important or thematic to a story you’re already in the process of making. The map is going to be made of phrases, strings of words. This is the stage where we source those words. (Mapping happens in stage two.)

You might choose a period of time for its significance, in which case allow the emotion and meaning you are already tuned into to show up freely in your lists alongside images and objects. 

You might choose a period of time/place randomly and then ask yourself about its significance, find out how it relates to larger patterns, longings, or held-onto principles in your life. Even if you’re writing fiction, you can do this memory recall with your own life. You can gift the map or its teaching later to a fictional character, or use it to inflect your own priorities as you develop your story.

What we’re doing in the sourcing stage is summoning language either directly from that time, or that helps you revisit that time in a sensory or emotional way. I’ve got two options for accessing the raw language.

Option one: free write about that time in your life. You can use the technique of trying to imagine yourself back into an exact place, writing in the present tense what you see, hear, smell, perceive, etc. You can use the looping prompt “I remember” — restarting sentences or paragraphs with I remember and letting things filter up to the front of your mind. It helps to set a timer (10 minutes?) or a number of pages to fill in advance.

Another option is to begin by making lists, again of things perceptible to mind or sense as you train your memory on that time. You might try a for a number that pushes you past the opening recall, say of 100 or 300 items. 

One way to open the floodgates is to task yourself with inclusions of external stuff alongside the personal: full names of streets, buildings, tv shows, social icons of the period, fashion brands, song names, radio stations, etc — anything you can summon to time-machine yourself into a place where the memory expands. 

As you freewrite or list, you might end up enlarging, shifting, or tightening your focus. Follow your memory to whatever is most vivid, what has the most heat. 

You might also think of your memory pool in a second-hand sense: like everything you can remember of what your parents told you about their own childhood, or your knowledge of where your ancestors came from or who lived in your childhood home before you did. Memory may not be a privately-held possession here. 

When you’re done free writing or listing, using a pen of a second color (or the highlighting tool if you’re working on a screen) trawl your freewrites or lists for language that feels resonant and appealing. Circle phrases or names with your color pen. Then recopy the most compelling or lovely or important. As you select for re-copying, try to distill to a set that feels appealing, that can now stand for that time in your life. Ten–twenty items, maybe. They don’t all need to follow the same syntax. Your set might have a full name, a question, a mini-list, a fragment, a lyric. What you’re looking for is the vividness of the memory — to you — as held by each fragment of language.  

That’s the sourcing phase — a kind of raw, open-gates recall, a trawling and selecting, and then a distillation to a final set of representative words. 

STAGE 2. Typographic/Calligraphic Map-Making

Now we make a map, a pattern laid into a page as a way to let us find our way back into that memory space at will. Over the course of the workshop, we’ll map (at least) three different kinds of space. This map will be arranged in symbolic space; to begin, you’ll need to find a shape or pattern to hold the language fragments you assembled in the first stage of the prompt. The goal is to allow design and the typography/calligraphy to merge, so that the language is the image, and the image is the language. 

Choose a shape

Here are two examples of religious symbolic patterns that become typographic guidelines. (Images below but the links bring you to high res versions.) This cruciform lectionary (of which you can see two example pages in the link) lays the entirety of its text into text blocks the shape of crosses. This page from the Irish Book of Kells does something similar.     Obviously the cross is an immediately graspable symbol for a Christian text that springs from the story of Christ, but the symbolic shape can come from any source. An abstract geometric figure might work. A shape derived from a pattern in nature might work. A shape extrapolated from a geographic feature and then turned into something more simple and abstract might work. I’ve been working on a memory map laid out along a grid in the pattern of “the vortex” that players had to navigate at the very last part of the Adventure Game, a show I used to watch as a young kid, and which laid heavy tracks in my brain — I thought the vortex grid was actually suspended over the void of space. 

Lay the language into the shape

The map is made by sketching the shape onto the page, and laying the language fragments into the lines and open spaces the shape offers. Work in pencil or good old non-photo blue to get the map’s basic form, then bring the calligraphy to fullness, all the way to illustration if you’d like. The map needn’t be exquisite, but it should be readable.

You might play around with the question of how much language actually fits on the map. Rework as needed. 

STAGE 3. Reading out, writing out of

We use the map by reading it out. The map is spatially freed from the seeming neutrality of the rectangular block of paragraph on page, so when we read the map out, there are options for where to enter and where to leave off, right from the start.  Don’t treat the text on the page as a representation (already closed off and decided), but rather as a way of bringing into your present mindspace something from a living past. 

