*
THE SHRUGGED ATLAS
BY
GEOFF NICHOLSON
“LIKE ALL MEN of the Library, I have traveled in my
youth.” And some of us, no longer by any measure in our youth, are trying to
keep up the good work, even as we wonder just how good it actually is.
The opening quotation, of
course, is from the Borges story “The Library of Babel,” which famously
imagines an infinite library containing every book that has ever been or ever
could be written. It must, I suppose, therefore contain atlases and books of
maps, though presumably not maps printed as single sheets.
How did Borges feel about maps?
Well, he did publish a book titled Atlas, a kind of travel book, first
published in 1984 in Spanish, translated into English a year later, and written
“in collaboration with María Kodama,” his second wife. There they are together in the picture above. It consists of 40 or so
short pieces, mostly prose, though a few are poetry, describing places he’s
visited around the world, along with some of the people he’s met on his
travels. The titles include “The Temple of Poseidon,” “Robert Graves at Deya,”
“The Desert,” and (perhaps inevitably) “The Labyrinth.”
There are photographs in the
book, but no maps, and in the prologue Borges writes, “Each and every man is a
discoverer. He begins by discovering bitterness, saltiness, concavity, smoothness,
harshness, the seven colors of the rainbow and the twenty-some letters of the
alphabet; he goes on to visages, maps, animals and stars.” That strikes me as a
curious order for discovering things. I’d have thought maps came well after
animals and stars, though only a fool would argue with Borges.
There’s also a piece in the book
titled “Iceland” in which he writes, “I was, as always, in the middle of that
clear haze visible to the eyes of the blind.” And if there seems to be
something richly, perversely symbolic in the notion of a blind librarian, a
blind cartographer raises the symbolic stakes even higher. Not that unimpaired
vision is any guarantee of knowing where you are.
¤
I was walking through East Ham in London, heading
for Itchycoo Park with my fellow scribe, flâneur, and chronicler of the
engagingly retro and off-kilter: Travis Elborough. You might think he was a
good man to have on such an expedition, being the author last year of A Walk
in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution and now Atlas
of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World’s Most Unusual Corners, 51
short essays on the globe’s more wayward places, with maps by Alan Horsfield.
Even so, we were lost.
I’d printed off a map from
Google, and Elborough had his cell phone, but we kept going astray. We were
never completely and utterly lost, but much of the time we weren’t quite sure
where we were or where we should be. We knew where we wanted to go but, map or
no map, we couldn’t always see how to get there. Consequently, we found
ourselves in various dead ends, and made a series of detours that took us
through terra incognita, along streets with names such as Ruskin Avenue and
Byron Avenue, and eventually around Shakespeare Crescent.
We told ourselves this
meandering was all part of the psychogeographic process, and I don’t think we
were entirely deceiving ourselves. In due course we did arrive at the entrance
to the park. There was a large, potentially helpful map, but the plastic that
covered it had become opaque, hazy, and impossible to see through. Borges might
have understood.
Itchycoo Park is simultaneously
a real, an imaginary, and a contested place; there should perhaps be quotation
marks around all those adjectives. Primarily, it’s the title and subject of a
great 1967 psychedelic pop song by the Small Faces that has the distinction of
being the first song ever to be banned by the BBC because it contained drug
references.
What did
you do there? — I got high
What did
you feel there? — Well I cried
But why
the tears there? — I’ll tell you why —
It’s all
too beautiful, It’s all too beautiful
It’s all
too beautiful, It’s all too beautiful
And later in the song Steve
Marriott sings, “I feel inclined to blow my mind.”
The ban therefore doesn’t seem
all that surprising, although the band’s previous single, “Here Come the Nice,”
which seems to be entirely about drug dealing and amphetamines, was broadcast
to the youth of Britain without demur.
In order to get the ban on “Itchycoo Park” lifted,
the band’s management claimed it wasn’t a song about drugs at all, but about a
patch of land where the band members had played as kids: as if these things
were mutually exclusive. But that was enough to get the ban lifted, thereby
suggesting that BBC decision-makers were even more hopelessly out of touch than
previously imagined.
A
number of after-the-fact origin narratives have placed Itchycoo Park in various
locations around London, and the itchiness has been attributed to wasps,
nettles, or rose hips — the last of these especially itchy if dropped inside
somebody’s shirt collar. Elborough and I were visiting Little Ilford Park, one
of the prime geographical suspects: the Guardian’s “London Calling: a
musical map of the city” unhesitatingly says
that this is the place. It’s a long, thin finger of greenery tucked in beside
the North Circular Road, a place with a designerish new adventure playground, a
lot of flat open land that looked like it had once been playing fields, a
shuttered sports pavilion, a rose garden, and a public toilet that was
functional (but with smashed windows).
