Insets

It is a prolonged meditation and puzzling over the relation of insets and calendars that has led me to lay down the following tracks.

Third stanza of "In The Country Where They Have No Maps" by Sandra Kasturi in The Day I Ate Jupiter (and other poems) Kelp Queen Press, 2002.

in a stone room scattered with crumpled parchment
the king strives to know his land
he tries to map the transmogrifying coastline
while telling me of tourist attractions of note
and landmarks that must be visited
his directions are always found to be wrong

And for some reason this excerpt from Sandra Kasturi resonates with a passage in Charles Bernstein's essay "Optimism and Critical Excess" in A Poetics

Maps — these schema so many of us love to create — have their primary value as imaginary constructions. Since art is not a fixed subject, it does not have a fixed group or series of objects, such as land masses, to chart. Our critical maps make various possible configurations seem real; it's almost as if the dynamic, shifting field of the works is frozen by our icy projections unto them. Potentiality is taken for actuality.

And so I taken back to try and understand what used to appear in a signature block. (E.g. see this posting to the Humanist discussion list.

A calendar is like a map. And just as maps have insets, calendars in the 21st century might have 'moments' expressed in flat local time fanning out into "great circles" expressed in earth revolution time.

"Calendars" and "insets" are not terms that mesh well. The Great Circles reference hints at time zone and one can well imagine an "insert" or pop-up window that provides information about conversions. The revolutions in time can also follow lunar tracking. Some calendars have useful insets showing the phases of the moon. And there is the trusty legend: a calendar marked up for the city's schedule of recycling, compost and garbage pick up — similar to pay day calendars. Still the notion of inset seems static for a rendering of the passage of time. And it seems to easy to confuse inset with legend. Yet there is a potential of different scales sitting side by side in the view that appeals to certain aspects of calendrical practice: "time fanning out" equivalent to an ecological concern where all directions transmute into preoccupations, and insets are always in step.

And so for day 964
03.08.2009

Cartographic Epithets

There is a wonderful set of epithets that one encounters in reading an essay by John Koethe (poet and philosopher) found in the collection Poetry at One Remove. Here they are lifted out of context — with a slight misquotation:

islets of memory and estuaries of desire

These are placed in parallel to "thoughts" and "feelings". And for you to judge how they sharpen the figure offered for the relation between subject and representation, here is the complete sentence:

The experience of the condition of extremity of the perspectival subject, then, is one of the dissipation of this sense of the private character of experience and of a correlative expansion of the sense of the possibility of a completely objective version of the world, which would locate "our" thoughts and feelings, inlets of memory, and estuaries of desire unproblematically on a map of the world and still leave no aspect uncharted.

I find the shift from "inlets" to "islets" telling as to how I regard the relation between thoughts and feelings. Koethe would use the water metaphor throughout and I long for a harbour.

One of us is more prepared to inhabit the sublime longer. Do see the collection for some further remarks about poetry, subjectivity and the sublime.

And so for day 828
20.03.2009

Sublime Selves

Marlene Goldman in Paths of Desire: Images of Exploration and Mapping in Canadian Women's Writing in a discussion of Jane Urquhart's The Whirlpool provides us with a concise and incisive explanation of the sublime:

According to both authors [Burke and Kant], these emotions arise because sublime objects challenge the mind's capacity to organize experience. [...] For Kant, however, astonishment is only the first step of a complicated cognitive process which leads the mind to recognize itself as sublime and the source of the sublime in nature, and to substitute the humiliating awareness of our 'physical impotence' in the face of nature for the empowering awareness of 'an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature'

The explanation is not an endorsement. In her introduction, she indicates that such accounts of the sublime "help clarify the dangers involved in adhering to the concept, which is based on the sacrifice of the body and nature in favour of an illusory sense of power and transcendence."

It is the key phrase "challenge the mind's capacity to organize experience" that reverberates. It seems the key to understanding the reading, copying and making of maps, Maps chafe the imagination: taking a this for a that.

The mind that resists metaphor has a hard time processing maps.

X marks the spot. And the view is sublime.

And by the recursive work of revisioning, we come to learn of an other, an immanent source of power. And learn with Austin Warren that "Art is the ordering of landscapes and loves." (Rage for Order).

And so for day 602
06.08.2008