Map Room 2: Representation and Visibility

Today, I want to think about the entanglement of knowledge, interest and visibility in a map, and how that tangle works by pulling a select set of elements into focus and obscuring or omitting everything else. There is always an interest for which a map is in service, and that interest determines not only what is represented but what the map can be used to order or enforce.

The example of parcels

A map needs to know what its units are. Here’s a map of America in property parcels. It seems neutral, just facts, but right from the start this map represents the country as a thing owned. Out of many parcels, one nation, under contract.

The parcel is the granular data point for the property conceptualizing the country, a conception given power by law. Named by street address and regularized by lines and corners, the parcel becomes an organizational container for a vast amount of information, much of it public. All of that information serves multiple interests. I have an interest in my property lines; I live and root myself within them, they tell me how far I can extend my garden. The town I live in has an interest in the boundaries of my parcel of property. My parcel allows my town to assess taxes, to charge for water and sewer, to place me on its voter rolls. If I had a paid subscription to the regrid map, I could even access the parcel map cross-referenced with FEMA’s map of flood risk zones, surely my home insurance company knows where this parcel sits in relation to those zones. It was in their interest to cross-check those maps before setting my annual premium.

The parcel is legally intertwined with the deed that re-describes the boundaries of the parcel as it records the transfer of possession. My parcel is not that old, a subdivision of presumably an old farm. I found the deed for a 1663 sale of land that makes up my town where by “the Indians of Nolwotogg upon ye River of Quienecticott made sale of Certaine landes unto Major Jno Pynchon of Springfeild.” That old deed’s surveying boundaries were narrative; the parcel map is made of lines, narrative’s irregularity yields to coordinates and well-tempered metrics. The parcel map makes manageable and actionable what would be an overwhelming amount of narrative. The parcel map serves the interest of our entire system of property, helps to keep it functioning.

Not only does the parcel map serve these interests, it, like other territory maps, has a strange way of shutting down time and process (or at least attempting to) in its representation of the land. There’s an accumulation of data associated with my parcel that does account for change — of ownership, of assessed value, of sale price, etc. But the lines lay fixed, and when I leave this house, those ghostly lines will remain exactly as they are. Even if my house burned down and we let the whole thing turn back to meadow, those lines would remain.

The cartographer Denis Wood describes this effect as maps asserting the past on the present, attempting to naturalize the map’s order, its claim to objective truth, in order to allow this settled knowledge to continue to project itself all the way into the future.

The example of psychogeography

The data in a parcel map is asserted as having a truth for all users — again in the sense that the property model of inhabitation would only change with a complete change in political system. But maps don’t have to make these kinds of claims to universal fact. Another discipline of mapping belongs to psychogeography, which is a loose set of practices concerned with the experiential dimension of moving through space. I love this map made by some middle schoolers doing a weird mapping camp (wish I’d gotten to go to that). The map is overlaid on a campus map — your generic pathways and buildings map. A pathway has been traced in red onto the map, which became the route for the psychogeographers to travel. (The pathway was derived from the shadow projection of wolf hands traced onto the campus map.) The units are snapshots images of points along the way, stacked so that there’s a continuous image layer under the red line of the tour. Each image is labeled in one of three categories: smell, texture, sound, with captions for the smell and sounds like mulch smell, crunch twigs, truck noise, and foul rotting stinky stink stunk. Textures are collected by what looks like crayon relief impressions. In the blog post that accompanies it, the teacher/camp counselor writes, “Making the map once again reminded me that it’s fun to make maps, if you have interesting stuff to map.” The interest this map serves is interest in bodily experience as a living form of knowledge: “no goal other than to know the path, not just walk the path. Its smells, its textures, its sounds, where draws one in 🙂 where repels 🙁 “

The example of psychogeography is important because it reminds us that the power whose interest a map is in service of isn’t necessarily a dominating kind, though it obviously can be. A map of havens, a map of stinky stink stunks, a map of open doors, a map of bird sightings, a map of waterways, a map of active volcanoes — all these invite the map’s user to move through the world in different ways. Perhaps we can say a map’s interest, in the widest sense, is to enable movement by setting the terms of the movement: along which pathways and networks its user can move, and at which points its user can be said to have arrived.

The questions

Let’s zoom out again into the abstract, back to the question of unit — and to the question of how mapping engages knowledge, interest and visibility.

The questions I want to raise as we move into our next map-making sessions are: What does a map know? What or whose interest does that knowledge serve? Think of that word serves, both in the sense that a map augments a claim, the way a map might serve one interest by foreclosing alternate understandings of a place, but also how the map serves the user. Where does the information on a map come from? By what authority is it verified, by what coordinates is it plotted? How far does the map go to represent the contingency of its knowledge?

The cartographic question then becomes how to make that knowledge visible. What are its units, what is its vocabulary? What are its marks? What are its lines?

On Symbol Keys

We’re going to enter the mapping process today from the symbol key, which distills the answers to all those questions into a graphic language. Symbols are used for points, but maps also for pathway, often in the form of different kinds of lines (dotted, dashed, heavy, thin, variously colored). Think about the symbol key. Let’s look at a few symbol keys:

We’re all pretty familiar with the generic language of maps. We can find the restrooms. The You Are Here dot. The summit. The interstate. But a map’s symbol key could range very far from that. Consider a symbol key for Jose Luis Borges’s famous taxonomy of animals (those that belong to the emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained, sucking pigs, mermaids or sirens, fabulous ones, stray dogs, those that are included in this classification, those that tremble as if the were mad, innumerable ones, those drawn with a fine camel hair brush, et cetera, those that have just broken the flower vase, those that resemble flies from a distance).

