Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [12]
That’s also demonstrated in our compulsion to turn everything—not just spatial data—into map form. For centuries illustrators have been drawing allegorical maps, which schizophrenically join the beauty and detail of classic illustration with all the bag-of-hammers subtlety of a 1980s after-school special. In the 1700s, it was popular to draw romance as a nautical chart: watch out for the Rocks of Jealousy and the Shoals of Perplexity on your way to the Land of Matrimony! Unlucky sailors would wind up marooned at Bachelor’s Fort on the unfortunately named Gulf of Self Love. The Prohibition era gave us railroad maps of temperance, in which the Great Destruction Route might seem like fun as you’re chugging through Cigaretteville or Rum Jug Lake but then quickly diverts you through the States of Bondage, Depravity, and Darkness. One of the most popular illustrations of the 1910s was “The Road to Success,” depicting a snare-laden road through Bad Habits, Vices, and the carousel of Conceit, in which only the tunnel of True Knowledge leads successfully through Lack of Preparation mountain and inside the Gate of Ideals. A recent Matt Groening cartoon updates this map for the twenty-first century. Now the road takes aspirants past the meadow of Parental Discouragement and the River of Unsold Screenplays, inside the House of Wrinkles, and up into the Tower of Fleeting Fame . . . which unfortunately leads straight to a long slide marked “Disappointing Sales of Second Album, Novel, Play or Film Followed by the Long, Long Slide Back to the Bottom* (*Drug Addiction Optional).”
The most popular allegorical map ever drawn.
Watch out for the slide of Weak Morals!
Why this urge to turn every facet of life into a mappable journey? Hell, why see life itself as a journey to Heaven, the way medieval Christian maps always did? That whole metaphor isn’t in the Bible anywhere. (Well, that’s not strictly true. I’m sure there are lots of verses about walking in righteous paths and so on. But nowhere, as far as I know, does God tell the children of Israel, “Verily I say unto you that life is a highway. Yea, thou shalt ride it, even all the night long.”)
For a long time I blamed writers like John Bunyan and Dante for this allegorical form of cartacacoethes. Desperate to extract a story-line from a possibly dreary and didactic subject—the struggle to live a life worthy of Heaven—they seized on a quest narrative, a “pilgrim’s progress,” and mapmakers were quick to follow suit.* I wonder: how would history be different if Bunyan or Dante had chosen to represent life not as a linear journey through a geographic territory but as something a little more holistic—a library, say? Or a buffet? (Pilgrim’s Potluck!) What would Western civilization be like in that alternate universe? Would we value different things, set different goals for ourselves, if the governing geographic metaphor of our culture were replaced by something else—recipes instead of maps, cookbooks instead of atlases? Would shallow celebrities still tell interviewers they were “in a good place right now”? Or would they say things like “I’m at the waffle bar right now, Oprah”? (“You eat, girl!” Respectful audience applause.)
Maybe, but I think there would still be people like me who would see everything through the filter of geography, because of the spatial way our brains are wired. The sense of place is just too important to us. When people talk about their experiences with the defining news stories of their generation (the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, the Berlin Wall, 9/11), they always frame them as where-we-were-when-we-heard. I was in the kitchen, I was in gym class, I was driving to work. It’s not relevant to the Challenger explosion in any way that I was in my elementary school cafeteria when I heard about it, but that’s still how I remember the event and tell it to others. Naming the place makes us feel connected, situated in the story.
And maps are just too convenient and too tempting a way to understand place. There’s a tension in them. Almost every