Read with your finger moving on the page, the way you might have read as a child, and the way some people bring themselves to their own holy texts. You could try dictating into a voice memo or similar, and later transcribing what you dictated. Or you could alternate, between reading out and writing, first moving your finger along the page and then writing that phrase, image, or transition. The language fragments might form their own kind of incantation or summoning — in which case the way you move around the map creates a new poetic form for the existing language, keeping open the options of looping and repetition and even moving through a phrase backwards — or they might act as calls, to which you extemporaneously respond by filling in further association or joining with a question or statement having to do with the meaning or feeling held in that fragment. You might also use the map’s language to nudge out a passage or monologue, connecting the fragments improvisationally. You might also read the map out aloud, and then write in response to it, without obligation to weave the map’s language into your writing, but rather being led by the feeling it produces in you as you read. 

As you read out, think about how grammatical tense works in this return and recuperation. How much is present tense, how much is past, how much do the all the other modal tenses of would, should show themselves as you face this memory stuff.

You might also gift your map to another voice not your own, to spin toward a fiction place. What if you gift this memory map to a character (already existing or freshly conjured), allow her to absorb and speak through this material as her own objects of rumination, love, or vehemence? Can you use your reading out of the map to follow the pathway of something true? Can you let your reading out of the map teach you something about what matters to you in this memory?

postscript: citation 


keep reading if you enjoy the academic vein. this is the passage that sprouted today’s installment. 

From Lines, by Tim Ingold. 

“If writing speaks, it does so with the voices of the past, which the reader hears as though he were present in their midst. As the historian Mary Carruthers (1990) has shown with an abundance of examples, from late Antiquity right through to the Renaissance writing was valued above all as an instrument of memory. Its purpose was not to close off the past by providing a complete and objective account of what was said and done, but rather to provide the pathways along which the voices of the past could be retrieved and brought back to the immediacy of present experience, allowing readers to engage directly in dialogue with them and to connect what they have to say to the circumstances of their own lives. In short, writing was read not as a record but as a means of recovery. Carruthers notes that the word used in Greek Antiquity for reading — anagignosko — literally meant ‘to recollect’, and that the corresponding word in Latin — lego — likewise referred to a process of gathering or collecting. One classical author after another would describe this process by means of allusions to hunting and fishing, to tracking down prey (Carruthers 1990: 30, 247). As André Leroi-Gourhan put it, in his massive treatise on Gesture and Speech, ‘each piece of writing was a compact sequence, rhythmically broken up by seals and marginal notes, around which readers found their way like primitive hunters — by following a trail rather than by studying a plan (Leroi-Gourhan 1993:261).

This distinction between trail-following or wayfaring and pre-planned navigation is of critical significance. In brief, the navigator has before him a complete representation of the territory, in the form of a cartographic map, upon which he can plot a course before even setting out. The journey is then no more than an explication of the plot. In wayfaring, by contrast, one followed a path that one has previously travelled in the company of others, or in their footsteps, reconstructing the itinerary as one goes along. Only upon reaching his destination, in this case, can the traveller truly be said to have found his way… the readers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages were wayfarers and not navigators. They did not interpret the writing on the page as the specification of a plot, already composed and complete in itself, but rather saw it as comprising a set of signposts, direction markers or stepping stones that enabled them to find their way about within the landscape of memory. For this finding of the way — this guided, flowing movement from place to place — medieval readers had a special term, ductus. As Carruthers explains, ‘ductus’ insists upon movement, the conduct of a thinking mind on its way through a composition’ (1998: 77). 

It would be wrong, however, to think of the mnemonic as an exclusively cognitive operation, as though the text, story or route already existed as a complex composition that had first to be accessed and retrieved in its totality, prior to its bodily execution in writing, speech or locomotion. Though medieval thinkers did imagine that the work of memory inscribes the surface of the mind much as the writer inscribes the surface of the paper with his pen and the traveller inscribes the surface of the earth with his feet, they thought of these surfaces not as spaces to be surveyed but as regions to be inhabited, and which one can get to know not through one single, totalizing gaze, but through the laborious process of moving around. In reading, as in storytelling and travelling, one remembers as one goes along. Thus the act of remembering was itself conceived as a performance: the text is remembered by reading it, the story by telling it, the journey by making it. Every text, story or trip, in short, is a journey made rather than an object found. And although with each journey one may cover the same ground, each is nevertheless an original movement. There is no fixed template or specification that underwrites them all, nor can every performance be regarded as a compliant token that is simply ‘read off’ from the script or route map.”

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?