Notes Towards a Cartography of the Self
A map is a paradox in that physically it is mere marks on sheets of paper, yet visually it brings to mind a multidimensional world, containing objects and even emotions not perceived directly on the piece of paper.
—Philip C. Muehrcke and Juliana O. Muehrcke, “Maps in Literature”
The artifacts of memory are a curious affair. Last summer I unexpectedly came across a 1994 Rand McNally map of Boston, Massachusetts. It was an old map, tattered, foxed, worn at the seams, and yet when I pulled it out of a long-neglected box of odds and ends it radiated a sinister and nearly palpable emotional force.
The story of my time in Boston begins in lightness and hope and ends in darkness and despair. I came there eager and quick; I left there broken and alone, shattered by a decade of ruinous drinking and bad choices.
I must have purchased this map not long after moving to that city as a 23-year-old editorial assistant. It lived on my desk then, ready to be consulted at need. It is impossible to put this into words and not sound banal, but it is difficult to explain or even remember how necessary maps were in the pre-digital age. I would have—I did—consult this map frequently, whenever I was going somewhere unfamiliar.
Boston is small relative to New York City, but it is enormous when compared to my home town of Canton, New York. It remained full of unfamiliar places even to the end.
Now I am excavating it from the musty box where it has lain for years. It still carries a ghostly trace of the emotions it once limned. Paper and ink, a combination of chemicals and substances, it yet organizes a world around itself—a world that no longer exists, and that was inhabited by a person who also no longer exists.
In current critical discourse, “map” can be both noun and verb; it is de rigueur to say that this or that concept “maps” onto another—a concept both pleasing and vague. “I do this all the time to the whole world,” writes A. V. Marracchini in We the Parasites:
see it as a layering of partially readable signs and portents … I map myself onto whatever interpretation I’ve divined for that day, that hour, and then map myself back onto the world again.
I think that we all do this all the time, to some extent. And I’d like to say, as I trace my fingers over its worn seams, that this map maps—not just my physical location but the path of my decline—but this seems too easy, too pat. Alcoholism, graphed, would be a steep descending line, a linear and geometric progression: the worsening accelerates. A map is a flat representation of a fundamentally two-dimensional space; it not linear, but radial, in its configuration. For the axis of time, it substitutes an axis of direction. There is some relation there, but it is oblique, shadowed, inaccessible.
A map’s flatness actually contains layers of memory and narrative, each thin line and faded type heralding a density of recollected experience, tragic, celebratory, amorous, disastrous, and every shade of emotional valence within. In “An Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” (1955) the French philosopher and gadfly Guy Debord coined the word “psychogeography” to define the effect that “the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not” had “on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
Armed with this concept of psychogeography, the map comes alive. When I locate my old neighborhood—the line of Queensberry Street bisecting the little tucked-away pocket that is the Fenway—I swear I can almost feel the grit of the sidewalk under the thin soles of my cheap dress shoes, feel the sultry breeze from the fan perched in the window, smell the streets and the garbage and the Indian food and the beer. It brings back the feeling of looking out the back window of my apartment building as the snow came swirling down in the gray light.
My eye follows the thin lines on the map through the Fenway and to Mass Ave, a long line indeed, running past my bus stop at Newbury Street and all the way across the Back Bay and into Cambridgeport, Central Square, Harvard Square, Huron Village; a journey I made twice daily for almost a decade.
I turn the map over and look south, to the scrabbly maze of Jamacia Plain. Somewhere in there is a hospital where I spent four days in detox, an episode of which I have very little memory. The map tests the limits of my memory in other ways, as well. Where exactly on Mass Ave. was that Cajun restaurant we liked so much? Where in the Back Bay was that bar that made the martinis I loved so much?
It takes me some time to find Miner Street, a little stub branching off Beacon, at the back end of the Fens. Miner Street was the site of a municipal alcohol-abuse treatment center, to which I was consigned for several months of outpatient treatment in a last-ditch effort at stopping my spiral. It was at Miner Street that my counselor told me, reluctantly, to take a little nip of vodka with me on my annual trip north, in order to effect a safe detoxification.
The tactic proved insufficient. Two days later I was in the hospital in Watertown, New York, after suffering a grand mal seizure due to acute withdrawal.
The intense nostalgia conjured in me by this map feels, like most nostalgia, utterly distinctive and personal, but the phenomenon is fairly common. “Because they can be so curiously emotional,” Laura Bliss writes in Maps That Make Us, “maps are as capable of directing the way we relate to our world as they are of reflecting it.” Maps, says Bliss, “have weirdly powerful holds on our imaginations.”
Debord writes about the “dissemination of a host of proposals tending to turn the whole of life into an exciting game.” For me, on those shimmery-hot pre-cellphone streets, the game—bound up with romance, with drinking, with friendship—was exciting indeed. It was only afterwards that the game turned dark, and then darker; finally, no light could be seen, through the fabric of the map, at all.
Another psychogeography made visible: nautical charts. The destination of the ill-fated trip that landed me in the hospital in 2000 was the St. Lawrence River, in the Thousand Islands region, where I learned to sail on a 25-foot sloop my parents bought in 1983. This was not yacht-club gin-and-tonics on the bridge sailing; more like RVs-that-happen-to-float kind of sailing.
