The Map Collector

Introduction

As I write this, a white blur that I’m sure is the wall surrounds my computer screen like a halo. I can hear the low hum of cars on the freeway through the open window to my right, and nearer, the quick chirp of birds. The light brown color near the bottom of my field is the floor, and in the center, a number of objects are clear. My laptop. The darker stain of the desk. A book with a white cover of a tree, a deer, a bird, a constellation. I can’t read the letters but I imagine I know what they say. In my other ear, a TV yaps tirelessly from the next room. There are things I don’t notice. The temperature, because it is perfect. My body, as nothing hurts.

I knew all along I was in my bedroom at my desk. Nothing that I saw was more than a few swatches of color or detail, yet I was able to fill it in and name the probably objects, know their state and purpose, and relate their positions. The sounds made sense in the context of memories. I’m sure all five of my senses were working hard to take in data, but only a small fraction reached my consciousness. None of the things I mentioned above occurred to me until I made it my mission to notice and describe them. Yet I knew where I was, even before that.
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I recently read an article quoting Dutch politician Thierry Baudet, founder of the Forum for Democracy party. His positions are quite controversial to most Europeans, and they include an Australian-style immigration policy, opposition to the EU, to climate change rhetoric, and generally being in favor of what people are calling “populism”. Those aren’t the bones I care to pick. The most interesting thing about him is that he is a tremendous fan of the classical arts, and prefers them strongly to anything the present era has to offer, whether that’s music, art, architecture, what-have-you. In terms of music, the only exception he’s willing to grant is The Beatles, which he calls satisfying in the way that fast food can occasionally be satisfying, but no substitute for a real meal.
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Before I go too far into the misty abyss of abstraction and dancing shadows of my own mind, it’s important that I restate the basic purpose of these essays, in effect to tether myself to something simple and concrete, grounded in the reality of everyday experience, as Eric Cartman famously did before entering the smug-filled city of San Francisco where people are lost in the vapor of their own farts. I like learning things. The problem is often that I’m not sure how much I actually understood. I can read a book and feel I’ve made total sense of it, but ask me to explain what I got in a few crisp sentences, and I fall apart. That’s not necessarily to say that I didn’t get anything from it, but that whatever it was is still in gaseous form, not yet distilled into something you can put in a mason jar and share. Of course, when it’s in that gassy form, there can also seem to be much more of it than I’ll get from the drip. In other words, half the time I know what I mean but I can’t say it, and the other half I have no clue what’s going on.
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We have learnt, in our cultural setting, to classify behavior into ‘means’ and ‘ends’ and if we go on defining ends as separate from means and apply the social sciences as crudely instrumental means, using the recipes of science to manipulate people, we shall arrive at a totalitarian rather than a democratic system of life.

—Margaret Mead

My purpose in writing these essays is to examine various maps—systems of metaphors for an unknowable territory—in order to suss out their usefulness as aids in navigation, which means decision making. I’m interested in how things work in terms of these systems, so along the way I’m going to be leaning heavily on the works of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, not the first but one of the better-known names in systems theory and cybernetics. My interest in Bateson is not completely unrelated to my interest in chicken wings. Let me digress:

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