When I started out as a teacher of English as a foreign language to adults, beginner learners were keen to learn practical language. One of the significantly enabling things people learned to do was asking for and giving directions. It was a great source of interactive classroom fun and games.
Using maps, people could practice directing each other around New York, around London, around imaginary English towns and villages, or even around a homemade map of their workplace. There were so many possibilities that all you had to do was change the map in order to bring the language skill back to life in motivating ways.
Maps are empowering things. But tell me, when was the last time you asked somebody for directions? I mean a real person. Somebody you didn’t know, somebody you spoke to in the street. We’ve simply stopped doing it.
And that isn’t because we suddenly know where everything is. That would require us to have a map of the world in our heads giving us the superpower of always knowing how to get anywhere.
We may not own such a map, but with Google Maps, Waze and the like, once we have consented to having our location revealed, today such a map owns us. As a result, we no longer need to know where we are to get where we want to go; we simply reveal our whereabouts to the great virtual map which locates our phone and gets us to where we want to tell the application that we wish to go. Simple, while the connection lasts. When the system crashes, we go back to asking other people or unfolding paper maps of our own. Or we get lost.
Maps allow us remember places and paths we would otherwise forget, know places unknown, see places unseen. The history of cartography is a fascinating subject reaching back to cave paintings and bone carvings. Maps are shapes made meaningful and here is a piece about a space that sells them.
The Map Of Us
Small from outside, the shop is a tardis –
Time And Relative Dimensions in Space.
Not needing to sprawl and spread because
Its mere presence intensifies the street.
Here lives not Doctor Who, but Doctor Where.
The shop sells shapes first born in eye and mind,
Not on paper, just drawn as fingered things
In sand or dust, then wisely brushed aside
In the hush which follows conversations
About strategy or safety or space.
Lines and crosses stand for geographies,
Lighter than histories, there to contain,
Yet yearning to be captured, caught carefully
Long enough to be traced and told again
From a rememberer’s faithful finger.
Once encrypted and copied, tucked away
Paper now gives this knowledge permanence,
Pocketed memory waits to display
Intelligent faraways and elsewheres
To guide all gamers from a single page.
Stanford’s in Mercer’s Walk is a maze thick
With shelves oozing Doctor Who’s shifting selves
For walkers to wonder – till they select
Promising paths among Doctor Where’s wares
Rather than letting a phone think for them.
In vain, inside, I seek the map of us,
Which shows lands which meet unexpectedly,
Both joined and divided by the same sea’s
Surge, our different weathers combining well
To everyone’s surprise. There isn’t one.
A word in your ear
Stanford’s in Mercer’s Walk, London claims to be the world’s biggest mapshop. Stanford’s is an anagram of stands for. A map stands for a place, an area, a country which its lines and symbols trace.
Once inside the shop, you began to measure its hugeness. This contrast between inside and outside can feel other-dimensional, like being inside Dr Who’s TARDIS. Then you start unfolding the maps on sale there and tumble into distances and sizes which are naturally smaller on a map in reality. It is the beginning of a new journey.
Maps can tell us where to go and how to get there. Google Maps and Waze can tell us how to get there in real time and put us back on the right road when we get lost. Location-based applications can tell us where we’ve been every day, month, year and so on. Enable the pedometer on our phone and we can count the steps taken getting there. That is a lot of data, but there will always be something left out which makes the map of ourselves. Something only we know.
More on maps? Slowly Bringing The Map To Life.
Discover more from GERRY THE KENNY
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One Comment
Richard Cooper
Your evocation of maps reminds me of the work of Borges, the Argentinian writer. Given your admiration for tango… or is it your shared love of lore and things? Such evocations are personal testimonials, a hum of wisdom and discovery, an invitation to look up and around more often from our screens, and note the non-two dimensional. And here I am on a screen ironically and on a nice day outside, I will close and return to the map vibrant outside. Thank you, Gerry.