It is a city stippled with gold and yearning for the sun. A city of dreams long gone and lingering still. It is a city of minarets and violet towers. A city with only one weeping willow hunched over a promontory. It is a city of stone churches smelling of green water at sunup. A city of redbrick castles with wide-open arms. It is a city of convents, fig-scented gardens and singing mounts. It is a city of sand and dunes, a city where the first and last human are covered in dust. A city of drowsy bays and flying men and opal lakes. It is a city of children running down heaps of garbage.
A city of evergreen hills and lucid water. A city of belfries harried by the screams of seagulls. A city of rivers streaming into an expanse of blue. It is a city of spires and transparent abysses. It is neither a city of the future nor a city of the past. The impossible city is a city made of all cities. In a poetic piece playing on Alice in Wonderland and titled A Map of Six Impossible Things, Iranian-born, Paris-raised, New-York-based writer Lila Azam Zanganeh, author of The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, imagines: However, it seems we cannot do without abbreviations of complexity in order to make sense of our world, in order to get to our destination. The journeys we make through the landscape look precariously unlike the lines we trace on a map - and it is here that the lost motorist moans. With a world map, we rise above the constraints of our segment of land so as to hold the globe in our gaze, much as with novels, we may be granted intimate access to minds beyond our own.īut of course, like a novel, a map can only ever be a model and reduction of reality. In both cases, we are placed in a privileged position vis a vis a reality which we usually only glimpse from a limited perspective.
The pleasure of contemplating the world on a map might be likened to that of reading certain novels. In an essay contemplating the delights of old maps, at once so misguided and so brave, philosopher Alain de Botton (yes, him - and him - also him) observes: Novelist Joe Dunthorne offers an illustrated map of “the mess of influences, anxieties, past failures, hopes, enemies, distractions and stimulants each writing day”: From Geoff Dyer’s bullet-pointed locational autobiography to Sheila Heti and Ted Mineo’s love letter to chance in a six-hexagram miniature of the I Ching, these imaginative and irreverent personal cartographies expand the conception of a map as a flat reflection of geography and reclaim it, instead, as a living, breathing, dimensional expression of the human spirit. Indeed, in the age of GPS and sterile, data-driven cartographic precision, how delightful to consider mapping the human experience based on disposition rather than position, on the subjective rather than the capital-O Objective, on the symbolic, metaphysical, and abstract rather than the literal, physical, and concrete. Consisting of sixteen maps by sixteen different artists and writers in a beautifully designed boxed set of booklets and fold-out maps, including contributions from Alain de Botton, Geoff Dyer, and Olafur Eliasson, this remarkable and unusual compendium places people rather than geography at the heart of the compass to construct a provocative new conception of cartography as wayfinding for the soul, not the body. Far from the precise navigational tools they once were, maps have now blossomed into masterworks of artful subjectivity, from Denis Wood’s narrative atlas to Paula Scher’s stunning typographic cartography - but nowhere more so than in Where You Are: A Collection of Maps That Will Leave You Feeling Completely Lost ( public library) by Visual Editions. Humanity has had a long and obsessive relationship with maps as sensemaking tools serving such diverse purposes as propaganda, imaginative interpretation, emotional memory, and timekeeping.