Cartography at Imbolc or Lughnasadh/Lammas.
The art of mapping new worlds, finding the spot marked X for buried treasure, the privilege of naming what has been discovered and mapped, a kind of colonising too, how we unmap the empire and return those named and defined spaces back to wilderness.
Look, I know that the Pagan Blog Project is about writing an entry each week on a ‘pagan’ theme and some of my word choices may not seem especially pagan, but if the sacred and mundane have no boundaries, then whatever stirs the imagination has its own ironic or magical power.
The first map I saw was at the front of my copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. There was the island with whales and pirates’ schooners off shore. There was Cutlass Beach, there was Smuggler’s Cove, there was the headland with palm trees waving, there was Death Creek leading to Hangman’s Tree, there was the casket filled with golden doubloons or pieces of eight lying under the spot marked X. I went away, found a school exercise notebook, a pencil and drew my first map. In the map I sketched out the unsafe places around the house and the garden, the wattle and pine forests running down the mountainside, the stream where otters played, the place where tree ferns grew on the bank of the stream, a waterfall higher up the stream and my hiding places marked X, W, Z. It was the first record of my own little world, the Strange Island of Incest in Nowhere Land.
When I went away to boarding school, there was a globe in one corner of the classroom. It spun around at a flick of your finger and showed the bulging shapes of continents and who owned what territory, who was allowed to live where. In geography we learned how to read contour maps and I drew pictures of volcanoes, jungles and uninhabited deserts. The English teacher read Elizabeth Bishop’s The Map to us.
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?
On maps we copied from the atlas nearly as large as the desk top, I carefully shaded in the sea around the coast with light and dark blue crayons, coloured the desert yellow, the forest green, the town red or black. The maps in our school atlas were out of date, place names had changed, countries were now independent, the world was post-colonial. Even then, even there, we were all unlearning the visual language of conquest. Africa was for the Africans.
Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves’ own conformation:
and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
–What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.
There was John Donne saying a woman’s body was like an undiscovered continent. There was the problem of naming, who got to name what. My father’s joke about Kenya. ‘Kenya: where men are men and women are wide open spaces.‘ The mapmaker as pioneer and looter, spoiler, pirate. Who gets to name what. Eavan Boland’s observation That the Science of Cartography is Limited
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
There were old maps of Africa hung up around my father’s study at home. Africa filled with exotic animals and savages and uninhabitable places. The maps were at fault, wrong, out of date but they were still thought of as cultural artefacts of historical interest. Nostalgia for a history of slavery and looting, appropriation, destruction. Next to the maps , my father put up framed photographs of us as small children, when we were supposedly innocent. He owned us, he could say what he liked about us. We called him the Werewolf and hid from him.
But elsewhere, others were unlearning the language of conquest, speaking out from the Cartographies of Silence described by Adrienne Rich:
A conversation begins
with a lie. And each
speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart
as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature
When I left home (ran away, escaped, fled), I could begin unmapping my life. A new geography of the mind was possible beyond the patriarchal metaphor and fantasy was never a flight from reality so much as a flight towards it. A woman become her own cartographer. The place marked X.
And others had gone ahead, were waiting for me to join them, Elsewhere, others were unlearning the language of conquest.
The light is critical: of me, of this
long-dreamed, involuntary landing
on the arm of an inland sea.
The glitter of the shoal
depleting into shadow
I recognize: the stand of pines
violet-black really, green in the old postcard
but really I have nothing but myself
to go by; nothing
stands in the realm of pure necessity
except what my hands can hold.
Nothing but myself?….My selves.
After so long, this answer.
As if I had always known
I steer the boat in, simply.
The motor dying on the pebbles
cicadas taking up the hum
dropped in the silence.
Anger and tenderness: my selves.
And now I can believe they breathe in me
as angels, not polarities.
Anger and tenderness: the spider’s genius
to spin and weave in the same action
from her own body, anywhere –
even from a broken web.
