I made my first upside-down map for you and I keep making them, also for you. I like the feeling of my mind resisting the new orientation, how it feels to wrestle with it. It matters because maps matter. Maps harbor many answers to big questions, for example “Where am I?”, to wit, “You are here.”
People resist change, whether their life or their mind. We can cross an ocean to have a great adventure living in another country, but I don’t want to right now, do you? We can have a revolution that makes life less of a grind, but we don’t. Often enough we can’t get ourselves to change jobs, or even habits, or even to just cross the room and talk to the nice looking person marooned near the crudités.
Doesn’t Texas look like a king here? And New England seems more tail than head. The mind reaches to grab the map by its Florida and its Maine and spin until all is straightened out.
Sometimes we won’t change because we have a theory about how we are already doing things right. That can be a motivated belief. The early 20th century author and activist Upton Sinclair put it this way, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”
An example I often think about is that when the germ theory of disease was discovered, you might think that doctors would run to embrace its actual cures. Instead they took sides against the new science (the “lab men”) because doctors had too much invested in the old ways. They had too much skill with their gadgets, physical treatments, and elixirs. Too much history of curing people. Nurses too. These men and women had to retire or die off before germ theory was generally accepted by medical practitioners.
Try to believe that the upside-down maps are normal. See if you can change your mind.
It used to seem that when the sun turned to rain, the weather here had changed. As if evaporation and condensation happened here. You might have known better, but it’s not how it seemed. Now with radar images we see that the weather over there blew over here. Clear as a clear day. This theory offers more hope that conditions will change, that something new will blow in. That’s whether you are farming in the dust or praying in a week of rain for an azure sky on your wedding day.
To art is to eat that sometimes the first print is going to be backwards, even though we already decorated it. We have to flip it one more time to get where we’re going. The backwards one is either garbage or art.
The GPS shows just the route and not the wider web of roads and fields of houses. Some of what we are sure of is based on map mistakes, or worse, based on a map that’s only a step on the way to making a map. Both garbage and art can teach us something, but not how to get from Harrisburg to Scranton.
If we want to get from here to transcendence we need some kind of art map. If I were going to an unknowable country I’d take a paper map and use it badly. I’d read something short and destabilizing. Maybe this. I’d run with a map that says You Are Here. I’d crumple one up and follow the creases.
Here we have a neater experiment in upside-downing. I Exacto-ed out the names of countries and I spun them 180 onto tape I’d put on the back. What do you think? Feels funny, right?
Before the GPS we all had paper maps in our cars, in books and folded. Many of us learned the necessary skills of reading a map and keeping a car on a route. Many of us just never knew where we were. I had the first skill better than many but wasn’t good with the equally necessary task of keeping the car in the real world on the route I was looking at on the map. I never knew where I was. It was a relatively constant sensation. Have I come to lament that we’ve lost being lost? No. And yet. And yet, where are we?
You are here. So am I. I don’t know how we are doing it. We need to believe so many things to get from day to night and some of it we recognize as convenient and contingent upon the situation — we know that if our interests changed so would our theories. Then there are the theories we have that we believe without reflection, theories about work and play, love and friendship, men and women, right and wrong. Everyone has their own. It is unlikely that all of your theories are a reasonable representation of how the world works.
I have to remind myself of all this because normal life is a very seductive and tenacious trance. I try to shake myself out of it and what better way than a map that only confuses? When returning from a day through the looking glass, down a rabbit hole, and into the wardrobe, it’s best to use a mad map to get home.
Maybe you don’t know where you are. Let’s face it, the map doesn’t really know where you are either, especially once you move it. Believe a woman who lived in the land of the lost, you can start losing yourself without even noticing. When you have been lost a long time you can suddenly realize what the map was trying to tell you, how tiny you are, the odds of you living this happy if harsh life so slim. You have been so loved, if often from afar. And I know it’s hard but forget about your fears and broken heart and read the map and know who is near. Listen. You are here. You are here. You are here.
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Thanks for reading. It’s exciting saying all these things to you. After I press publish my inner frequency goes wild. Hit like or subscribe to help calm it down? If you are exhausted, lonely, or want to accomplish, then take a rest, put up with some bullshit, or get ‘er done, each to its own kind. Don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.
love,
Jennifer
Love hearing this. So wonderful to have your voice with me as I take this in.