The USCG charts of my youth were plastic, with an soft laminated finish; they could be crumpled up and spilled on but would retain their legibility. They were essential, because that stretch of the St. Lawrence is riddled with shoals. The bottom is rocky, so if you hit one (keeping in mind that the keel of a sailboat extends anywhere from three to six feet or more down from the surface of the water) it can mean serious trouble. In this case, the map is leading the viewer away from danger—providing a safe path—but the marked danger spots are, in the physical world, invisible. There is often no way to know, looking at the surface of the water, whether it is forty feet deep, or four. If a map is a physical instantiation of a seen geography, as it is with the Boston map, then a chart of this kind instantiates the unseen. All the numbers, printed in a serif italic font, tracing an invisible underwater horizon. If all the water in the St. Lawrence River were somehow drained away, the riverbed it exposed would be characterized by outrageously steep and jagged stalagmites, far more uneven than the topography that lines the banks. Attention must be paid.
On August 9, 2010, I wasn’t. We were coming into Kingston, Ontario after a long, glorious sail all the way up-river from Clayton, New York, sails doused as we motored along the channel on the north shore of the river towards the harbor, when we felt and heard, almost at once, a sickening lurch and thump, followed by the high whine of the engine as the sloop shuddered to a halt. I had grounded us on a shoal; dazed by sun and wind and distracted by the vision of port and a shower and a fine dinner, I had cut a short cut too short.
A look at the chart suggests a lazy helmsman and captain. The channel between Point Frederick and Point Frederick Shoal is clearly marked with a buoy—R KH2 FI R—and there appears to be plenty of room for safe passage below a menacing “2”—for two feet of depth—extruding a blue finger south from the point. It was on this “2” that I impaled the sloop. The log, scribbled ballpoint pen on lined wire-bound note paper, reads:
C1800 run aground 20 ft S Pt Frederick NRKH2. Crew forward to rock on deck, c1815 free shoal. 1822 Confederation Basin Kingston, slip J13, $69.16 CAN, customs 2102210603.
In other words, we ran aground at approximately six o’clock. With me toggling the engine wrackingly between gears as my then-girlfriend and her teenage daughter and friend raced from the bow to the stern and back, using their shifting weight as a lever, we rocked the boat off the shoal about fifteen minutes later, and docked in Kingston at 6:22pm. It could surely have been a lot worse.
And if I coast, down toward home, spring evenings, silently
a kind of song rising in me to encompass
Davis Square and the all-night
cafeteria and the pool-hall,
it is childhood’s song, surely no note is changed,
sung in Valentines Park or on steep streets in the map of my mind
in the hush of suppertime, everyone gone indoors.
Solitude within multitude seduced me early.
Denise Levertov, “Living Alone (I)” (1975)
The song from which this essay takes its name is the second song on R.E.M.’s coruscating Fables of the Reconstruction, from 1985. The record served as an aural map of sorts to me at a strange and difficult time, when I was living and studying in London, homesick, lonely, and disoriented, smoking too much crappy hashish and drinking cheap Scotch. It was the first time I had ever lived in a city.
R.E.M. is from Georgia, and Fables, in its oblique way, registers as the most Southern, the most rural, of their albums; the murmured, fragmented lyrics suggest an oneiric mythology of bridges and trains and maps, of stray dogs and eccentric hermits. The record felt like a sonic home to me in a way that I cannot fully explain; its mazes of chiming guitars and ethereal vocals took on an almost concrete dimensionality in my mind. “Maybe these maps and legends,” Michael Stipe sings, “have been misunderstood.” (The pun—“legends” meaning “ancient myths” but also “explicatory key”—was surely a deliberate choice on the part of these smart, highly literate men.) Someone on social media recently posted a photo of the band’s first four Lps, with their murky psychedelic collaged covers; the caption read, “I built a whole nation in my head out of these records.”
The music sounded to me—still sounds—like the work of people who were trying to find the path through the woods, who were holding on to the idea of the familiar. R.E.M.’s secret weapon was bassist Mike Mills, whose sonorous backing vocals, buried deep in the mix, seemed to come from around corners and out of the air; they radiated a mournful secrecy. The record sounds like it should have been referenced, through some spectral retroactive magic, in books like Constance Rourke’s American Humor and Gilbert Seldes’s The Stammering Century, decoders of the mystic tongues of a lost nation. “Keep your hat on your head,” Stipe sings mournfully. “Home is a long way away.” Stranded in this murky, rainy city across the sea from my home, skinny, poor, often high, I felt the words in my ribcage.
Like many boys of my generation, I was entranced by J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit, and then, ineluctably, by The Lord of the Rings. Both volumes famously feature maps drawn by the author as frontispieces, and to call them up on a computer screen is a potent madeleine indeed. The map for The Hobbit has a twee fairy-land quality to it, with its curlicued faux old English lettering and its silly names: The Lonely Mountain, the Misty Mountains, Mirkwood.
