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He practiced thick cartography,
Loved to invent terrain, contour lines,
Though he knew the windward/leeward
North/south facing structures
And all about fertile lands,
His cartography revolved around shadows,
Fantastic creatures, mythical beasts,
Away from vegetation and mountains;
He argued that whenever settlements occur
They follow water lines, rivers, canals, waterways,
For waterways reflect rainfall patterns,
He felt that we need to know all about creating security
And we need to learn how social pressures
Create their inflexible contours,
How the savage and the monstrous
Make you live on the edge,
Especially in wars when the pastures break down
And intimate talk often becomes choppy
How the incompatible gods make it difficult
For us to act politely.
The mapmaker worked furiously
On fantasy cartography
Amidst a disorderly studio
Strewn with magnetic compasses, telescopes,
Sextants, atlases, sea charts,
Engravings of long-forgotten lands,
Plain spheres, tabula rogeriana
Knowing that experience was never fixed
But changing, bringing new perspectives,
A combination of modern hermeneutics
And philosophical paradigms,
A fusion of Gadamer and Paul Ricœur,
Where hermeneutics translated into interpretation
Just for those pleasant fantasies,
He loved the topography, the undulations,
Changing it here and there to suit his needs
Depending on his health,
The passage of time,
His momentary assumptions,
And the repositioning of his plots.
He loved to play god,
Reducing the geography of latitudes,
Longitudes and magnetic directions
Into incongruent places,
He loved croquet, gin and lingerie
Every part of a woman’s anatomy,
The wings of fairies,
The gentleness of old age,
The gossamer of dreams,
But he also found the gnomes, the ogres
Enticing an orgasmic delight in the universe,
He was intrigued by ways
To reduce reality to relevance
And saw maps as messages
And like St. Isidore, Ptolemy or al Idrisi
He was always on a new project
To create the ecumene,
The mappa mundi
And travel where no man has traveled before
Even if it meant that he had to force alter reality. |