What distribution of beings, sites, or forces do you want to make visible?

PROMPTS

Stage one: symbol key + map drawing

I’ve got two offerings of prompts for deriving a symbol key, one that is generative and starts without an existing story, the other for a story already in progress.

Scavenging version

Go scavenging for a symbol key by looking for images that appeal to you. Choose at least three and no more than eight. You could browse junk snail mail catalogs, flip through an old book, or just glean from the room you are in. Work backwards from the image to something it could represent on a map. I see a candlestick in front of me, so I could use a candle for any number of things: places of rest, communal dining tables, residences of figures keeping a certain underground flame alive… Or maybe I’ll discard the candlestick and keep the fire icon for my arson map.

Seeking the image key in reverse (what could a candlestick represent…?) can be a nice way to find your way into an aspect of the story world you haven’t planned. Let the image act as a lure.

Trawling version

You can apply the scavenger exercise above to an existing story as a form of off-brand divination, using it to open up layers of story you haven’t yet encountered or to recategorize layers that you have. But for a story in progress, you might simply go trawling for images or objects or locations that are in it that appeal to you because you have a sense they are leading you somewhere. For example, I have several pages of rough spew of a story that has many kitchens in it as well as several surveillance cameras and dedicated rooms for a very special textile cleaning procedure. I read my rough pages, keeping on the lookout for some kitchen item that might graphically stand for kitchen, etc. As I’m reading, I may notice other items or locations I haven’t clocked as important but that interest me now I think about it. I can add those to my symbol key.

(You can also do this trawl with old notebooks as a generator: tap into your reservoir.)

Your choice of symbol will influence the map’s tone which in turn influences the sense of how it might be used by a map reader. You can leave off inflection by using an abstract symbol (like stars, crosses, hatch marks, etc.) yoked to its meaning through a table (x=waterfalls; ^^= locked doors). A graphic symbol might aim to distill the meaning into a visual form (like walk signs and bathroom signs or the signs for buried nuclear waste) not reliant on verbal understanding. But it might also reveal something significant about the nature of the the thing symbolized (the flame of learning, the lightning zap of a place of danger or excitement, the poison of the foul stinky stink stunk).

Now the lines

Make your symbols for all the items or locations that are points on the map, and then turn your thinking toward its lines. What balance do you want between the array (of symbols) and the connectors? What kind of lines will you use to designate pathway or connection? Who uses these thoroughfares? How many different kinds of pathway would you like to represent?

As you consider both items and pathways, let this symbol key drawing be an open, receptive time to allow you to see beyond what might already be visible or mapped in the story-area you have chosen.

As you consider lines and pathways, remember that what you include is entirely up to you. A map doesn’t have to have streets on it. If you’re making a distribution map (showing concentrations of x or y) you might not need any indication of pathway or connector. Are there other forms of division or subdivision you want to indicate?

Draw your symbol key. Give it a section of points and a section of lines.

Make the map

Find a shape in something, perhaps something you can see in the room, or perhaps you find it by thumbing through an illustrated book or manual or art book. Transfer it, 2D, to a large page. This is your region.

Then lay the symbols into the map.

You may choose to reproduce your symbol key in miniature on the map itself. Will you box it or leave it unbordered? Put it in a corner or array it anywhere there’s open space?

Now you have a map that represents a limited number of items, connections, and place types.

Stage Two: Writing from the Map

Use any or all of these.

1) Use the map to derive little prompts

Look at adjacencies, junctures, confluences and divergences on your map. Zero in on a place where elements of the map join, and write yourself a prompt that asks you to connect two elements of the map. These connections might be forms of encounter. They might be varieties of pressure. They might be events of swerve or redirection. Let the map show you were the energy of connection occurs. Let these prompts either seed something new or open up an existing dimension of your story.

2) shifting foregrounds

Think about foregrounding different elements of the symbol key in turn. What if you wrote a passage or a chapter or a scene of all [candlesticks]. A chapter of all [food caches]. A scene of all [footpath traffic]. Allow the map to propose both points of focus and networks of attention. Write a short chapter or scene, and as you write, embrace the idea that this attention you are giving to this isolated layer is allowing you to draw it into further visibility.

3) landscape description

Move your finger along the map and describe the journey your finger is taking. Delight in the old form of travel narrative. Who is the traveler? Have they already been living in the world of this story (if you have one in progress)? Do you want to use this as an occasion to conjure a new figure, a new perspective?

3b) landscape description with constraints

Do the finger journey described above, but lay a formal constraint upon the description that acts as a filter. Like, could you take the finger journey through the map, but relay it only through a series of questions? Relay it only through the priorities of a dog? Relay it only through the interest of one kind of map user. Relay it only through descriptions of the relative light and darkness (literal or in mood) of the journey’s steps? Relay it only in archaic spelling?

4) writing about the map

Set a timer for ten minutes and reflect on the attractions and pleasures and discoveries of the map making process, with special attention to the idea of what it makes visible. If you were making a map from scratch for an unknown reason, ask yourself if it contains any elements, images, or adjoinings that you feel compelled to follow. (If so, perhaps follow up with prompt 1, prompt deriving.) If you have made a map for a story you are already in the process of telling, what did making the map show you about what you want to make visible in that world. Go back to the question of knowledge and interest. What does this map know about the region of your story? What interests (both in the storytelling and for figures within the world of the story) can this map serve? Likewise, what knowledge, what interest, does it obscure?

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?