Map Reference: United States of America

I am in the map room on the top floor of the Seattle Public Library, staring down at a map of the United States. It can be any map, old or new, emphasizing physical details or political details, in color or in black and white.

Staring down at the tangle of rivers and railroads, I try to make sense of what I see. I try to correspond these neatly typed place names and these geometric symbols-- each represents a cleanly categorized type of real entity-- to my own perceptions of where these things lie in relation to one another. To my own memories of these places, to the photos and drawings I've seen, to the stories and descriptions people have told me. When we look at a map, we try to take all of these representations and all this subjective stuff and compress it into the structuralist confines laid down by Rand McNally.

In Asia and Europe, so many names correspond to the histories and myths of a landscape, the names etched out through millennia of recorded history. Village names refer to battles, to the patron saints of local parishes and the miracles these saints performed, to forking rivers, to fields of rice and turmeric, to long-gone castles. This is a landscape of what Marx called the regime of primitive accumulation, those Medieval approaches to the distribution and control of land and wealth.

But in the United States, place names are generated not by the edicts of a count or a priest, nor are they slowly made standard over the centuries by the habitus of local people. They are, by and large, a product of the state and of the commercial institutions. We have countless names cribbed from the Old World. The East Coast is full of towns named for the birthplaces of the colonists. Further west, so many of them seem to have been culled at random-- a Madrid, a Lisbon, a Persia, and a Pekin named by entrepreneurs who likely never set foot there. And between the imported names, we have the names of the heroic figures of the capitalist era: the pioneers and postmasters, generals of the Revolutionary and Civil and Mexican-American Wars, railroad men and their daughters who would marry their fathers' junior executives.

And there are the names inherited from slaughtered Indians, the names of great chiefs, the names that describe the myths of the wendigo and the Happy Hunting Ground. Their meanings are transcribed by local historians and sealed in dusty histories that moulder in county courthouses and small town libraries. So many of the languages that encode these meanings are forgotten by all but a few scholarly linguists and a few ancient Indians on remote reservations. Those elderly last few speakers of Pawnee and Osage have no one left to speak to, and the languages that carried the chants of the Sun Dance and the potlatches are forgotten. Their names for rivers and mountains remain, but they are little more than novelties for history buffs and students.

I live in a city named for a chief who famously told Governor Stevens and his men in Olympia that his people had no concept of land ownership. Governor Stevens looked back at him, shame-faced, and promptly removed Chief Seattle and his men to a patch of land on the other side of the Sound. They named a city for the man and a river now lined with Superfund sites for his tribe, still federally unrecognized. His daughter, Princess Angeline, died a pauper selling Indian baskets to tourists, watching a city grow along the peninsulas she was born in. The city fathers, feeling nostalgic, named a side street for her that cuts jaggedly through the South End.

As America dialectically unfolds into a new information age, the names of our streets have ceased referring to robber-barons and Babbittian developers. They refer to abstract concepts, readily marketable to a consumer society. Vast tracts of suburbia are given pastoral names straight out of Wordsworth. Within the nameless and shapeless swirl of houses, schools and parks are built, likewise named for abstractions. In places like Phoenix and Las Vegas, schools are named Cactus and Bonanza and Liberty, vague images inhabiting an imagined reality without reference points.

Eventually, human memory will dissolve all the input of nomenclature. All these place names will be overwritten with human experience. Kuala Lumpur, a city of gleaming mosques and ornate row houses, means "muddy estuary" in Malay. And the lovely names of Shiloh and the Marne are associated with nothing but war and death. Meaning is not a product of intrinsic nature, it is a product of history and struggle and collapse and redemption played out in space and time. Walking through the tracts of suburbia, I hope, vaguely that some day, the venal world we erect will someday seem as saintly as Chartres.