Destroying Maps & Inventing Time [#Itchmas Day 2]
I don't know where to begin.
See, I committed to writing this series of reviews but I have coasted on holding presence on the internet long enough, simply vibing rather than Posting, not garnering much-craved attention but by the inverse of that that selfsame coin, not getting blowback. "I lack the Poster's Gene," I tell myself from in my foxhole, watching the howling mob tear apart today's main character of the internet.
This blog is an effort to carve out space for and of myself: a generative outlet that accrues over time, and leaves me with something to show for it. Something to point to, as the ceaseless rise and fall of internet spaces churns onward: what matter the more than a decade to a twitter account, if it drops like a stone into water and leaves no ripple?
The white blank page oppresses. How am I supposed to break down a page of high concept instructions into a coherent content review?
The map already exists. Can you see the outlines of it? I'm carving details in sentence by sentence.
A map is a representation, but no representation is a perfect recreation. More educated and refined minds than mine have spilled far more words than I have the inclination to here unpacking the consequences and implications of this. Borges comments to this effect by postulating a 1:1 map of the territory in On Exactitude in Science.
Destroying Maps, coming to us from the mind of Geostatonary, begins at the endpoint we already inhabit: a mapped world.
Every map, the game rails at the reader, is an attempt to assert a particular reality. An emphasis on roads and cities betrays the creator's priorities. Borders are scars on the face of the planet drawn and color-coded by the cartographer's hand.
Where on this map is the crude knife-carving of juvenile love into the bark of a tree? How does it represent the cool dew at dawn, and the chattering song of early-rising birds?
Explorers in the golden age of sail reveled in the expansion of the sciences that mapping the globe provided them. See here these tools we refine, this new knowledge of peoples and things and ways of getting to places.
Their monarchic European financiers devoured this knowledge, and used it to shear the world into bleeding strips. The people not butchered become chattel; land is claimed and resources extracted. Voracious appetites export misery and inhale expropriated profit.
All the world must be catalogued and taxonomized; thus to be leveraged by systems of structural power to stack the deck in the favor of those who exploit for gain.
But there are more maps than these. To build a new imagining, Destroying Maps asks you to first unbuild that which you know.
There is a map for everything, if you but have the eyes to see it, and the openness of heart to imagine it. Is this blurred plurality of possibility lessened for not being captured? No, rather: it is beautified to attempt to capture some other facet of it.
Inventing Time stridently repeats this selfsame message. All is not lost for our inability to see outside our present constraints. There hides beneath a leaf in that bush there a whole new way of seeing the world.
It's just on us to map that space; to reinvent ourselves to fill that time. I've tried to sketch an outline, here, and I know it's undisciplined and insufficient. Won't you join me, and show me more ways to see and know and be?
#12DaysOfItchmas