What did we do there? Well we
didn’t get high, nor did we find it all too beautiful. Rather, we talked about
maps and territories, nostalgia and modernity: which is to say we discussed
Elborough’s new book.
¤
This Atlas of Improbable Places joins
a small but growing number of what we might call alternative
or perhaps “indie” travel guides, maybe anti-travel guides, postmodern
Baedekers for those wearied by (or too hip for) the conventional
itineraries. The genre includes Unruly Spaces (2004) by
Alastair Bonnett, subtitled “Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable
Geographies” and Tom Lutz’s And the Monkey Learned Nothing and Drinking
Mare’s Milk on the Roof of the World, both published this year, subtitled
“Dispatches from a Life in Transit” and “Wandering the Globe from
Azerbaijan to Zanzibar.” (Full disclosure: Lutz, as you may well know, is the
editor of LARB, and also, as you may well not know, the editor of this
piece [I have no idea what he is getting at here, Ed.]). There’s
also the recent Atlas Obscura (2016), “An Explorer’s
Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders” — yes, a lot of subtitling seems to be required
in these matters.
All these books display a
fascination with ambiguous or edgy or potentially dangerous places: ruins
(industrial rather than classical), deranged architectural follies,
environments created by outsider artists, underground or utopian or lost
cities, abandoned prisons, bunkers, theme parks, relics of the Space Age and
the Cold War; examples of all these appear in Elborough’s book.
He writes about some places that will be familiar
to Angelenos, such as Slab City and the Hearst Castle, but he ventures much
further afield to the Aral Sea tucked between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which
has dried up to become the Aralkum Desert, to Wittenoom, a town in Western
Australia caked in blue asbestos, that was closed down and removed from official
maps, though it’s easy enough to find on Google. I was especially taken with
his account of the “illicit tunnels” of Moose Jaw, Canada, which manages to
join the dots between Walter Benjamin, Chinese immigrant laborers turned
bootleggers, and J.G Ballard.
Inevitably, there’s some overlap
in these alt-tourist volumes, though less than you might think. The Atlas
Obscura, being partly crowd-sourced online, contains by far the greatest
number of sites, and Elborough admits that it came as a shock, and maybe a
threat, when he went into a store looking for his own book and found that
volume instead; thick, lavishly illustrated with photographic images, full of
bells and whistles, sidebars, directions, details, opening times, and whatnot.
It’s a good book. You can understand his anxiety, but I’m sure there’s a
readership for both. Elborough’s is by far the more serious, literary, and
essayistic, and also the one with the better maps.
¤
This urge to travel to ever more outlying and
freakish destinations is not hard to fathom. We’ve read Marc Augé’s Non-Places:
Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), so we’re familiar
with the idea that the world has become a series of homogenized, globalized,
interchangeable spaces. However, as Elborough says in his introduction, “claims
about the growing, soul-crushing similarity of places can be overstated […]
Thankfully, the world continues to be a dizzyingly diverse place. Our appetite
for the unusual and the out of the ordinary has, if anything, only been heightened
by new technology, the scanning and sharing of fresh information and imagery
themselves a spur to further travel and post-industrialization changing the
kinds of places we find intriguing, beautiful or worthy of cursory
investigation.”
Of course this kind of
cataloging involves exclusion as well as selection, creating a new canon, and
possibly just a new tourist traps. I asked Elborough if he thought we were
heading for some kind of subversive Grand Tour, whereby travelers no longer
visit the Uffizi but instead go to look at, say, the ruins of the Teufelsberg
spy station in Berlin? And ultimately how subversive is that likely to be
anyway?
“Well,” he said, “Grand Tourers
were definitely fond of a ruin, hence the presence of Venice and Rome on their
itineraries, but I too wonder about just how subversive it might be. It seems
to me that just as the Romantics forged a new aesthetic of beauty in the wake
of industrialization, we have worked out our own criteria of interest to meet
the needs of a post-industrial, digital society.”
“Addison, when formulating the original idea of the
sublime, wrote about the ‘agreeable horror’ of oceans — a description that
could equally work for Battleship Island.” (That’s the deserted mining
settlement crammed with high rise buildings, off the coast of Japan, seen at
its best in the movie Skyfall.)
Elborough continued, “I do
wonder sometimes if it might not be time to take a fresh look at, I don’t know,
the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Eiffel Tower, the absolutely ridiculously
over-familiar, just as an exercise. Even I find myself dozing off when I hear
the phrases ‘liminal’ or ‘edge lands’ these days … I am often left wondering
about the ‘dead centers’ of cities, the bits that only tourists and
increasingly only the very wealthy (and their poorly paid minions) really spend
any time in.”
