Map Room 9: Edges, Uneasiness, Monsters

This is the ninth of ten installments of the Map Room and the last new angle of entry into map thinking in this series (the tenth will compile these nine angles). We have moved through mapping as a mnemonic holding place, as an expression of visibility and power, as a form of marking borders, as a space of wayfaring lines, as tools for understanding and licensing story forms, as atlases that accumulate narrative, as receivers for newly imagined regions, as spatial forms liable to variation and distortion. Today in the map room, we turn to the unknown edge space and consider how to map the forces at play at the margins of our experience or survey. We allow those forces to take shape as monsters (or creatures, if you prefer) of our imaginations and send those monsters into the story.

Our patron monsters of the day will be the sea creatures that litter the maps produced by medieval European voyagers, and the emblematic motto, hic svnt dracones — here be dragons — often attributed to maps of this age and provenance. This phrase, like many such nuggets of common knowledge, was not actually a common notation on medieval maps, being found in those actual words on only two extant maps — it is an idea that retrospectively gained appeal as a way of talking about an older world understanding and its limitations and biases. But there is something delicious about the story that cartographers marked uncharted regions so. 

(Can you find the dragon warning on the Lenox Globe, somewhere on the coast of Southeast Asia?)

The dragon warning tells about a kind of ignorance, fear and wonder that is somewhat lost to those of us who inhabit this planet in the age of satellite photography and all the other forms of sensing and reporting that our collected scientific instruments are capable of. (Not that xenophobia is lost to us by any stretch, or that we don’t have other ways of summoning and depicting monstrosity.) The monsters lurking in these maps seas tell of creature fear but also to my eye something slightly different, a funneling into the emblem of the creature the sum sense of danger and vulnerability that belongs to this kind of seagoing. 

A small gallery of sea monsters:

Dragon eats boat, 1539 Map of Scandinavia by Olaus Magnus
beware the giant lobster, sailor
things get very weird near Iceland, 1542

In this much later Japanese map, which shows the areas of damage (yellow), inundation (blue) and devastation (red) caused by two earthquakes and a tidal wave that struck Japan in 1854–55, a dragon wraps around the perimeter of the damaged regions, standing in poetically for the destructive force of earthquake and acting as a border frame for the map.

earthquake and tsunami damage in 1854-55

What I want to borrow from these depictions and warnings is the impulse to make an imaginative corporeal form to embody, in a monster-myth way, a set of forces or a partial glimpse of a suspected swarm of menacing or incomprehensible creatures. 

In this borrowing, though you you may be curious about the tracks of fear, you are in no way obligated to its mood. The unknown, after all, may produce a fear response, but it also might be an edge of magic, seduction, wonder, or anything else. 

What we’ll be doing is thinking about the forces at play in the far reaches of a map, where the map is a container where we mark down what we know. 

We’ll be borrowing a mode of mapping from a book called Terra Forma, by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arenès and Axelle Grégoire (a trio of one architect and two cartographers), which describes itself as a book of speculative maps. The “speculative” they engage isn’t a speculation on other or alternative worlds in the mode of speculative fiction, but a graphics-based speculation about ways to re-comprehend — and so re-visualize — our own world in ways that decouple from the limitations — imaginative and ethical — of the grid-based territory map that is associated with empire, property, and control. (Their re-oriented map of forces at play in soil offers us a variable to add to the last installment’s set, bearings.)

Say goodbye to the grid with a farewell glance at the first known grid-based map: Coasts and waterways, South Song Dynasty, 1136. Grids may be suspect and empire-related and all that, but they’re also pretty.

Before we look at the soil map model, let’s go over to the monster lab. 

What is at the edge of the known world of your story? Edges can be found in all directions. The upper atmosphere is an edge, the lower soil is an edge, as is the farthest reach of east or west, north or south. An edge space exists at the limits of the common ground. Attics, basements, roofs, are edge spaces. City limits are edge spaces. Woods, coastlines, caves are edge spaces. 

But an edge doesn’t need to be a geographic region. There are the edges of a personality, found by mapping a character; there is the edge between states in a complex system, found for example by mapping disease, health and susceptibility in the story’s systems and beings. There is the edge of what you as author are willing to address or make visible or give attention to. There is the edge of your desire to behold and engage with something. 

We’re going to build monsters by giving embodied form to a combination of moving forces at an edge zone, a region of uneasiness. So take a moment to consider what edge spaces quiver for you with unease, danger, and curiosity. And keep your mind open to the possibility of monster-manifesting by combining edge types. 

