The Mapmaker

            Hi there, reader. I hope it’s been a day full of sunshine and rainbows for you. Now, I’ll be honest with you, reader: I’m starting to get the feeling that writing about writing is a bit of a nasty habit, something that you aren’t necessarily proud of but you do anyways because it gives you a little transgressive thrill. Now, of course if you’re going to have writing in the first place you’re pretty much bound to end up writing about writing here and there… after all, writing is a way that human beings act in the world, just like breathing and sailing and cartography.

            But let’s say there’s a mapmaker. Let’s even go so far as to say that she’s a pretty good mapmaker at that, let’s say she’s got a gift for the thing… it’s her art, after all, it’s her work and she loves her work, she is her work. Say she makes a map, a beautiful map, the kind that calls to mind those old medieval charts where you see the outlines of empty continents, dark rivers with unknown sources, and here and there the inscription Terra Incognita enwreathed with serpents and all the monsters of the imagination. Say she makes such a map, perhaps on some sun drenched morning in May, caught in an inexplicable frenzy of inspiration, full of a giddy, giggling enthusiasm. Say she creates this map, but some days after the fact she realizes that there was a flaw in the heart of it—maybe not so much a fault in the map itself as in the way she thought of it. Now that the map’s been created, after all, she’s not got any power over it. The map is an independent entity now, just as real as she is. The map knows itself, she realizes, far better than she knew the winding paths she tried to weave into it, to indicate in it.

            She pores over the map, eyeing the streets and rivers, the roads and highways that enfold endlessly into and out of themselves, winding like telephone lines, enlacing and intertwining like wires loaded with electronic infinities, pulsing silently with messages on all levels. She makes a phone call to a neighbor and is assaulted by a wave of white noise, and the voice insisting, “The number you have reached has been disconnected or is temporarily out of service…” She finds herself awake at all the silent hours of the night, trembling from coffee and a nameless anxiety. She tries to distract herself by working on other maps, or by reading over the maps of others. There is no relief. When sleep does come, the map waits for her in her dreams. Always the same map, yet somehow different every time… yet always somehow staring, always the insistent heartstopping stare of a thing without eyes.

            She knows, she feels, she can’t escape the profound conviction that the map carries a message she meant to send to herself… but how could she ever have misread her own map? What’s the territory she tried so hard to chart, anyways? She wonders if she inadvertently made a photographic negative, a reversal of what she thought she’d meant… what if every mountain was a lake, every forest a garbage dump? What if—terrible thought!—she’s forgotten what maps are? She can’t deny the creative ecstasy she’d felt when making that map… it seemed to grow itself, to build itself up out of the air—there was something essential about it, something terrifically true. In a life of short circuits, of misconnections and missed connections, for once she’d felt the current of some electricity outside of time running through every inch of her body. She can’t bring herself to doubt that the map was something true, something like a gift from the gods. But what does it show? But where does it show? And how to read it?

            The mapmaker can’t help herself. She must understand the map, and so she does what she knows: she starts to make maps of the original map. She charts out its wrinkles, its borders and edges. She makes a map of the paper, a map of the ink. She maps out the corners, mapping and remapping the very same territory over and over again, weaving charts of her memory. She makes maps of her own readings of the map. And as the maps pile up, she’s increasingly haunted by a disagreeable feeling, a feeling that she’s known all along, intuitively, what was staring out at her from behind the map. Then silent sounds, a whisper, thrown voices and images. She senses that the accumulating maps are drawing something out… she sees the dawn about to break on the horizon, and gradually realizes that she’s slipped from making maps to draw out the truth. She’s sunk, somehow, to using her maps as shades to guard her against the growing light. She has been sunburned before, naturally.

            For a long time she’s loved the moonlight. But she can’t deny much longer that the moon’s light is only a reflection of something greater.

            She’s grown used to not getting used to things. She’s very comfortable in being uncomfortable. She realizes she’s gone at things from the wrong angle, that she’s all the while been a sort of bird that obstinately insists on walking. She’s learned to read the map, and it says, “Jump.”

            I hope she jumps, reader. She needs to. And above all, I hope I can get out of this nasty little habit of writing about writing. For your sake, reader.