The Desire for Something Else

It lies back in there somewhere, deep in the recesses of early memory. The sweet smell of an attic, the cardboard boxes with the outdated logos of various American conglomerates and long-defunct department stores, and the endless piles of old magazines.

In the detritus of industrial America, I knew I would find something, some answer, some key. It was a belief I was never able to articulate, but that always lurked in my consciousness, like the feeling of looking out on an empty yard and not being able to recall where one last saw light of this quality, this hue.

So I looked through the magazines. Certain places evoked an immense exoticism: the scented jungles of Southeast Asia, vast, snowy islands in Northern Canada, the windswept steppes of Central Asia. Places at the margins of what we deem to be "civilization," where the experiences of positivism fray. They remained vast territories where death came from the primordial landscape, where human life still occurs in strict tandem with the season cycle and where animist myth still holds greater credence than the laws of planetary motion.

And there was my lifelong love of the map-- a beautiful tool that has been eclipsed by the admittedly more precise and useful version offered by Google. Maps of my own era were fine, but I was more interested in the earlier versions: maps with odd corners of Africa and Australia still marked "unexplored"; maps of old American entities long since passed into obscurity, the Lincoln Highway and the Gulf, Mobile, & Ohio Railroad, Western outpost towns with names like Aladdin, Wyoming and Kremlin, Montana; the old nations and cities that conjured up a more romantic era of travel-- Cochin China and Austrian Galicia, Danzig and Adrianople-- and those sepia-postcard spellings like Roumania and Tokio.

It wasn't so much that I was nostalgic for another era, but, as I grew older, more that I wanted to radically negate my surroundings. The more standard breed of teenage nerd stuck to Dungeons and Dragons or Final Fantasy VII or whatever, but I had an 1898 atlas prefaced by the stern face of President William McKinley.

But of course, this vision has little to do with the exigencies of real travel. Those hours spent with maps and photos have nothing to do with the hardship, the occasional bouts of sickness, the insectarium cheap hotel rooms, the occasional scams and cons, the terminal boredom of long waits at rundown train stations, the ugly habit of fat package tourists being waited upon by native servants, the even uglier habit of young backpackers looking to drink rum-and-Cokes on every continent and still have the gall to call it enlightening, and the awful recognition that you are probably not much better yourself.

***

I was sitting in a nowhere zone somewhere in Nong Khai Province. Red mud and intermittent rain and the butts of cheap Thai cigarettes stomped into the dirt. We were waiting for the border to open, in the humid pre-dawn. It was too dark and I was much too tired to read. I tried to fill the mindless void, but ultimately was alone to confront it.

But times like that are good for reflection, when you're far form home and wondering how you got there, how the hell it is that you've arrived in this godforsaken place on what was once the front line of the Cold War, where now there are groups of men sitting silently in the dark, smoking and staring.

I cycle back through my memory, through the chain of events that led me to this one specific place. And inevitably I arrived back in that attic, back to the thoughts of a blonde-headed kid in snowbound Iowa who saw a picture of a Papuan perched in a treehouse above the rainforest and wondered if, some day, he might sit there.

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.

The Aleatoric City

Sitting on a bench in Steinbrueck Park, looking out over the harbor. Tourists are looking at a map of the city that is hopelessly not-to-scale. Downtown is stretched and warped, a funhouse version of itself.

Modern maps are representations of the physical city. A tourist looks at a map of the city (or at a GPS, or at map software), at the grids collapsing into grids. He plots a route using the gray lines of streets, the red bands of freeways that slice the city into chunks.

And then there is the city experienced on a personal and subjective level, based on our landmarks, our routines, the ballet of traveling from point-to-point that composes our day-to-day lives: walking to the bus stop, driving to work, biking to the grocery store, and all of the other little spatial tics that, when accumulated, form our conception of the shape of the city.

And, lastly, most subtly, there is the aleatoric city. Things you cannot control, things left up to chance. Bumping into a friend you haven't seen in months at the market, encountering a little restaurant hidden down a side street, a tangle of warehouses you get lost in trying to find a shortcut. In the aleatoric experience of the city, every street and every corner hums with the potential for fortune and misfortune, synchronic event and diachronic event.

Cardinal directions make sense to me. I've always looked at maps. When I look at the map, when I conceive of the form of the city, the personal and aleatoric experiences of space are subordinate to the lines of boulevards, parks, rivers, and railroad tracks. Minneapolis: a grid curving along the Mississippi River. Seattle: a fractured isthmus decorated with lakes and canals. Get on Google Maps, and there are the shapes of Paris, Tokyo, Fez, Rangoon, Miami.

But then I visit the city and the map fills in, block by block. All of the sudden, the abstract shape is imbued with light. A corner that was once a red square, a gray dot, becomes a flight of crows on a fall evening, an ice cream scoop falling off a cone, three Japanese girls taking a photo on a flawless summer afternoon.

This was how I viewed cities until I came to Bangkok, a city whose cartographies elude reason. The tangle of major roads-- Yaowarat, Ratchadamnoen, Rama IV-- separates out vast swaths of alleys, many too narrow for cars. Without pattern and without shape, my perception of the city cannot be contained in the map and so I throw the map away. Bangkok is made of connections between the Hualamphong Railway Station and favorite noodle shops, black canals and gilded palaces.

The solitary central stupa of Wat Arun, the temple of dawn, looks over the old city, glittering with tiles originally made from the shards of Chinese ceramics dropped by junks as ballast in the Chao Phraya River. Celadon cups are discarded and reborn as tiles. Cracked and faded tiles are taken off, with new ones embedded in their place. The map of the city is analogous to the stupa, constantly taken apart and reconstructed. City and stupa are a massive mah-jongg game, tiles replaced, tactics perpetually revised, individual pieces re-shaped, carrying on into infinity.