The map for The Lord of the Rings, like everything else about the later work, is infinitely harder, darker, more dangerous. For a timid, imaginative boy of ten or so, the mystery and promise inherent in these names and imagined topographies was immense. Paradoxically, their evocativeness was at its most distinctive when first encountered at the beginning of the book, with no narrative or description to accompany them, blanks with nothing to impede their mythic resonance.
A more conventional emotional power, of course, was revealed, of course, as the places were progressively encountered in the novel, the map being an aide to tracing the path taken by the fellowship of the Ring, the fading dusk of Lothlorien or the broad, grassy meadows of the Rohan, the savaged plain of Mordor or the barren, rocky slopes of Emyn Muil. But some of this ghostly first kind of magic remained even after the book was finished. Tolkien was cunning enough or careless enough to include many areas of the map that do not feature in the narrative, and these held a special attraction. What does the sun look like setting over the impossibly distant Sea of Rhûn, which is never even mentioned in the book? Who inhabits the Harlinden, the narrow finger of land between the Blue Mountains and the sea? The Icebay of Forochel? The Eryn Vorn? Just the act of naming them endowed them with a strange evocativeness. The map was teaching me how to imagine.
Jasper Johns made his first map painting in 1960. Using a projector, he traced an outline of a map of the United States onto the canvas, and then filled the map in with splashes of vibrant primary colors, blue and red, orange and yellow. (In later iterations the colors faded to a sullen, muddy gray.) The colors overran the state borders, they swirled and smeared up against each other; the names of the individual states were stencilled clumsily onto their apposite spaces, often abraded or masked by the layers of pigment.
Johns’s fundamental operation here, as it was with the targets and flags that preceded the maps, was to take something visually so familiar that it was essentially invisible as a piece of design, and build surfaces upon it. The jagged “U” of the outline of the United States, with its Q-like descender on the lower right and its hollowed-out inverted spike at the center, is rendered as a shape to be recognized immediately, almost subconsciously. By using a ready-made visual structure, Johns essentially eliminated the whole idea of composition from the artwork, freeing his—and the viewer’s—attention to focus elsewhere. In this case, as with the flags and targets, the “elsewhere” in question was the surface of the painting, a lush, scumbled collage of encaustic and newspaper. What gives the paintings their uncanny power is the sense that the teleology of the image has been completely subverted; it is a map that has no correspondent exogenous reality. Its meaning has been displaced from the external to the internal.
Despite this power, and despite the central place these paintings hold in the pantheon of post-war American art, the map paintings always conjure in me a faint sense of disappointment. When I saw them, yet again, at MoMA’s 2022 retrospective, I felt I finally understood why. Unlike a target or a flag, or a series of numbers, a map has no boundary, at least theoretically. An American flag stops at the top of the field, where the canton and the stripes meets. A map continues on forever, in every direction. It is not completely self-contained, even as a piece of abstract design. In a small way, this fact undermines the purity of Johns’s schematic, and thus its force.
“Since the exact duplication of a geographical setting is impossible,” wrote geographer/philosophers Phillip C. Muehrcke and Juliana O. Muehrcke in 1974,
a map is actually a metaphor. The map maker asks the map reader to believe that a mosaic of points, lines, and areas on a flat sheet of paper is equivalent to a multidimensional world in space and time. To “read” a map, one needs imagination. Map symbols and their interrelationships are, in themselves, meaningless, except possibly for their aesthetic appeal. For full meaning, the map reader must go beyond the physical presence of ink on paper to the real-world referents of the symbols.
In a 1999 episode of the television situation comedy Friends, Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc) travels to London for the wedding of his friend Ross Geller (David Schwimmer). An echt ugly American, Joey is confounded by the alien terrain, aided only by an oversized fold-out pop-up paper map. Unable to make the mental connection between the map and the surrounding landscape, Joey places the map on the ground and steps onto, or into it.
This action is played for laughs—LeBlanc’s delivery, his evident pleasure at his own resourcefulness, is authentically funny—but there is something interesting going on here. First, the map is already a pop-up map, so its construction is itself three-dimensional, although its dimensionality in this instance is of course not meant to reflect topographic accuracy. More important, in “stepping into the map” Joey is simply doing literally what all of us do when using a map; we step into it mentally in order to orient ourselves to it. The metaphor referred to by the Muehrckes has been made literal.
Sometimes when I am trying to find my way in New York—usually when in the West Village, which despite decades of familiarity consistently baffles me—I pull out my smartphone to consult the miracle that is the GPS-powered digital map. When doing so, I often find myself rotating the smartphone so that the map corresponds to my location and direction. I am in the map.
Very few categories of artifact have as durable an appeal on me. Despite Boston and the St. Lawrence River and R.E.M. and Tolkien and Johns I do not, in the end, truly know why this is. Perhaps it is because maps have a trace of ontological poignance to them, as all artifacts that strive towards perfect objectivity do, almost in spite of their inevitable failure, their lapse into historicism and intentionality and bias, of the taint of the subjective. Debord’s idea of psychogeography is appealing because it implies that our interior mental processes are what truly matter, that each person creates his own inner map of the self, no matter how haphazardly or subconsciously. There is not one cartography but several, many, millions, of cartographies, of sets of orientations. We are all, always, in the map.
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