¤
By now, we’d done a circuit of Little Ilford Park
and the place was filling up with people. A lot of children had arrived with
their teachers and were playing games. We speculated that they were doing this
in a public park because so many British school playing fields had been sold
off to property developers. We also noted that large areas of the park had been
left to run wild, to let wild flora and fauna have their way, a convenient if
dubious conflation of conservationist and cost-cutting interests. No doubt
there were nettles, and very possibly wasps and rose hips in the tall grass,
but we managed not to get stung.
We were also there to discuss an
event that he and I were doing a couple of days later, organized by Elborough,
at a place in London called the Horse Hospital, advertised as “an evening of
spoken word, discussion, music, performance and short films about urban spaces,
London and Los Angeles, sex and food, memory and maps.” It was called with a
certain inevitability — “The Map is Not the Territory.”
That had me thinking of Borges
again, specifically his one-paragraph story “On Exactitude in Science,” the one
in which “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was
that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it,” which of
course is a variation on an idea found in Lewis Carroll’s “Sylvie and Bruno
Concluded.”
“‘It has never been spread out,
yet,’ said Mein Herr: ‘the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole
country and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own
map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’” Here, of course the territory is the map.
And the fact is I’ve always had
some trouble with this notion that the map is not the territory. I don’t doubt
that it’s true, but does it really need saying? Is there anybody in their right
mind who would think otherwise?
Well, I discover belatedly that
the phrase was first used by Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-American “independent
scholar” who more or less invented a field of studies called general semantics which
doesn’t have much to do with our usual understanding of semantics, and has
overtones of self-help and behavioral therapy. His point, hardly a
revolutionary one, is that the human perception of reality is not the same as
reality itself. The brain is an intermediary, a translator, a cartographer. But
that doesn’t make our perceptions irrelevant or redundant. Korzybski writes in Science
and Sanity (1933): “A map is not the territory it represents, but,
if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts
for its usefulness.” I’m a little troubled by the notion of “correctness” in a
map since it seems to me that all maps involve falsification to a greater or
lesser degree, but it’s good to know that the phrase is a metaphor, not
just a statement of the blindingly obvious.
 |
| Photo: Del Barrett |
Well, the event went perfectly
well. We talked about many things regarding London and Los Angeles, not least
the London A to Z, generally a small paperback designed to be carried in
the pocket while walking, as opposed to the Thomas Guide obviously
designed to be used in a car. I bought a Thomas Guide the day I moved to
Los Angeles over a decade ago, and have used it maybe three times. Nevertheless
it sits in the back of the car, like a talisman or a security blanket, not that
it makes me feel especially secure.
¤
Here’s Beryl Markham writing in West With The
Night (1942), a book about her travels in what was then British East
Africa, now Kenya. “A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely,
doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me,
you are alone and lost.’”
Well, I wish I had her
confidence. Some of us often feel especially alone and lost when we’ve
got a map in the palm of our hand. It ought to tell us where we are and how to
get to where we want to go, but sometimes it just doesn’t, and that can feel
worse than having no map at all. When I was in Tokyo earlier this year, I
always carried, and frequently consulted, a printed map, sometimes more than
one. Mostly I felt as though I was carrying a superfluous and meaningless piece
of paper. Sometimes, admittedly, I also consulted a superfluous and meaningless
image on a cell phone screen. It rarely helped.
It was some consolation that I
saw many locals who seemed to be as lost as I was. They stared at the large
public maps found on many Tokyo street corners, with just as much confusion as
I did. Sometimes they even photographed these maps with their cell phones, so
they could carry them away with them. Not that I imagine it did much good.
Recently there has been further
consolation from reading a section in Lutz’s And the Monkey Learned Nothing
describing his own experiences in Japan. Lutz is indeed a man of the library,
in fact a man with an urge to visit every country on Earth, and (just as
important) write about them. Here he writes,
"People who saw me looking at my map came up to
help. As far as I could tell, none of them knew how to read a map. They studied
mine, sometimes turning it over or sideways, never able to say where we were.
But they went through the motions of being helpful very cheerfully, finally
made a guess, and bowing, invariably pointed in the wrong direction."
There is quite a skill, it
seems to me, whether you have a map or not, whether you know how to read it or
not, in remaining cheerful even when you’re completely lost, and that may be
the best way to end up in some improbable places.
*
You can read it, and much else besdies, at the LARB website here:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-shrugged-atlas/
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-shrugged-atlas/
