Map Room 4: Wayfaring

Today in the map room, we consider the idea of wayfaring. We consider it as a way of living in space, and consider its corollary in the kinds of maps a wayfarer might create or welcome. Then we make a map and write by wayfaring through it. 

The ideas in this installment think through some source material from Tim Ingold’s anthropological investigation, Lines: A Brief History. I want to start by distilling a small conceptual vocabulary from Ingold that sets up his distinction between wayfaring and other kinds of travel. 

First, he invokes the gesture of a line that goes for a walk, a figure that comes from the abstract painter Paul Klee. The line that goes for a walk is a thing that is its movement, not simply the measure of the distance between points. The movement has residue; it leaves its trace behind.  

In relief to this moving gesture line is Ingold’s idea of lines connecting points in the most direct way possible, which form not a walk, but a pattern or a node-based network. Pattern to Ingold, is a pre-determined form that begins as a set of points to be joined up. Pattern is not its movement, because it is also already a completed plan. It knows its ends before it starts. The work of going through space is simply to join it up. 

One of the key distinctions between a living line and a static line has to do with this idea of completeness, whether the sum of its path is considered a finished object — with settled knowledge, clear directive, or a clear point — or a thing that is in motion and always will be.   

A corollary is proposed between ways of traveling (destination-driven, not journey-driven), ways of mapping (coordinates, lines, plotted points, knowledge represented as fixed from an overhead god’s eye perspective), and ways of telling (completing a story’s action by progressing through predetermined plot points rather than a continuous presence-based gesture of storytelling). 

A storyline that goes for a walk, a storyline that is its movement, would be one bodied more by its telling than anything it could be reduced or distilled to. The aboutness that would matter here would be the way it moves about in space, rather than its conclusions about a topic. 

Valorizing the line that goes for a walk over the point-joined pattern signals a desire to divest oneself and one’s society of the domineering hubris associated with modernity and especially 19th and 20th century Western forms of power and engineering, and recuperate lived knowledge that belongs to cultures not subject to the accelerations made by the twining of technology, industry, and capital. 

Ingold is an anthropologist, and his examples of wayfarers come largely from various indigenous groups. He compares the Inuit line of movement in tracking and laying tracks — “the entire country is perched as a mesh of interweaving lines rather than a continuous surface” — with the Royal Navy moving through the Arctic as if it is a “fluid, trackless sea” which can be navigated with the abstract beacons of latitude and longitude. 

Again, what is alive in this and other examples, for Ingold, what makes meshwork a figure of living materiality and embodiment to him, is that the line traveled is always in movement and that the movement itself is a way of living. This is not the endless empty movement of counting miles between exits on the New Jersey Turnpike, or any other road of enough homogeneity to drain a place of its specificity. This is not static hours in the air, hours in the connecting airport, and more hours in the air before the trip finally begins. This is not the mind-numbing time of waiting for a work shift to end. This is a form of wayfaring that begins the moment a step is taken out into the world, and has no final ending, only ongoing inhabitation. Here’s a passage from Ingold: 

“Wayfaring, I believe, is the most fundamental mode by which living beings, both human and non-human, inhabit the earth. By habitation I do not mean taking one’s place in a world that has been prepared in advance for the populations that arrive to reside there. The inhabitant is rather one who participates from within in the very process of the world’s continual coming into being and who, in laying a trail of life, contributes to its weave and texture. These lines are typically winding and irregular, yet comprehensively entangled into a close-knit tissue.”

From wayfaring to storytelling is a frictionless glide. Ingold’s analogy carries across modes anywhere a polarity between the lived/moving and the static/dead can be wagered. The storytelling that belongs to the premodern past, for Ingold, moves in the mode of wayfaring: every moment along its line relates the perception and incorporation of lived knowledge. Storytelling’s bad twin is modernity’s (and the publishing world’s) insistence on pre-formed plots of approved types, a mere dot-to-dot connection.  

Well there’s a lot of overstatement, here. (Tho, try looking for some ground-level advice about how to structure a story and you will be beat over your head by an insistence that stories take place in arcs, that stories do not include what is not of a piece, that stories need beginnings middles and ends, and so on. Re-watch almost any piece of our glorious new serial television and behold the entire story’s active ingredients laid out and primed in the opening episodes, the duration of time a character can be bad before we are let in on the inciting incident of their bad behavior, and so on.) But it is interesting to ask about a kind of storytelling that may pass through the concentrations and intensities that could be called plot points, but of which we could say, the telling is the thing, not the destination. Ingold seems to despair that this kind of storytelling has been lost to us with modernity and printing, but in fact it reminds me of what Mac Wellman says about plays in his essay Speculations, that “the structure of a play should be conceived as a moving point.” Could a writing be so dense with life, so continuously interwoven with process and relationship that it is always full? And what constitutes an ending if it’s not about destination, with everything else in the composition subordinated to the goal of getting us to that point? Not all forms treat endings like this. Find an ending, we say, when a movement improvisation session is nearing its close. 

A MESH MAP

“In the dark, something is reticulating.”  (a moment of creeping horror in Anne Washburn’s play, Apparition.)

