Book: You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination

[spiralsheep]

You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, edited by Katherine Harmon. This book contains many reproductions of idiosyncratic maps, although the details in some are frustratingly small. It also includes seven texts, mostly essays, on the theme of personal geographies. Recommended.

Extract from the essay "I, Mercator" by Stephen S. Hall:

That was my first taste of orienteering – crashing through a landscape without paths, provisioned only with vague bearings and a distant destination. "Orienteering" is such an odd but impressive word that it has always stuck with me, and in fact moves me to propose a related concept to describe a process somewhat like orienteering but more personal, more historical, more associative, more metaphorical, perhaps more spiritual: "orientating," or crashing through the larger landscapes of memory and experience and knowledge, trying to get a fix on where we are in a multitude of landscapes that together compose the grander scheme of things. Orientating begins with geography, but it reflects a need of the conscious, self-aware organism for a kind of transcendent orientation that asks not just where am I, but where do I fit into this landscape? Where have I been? Where shall I go, and what values shall I pack for the trip? What culture of knowledge allows me to know what I know, which is often another way of knowing where I am? And what pattern, what grid of wisdom, can impose on my accumulated, idiosyncratic geographies? The coordinates marking this territory are unique to each individual and lend themselves to a very private kind of cartography.