Map Room 6: A Narrative Atlas

The first time I recall encountering mapping as a compositional strategy was as a collaborating dancer in David Neumann’s Tough, the Tough. David asked us each (there were six of us including him in the piece) to map out the path, in both space and gesture, of our morning, from getting out of bed through early morning stuff like going to the bathroom, eating, brushing teeth, morning smokes. We each built material that was precise to the square footage of our apartments. Everything we did — the direction we laid in the bed, the, number of steps we took before turning a corner, the facing of each action — was determined by our actual home layout. We softened the gestures into semi-abstraction, some retaining more traces of the literal than others. Each person’s morning was slowly overlaid into the space, joining in one by one and looping through our maps as needed until we had all accumulated, at which point we slowly merged into other tracks, other sources of movement material.

There’s a specificity and complexity to that simple section that runs through all of David’s work, and the slow accretion toward complexity is one of the things I learned from being witness to his process in the years I collaborated with him. The mapped apartments, overlaid, automatically produced degrees of difference and coincidence. The rule that we walked as many steps as it actually took to get from the bed to the bathroom meant that no other compositional logic was going to override and smooth, whether to make nice or neat, to face the audience, or any other learned compositional reflex.

I used to assign a similar exercise to my classes when I taught choreography. I’d send everyone out to a nearby park, have them map the park and collect activity and movement information from observations of people in the park, then come back and overlay them in duets or trios. Inevitably it was some of the most interesting material created. Observation’s dual specificity and disinteredness lent a kind of serene logic to the material when it returned to the studio. The transplanted corners, pathways, obstacles and facings produced interactions that held both logic and surprise, held nuance that would have been hard to produce deliberately. The material was interesting enough on its own, but overlayered, became something more, something living.

I am thinking of these choreographic mappings today because this installment is an installment of narrative atlases, which means that it is an installment of overlays and interactions between layers pointing toward the complexity and dynamic interrelation that makes a lived-in and living space.

CASE STUDY: EVERYTHING SINGS by DENIS WOOD

The idea of the narrative atlas we are working with today comes from Denis Wood and his book, Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas. I found images from some of Wood’s maps when I was putting together a packet of image prompts for that choreography class. I found it pretty thrilling that they are grouped together in a larger work called “Everything Sings,” as one of my own attempts to write from maps has been the prompt, “let the landscape sing itself.” (More on that in Installment 7.) Wood, here and elsewhere, has a pretty strong objection to the discipline of cartography’s appearance of strict facticity and neutrality, something that he thinks masks the mark of the interest served by any particular map. (Installment Two of the Map Room (representation & visibilities) took up some of this critique.)

Everything Sings maps the Boylan Heights neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. It’s an offering of a mapping that tries to show the various interrelated dynamic elements of a place () without invisibly fixing any one guiding interest to police its edges or control its vocabulary, or choose what is made visible and what is left out. The presence of the cartographer on the ground, in the neighborhood, is inescapable in these maps because of their idiosyncratic units, metrics, and names (the power lines, for example, are designated as a map of “squirrel highways” and several maps are devoted to paper routes, coming into the neighborhood on Scott’s truck and distributed to the neighborhood by Lester). Some of the map’s information surely comes from municipal records (like the map of calls made to the police from different houses, or the maps of sewer and gas lines (“intrusions under the hill”)), but much of it could only have been collected on foot. Many of them think in sensory ways, dispensing with elements that we think are indispensable (streets!) or mapping areas of affect instead of precise points. (The map of pools of light, for example, measures light spill from lampposts, and doesn’t bother marking the post’s point. The map of wind chimes too tries to track overlapping pools of sound.) “They are maps with all the science and technology that this implies,” he writes,” yet they have fingerprints all over them. I don’t know where it comes from, but they have heart.”

The narrative in Wood’s narrative atlas is the story told — of a place and of its inhabitants’ lived experience — by this gathering of maps. Put something in sequence and there will be a story. The atlas in Wood’s narrative atlas doesn’t dream of being comprehensive and total (he notices what he doesn’t map, too), but it does aim at the feeling of many lives, many ways of moving.

Wood’s narrative atlas is particularly interested in the way home (as house, as neighborhood) is the place of a continuous two-way transformation between individual and citizen. “The neighborhood is a process, a process-place or a process-thing, that transforms anywhere into here, and here into everywhere, the city into the space of our lives, the citizen into the individual, and vice versa,” he writes. He names this the transformer. How do you map a transformer? Wood’s answer for Everything Sings is to map a long series of layers organized along the phases that lead back and forth from individual to citizen: the neighborhood’s continuity with the rest of the city (which includes visible sky, topography, water, sewer and gas infrastructure belowground, electric and telephone infrastructure above, trees and broken canopy, and on); the neighborhood’s character as a transformer, “turning city stuff into neighborhood stuff and vice versa”; and its uniqueness and discreteness in the city (this corner, this lamppost, this house). It’s only the combination of all these things that produces the feeling of heart. Thinking of heart this way, I wonder if we could say it’s what shows itself in the energy it takes to ride the navigation between living in a system (a city, a citizenry, a sport), and being this exact person, this one only. Meeting the system with energy.

Last note on Everything Sings before we look at some of its maps. Each map includes a notation on how to read it. The images are beautiful on their own. They become maps only when we understand how to read them. The maps become an atlas as they accumulate resonance and dimensionality from page to page, on behalf of the place they represent.

Here’s an excerpt from the book.