The map we’re going to make, and with which we’re going to write, is a mesh map. A mesh is a non-rationalized series of reticulations. That means that the lines that make up the mesh haven’t been reduced or abstracted to type at the expense of their specific, contingent details. The lines that make up a mesh are paths that living things take; paths that form spirals, curves, coils and knots. The knot creates a concentration, it is made of encounters. 

Everything in the living and material world is part of this meshwork. Although we can choose to filter our attention, there is no actual separation between the human and the nonhuman, between the growing and the decaying, between the road and the air, between the bulldozer paths and the turtle nesting areas. Even our industrial entries into the mesh that seem to aspire to something highly rationalized, like the straight roads that in grids across north Texas, the New Jersey Turnpike, the multiplying locations of fast-food chains, are not separate from the mesh. We may move far and wide through the mesh of the world, but every place in our movement is somewhere, a knot, run into and out of by innumerable other threads. 

This impossibility of a truly separated rational space is why the distinction between linear and nonlinear storytelling should be chucked out for good. A straighter faster line is one way of moving, and once can still integrate experience and be alive in that speed. Is your story moving on foot or by zip line? Zip lines are embodied forms of travel too. Like so many things whose polarity we insist on, it really needn’t be an opposition. 

PROMPTS

And finally we are at the prompts. Let’s make a map. The task today is to build a dense map with many layers. Gather up your colored pens or pencils, choose or sharpen to fine tips. Get a very large piece of paper. We layer and layer so that convergences, folds, proximities, radiating paths are possible from any one place. The map has to be “confused and superabundant,” to borrow William James’s description of life. Channel your best cartoonist and miniature captionist. You are going to work at this map until it is like an excellent bathroom wall in a bar you might have gone to in another year or another era, one of crowding, conviviality, and excellent bathroom walls. Add stickers if you want. Watercolor or spray paint. Feel free. 

Oh Freddy’s. Oh other lives.

There are two basic large orientations. You can map the world of your story with reference to its geography, to the land in which it is lived. Or you can map the world of your story as a kind of world of moments, themes, images, characters, and also landscapes. 

The rule of our mesh map, we’ll call it the Ingold Rule, is that we will be laying in lines (the walking kinds) and not points. Intersections and knots may emerge and we are welcome to give these places names. But we discover all those connections by tracking lines through a common space and noticing how they relate. 

What lines will you lay in? A simple beginning is the line of movement of a character, not necessarily in the focalized part of the story, but just their lines as they move through the world in a daily way. Then add layers for more of the story’s living beings, both humans and nonhumans. 

What else moves through? The line of the weather, storm-tracking? 

What about traces of what has moved here? The line of mountain ranges, trace of tectonic action. The line of soil expanses, marks of old lava flows. 

Traces that have grooved the pathways people tend to follow are fair game, as are cut-throughs, short-cuts, and lines of getting lost or detoured. 

You might choose a layer and then lay it in. You might hover your pen over some of the map’s blank space and ask yourself, what just passed through here? What formed this place? What will be here tomorrow and where is it now? 

Your lines can track objects or matter that isn’t living, but is moved around by living processes: What has been lost in this place? What has been found? 

Add a layer of associative thinking — of the heart and mind’s topics, as topoi. In this place my mind turned to something I feared. In this place my mind raced ahead to what I had to do tomorrow. In this place I had an insight about maps. If I was to map my day yesterday in a topographical emotional way, I would be obligated to note a peak (or a sinkhole?) of intensity where I parked the car on returning home. This is how things like emotional experience and dogged thinking can enter into the spatialized array of your map.

You may be mapping a fictional world but allow your questions — as a writer but also as a living being — your heavy and prized figures of thought, to be laid into this world too. Let this map honor a kind of porousness between your life and the story world life. Let the season in. 

If you are doing this for a story you are already in the process of writing, take your time. Map carefully over a few different sessions. Filling the map with what you already know about your story allows you to create a space to behold its interactions. Filling the map with what you don’t yet know might be a generative occasion, allowing you to think about dimensions of the region of the story in new ways. Let the tempo be unhurried, let your fine-tipped pen draw you in. Letter and draw with care. 

WRITING FROM THE MAP

To write from this map is to write an inhabitation. Write the journey of something through the space of the map. It might be a person, it might be a floating ghost eye, it might be the track of a rat or a bird, it might swap out like a relay, share the point of view. As you write, track your place, as a moving point, on the map. Maybe even fish out a game piece or statuette and move it around the map. At any point, allow the something you are tracking to slip layers, to navigate folds, to follow the mesh. Let your movement be unimpeded. If you hit a wall, climb over it, seep under it, patiently erode it. Every spot on the map is a perch, a moment slipped into, savored or rushed, noticed or absorbed otherwise, and moved on from. 

If you’re making a map without an existing story to map from, you might want to start with your own lived space, but allow your imagination to take over if it starts to propose fictions. 

More, if you would like

Repeat, with jumps or skips. Build zip lines and glass bottomed funicular railroads as a treat to get your wayfarer off their feet. 

Or repeat, following someone or something else through the map. 

As you write, prize the perception won by each successive vista.  

Set a timer before you write, or decide on a number of pages. When the timer rings or you reach your page bottom, find an ending. 

Let’s end with some sentences from Virginia Woolf.

Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?

From Street Haunting: A London Adventure, Virginia Woolf, 1930

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?