[D'log] A map is a way in to a territory. When you get there, the map changes.
[London and the North] Guest Blogger: Tricks.... "The map is not the territory"? Well actually, it is. They whom I live with are inclined towards postmodernism. I'm more of a modernist myself. In my world the map is the territory. There's a lot of it - some of which I tread often and parts which I will visit some day I expect.
[Bowen Island Journal] We normally think of maps as flat reproductions of the elements of a landscape. They are pictures, with physical geography represented by lines and colours. Peering at these maps can help us understand the forces that shaped the land, or the best place to build a house. Maps are animated by a keen eye, and eye which understands both what is being represented, and what it really looks like.
But maps are just pretty pictures without a sense of place. Only when you have visited Bowen Island does the map mean anything substantial to you. It is only after you have walked through the old-growth of Cape Roger Curtis that the 600 acres in the lower left corner of the map resonate so strongly for the wild jewel that it is. Only after standing on my deck overlooking Mannion Bay - the large "bite" on the right side of the map - can you know what it is to look out over log booms and ferry traffic to the rocky shore of Whytecliffe on the mainland.
[Mulubinba Moments] Many years ago, while still a full-time student and despite meagre financial means I decided to buy the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Not for me the sensibly priced paperback edition, I had to have the hardback edition - for the maps. The paperback edition lacked the elegant fold-out maps boldly printed in red and black on crisp pure-white paper. For me these maps were not just an indispensable aid to finding my way around Middle Earth as I read the books, but beautiful artefacts themselves.
Maps and writing are inextricably linked. But just as language existed before writing was invented, so did the oral and mental equivalent of maps. Aboriginal Australians did not have writing or maps. Yet they were able to do many of the things we use maps for.
[Panchromatica] Maps I think are a language, not a place. They translate what you see as you walk around into another medium, a story if you like, a story that you can take away and reread. Like any language some of us are more fluent than others and can read them in the original - we can look at a map and visualise what it represents. I find that easier with rural mapping than with urban. I can read the topography and get some idea of the landform, although crucially the vegetation will be missing except in the most rudinentary form.
With urban mapping however there is no building equivalent of the contour and so the key issue of enclosure is missing. That square we see could be surrounded by a series of single storey sheds or by the most elegant of Georgian terraces. While there are often clues in things like road layout, usually the place has to be experienced in the 'original language' for the urban map to mean something. Pushing the metaphor too far perhaps, urban mapping needs some sort of Rosetta Stone - photographs, written descriptions, personal experience for a full ranslation to be possible. - Ian
[Fragments From Floyd]...To possess an accurate and detailed map and see the world through its symbolic language of place is perhaps the next best thing to being physically in the place depicted. And yet, at least today, there still remains a vast gulf between map and territory. This may not always be so, and the best maps and the places they symbolize may someday be difficult to distinguish from one another.
[Notes from an Eclectic Mind] My family always seemed to travel to known destinations. That simple statement says more about us than volumes could. It perhaps explains why today I don’t like to go to places that require me to use a map. For all my forty years I’ve lived between the Red River and the Rio Grande and known how to get everywhere I needed to in between. More than once I’ve headed down some narrow country road only to have a passenger ask nervously, “Do you know where you’re going?” And always I’ve answered; “Sure,” as I traced the lines on my mental map of a life lived in small places.
[Feathers of Hope (Pica)] My father could study a map of a place he had never been (Spanish military maps were superb, almost as good as the British Ordnance Survey Maps) and decide that THIS place would be a good spot to camp in (we wildcamped throughout the 1970s and 1980s in rural Spain). He was always right, down to the abundance of firewood he predicted just by looking at an unfolded sheet of paper...
[TheCassandraPages] Maps represent a lot, but neither are they a place, nor a person; maps are merely tracks on a beach, an enigmatic, tantalizing trail...
[prairie point] most of the places we would like to get to are not as easily pictured and there are not always superhighways leading to them. We have to fall back on the equivalent of hearsay and opinion...
[alembic]When history shifts the ground under your feet with wars and revolutions that fence you in or herd you off like sheep or cattle, you learn that “there is no here,” and yes, “there is no there … there,” to appropriate a cliché.
[Feathers of Hope (Numenius)] Maps are talismans.
[travelertrish] "Man has invented three suberb means of communication - language, music and maps, maps being the oldest of the three,” said the introduction to the atlas in the glove compartment in our little red rented Mazda on an unspoiled island in the Baltic Sea off Estonia. The oldest? I wondered. People without language drawing maps in the dirt with their fingers.
[OnePotMeal] Maps are just stories we tell about a place--what we imagine it is, or was; what we will and wish it to be. Maps are no more a place than a photograph is a moment, obsolete as soon they're printed. They're Arcadian visions: a unified Europe; a manifested North America; a conquered Iraq. Arcadian as Mapquest's world without people, a perfect, paved world of uncrowded, egalitarian roads.
[Bowen...Bowen...Bon] Prints of the New World... "Go on."
My eyes gaped at the ten or twelve maps that covered my aunt's spare bed. I pointed to a purple and orange reproduction of western Canada. Past the Great Lakes, the Prairie Provinces bubbled westwards, growing less and less familiar as they approached the coast.
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