New maps were made, complete maps, so that every inch was accounted for, and everyone now knew who they were, or at least who they belonged to. Those maps, how they transformed everything. And so it came to pass that in time those scattered little towns by the sea along the African coast found themselves part of huge territories stretching for hundreds of miles into the interior, teeming with people they had thought beneath them, and who when the time came promptly returned the favour.

Silences

“Though even after all the fading and furring, so many lines still remain, now seeming like even sparser fragments of the whole: a warm look in the eye when the face is lost, a smell that recalls a music whose melody is out of range, the memory of a room when the house or its location is forgotten, a field of pasture by the side of the road in the middle of a void. So time dismembers the images of our time. Or to put it in an archaeological way, it is as if the details of our lives have accumulated in layers, and now some layers have been displaced by the friction of other events, and bits of contingent pieces still remain, accidentally tumbled about.

New maps were made, complete maps, so that every inch was accounted for, and everyone now knew who they were, or at least who they belonged to. Those maps, how they transformed everything. And so it came to pass that in time those scattered little towns by the sea along the African coast found themselves part of huge territories stretching for hundreds of miles into the interior, teeming with people they had thought beneath them, and who when the time came promptly returned the favour.

I speak to maps. And sometimes they say something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. And later when it became necessary, geography became biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and primitiveness in other places on the map.

Silences

“Though even after all the fading and furring, so many lines still remain, now seeming like even sparser fragments of the whole: a warm look in the eye when the face is lost, a smell that recalls a music whose melody is out of range, the memory of a room when the house or its location is forgotten, a field of pasture by the side of the road in the middle of a void. So time dismembers the images of our time. Or to put it in an archaeological way, it is as if the details of our lives have accumulated in layers, and now some layers have been displaced by the friction of other events, and bits of contingent pieces still remain, accidentally tumbled about.