Geographical imaginings
Her eyes are fixed on the tall man. I am close to them after the crush at Earlsfield and she has asked him a lot of questions. Her strange, inverse-shaped head it seems, is full of questions, and I don’t have room to read my paper. The man releases a punctured sigh before speaking.
“It’s about this bird who finds a book and it’s the doomsday book and these geezers start chasing her.”
“Is it really?”
“Yeah and it could mean the end of the world.”
“Really?”
This continues as the train pants into Vauxhall.
The girl is getting louder. I know her kind. She is one of the office mice. They are small and fast and they dash for doors in a scurry. They hit people with bags, poke them with umbrellas, they dodge and weave with their pale faces pulled tight on their bones. Men cannot behave like this. They would be called to account.
She is getting louder. “I texted Matt right, about this article in the paper, right, and I told him READ IT! READ IT! Because it was so funny, and he didn’t and I was actually quite annoyed with him for that! He should have read it!”
The train arrives in Waterloo and off we shuffle, shuffling down; into the tunnels beneath London. From above we might look like we’re queuing. But we are not. We are commuting. We are stuck-pushed in great piles, on steps, in tunnels, on platforms and trains. Ours is not an over-riding urge to be at all those theres but to avoid being at this one here. Commuting. Going faster. Faster. We are pushing and shoving. We are not patient. Not queuing. We are simply stuck.
Later, and I come into the light. Outside the British Library I join a real queue. There is a dread-locked black man and a very clean man with a bag of sandwiches and eyes like foam. There are Asians, and jolly spindly women from Wales who look like witches. In turns we are swallowed by the great block.
The library is the one part of this city in which I do not feel clammy. In London I sweat constantly. Not in great rivulets, but in a damp, layered way. It’s the climate, the commuting. It is the tunnels underground. On my desk are old maps and in my nose the smell of musty books, their covers marbled and embossed, bound with animal and wheat-paste glue. In my hands these books are adventures, these maps an alluring suggestion. Maps with blank spaces invite geographical fantasy. They feed our geographical imaginations. The empire that amassed all these books fed on blanks in maps. That is why Africans, Asians, spindly old women from Wales and Irishmen queue outside in the mornings, which are quiet. It is only in the afternoons that recorded birdsong is played in the foyers.
The power of maps lies in how they enclose and define space and in what they ignore. I begin to think about what Europe was like before it was a map. From caves the earth would breathe, mountains were altars to the all-father of the gods, the sky, Poeninus, and islands were undying lands. Hills, woods, rivers and streams, roads, enclosures and piles of stones were holy and the only map you had was the one in your head. The world as you remember it and at your feet with the wind in your face. But mountains are contoured numbers now, and lakes no longer doorways.
There is a map of the world where I am staying. Korea is at it’s centre; it bulges pink and bigger than Japan. A graphic illustration of how peripheral my world is to the Korean one. I ponder the possible effects of flooding Irish classrooms with Korean maps of the world.
My mind a jelly of new ideas I leave the library and go back into the streets and tunnels. I do like maps but the
I am reading an article about adventure. Adventure it says, is defined as a series of events, partly but not wholly accidental, in settings remote from the domestic and probably from the civilised.
I would not call these tunnels domestic nor this shuffling existence civilised. I must be having an adventure. I look up. On the tracks black mice have dashed out to grab food before another train comes.
admin @ April 5, 2009