Lost

By Gwen Morgan

You go to the museum to look at some maps. You do this even if you’re not a museum regular, even if you don’t live nearby, even if you’re male, according to the stats put out by the Walters museum after a recent map show. So even if you’re a man, maybe not so prone to darken the doorway of a museum, you go to look at some maps because these aren’t some dose of culture that goes down with all the charm of cod liver oil or that leaves you impressionistically at sea, chippy with the suspicion that what you like is popularly believed among the denizens of high culture to be crap. These are maps, devised that we might know how to get from point a to point b.

I love maps (who doesn’t?), even those back page charts of flight routes that I find in airline magazines, always the same: flight around the world reduced to nexus and tentacle. Even the most mundane maps are at once practical and evocative. All the cleverness of man comes into play in the transformation of space and time into a useful representation, a tool for navigation, and yet every map seems to evoke endless possibility, to verge on metaphor and allegory. So complete is their power that it is enough to make up titles to evoke intricate landscapes of story: Mappa Mundi, The Cartography of Desire. The Cartography of Story, with its seas and continents, magnetic north, compass rose. To see an actual map is only to imagine more places just unknown enough.

Maps are understood to be non-fiction, to be “true” accounts of place unless otherwise indicated. Nothing has more authority than a map, a device that appears to be authorless and objective. But, like all good stories, they have their silences, their cadence and their point of view. They are always about something, be it the geology of the Caspian basin or the shortest route from St. Louis to San Francisco.

Here are the early Portolan maps with their bright coastlines, their illuminated flags of each principality, crisscrossed with rhumb lines -- each a compass heading -- that allowed sailors to navigate out of sight of land. Here is the original Mercator map, taking up the space of half a wall, the sphere of Earth translated into two dimensions. Around the corner Lindbergh’s flight plan, a pencil mark every hundred miles where he checked his position, a record of the attention to detail that kept him in enough fuel to cross the Atlantic. Here is a 300 hundred foot long map depicting the road from Edo to Kyoto, from the emperor to the most powerful warlord, a delicate representation of the lineaments of power. Walk away from this line and you will find the concentric circles of the Buddhist and Hindu maps, centered at the axis mundi of Mt. Meru, oceans and continents in relative proportion to the center, a map that depicts the holy mountains and rivers with, far out on the corners, four persons who have transcended the world of the map. This is practicality taken to another plane: travel to the holy mountains with the goal of going off the map entirely.

Maps are graticules of possibility, reductive devices that provide the starting point for any kind of voyage, in this lies their seductiveness. You name it, you can make a map to take you there. It’s the reduction of space and time itself to something we can hold and comprehend, which opens out to the infinite. It’s the space between Adam’s reaching hand and God, the gap not quite bridged, the promise of the place not yet seen, travel, the exotic, all the spices of India, the thing almost within our grasp, herein resides desire. That’s where your imagination lives. It’s out there, let me draw you a map.

Stephen Wilkes, Data Center, Olympic Village, Beijing, China, 2008, ClampArt, New York