On monsters and monstrosity

Let the monster be fearsome and animated by forces; that does not have to mean that it is evil. The monsters, once we find them, might also be our teachers, friends, or lovers if we can figure out how to behold them so. I am using “monster” because it’s vivid, playful, because monsters are a taproot into deeptime storytelling, and because although my own things tend to be outwardly gentle and tranced out, I have always had a taste in my mouth for the wild north wind and what comes in on it. I am using “monster” because it takes us into the story forms of appearance and encounter and Ovidian transformation and of course, elemental battle. 

Our soil map teacher (from Terra Forma)

the forces of one place, interacting fluidly

This map of forces at play in the earth’s crust looks for an alternative to the point-in-space stratigraphy (depth sample of levels/layers) and instead plays with the idea of mapping combinatory forces in motion.  Of the map, they write: 

“From the point of view of geologists… the soil appears quite different. Subject to multiple entropic and negentropic pressures, it shifts, crumbles, slides, sinks, and collapses [see the first image]. Its waves spread both horizontally and vertically. The motions of the tectonic plates and the water cycle driven by the sun’s energy, combined with the actions of living organisms, mean that the ground is never at rest, from the Earth’s crust to the thinnest layers of the fertile surface…”

Let’s do a little borrowing right now, as preparation to use this map as a model. To translate this map to something that tells us about an edge region in a story (whether inside the story’s world or in the mental work of making it), we first need to identify the forces in play in the complex phenomena of our region. What are three to five forces of destabilization or pressure that exist in this region? Notice how the soil map’s forces are represented not by symbols but by moving lines. You can identify a type of movement in the line, a general gesture, but it does not resolve to icon or symbol. 

Choose three to five phenomena that are in motion in your edge, and find a gesture line for each. 

I want to share one more map from Terra Forma, although you may choose to stick with the model above. To map the soil and to give it adequate emphasis in the layout of the map, the TF authors change the bearings completely. About this they write: 

“To explore such a complex terrain, we must first create the right tool, a sort of telescope for viewing the interior of the Earth… By means of a thought experiment, we find ourselves at the core of inverted globe, one that has been turned inside out like a glove. Its exterior, the atmosphere, is at the center, suddenly confined in a closed, reduced, constricted space. Its deepest part is now arranged in concentric circles reaching the outer edges of the map… The model makes it possible to visually represent the constant flux between different levels of the ground—a fluidity rarely associated with the Earth…”

the glove-turn mechanism for a new bearing
“Its deepest part is now arranged in concentric circles reaching the outer edges of the map…”

What I like about this second map is the mood of pressure that it creates, a sense that the zone of air and surface (the open central circle, where we could imagine our narration or our character perches) cannot escape the influence of everything at play in the soil.  

So let’s make a map. Choose one of the Terra Forma soil map models. We’ll stick with the same three to five elements in either option; the difference is how you can think of this map’s offerings for narrative thinking. 

In the first model, call it the wheel, we have a circular visualization of a spatial region without incorporation of the single-point-in-space, you-are-here function. The map tells you something about an edge space you can move into and what you might expect there — about contact, meeting. 

In the second, call it the glove, the you-are-here is inside that encircled center, and the map’s proportions are given over to the depths. This map tells you something more about what is encroaching you when in that edge space, what pressures and surrounds. 

Take your forces and their gesture lines, and draw the map of their interplay, as wheel or glove. 

From this map, you now harvest a monster image. Perhaps you glean the image using the method of that excellent monster-finder art teacher game, where you scribble randomly and then find a monstrous figure within the scribble to draw forth and decorate and bestow with eyes and other monstery detail. Do this by looking at the shapes and figures made by the intersecting gesture lines and seeing what it suggests.

Or perhaps you intuit the image by reading the mood of these forces and the kinds of havoc or unsettlement (or enchantment) they might wreak. Do this by imagining a body that could stand poetically for this combinatory havoc. 

Here are a few more monster images to loosen your imagination:

How to use your monster

Take yourself to an edge space in your story or otherwise open up a space of unease and unknowing. Then summon your monster.

Use it literally or use it to set your own mood. Use it by engineering an appearance, in the full light of day, in the depth of the night, or in disguise. Use it to send unsettling howls into the air without ever showing its face. Use it by bringing your story into an encounter. Use it in an act of destruction. Use it to form a new alliance. Use it as a blueprint for an Ovidian transformation. Use it to stage an elemental battle, or maybe a coupling, why not. Learn something from your monster about what forces shape and unmake the story or its world.

Remember that your monster is made from living, moving, multiplicity, and restlessness. 

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?