PROMPTS FOR A NARRATIVE ATLAS

We’re going to make a narrative atlas, but there are several possible ways to approach this. The biggest question to ask is what place you want to map. But remember Wood’s idea that place isn’t some passive portion of space stuff just sitting there to be lived in, but is itself a process. Do you want to map the region where your story takes place? The most straightforward way into this is to make an atlas of the story’s world. Some more conceptually weird but potentially compelling approaches are to think about the process of story making as a place. You could map the story itself as a page-based place. More notes on that at the very end of the prompts. Or you could map the story’s process of taking place?

Let’s pause on this somewhat wackadoo question of how to map the way a story takes place. What is the action of taking place? Some kind of selective drawing from the real or imagined world to build out the sense of place projected by the writing itself. Is it fruitful to think of the action of taking place as one of the transformers between story world and story telling, analogous to the way that Wood thinks of neighborhood as a transformer between individual and citizen.

(If that lights up anything for you, be sure to start fresh with your sense of the word taking. Yes it might mean appropriating or plundering but it also comes in many other valences, taking something offered, taking something in, etc.)

These are approaches to creating an atlas that will help augment an existing story in progress, but you could also use the narrative atlas as a form of research or training that helps you become more receptive in general to the stories that might emerge from any place. Instead of tracking a particular story, you could, following Wood, map the neighborhood you live in, or one you used to lived in. You could map a place you want to know more about, whether your access to it is on foot, through archive, through google earth, etc.

So. Make your choice about what place you want to map.

Stage one: Choosing layers

Before you start drawing maps, identify layers of life in your place, with an emphasis on process. I’ve got two ways in for this stage: from free writing or from walking observations.

From free writing

Set a timer for 5 minutes, and write down what moves through the area, matching that to possible points, lines, or pools to map. This might be something like “wind blows through the yards — map spill of fallen leaves or downed trees, or the path of scattered trash cans.” It might be “cars move through the streets at night, map the houses of driving-age teenagers with notations for how busy their driveways/curbs are,” or “Snow plows move through the streets after a storm — map the piles of snow that obstruct or remake foot paths.” So the idea is to first identify a kind of movement, and then ask yourself what traces that movement leaves that could be mappable.

After five minutes, read what you’ve written, and ask yourself if any larger dynamics or sorting rubrics are showing themselves and that intrigue you. Think about the idea of the transformer. In the wind example above, wind-snap transforms the backyard or domestic plot from a private, boundaried space into an extensions of the natural world. Obviously it’s both the whole time — but the point of the narrative atlas is to allow us to perceive this multiplicity by sifting it into layers. Then repeat the timed writing, looking again for movement and its traces, focusing on those transformer dynamics.

Repeat the loop as many times as you need. Then read over everything you’ve written and make a short list of maps you would like to choose for your atlas.

From observation

An alternate process is to gather these possible layers through active observation. Whether or not you want to map the actual neighborhood you live in, your immediate neighborhood can give you information of types of layers that you can then take to your story’s place, whether real or imagined, to actually map.

Take a walk and tune in to process and movement. For everything that seems like a still object, ask yourself how it fits into a pattern of movement. Try to see each object of your attention in multiple ways. For example, the trees might be part of a larger expanse of canopy or tree cover in the region. But they might also be part of the map of wind-snapped branches, or a map of treehouses or slack lines, as hot spots of ambient sound (the murmuration of birds, or windy night creaking concentrations), or allergy-riling blossoms. As you walk, keep simple notes in the form of this as that: trees as larger canopy, trees as allergy triggers, trees as part of neighborhood sound makers.

At the end of your walk, read over your notes and then follow the free writing prompts above.

Making maps

Now make your series of maps. You may want to use some kind of basic spatial template so that they share a scale. Limit each map so that it includes what is needed to render that particular layer visible, and nothing else.

Write your notations

The map is only a map if it can be read. Write a one-paragraph notation for each map that, either directly or obliquely, tells how to read and also includes, if you would like, by what parameters its information was collected, and by what process or rationale its graphic symbol system was decided.

What to do with your atlas

Study your atlas for the stories it tells in different sequences. You might write a story that moves by coasting between different layers of the atlas. You might write a group of very short stories, one for each layer. You might keep the atlas by your notebook or computer, consulting it as a work of reference, to add detail or as a way to direct your attention to all the living processes that cut through the scene or moment.

Addendum: Note on the Page-and-Mind Place

What does it mean spatially, graphically, to map the story as a page-based place? If you’re not mapping an actual space, what are you mapping? This one’s definitely a little abstract and will require just making up your own rules as you map, following a whim. If it hurts your head, just ignore it.

Probably you will need to make a somewhat arbitrary determination of how to give your map an area. Remembering that the atlas works by overlayering, you will probably want to drop the idea of representing time and the timeline of the telling, in your maps. You will need to choose some kind of spatial logic, though, so you can plot your elements onto the map. Let’s say you choose to represent the page-mind-place of your story as the area of a circle. Perhaps your map’s spatial logic is about center and periphery. Let’s say you make a layer that maps your story’s metaphors or key images. Perhaps elements that are visualized inside the mind of a character are mapped inside the circle, and those supplied as narration are mapped outside it. Or you map the images in a wheel, arranged from emotionally lightest to emotionally darkest.

As you choose layers, think of processes, and how each point is imbued with process, and how that process is part of a larger “transformer.” Just as with the actual place-based parts of the exercise, it might be useful to ask yourself what is moving through the story, and what traces it leaves that are mappable. What you might map is up to you and depends on your story, but here are some ideas: active images, invocation of real or mythic creatures, moments of addressing the reader, echoes and recurrences, lyric or descriptive passages, groupings or relationships of characters.

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?